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couldn’t
see.
    “Yeah, just a bit,” Jake said, joining her in laughing at the craziness of it all.
    Raven was so disturbed by Kurt’s presence
that she wanted nothing more than to go back to her own room.   The moment the doors opened again on
their floor, she got off and abruptly made a beeline in that direction.
    “Raven,” Jake called out, moving to
follow her.   In a few quick steps
he’d caught up to her.   “Hey,” he
said, “where are you going?”
    “To my room, Jake.”   She kept walking, trying to put distance
between herself and Kurt.
    “I thought you and Kurt and I could hang
out in my room for a bit, talk shop.   Discuss strategy.”
    “Yeah,” Raven said, “the thing is, I really feel kind of sick.   I need to go back to my room and lay
down for a little bit.”   At her
door, she pulled out he room key, fumbling it a little.
    “Raven, is something wrong?   Like, really wrong?” he asked, putting
his warm hand on her wrist.
    “I told you—“
    “I just want to be sure everything’s
okay.”
    “I’m really frazzled.”   She swept her bangs from her forehead
and looked at him briefly, but she couldn’t meet his gaze.   He looked too concerned, too
worried—almost like he actually cared about her.
    He
doesn’t really care about anything but whether his big plan is going to be
ruined.   The big plan that I
stupidly came up with in the first place.
    Her door unlocked and she went inside,
while Jake stood there in the hall.   “I’ll come and check on you soon,” he told her.
    “Okay,” she said, suddenly needing to be
alone more than anything in the world.   As she shut the door, everything crashed in on her at once.   She ran to the bathroom, feeling like
she might be sick.
    She leaned over the toilet bowl and
waited for everything she’d eaten earlier to come up, and for a brief moment,
she was sure that it would.   But
then her jittery stomach seemed to calm, and she simply collapsed to a sitting
position next to the toilet, head hanging limply.
    All of those photographers and reporters
out there—they’d known her name.
    They’d known who she was already.   How was that even possible?
    It was shocking, really, to feel the
ferocity of it all, like being slammed by a forty foot wave that you never saw
coming.   The scope of it was so much
bigger than she could ever have prepared herself to cope with.
    Soon millions of people might know who
she was.   They’d be dissecting her
and talking about how she was too ugly, or short, or fat, or whatever people
would say.   She was sure none of it
would be good.
    Raven wondered why she’d put herself in
this position.   To
help Jake Novak?   He didn’t
need her help, and besides, she wasn’t capable of giving him her help.   She was turning to jelly and nothing had
even happened yet, really.
    Maybe it was time to have a chat with
Jake, to pull out of the deal.   Explain that she wasn’t cut out for the spotlight.   He would be better off trying to make a
go of it with Courtney Taylor or someone on his level.
    Slowly, though, her breathing was getting
a little less shallow, and she felt her light-headedness giving way to just
sheer tiredness.
    You’re
okay, Raven.   Nothing bad has happened.
    Well,
not yet anyway.
    Raven got slowly to her feet and left the
bathroom, went to the window of her hotel room and looked down, where she could
see the crowd still gathering.   It
was so strange to know that they were there, at least in part, to see her as
well as Jake.
    She took out her phone and pulled up
Google.  
    Before, she’d sometime googled herself to
make sure that all of the old garbage from her past had been scrubbed from the internet and wasn’t still coming up.   It had been gone for years by now, but
she still occasionally checked just in case.
    Just a few weeks ago she’d plugged her
name into Google and gotten less than five direct hits.   A race result, some article about her
old restaurant