But not any more.
That version of Keera is gone.
The new one wears boyfriend jeans, loose T-shirts and sweats that cover her body up because she’s obviously not as thin as she was when she was doing coke, smoking way too much and basically living on straight tequila.
It transpires that no food plus a diet of pills, margaritas and thirty cigarettes a day is an excellent if precarious way to stay incredibly thin.
Keera mourns the loss of her concave stomach but likes that nobody recognises her any more.
The last thing she wants is to be snapped with somebody’s iPhone and displayed all over social media.
‘Mystery of Firebird Singer Keera’s Disappearance Solved!’
‘Firebird’ is her most famous song, the one that shot her from Disney-Channel-cute-star fame to one-name-only singer fame.
Keera’s amazed that her time in rehab hasn’t emerged onto social media – but then, her mother would have been the person to leak it.
Dr Bobbi, her mom and Keera’s manager, didn’t agree with rehab at all.
‘You don’t need it! So you drink a little, and doing coke is not a good look, but nobody has shots of you using! You just have to stop the cocaine,’ Dr Bobbi warned. ‘You’re the girl next door, Keera! That’s your brand. Rehab would destroy that.’
Thanks, Mom.
Keera knows that her girl-next-door image would have been destroyed for sure if anyone had heard her addiction diaries in Haven Clinic.
Even a guy named Sketch (addicted to crack) had opened his slitty eyes long enough to look at her when she told them all the worst thing. Telling people about your drinking and using was a big part of Haven Clinic.
Sketch had looked her up and down when he heard Keera’s drugging confession with everyone else in the group.
‘I would,’ he’d hissed, because he didn’t have much of a voice left thanks to years spent smoking crack.
‘Not helpful, Sketch,’ admonished Lexi, Keera’s favourite counsellor.
But the words had lingered in the air.
Keera still cringes when she thinks of Sketch.
His deadened shark gaze and hissing voice should be enough to keep her clean and sober for life, she thinks. Because when she was drinking and using, she could have easily ended up with Sketch.
Drink and drugs totally skewed her judgement. She shudders.
It’s four months since she left rehab.
Stopping using was one thing.
Keera needs the retreat to work out how to fix the rest of her life. But some of it just seems too complicated.
Plus, she’s now broke. The Keera bandwagon was an expensive show and she and her mom spent far too much early on.
This trip to Corfu is her last expense before going back to the real world.
But just what is the real world and what is her place in it?
It’s ten at night when Dan steps out onto the balcony of his room in Villa Artemis and lights up. He’s tried stopping smoking so many times and, as a man of science, he knows how ruinous cigarettes are to his health. At least he’s now down to a few a day, which is better than twenty.
He wonders if Rose Talisman can help him stop smoking, but that’s a side quest, really.
‘Sort your head out, Dan,’ his sister, Vicky, had told him when she showed him the Instagram post about Rose’s new venture. ‘Nobody has to know you’ve gone to a therapy retreat if you really think it’s weird. Keep it private, sure. But Julia’s left you. You’ve got to deal with that, or who knows what’ll happen. Julia’s a complicated woman. I don’t want to wake up one morning to find that she’s dead and everyone says it’s your fault. It’ll destroy the rest of your life thinking of the part you played in it. So you need help.’
