Under the Dusty Moon

by Suzanne Sutherland

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve been coming here a while. My mom used to take me when I was younger. She’s a big Doctor Who fan, and I’ve always been into comics.”

  “Isn’t she bummed that you’ve ditched her?” I asked.

  “She’s got Miles. That’s what younger brothers are for.”

  “Wow,” I said, “so your whole family are hardcore Con-ers, eh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, giving me a sheepish smile, “kinda. You’re, like, totally going to ditch me here for someone cooler, aren’t you?”

  “Nah,” I said, “you’re pretty cute. Think I’ll stick around.”

  “Good thing I’m such a babe, eh?” he said, smiling down at the copy of Sand Mummy #1 in his hand. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Shaun waited in line to get his comic signed while I hung back and scoped out another artist at a table nearby. When he came back to join me he was thrilled to show off the creators’ signatures scribbled on the cover.

  “Isn’t this awesome?” he said. “What do you want to do next?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, spinning around to survey the floor, overwhelmed and excited by everything I saw.

  “Want to check out the exhibitor floor?” Shaun asked. “There’s always lots of cool stuff there.”

  “Sure,” I said, and let Shaun lead the way.

  Passing through the double doors that led to the exhibitor floor, there were rows and rows of elaborate corporate set-ups. And that’s when I saw it. What I’d forgotten I’d even been looking for.

  “There,” I said, pointing at the giant banner where Stara’s intense gaze stared back at us.

  LORE OF AGES VI: CON-EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

  “Take me.”

  The line-up for the LoA VI demo was long, but Shaun was happy to wait with me. I was so excited to see what the new game looked like, even if I hadn’t quite beaten LoA V yet. I kept thinking that we might run into Lucy in line, and kept imagining that I saw her, but it always turned out to be someone else. Lucy was nowhere around. She’d probably been by the booth already; in fact I was almost sure she had. No way could she resist the siren song of the Con’s greatest treasure.

  When my turn came up, I grabbed the controller with my left hand and started running around just to see what the controls and the graphics were like. There wasn’t much else I could do with only one hand but it was amazing just the same. Like a next-level version of LoA V, which, I realized as soon as I thought of it, was of course the point. Shaun just stood by watching me play, quietly mesmerized.

  “Wow,” he said, “you’re really into this, huh?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “I mean, I love it but I’m not very good. My friend Lucy and I were actually working on making our own game for a while, but it kind of ended badly.”

  “What, like this?” Shaun asked.

  “Ha, no,” I said, “not quite. Just something really basic. It was fun.”

  “Yeah?” Shaun said. “That sounds cool. So what happened?”

  “We had a fight,” I said. “But I feel like I should kind of just apologize, you know?” The truth of my words hit me as I said them. “I’ve been kind of a crappy friend.”

  “It happens,” Shaun said. “I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, as one of the staff tapped me on the shoulder and told me my time was up. “I hope so.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering from room to room and table to table, from fandom to fandom, losing ourselves in the crowd and the fun of it all. I got Shaun to take my picture with an amazing Stara Shah, and I took his with a guy in a rubber Batman suit who was waving a Canadian flag and calling himself Toronto Batman.

  I was so overwhelmed by all the stuff for sale that I almost couldn’t make up my mind on anything. In the end I was swayed by a girl selling dresses with prints of classic video games when I realized that I’d been living a shadow of a life without a Ms. Pac-Man dress. I had to hit an ATM and take money out just to pay for it. I knew that I’d have to lie to Mom and tell her it had been on sale for twenty bucks, but it was so worth it.

  As the girl handed me my way-overpriced dress in a plastic bag, Shaun shook his head.

  “You’ve gotta stop being my dream girl,” he said. “Seriously.”

  “What can I say?” I said, slipping the bag into his backpack. “A dream girl’s work is never done.”

  We were getting ready to leave — we’d both spent almost all of our money and only had enough left to eat at the hot dog stands outside — when I heard a just-barely familiar voice call my name.

  “Vic? Hey, Vic!”

  I turned around. It was Mom’s friend with the purple hair from the record store. She had ditched her record-store clerk uniform of dark jeans and a band T and was dressed in a flannel shirt and jean shorts with a Star Trek insignia pinned to her chest.

  “Hey,” I said, “how’s it going?”

  “Good,” she said, “did you guys just get here?” She stuck out her hand to Shaun. “Have we met? I’m JJ. I’m a friend of Vic’s mom, Micky.”

  “Yeah,” Shaun said, “maybe at Rotate?”

  And as their hand connected, JJ noticed his Dusty Moon T. “Nice shirt,” she said.

  But JJ’s knowing smile was totally lost on Shaun, thank God, who just shook her hand and smiled back. Was one of Mom’s stupid friends going to blow my cover? I could have killed her.

  “Oh,” Shaun said, “cool. Thanks.”

  “We were just leaving,” I added. “We’re starving.”

  “Well it was great running into you! I’ll see you guys around.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “maybe.”

  “Your mom has cool friends,” Shaun said as we crawled our way back out of the convention centre. “What label did you say she worked for again?”

  “Uh, Toreador Records,” I said, naming the big indie label that had signed Dusty Moon so many years ago, and then immediately regretting it.

  “Whoa, seriously?” Shaun said. “That’s awesome. But aren’t they, like, American?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but she, you know, does stuff with their Canadian bands. And, like, with the market here. You know.” I shrugged like I was sick of talking about my mom’s cool job, hoping he wouldn’t ask any more questions I didn’t know how to answer.

  Thankfully Shaun just nodded.

  We finally emerged from the long line of escalators back into the daylight. “Come on.” I felt around in my pocket for change and felt a stash of loonies. “I’m buying.”

  “A hot dog from my dream girl?” he said, clutching his chest and batting his surprisingly luscious lashes. “Be still my heart.”

  Fifteen

  My Con date with Shaun sent my brain off into the clouds, but I couldn’t put off apologizing to Lucy any longer. Shaun’s parents had unceremoniously whisked him and Miles off for a weekend at a family friend’s cottage — despite Shaun’s protests, since we’ d planned to go down to the water together after I told him about my favourite spot up on the lifeguard stands — and the LoA VI demo at the convention had made me homesick for the afternoons Lucy and I had spent together in front of my computer.

  I knew that I’d already let things go long enough that a text-message apology wouldn’t work. Sure, it sucked that Lucy had changed the game around on me, but I had to admit that Castle Forkenstein was pretty good, and that she’d worked really hard on it. I’d ignored Lucy, so it wasn’t that surprising that she’d kept on working without me. The game was important to Lucy and I had trashed it, pretending that it was justified. It was time to grovel, but I had to do it properly. In person.

  I took Mom’s shopping list off the fridge (Perrier, tuna, gum, Diet Coke — as if this constituted a balanced diet) and told her I was headed out, walking as slowly as I could manage toward Lucy’s parents’ store. What exactly was I going to say? I swallowed my anxiety and opened the door, a little chime above me ringing as I did.

  “Hi, Victoria,” said Lucy
’s mom. “Nice to see you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you, too.”

  I scanned the small aisles of the store, but couldn’t see any sign of Lucy. Both disappointed and relieved, I quickly picked up the things that I needed from the shelves, taking a jumbo sour key with me as a snack for the walk home. I was just about to drag out my haul when the front door chime rang again and Lucy came in with her dad, mid-conversation.

  “Look, I told you —” Lucy was saying to her dad, stopping short as she realized who the customer waiting to leave was.

  “Lucy, Victoria’s here,” said her mom.

  “Yeah,” Lucy said, sounding supremely unimpressed, “I can see that.”

  “Can I, uh, talk to you for a second?”

  “Go ahead,” said Lucy.

  “Like, outside?” I said to clarify.

  “You girls go,” said Lynn. “We’re fine here. Just be back to help me close up, okay, Lucy?”

  “Trust me,” Lucy said, “I won’t be gone long.”

  “Look,” I said, when we were out of the store and earshot of her parents, “I’m really sorry. About the game, okay? I was a jerk.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and?”

  “And I’m sorry I ignored you for Shaun,” I said, putting my bag of groceries down on the pavement beside me.

  “Yeah,” she said, barely nodding in agreement. “And?”

  “And what?” I said, “I should have come up to visit you. I shouldn’t have ignored your texts. I shouldn’t have ignored the game.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and you shouldn’t have said it was cheesy when I made it better.”

  “Without my input,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “without you.”

  I gave her an unimpressed look.

  “I should’ve told you I was working on it,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I guess I was trying to, like, get back at you or something.”

  “Well yeah,” I said. “And it worked.”

  “So are we cool? Are you going to start answering my texts again?”

  “Are you going to keep sending them?” I asked.

  “Depends. Think you’re ready to come with me to She Shoots?”

  “Wow,” I said, “you’re really gonna go talk about the game?”

  “That’s the plan,” Lucy said. “They loved Castle Forkenstein. They invited me to come speak at the social. Tomorrow.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, my mind officially blown.

  “No,” she said, “seriously. And I’m so freaked. You have to help. Will you come and present the game with me?”

  “But it’s your game,” I said, and I meant it, though not in the way I had before.

  “It was our idea,” Lucy said. “Please?”

  “I mean … sure,” I said. “Of course. Come over and we’ll figure out a plan.”

  “Okay,” Lucy said, grabbing one of the handles of my shopping bag as I grabbed the other. “Let’s go.”

  Back at our apartment, Lucy and I planned out how we were going to talk about Castle Forkenstein in front of a whole group of people. People who were probably way more experienced game-makers than we were. Who were older and cooler and, like, everything-er than us.

  “Are there going to be, you know, a lot of people there?” I asked.

  “Sasha said that there might be a pretty good crowd, yeah, but that everyone was, like, really supportive.”

  “Sasha?”

  “One of the organizers,” Lucy said. “Don’t worry, she’s nice.”

  “So what are we supposed to say?”

  “She said just to talk a bit about how we made it,” Lucy said, “and, like, what it’s about and stuff. They won’t be able to play the game, but I sent Sasha a screenshot and they’re going to project it behind us while we talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, letting it sink in. “Wow. This is really happening, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said. “It really is.”

  We practised talking about the game like we were presenting in front of a big group, and ran through it six times before we decided it was good enough. Or, anyway, that it was as good as it was going to get.

  After that Lucy and I compared notes on the Con demo of Lore of Ages VI. I was right, she’d already played it twice by the time Shaun and I got there on Saturday. Talking about the new game with her got me so excited that I could hardly wait to get my cast off and get back to playing. It was hard to believe I’d had it on for almost the whole summer. It was going to be weird having two good hands again.

  Making up with Lucy felt good, like a massive weight was gone from my shoulders, and geeking out with her over LoA VI got me feeling brave. Brave enough that I finally dug out my sketchbook to show her my imperfect drawing of Stara.

  “Whoa,” she said, “you did this? You should totally post it.”

  “Yeah? I mean, it’s not done. I’m not going to be able to finish it until after I get my cast off.”

  “Sure,” she said, “like, whenever it’s ready. I didn’t even know you could draw — why didn’t you say something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And, really, seeing Lucy’s reaction, I didn’t.

  “So obviously you’re illustrating our next game, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “obviously.”

  Eventually Lucy went back to the store to help close, and I went into the kitchen to help Mom with dinner. We were having beans and rice, which, she said, was what we’d be eating for the next year if I kept up my new habit of buying expensive dresses. She’d seen right through my lie that the Ms. Pac-Man dress had only cost twenty bucks, and was annoyed that I’d blown so much of my money when we were in kind of a tight spot.

  “Next summer,” she said, “you’re getting a job, all right? I don’t care where. I mean, as long as it’s not on a pole.”

  We ate our meagre meal in a huffy near-silence.

  The next day Mom tried to make nice. She wanted me to spend the day with her, to go for a walk or go window shopping. Something cheap. But Lucy and I were headed to She Shoots, and I still wasn’t ready to tell Mom about this new part of my life. I knew that she’d wind up making some dumb joke about it all, and I wanted this to just be mine for as long as I could.

  “I told Lucy that I’d spend the day with her,” I said, which wasn’t technically a lie.

  “She could come with us!” Mom insisted.

  “Sorry,” I said, “under-thirties only.”

  “Fine, fine, fine,” she said. “I should probably give Sal a call anyway. He was bugging me to come in for a late shift tonight.”

  “I thought we’d just have rice and beans every night until I graduated.”

  “If you’re lucky,” she said. “Pretty soon it’ll be just rice. Have you seen the rising cost of beans?”

  “Oh,” I said, humouring her, “they’re hot?”

  “They’re practically jumping.”

  “That’s terrible. Even for you.”

  “Thank you. Thank you,” she said, offering me a little bow. “You’re too kind.”

  “I’m gonna go now,” I said, “all right?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”

  “All right.”

  “Love you,” she said, ruffling my hair.

  “Whatever,” I said, giving her a hug. “See you.”

  I met up with Lucy in front of her parents’ store and we walked over to the address that Sasha had given her.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she said, with fake bravado. “Why, are you?”

  “No way,” I said, faking along with her. “I do this kind of thing all the time.”

  We got to the space a little before four and it was already filling up. Two dozen or so people, women and men, were milling around the room and chatting in small groups. Some wore big plastic-framed glasses and others had short, asymmetrical haircuts. A few of them were wearing band shirts
, but others wore bright vintage dresses or standard-issue black jeans and T-shirts. Some were pierced, a few were tattooed, and one woman standing at the front had a hot pink streak running through her hair. A couple of women were setting up laptops and other gear at the front of the room, and Lucy and I drifted around taking it all in. It was a big, airy room that looked kind of like a space-age art-school cafeteria, but I felt like everyone was staring at us. Apart from a baby in a sling, we were the youngest people in the room by about ten years.

  “This is … cool,” Lucy said. “But I guess we better find Sasha?”

  Though the second part was unnecessary. Just as Lucy finished saying her name, a woman with fire-engine red hair swooped in and stuck out her hand to us.

  “Hi,” she said, “you must be Lucy. I’m Sasha. We’re so excited to have you here.”

  “Oh,” Lucy said, having apparently lost all of her words, “yeah. Thanks.”

  “I’m Sasha,” Sasha said again, shaking my hand. Her grip was solid. Mom would’ve been impressed.

  “Victoria,” I said. “I, uh, helped Lucy a little bit. With the game.”

  “Fantastic,” she said, “I can’t wait to hear more about it. I told a few of our members about you guys, and everyone’s really excited you’re here.”

  So that was why people were staring. Still, it was nice to be noteworthy for something other than being Micky Wayne’s daughter. For the moment, anyway.

  Sasha explained that we’d be hearing members of the She Shoots community talk about the projects they’d been working on during the game jam the weekend before. She said that there would be ten short presentations in all, and that we were going to be the fifth ones up. Some of the projects, she explained, would be finished games, but many of them would still be works-in-progress, and she encouraged us to talk to anyone whose work we were interested in hearing more about.

  “Because trust me,” she said, “everyone is going to want to talk to you.”

  My stomach tightened. Was I ready for this? Did messing around in Twine with Lucy make me someone worth talking to, or would all of these people be disappointed when they heard me open my mouth? My mood flipped when things finally got started, though. A woman with curly naturally red hair cut super short on one side and long on the other got up and started talking about a game that she and a friend had worked on during the jam. The game was called Pizza Blaster, and it looked a lot like Space Invaders except you played as a slice of pizza shooting at toppings and dodging the fire of rogue ranch dipping sauce.