They -- whoever "they"
were -- lied.
It was not lonely at the
top.
Bethany Miller found it
danged crowded. The number of people who gathered around her growing stardom made
her feel downright claustrophobic. What had made her think she wanted this?
Oh, yeah. To show all
those idiots in school who made her feel invisible. Other than a few friends,
starting with Athena Longfellow, it was like an invisibility cloak had been
wrapped around her all her life. Except when she got on stage. Then she became
visible, and audible -- everybody watched her, everybody listened. Meaning no
sense of privacy. Sometimes she felt like her godmother, Angela, was a faerie
godmother who had gone too far with a spell designed to protect her. The same
sense of "go away, we don't like you here," that drove most
troublemakers away from Neighborlee seemed to make her invisible to everyone in
town.
When she won a talent
competition, got an agent, started doing commercials and small recurring roles
on networks like Nickelodeon, then she became visible.
Which wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
With shooting wrapped on her third feature film, she looked back on those days of invisibility and anonymity with nostalgia. What insanity had driven her here? She could be perfectly happy right now, flipping burgers at her father's diner, being a perpetual student at Willis-Brooks College, clerking for Angela, spending her weekends hanging with Athena and her gang of computer geeks. And yes, trying not to be jealous that Athena was now engaged and deliriously happy. But no, she had taken the path that meant she couldn't even walk to the corner drugstore to get the paper without being recognized and mobbed.
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