Page 3 of Ticket to the Stars: Part One

Alexa had to drive me home. We lived only ten minutes apart. As she pulled into the driveway with her old beater car, she pulled right behind someone else’s car—a vehicle neither of us recognized.

“Who’s here?” Alexa said, glancing at me.

“I don’t know,” I answered. I spotted someone standing near the front door. A woman, by the look of her, with long frizzy black hair and sunglasses that hid half her face. The clothes she wore told me she didn’t frequent this area of town.

And what area was that? I wouldn’t call us a poor area, but we weren’t exactly overflowing with three car garages and well-manicured lawns around here, either.

“Need me to grab Donny?” Alexa asked, helpful as ever. Donny was the metal baseball bat she kept in her backseat. Couldn’t ever be too careful. As much as she postured about using Donny on people, she’d never actually done it, and a part of me wondered if she even could.

“No,” I said. “Just wait a second while I see what she’s here for.” Alexa leaned over and asked if I wanted her to come with me, but I shook my head no and got out of the car.

The woman was dressed in fancy clothes, even though her hair was a little wild. And the car that was parked in front of our garage was sleek and small—some type of sportscar, maybe? Whoever this woman was, she had some money and she wasn’t afraid to show it.

Whoever she was, she didn’t even glance up when I approached her. Whatever was on her phone was just so interesting that she didn’t hear me when I asked, “Can I help you?” I had to say it a second time before she finally looked up.

The sunglasses on her face hid everything except her nose, her jaw, and her mouth, and that mouth of hers frowned somewhat as she studied me. Her hand curled around her phone, and she was slow in lifting her glasses so she could see me unobstructed. A pair of black eyes stared straight at me.

“Are you Maggie Stiefer?” She pronounced itsty-ferand notstee-fer, a mistake which most everybody made if they didn’t hear our last name spoken out loud.

“Stiefer,” I repeated it with the correct pronunciation. “Yeah, why?” She wasn’t the only one scrutinizing the other here. I had zero ideas who she was or why she was here, asking for me, of all people.

She suddenly thrust out her phone-free hand, offering it to me. “The name’s Ramona. Are your parents home? There’s something we all need to discuss.” Now that her glasses were off, I put her at about thirty-five years old. She could be older, though; she was wearing a lot of makeup.

I thought it was weird she was offering absolutely no details about who she was or why she was here, and the way she said her first name, like she expected me to know it… who the hell was she?

“It’s just my mom,” I said. “And my sister. They should be getting home any minute now.” A bit of a lie, but she didn’t need to know that. There was nothing inside our house that this Ramona woman would want or steal—she had money, by the looks of her, so what on earth was she doing here?

“Right,” Ramona nodded once as she said, “Cleo, right?”

How did she know my sister’s name? How did she know me? I’d never seen this woman in my life. I was rooted in place, completely at a loss for what to do or what to say, and it must’ve shown on my face, because Ramona said, “Why don’t you let me in, and I can tell you why I’m here?”

“No offense, but you’re a stranger. I’m not letting you into my house.”

She smiled—and by smiled, I meant her lips pulled tightly over her face, like she wasn’t used to smiling. “Maggie, I understand you don’t know me from a random stranger off the street, however, if all goes well, that will be changing very soon.”

And then she gave me a quick run-down why she was here, how she knew me and my sister. It didn’t really make sense to me. Most of it flew right over my head as I tried to disassemble the new information.

With a quick glance to Alexa, I motioned for her to go. She’d rolled her window down to try to eavesdrop, but with how loud her car idled, I doubted she heard anything. If she had, I didn’t think she’d be staring at me with a clueless expression.

What did Ramona say, exactly?

“You’ve won your ticket to the stars. Out of thousands of applicants, you were selected to become the fourth member of Black Sacrament.”

Chapter Two– Maggie

I sat in the middle of my mom and Cleo, staring down at the kitchen table. Ramona and my mom were talking about the contest, while Cleo squirmed and grinned like she couldn’t hide how excited she was.

When Cleo and Mom got home, they came in through the garage and spotted Ramona and I sitting across from each other. Cleo immediately squealed, and then her excitement had died off—only for a few minutes—when she saw the serious look on my face. I’d never heard a guiltier “I have something to tell you” in my entire life.

Cleo was only eleven. Seven years between us, and she never let me forget it. She was wild and rambunctious, loud and non-stop talkative. Go, go, go all the time. Honestly, she was exhausting. She had the same eyes as me, a dirtier blond color for her hair, and since she hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, she was a twig.

Turned out, one of Cleo’s favorite bands was hosting a contest. They’d lost their frontrunner a while back and had been laying low in search of new talent. They turned their scope to the world; anyone could submit a video of them singing. That’s all that was needed to enter.

“The team and I thought it was so sweet your sister would enter you in secret,” Ramona said, staring squarely at me. Cleo giggled. “It’s a great story to expand on, once we go public—that is, if you accept. I can’t force you if you don’t want to.”

Mom still wore her waitress uniform, an ugly light blue number with a matching set of shorts with her button-down shirt. Her old nametag sat on her chest. Her blond hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. “Do you have the video on you? Can we see it?” She leaned around me and shot Cleo a look. “I had no idea Cleo did any of this.”

“Me either,” I huffed. My brain still hurt. If Cleo knew about the contest, it had to be one of the bands she liked… and let's just say our preferences weren’t the same. She liked the harder stuff, while I liked stuff with a beat, songs you could dance to.

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