Chapter 1

NOW

I’m never wearing anything cute or doing something glamorous when I get recognized these days. Either some TMZ photographer’s trying to get pictures of me eating a burrito from a deeply unflattering angle or I’m in a sweatpants–flip-flops combo on day three of not washing my hair, standing in the frozen aisle of Kroger.

The lady hovering next to me pretending to look at Eggos while not so covertly examining my profile waits for me to drop the sixth frozen meal into my shopping cart before she shuffles forward.

“Excuse me, dear, I don’t mean to bother you, but I just wanted to ask, were you on that TV show? The one about the Asian pop group?”

The fact that she didn’t use my name or the title of the show is enough to tell me that the best course of action here is to show myself out of this potential social disaster by offering her a polite “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong person.”

But the corners of my mouth lift and the words are spilling out before I can stop them.

“Yes, I was!” My voice automatically pitches into a higher register, the one that makes me sound younger, friendlier. “That’s me.”

The lady lets out an excited whoop. “Oh my gosh, would you mind taking a quick picture with my daughters? Just one? They absolutely adore you!”

“Of course.”

The rational, self-respecting part of me floats away, untethered, glancing down in disappointment at the lesser me left behind—the one who still craves the validation of strangers.

“Aubrey! Anya! Come here, quick!” the lady hollers. “You’re not going to believe who I just met!”

Two tween girls come bounding around the other end of the aisle. One has locks of purple twisted into her curls, and the other’s got streaks of blue weaving through her high ponytail. They look twelve, thirteen at most, but their style is impeccable, their makeup stunning enough to be on a Sephora ad. They probably have a dance video out there that’s got eight hundred thousand views. The next generation of trendsetters, here to step all over the corpse of my career with their rhinestone sneakers.

“It’s Candie—from that show you love!”

The name lands like a gut punch, and I bite the inside of my cheek as the pang hits.

Even during the height of our popularity, Candie and I still got mistaken for each other all the time. I used to get happy butterflies when it would happen, thinking that it meant people thought we looked alike. It took me a while to realize they merely thought of us as interchangeable.

The mother presents me like she’s unveiling a prize, and the girls’ faces progress through a slow-motion car crash of emotions, shifting from surprise to recognition to alarm to disappointment to unbearable secondhand embarrassment. And finally, to pity.

“Um, no, Mom, that’s—” Purple Curls attempts to correct.

“And she was nice enough to agree to a picture!” The woman’s already got her phone out and she’s shoving her daughters forward, arranging them next to me, one on each side, like we’re estranged relatives being forced into a family photo.

I flash Purple Curls and Blue Pony a tight smile, hoping to assure them with my eyes that I won’t make this any more uncomfortable than it already is and that the sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can all be released from this awkward circle of hell. The girls cooperatively stay silent and lean into me as their mother snaps a picture of us against a backdrop of frozen peas.

“Thank you so much!” the woman gushes.

“Yeah, thank you,” Blue Pony mumbles.

“Uh, good luck with everything,” Purple Curls adds.

“It was nice meeting you both,” I tell them, forcing myself to maintain the smile until the girls rush their mother away into the next aisle. The lady’s voice comes sailing over the top of the shelves.

“What’s the matter with you two? What are you upset about? I thought she was the one you liked.”


Copyright © 2023 by Linda Cheng. Illustrations © 2023 by David Milan.