by J. C. Lillis
The fic writes itself: I track him down at the crowded station, shout his name over the very last call for his bus. He makes me work for forgiveness when I catch up to him, but only for a minute. We fall into each other’s arms and the make-up kiss goes on and on, and all the travelers set down their suitcases to clap for the triumph of love.
I stagger to a stop by a giant cottonwood and close my eyes.
“No,” I tell her. “What’s the point?”
She watches me carefully.
“Okay, well. I’m up for anything,” she says. “Just tell me what you want to do.”
She waits in the near-dark. She’s wearing sneakers with her pajama pants and the sleeves of her black t-shirt are rolled up to her shoulders, like she’s ready for a fight. I think of Sim. Standing outside Lagarde’s hut with a knife pointed to his right temple, where the evolution chip was installed. Take it out, he’d begged Lagarde. How do people live like this?
When she refused, he’d picked up a thick long branch, like this one, and beat it against a tree until it shattered into splinters.
Like this.
Bec watches. She doesn’t try to stop me. She just lets me pummel the poor old tree like a Boy Scout gone savage, smashing one branch after another until I’m out of branches and out of breath and I give up the fight, collapsing limp against the ancient bark.
I hear a distant trill. My phone.
“That’s him,” Bec says.
She sounds so firm and hopeful that I believe it too. I yank the phone out of my pocket and answer fast, in the dark. If I’d checked the screen first, I would’ve seen the warning.
HOME CALLING.
“Brandon?”
Damn.
“Uh. Hey!” I force a smile into my voice. “Everything’s great. Can I call you back?”
“No, actually,” Dad says.
“Brandon,” says Mom, in the same tone she used when I was twelve and she found the Tiger Beat stash in my closet. “Is there something you’d like to tell us?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I would like to know,” my father says, “why your mother had to find out in an email from Mary Beth Heffler that you were driving across the country with a boy we clearly do not trust.”
“What?”
“Facebook doesn’t lie, Brandon. Mary Beth’s daughter posted on Bec’s wall. Something about—you have it, Kathy.”
“’Lucky you…cross country with two hot guys! Too bad they’re both gay, lol.’”
Oh God.
I make an I’m dead sign to Bec, finger slashing throat. She cringes and makes a Should I stay? motion; my hands tell her My demise needs no witnesses. She slips away but I see her stay close, just behind a Ponderosa pine a little way back down the path.
“You lied to us,” Dad says. “True or false?”
“True,” I whisper. I rest my forehead on the cottonwood I’d just attacked.
“Tell us it’s Abel, at least. Not someone worse.”
“It’s him. Or, it was. He—” My eyes fill up. “He left.”
Dad makes a disbelieving ugh sound. “You’re coming home, in case you’re wondering,” he says. “Right now.”
“What—why?”
“Why?”
“There’s one more convention.”
“You should have thought about that before you spent five weeks lying to your parents.”
“I’m not in high school anymore,” I say. “It’s my life.”
“Well, it’s my RV, kiddo,” Dad says calmly. “And I want you to return it immediately. Where are you right now?”
I dig my fingernails into the bark. “Far away. Nebraska.”
“All right. Fine. I want you back here tomorrow night. On Friday you can help with setup for the Funfair at St. Matt’s and then you and your mother and I will have a long talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Honey. Come on,” soothes Mom.
“I’m not coming home yet!”
“Ah, okay. I see.” Dad’s voice goes low and taut, like it always did when he’d lecture Nat. “So this is what the Life of Brandon’s all about now. No, I get it. Real cool. You walk away from church, you lie to your parents—”
“Yeah, well, why do you think I lied? What if I told you Abel was coming? There’s no way you’d have said yes.”
“You’re damn right!”
“We’re just concerned, sweetie,” says Mom.
“You’re just backwards, is what you are,” I shoot back.
We all plunge into silence. The woods around me feel dark and cold and endless. I think of the old Family Game Nights in the St. Matt’s parish hall, when Dad would school everyone in Jeopardy and Mom was reigning Pictionary Queen with a 7-layer taco dip everyone wanted the recipe for. Nat would roll her eyes when they put their goofy plastic trophies on the mantel but I thought it was great, having parents who were champions and knew just about everything.
“Do you think I want to be this way, Brandon?” Dad sighs. “I mean, look: I wish to God I could say ‘Suuure, go ahead. Whatever you want, kiddo! Dessert for dinner! Blow off that homework! Loosey-goosey, whatever feels good…’”
Mom giggles lamely. “Loosey-goosey?”
“The point is,” he huffs, “I’m on your side. Very much so. I want you to be happy. I want to see you fall in love, get married—”
“I can still do that.”
“But the fact is, you’re never, ever going to be at peace. Not like this.”
I just blink.
“Greg…” my mother whispers.
“It’s true. You won’t, because your mom and I raised you to know what’s right, and you’re always going to know deep down that this isn’t what God wants for you. That even if he quote-unquote ‘made’ you a certain way, you separated yourself from him with your choices. And if I didn’t keep pointing that out to you, if I didn’t give my only son every chance to fix his relationship with God—” His voice wavers. He pauses, pulls in an even breath. “—then what kind of dad would I be?”
The kind of dad I need. If hey_mamacita was real and I was in her fic, I’d say it clear and brave. I’d tell him I respected his opinion, but it wasn’t mine, not anymore. I’d tell him that my beautiful boyfriend was probably still at the bus station, and if I drove fast enough I could probably still catch him.
Instead I just mumble I gotta go. And I hang up.
Three seconds later it rings again.
hey_mamacita says, Answer it, baby. Stand up to him. You can do it.
It keeps ringing.
Tell him who you are! Be Fanfic Brandon! Unleash some mayhem!
Which is easy to say, when you don’t exist.
I wait for the phone to stop ringing. When it’s finally quiet, I send a single pathetic text to my dad’s cell. He always keeps it on his belt, even when he’s home watching baseball or working in the garden. “I don’t want to be fertilizing the roses when someone calls with terrible news,” he likes to say.
GOING 2 BALTIMORE CON
HOME SUNDAY LATEST
I hit send and shut my phone off before it can protest. The world doesn’t end. The cottonwood in front of me is tall and strong and unchanged. I peel a small patch of ragged bark from its side and slip it in my pocket.
Baltimore.
Bec shuffles back down the dirt trail, drawing a line behind her with the tip of a thick walking stick.
“We’re going on?” she says.
“Going on. Yeah.”
My legs are going boneless. I start to shake a little.
“Here.” She hands me the stick, and we start on the uphill path back to the Sunseeker.
CastieCon #6
Baltimore, Maryland
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bec and I do our usual on the long drive east on I-80.
We put on the playlist we made together a couple years back and hum along with Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine, Rufus Wainwrigh
t, Dylan. We argue over whether Scott Pilgrim is actually any good. We polish off the dregs of the snack bin: raisins, stale trail mix, packs of code-orange crackers with crumbly peanut butter filling. She props her polka-dot flip-flops on the dash and reads me ridiculous Cosmo quizzes on the right animal print for your body type and what your favorite martini says about you.
But sometimes I’ll catch her eye over a diner menu or glance at her while we’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper, and I know she knows that everything I say is just filling silence. That inside I’m secretly doing what Past-Tense Brandon does best: flailing wildly.
She’s right. Like right this minute, on the morning of July 4th, what we’re technically doing is listening to the Broken West and estimating how many crunches a day she’d have to do to get as ripped as Della Wolfe-Williams. But the whole time I’m rifling through a flipbook of options. I’ll go home, straight home, and apologize to my parents. I’ll call Abel, beg him for another chance. I’ll find a church and talk to a priest. I’ll pick up some random guy at the Baltimore con and drag him into a bathroom stall. I’ll swear off sex forever and join a monastery and spend the rest of my days meditating and making thimbleberry jam.
“You miss him,” Bec says, for the millionth time. We’re on 76 now, snipping the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. I’m wearing Abel’s white shirt from the Castaway Ball, the sleeves rolled up to fit me and the collar still tinged with blue.
“Yeah.”
“So call him.”
“I can’t.”
“That’s it.” She pulls out her phone. “I’m dialing.”
“No! Don’t.”
“Why?”
“It’ll just make things worse.”
“Like waiting too long won’t?”
“I need a sign.”
“Okay: STOP.”
“No no, listen. I have a feeling.”
She sighs. “Here we go.”
I can’t explain it. I try anyway. I tell her I feel like something’s going to happen at the Baltimore con, at the Q&A. Like I’ll absorb some of Lenny Bray’s storytelling genius on this subatomic level and I’ll have an epiphany, and all the confusion will dry up and I’ll know exactly what to do and where to go next.
Bec nods gravely. “That’s really kind of dumb.”
I grip the wheel tighter and kick it up to seventy. Let her think that; I don’t care. We merge onto 70 East, toward Baltimore. I direct the next part straight to God, if he’s up there. Please help me. Please find some way to speak through Leonard Bray today. Give me, once and for all, the sign I’ve been waiting for.
***
***WE’RE SORRY***
TODAY’S Q&A WITH LEONARD BRAY
IS CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS
MR. BRAY SINCERELY REGRETS ANY INCONVENIENCE
***NO REFUNDS***
For a long time I just stare at the sign—attached to the closed door of Meeting Room 1-C with cheery mismatched thumbtacks, as if it were announcing a shortage of strawberry ice cream instead of a cruel practical joke of the universe.
“Crap,” I whisper.
Bec squeezes my arm.
Outside the Q&A room in the Baltimore Dorchester, the CastieCon staff—a burly guy with a black goatee and a skinny lady with straggly brown hair—are getting absolutely jackhammered. The crowd around them gets bigger and angrier by the minute, the fans shooting out questions and threats and conspiracy theories.
“I drove my son all the way from New York! We’re missing fireworks for this.”
“I knew he’d pull this. He planned it, didn’t he?”
“He’s got stage fright, you guys. He said—”
“Bullshit! He hates us. Always has.”
“Refunds or revolt, people!”
“Refunds or revolt! Refunds or revolt!”
Bec pulls me away from the chanting crowd.
“Sorry,” she says. “This sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you want to do?”
I scan the convention hall, hoping the answer will pop out. But it’s all the same CastieCon stuff—the vendors and the overpriced snack stand and the trivia games and costume contests—and none of it is fun without Abel. I can’t go, though. Not yet. I can’t just go home to my pissed-off parents and the St. Matt’s Funfair and my stupid room with the stupid solar system sheets, like the past six weeks never even happened.
“I need some time,” I tell Bec. “I think maybe a long walk or something…”
“Want company?”
“Not this time. That okay?”
She nods. “I’ll hang out here. I want to call Dave anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
“There’s a fanfic panel at 12. It might be fun and educational.”
“Really.”
“Plus there’s a pool. Take your time.”
She’s snapping a little blue plastic dragonfly barrette in her hair, the kind she used to wear when we were kids and spent whole afternoons in the woods around St. Matt’s with her dad’s metal detector. She used to save the bottle caps for me, even that awesome vintage Orange Crush cap she probably wanted to keep.
I crush her in a hug.
“Okay, freakshow,” she laughs. “Go find your epiphany.”
“Thanks.”
“Try the gift shop first. I think they’re on sale.”
I give her a raspberry and a wave.
“Bring me back a snow globe!”
***
I stick my earbuds in and call up a Sim playlist, scrolling right to the song Abel contributed (”Coin-Operated Boy” by the Dresden Dolls). I stalk the hotel lobby while the song tootles in my ears like a demented music box. I walk with purpose, even though I have none. I scan everything like there’s a clue inside: the concierge, the fountains, the sleek leather armchairs, the glass chandeliers shaped like upside-down birthday cakes.
Just past the elevator banks, I spot the nun.
She’s an old-school kind I’ve only seen in photos, with a long black veil and just a small window of face peeking through. Like a relic from Gram’s day, when it was okay to throw a five-pound Latin hymnal at someone for mispronouncing venite adoremus. She’s walking arm in arm with a young blonde woman who’s dressed way older than she probably is in a dark severe pantsuit and pearls, her hair swept up and sprayed stiff. She looks familiar, the way all churchy girls do. They’re probably off to some kind of youth convention, where Pantsuit Woman will pump them up with an abstinence-is-cool speech and the nun will make sure no one’s secretly making out in the coat closet.
Follow them.
The weird idea presses into me. Lightly at first, then hard as a fist; they vanish around a corner and my legs jerk to action, run to catch up. Cold sweat breaks out on my neck. When you’re trolling for a sign and your gut tells you follow that nun, you probably won’t like what you get.
They turn down a narrow hallway, a dim passage with a red EXIT sign flickering at the end. I hurry past the opening, all innocent-passer-by, and then back up and duck behind the vending machine at the hall’s entryway.
“He says wait here,” says the nun, in a deep raspy whisper I didn’t expect. “He’s pulling the car around—What’s that face for?”
“You look ridiculous.”
“Effective, though. No one looks a nun in the eye. We’ll return the costume on the way to lunch.”
“Oh, geez, Lenny.”
Every hair on my arms lifts straight up. Now I know where I’ve seen Pantsuit Woman—decorating his arm at the Emmys, shuffling shyly in a mermaid-tail gown, the forums snarking Bray likes ‘em young.
I crouch down and sneak a quick peek.
“This is really pathetic,” his wife is saying.
“Well, I’m sorry, Elizabeth. Some days I can. Some days I cannot. This happens to be a cannot day.”
“At least be honest with them.”
“I was! Illness. It’s a useful word. Crippling anxiety slot
s neatly therein.”
She sighs. “Crippling? C’mon, that’s a little—”
“I am deep in disguise, skulking past angry throngs of fans. Would I do this unless I had to?—Yes, hello?…Uh-huh, fantastic. And it’s a curtained alcove? Marvelous. We’re on our way.” His phone snaps shut. “Reservations at Cereza. That should cheer you up. Private room, little plates, no one to bother us.”
“You break people’s hearts.”
“Darling, please. They just want to ogle me like a zoo animal. The only one who truly wants to see my ugly mug is you.”
“Not true. You’re the Genius Creator.”
“Oh, tell me more.”
Do it now. Talk to him. I risk another peek; Bray’s yanking off the nun costume, hopping on one foot with a hand on his wife for balance, and he looks so human and approachable with his bald spot showing and his underwear peeking from the waistband of his cords that…
A sneeze sizzles up my nose and roars out of me.
“Who’s there?” Bray’s voice: sharp and mean, a trace of fear. I clap a hand to my mouth.
“Hello?” says Elizabeth.
“Show yourself!” I get a fanboy chill. He’s doing Xaarg. I remember how he joked in that interview once, how writing the voice of God was “frighteningly easy” for him. “It’s impolite to hover!”
I could run. There’s a staircase three doors down; I could lose the voice of God in a heartbeat if I tried.
I close my eyes. Breathe in, breathe out.
I step into the dim hallway light.
Bray squints.
“My glasses,” he whispers. Elizabeth digs in her little black purse, passes them over. He slides on a thick pair of tortoiseshell frames and sizes me up.
“What hath the heavens discharged?” He blinks theatrically. “One rumpled fool in an ill-fitting shirt.”
I clear my throat. “Mr. Bray, I—”
“Oh. God. Why? Why why why do you have to know who I am?”
“Foolproof costume,” Elizabeth eyerolls.
“No—” I take a step closer. He’s short in person; we stand eye to eye. “No, see, I’m a fan—”
