Pinch Me

Darius Zaire can’t seem to wake up. And he really, really wants to.
   The seventeen-year-old pop star falls out of bed after another big night of girls, music and booze only to land on the cruddy floor of his old bedroom in his single mom’s crumbling townhouse. No mansion, no collection of luxury cars, no platinum records. No Darius. Before he was his sensational self, Darius Zaire was ordinary Darren Zegers, a not-very-popular, dyslexic band nerd who was crushing on Susan Koh and failing ninth-grade English. And now some kind of nightmare has erased everything that happened to change Darren the dweeb into Darius the multimillionaire superstar. The years have still passed, but not the glamorous ones he’d thought he had.
   When his mom shoves him onto the school bus, Darius has to face an ordinary day in the twelfth grade, suffering through remedial English and wondering what happened to the last three years and all his fans and money. Darius desperately wants to return to his old life, but as the day progresses he starts to worry that maybe this is reality, and his other life was the dream.