At my old school, jumping headfirst into fiction had been the only thing that had stopped me from cracking; things had been horrible, but at least I had known that once class was over, I could spend the rest of the day in another reality where nothing could hurt me, where obstacles made the hero stronger, where villains got what they deserved, and where pain was always followed by a happy ending.

However, with Noelle’s last words still hanging in the air, escaping into the pages now seemed like a cowardly thing to do.

Instead, I paced around the room, trying to come up with an answer as to where she could’ve gone. I had already asked Jasper if she was with him, then I checked the gym, the common room, the Great Hall, and even the library, even though I knew she wouldn’t voluntarily set foot in there.

With a sigh, I stopped in front of her desk, looking at it as if I would find the answers to any of my questions within the mess on top of it. My eyes landed on her stack of magazines that kept piling higher every week, the glossy pages tattered in places from the number of times Noelle had flipped through them. It was the first time I really looked at them, so it was only then I noticed the little sticky notes that were marking some of the pages.

Out of sheer curiosity, I picked one up and flipped to one of the tagged pages to see the article headline: “Crystal Danell: The Queen of R&B is Back with Another Album.”

The photo beneath the title showed a woman, presumably Crystal Danell, strutting down a sidewalk, one hand lifted to wave at the camera. She wore classy black high heels and a pink pantsuit that was shockingly bright against her warm brown skin, her hair framing her face like a soft cloud.

Looking at her face, my heart skipped a beat. Not just because it was beautiful, but because that smile on it was so familiar. I knew the sly glimmer in her eyes, knew that curl of her lips; after all, I had felt a duplicate of it against my mouth only a few hours earlier.

Crystal Danel ’s features were sharper, with a stronger jaw-line and more prominent cheekbones, and her hair was much curlier, but there was absolutely no doubt that she looked eerily similar to Noelle.

With a sense of detached wonder, I picked up the next magazine. This time, Crystal was on the cover, along with a man I didn’t know and the headline “Who’s Crystal Danel ’s New Lover?”

After I had a look at two more magazines, it became clear to me that the only thing Noelle had been reading over the last few months were things featuring articles about Crystal, even if they were only a few sentences long.

The more I read, the more pieces I found to put the puzzle together: Crystal Danell was an R&B star who seemed to be pretty famous in the US, had been nominated for a Grammy, and was involved in a lot of charity work. She had also been dating an actor I didn’t know for a while last year but then broke up with him and was working on a fashion line of her own.