Land of Hope and Dreams

[D/N]

Fucking John Rizzolo. He'd made California look so easy. Of course, he'd only been competing against himself, but still. It hadn't been like the rest of Andrea's classmates had been much in that regard.

No, for the most part they were all off shunning the spotlight, trying to disappear, acting like that was the healthiest option. Fuck 'em. Taking the easy way out. Let them go on like that, pretending to be better than her. Someone had to fucking step up and preserve their place in history, after all. She'd take one arrest for public intoxication and unflattering tabloid photo over a lifetime of suppression any day of the week. Besides, wasn't like any of them had appeared on the 2008 SpikeTV Scream Awards to co-present the award for "Holy Sh!t Moment of the Year" had they?

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Her book had sold decently. Enough that she'd be able to write a second one, at least. And actually write it herself this time. She'd made sure that was in the fine print all the way back when she signed the contract. Sure, publisher folks, get this first book ghostwritten and print it off, strike while the iron's hot and all that jazz.

But eh, she'd gotten the important stuff across, at least. The STAR stuff.

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"So you're certain that STAR, the rescue group, they deliberately withheld that, Andrea?"

"100% Larry. 100%. I mean, it's all right there in the footage, isn't it? That distress call, Roland and Isabel and Dave Morrison and all of them actually sent out the location of the island, but the footage of them doing that was never shown. If it had actually gone through, then I mean, someone would have seen it, figured out the code. But nobody did. "

"Except for STAR, you're saying."

"Exactly! How could STAR be the only people in the world to have seen that footage, figured out where the island was? I mean... there's a lot more detail about this in the book of course Larry, but the bottom line is that either they somehow prevented that footage from getting out to the rest of the world, or they knew where the island was all along. And either way, did they tell anyone? Did they, I dunno, call in the army? No, they showed up in two boats a couple days later! They could have saved every single kid on that island if they'd wanted to Larry, and they didn't."

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Oh yeah. Fucking STAR. She'd had plenty to say about them, all right. Not that Andrea really thought they were in some secret league with Danya, but she had to Hollywood things up a bit, make folks notice. 15 minutes don't last forever, after all. Not to mention that it was getting close to one year gone by, which probably meant that v5 was just around the corner.

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Except that as things turned out, v5 wasn't just around the corner. Huh. Andrea hadn't expected that. So, as the days passed and senior trips across the country proceeded uneventfully, the nation breathed a sigh of relief and celebrated, Andrea had some time to think about what to do next and some time to still book appearances and show up on TV to talk about the distinct lack of SOTF action going on and some time to forget about writing because she was Hollywood baby now and coke was SO much better than Ritalin, and then not long after that she got that message and found who she was looking for and figured it all out.