Page 1 of Wish You Were Her
By eighteen, Allegra Brooks was used to hearing her name from the mouths of strangers. She was accustomed to people speaking excitedly to her without introducing themselves. She was even used to the occasional grab and shove.
But she never quite acclimatized to being pulled apart by people she had never met. She watched fans become her biggest critics, all because her boundaries had angered them.
“Stop scrolling. Put that phone down.”
The words were whispered to Allegra by Natalie, her publicist. Natalie was twenty-six and the hardest-working person Allegra had ever met.
She would often ask herself “what would Natalie do?” before forcing herself into a party she had been terrified of going to, because the woman’s professional courage and work ethic put everyone else to shame.
The two of them were in the back of a hire car—they were due to appear at a swanky benefit for literacy—and the tinted windows offered a brief respite from the outside world.
“Nat,” Allegra said, her voice shaking a touch, as she swapped her dark glasses for her regular ones. “I’m not—”
“Forget that stupid article. Stop reading those comments. It’s basically self-harm at this point, Allegra.
Enough,” Nat said firmly. “Being loved on a massive scale means being disliked and misunderstood just as much. It all balances out. Wear the dark shades, there are tons of photographers. You’ll get overstimulated.
Don’t think about that stupid hack of a writer. I never should have agreed to her.”
“I must have done everything wrong for her to have written that,” Allegra remarked, as they waited for the car to stop. “I feel like I’m not playing the fame game very well.”
“Nonsense, you’re perfect. It’s a clickbait tactic. The snarkier and meaner they are, the more people will read it. You were trending on socials because it created so much discourse—”
“I hate discourse,” breathed Allegra, rubbing her palms and trying to find some calm.
“But the best people are on your side, kid. Don’t you stress. Now, come on. Chin up. Let’s go.”
Allegra let Natalie propel her out of the car and the flashes started. People yelled out her name and she pretended that they were calling for someone else. Some other eighteen-year-old girl who had just set the world on fire.
One successful open call audition at the age of thirteen, and she was now the owner of two Emmys and one very shiny Golden Globe.
She had been made a household name by her most recent and most famous role to date: Clera in the globally acclaimed television adaptation of fantasy series Court of Bystanders .
It just didn’t feel like a name she recognized anymore.
She had been cast in a revival of the musical She Loves Me , but the director’s dubious past had been made public and the whole thing had been canceled.
So now she had a free summer for the first time in years.
She was almost afraid of the open calendar.
At that moment, Allegra noticed a young woman filming herself at the main door. When she spotted Allegra, her eyes widened and she leaped into motion.
“Allegra? Allegra! Oh, my God! I need a picture with you!”
Allegra smiled instinctively but she saw how anxious her eyes looked as she stared at herself on the girl’s phone screen.
Once inside, Allegra felt a bitter taste under her tongue when she looked around at the glitz and sparkle: this was a charity luncheon .
There was a vast ballroom full of tables with guests milling all around.
A large screen played slides full of information about the people they were supposedly there to help, but nobody paid attention.
Attendees buzzed from table to table, all trying to find the most socially beneficial beehive.
Allegra had made a sizeable donation and had hoped, in the car, that the event would highlight the underprivileged children the charity was trying to help.
Now it seemed like yet another soulless gathering for the people who had decided she was going to be one of them. Well, if she behaved.
“This is not my world,” Allegra said, too quietly for anyone to hear. “I don’t belong here.”
Natalie was a human battering ram against the crowd of photographers. Some attendees nodded at Allegra in greeting, others looked her slowly up and down. Almost all of them whispered to their companions as she and Natalie passed by.
Allegra had been working steadily for years, hacking at the tree of acting and making little dents with every artistic pursuit. Then one day, the tree just fell. All those years of working on its trunk had paid off and the towering thing hit the ground with enormous shockwaves.
And there was no standing the tree back up.
Natalie found their place settings at their table and Allegra moved to turn off her phones—one for work and one for herself. Natalie had wrangled the personal number from her so she could reach her late at night, but otherwise only the odd co-star and her mother got in touch on the personal phone.
So she was surprised to see a little red number one looking up at her from its barely used inbox.
People were still filing into the room. She opened her inbox to find an email from Brooks Books, her father’s bookshop; a reply to an email she had sent, intending it to reach her father:
[email protected]
to: [email protected]
Subject: Summer Book Festival
Hello!
Hope it’s okay for me to email here. I called the shop but no one answered. Can I doublecheck the dates of your book festival? You don’t have a website and I can’t find it on socials.
Lots of love!
[email protected]
to: [email protected]
RE: Summer Book Festival
Dear Mysterious Reader who did not leave a name,
Apologies for our lack of technological advancement.
Alas, I have implored George Brooks, my fearless leader, many times for a website but he is an adorable curmudgeon about such matters.
The festival preparations have begun and it’s already taking years off my young life.
We open on July 28, and the last night is August 23. Only two months to go.
Wish an overworked bookseller luck!
Warmest wishes,
Said Overworked Bookseller
Allegra smiled. It danced on her lips and then grew into something wide. She started to type a response.
[email protected]
to: [email protected]
Subject: Summer Book Festival
Dear Said Overworked Bookseller,
So sorry to have added more to your to-do list. For some reason, I thought Mr. Brooks was manning this email address but I should have known better. Consider me scolded.
Thank you for the festival dates, it’s gratefully received. The Twitter account only has this email address in its bio and no one has tweeted in this calendar year. Appreciate speediness of response via email.
Best,
Mysterious Reader
Allegra sent the email and switched both of her phones off, before sliding them into her clutch bag. It was a gift from an up-and-coming designer. She so rarely chose her own outfits anymore. She had become a canvas for other people’s art.
She found herself daydreaming for most of the luncheon.
She knew so little of her father’s small town, Lake Pristine.
Her mother had always spoken of it with great fondness and her father would send beautiful pictures of it at Christmas (physical Polaroids in the post because technology unnerved him).
His bookshop was his pride and joy and Allegra could imagine it, in the sunny picturesque town where everyone was as friendly and funny as the bookseller on the other end of their email exchange.
She had begged to visit as a child, imagining it to be a place of mermaids in lakes and fairies in the woods.
But her father had always chosen to visit them in the city instead.
The drive was too long for her, her parents would say, and as a child prone to travel sickness, she believed them.
Now she wondered if it was just hard for the two of them to be there together—in the place where they had first fallen in love.
When Allegra’s acting career had taken off, her life had become one of trailers and hotels. No time for any kind of home.
Now Lake Pristine suddenly felt like an escape portal. The kind of world she wanted to fall into, even if only for a short spell.
“We need to discuss the summer,” Natalie finally murmured. “Have you decided what you’ll do with your time off? I can pull together a schedule if you want to keep working. You won’t be needed for press until August though.”
Allegra turned her personal phone back on.
She could feel Natalie watching her curiously. “You’re staring really hard at that thing. Not reading anymore trash opinions, I hope.”
“No,” Allegra said. “I—just emailing a friend.”
“A friend?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
Natalie blushed. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just know work’s had you a bit… isolated.”
“I’m emailing a new friend.”
Natalie gave her a look of approval and held her hands up, as if to assure Allegra that she would let the actress draft these emails on her own and would not pry or spy.
And she did.
[email protected]
to: [email protected]
RE: Summer Book Festival
Dear Mysterious Reader,
I feel you’re less mysterious now, though I obviously don’t know who you are. A book lover, I hope!
No scolding intended, I assure you. I don’t think you live in Lake Pristine, or you wouldn’t have emailed.
People who live here don’t believe in polite contact—they just come and bang loudly on the front door if they want something or have a question.
Most of our festival patrons receive a posted program, and descend on the town when the festival starts.
I sometimes forget people might look for us on social media.
I avoid it all now, too divisive. Or I’ll get caught in a rabbit hole of some weirdly specific drama, usually not related to anyone or anything that I know, and then my evening has gone and I’m cold with shame.
Love,
Ashamed ex-Twitter addict
Allegra blurted out a laugh. Someone at the next table threw her a look of suspicion and her mask slipped back on without a moment’s hesitation. She sighed. Being perceived took away the precious things and made them feel cheap.
“What’s wrong?” Natalie asked, looking up from her own phone. Perhaps she so rarely heard Allegra laugh, she had mistaken it for a noise of distress while focusing on her own alarming inbox. The publicist’s emails replaced themselves like a shark’s teeth. There were always more waiting.
“I know what I’m doing over the summer,” Allegra said decidedly. “I’m spending it with my dad.”
“Your dad? At the bookshop? The whole summer?”
“Yep.”
“Which is where again?”
Allegra slipped her dark glasses on and smiled. “Lake Pristine.”