“I’ve been in sessions with you since ten a.m.,” I said. “I’ve been learning all day. And the turkeys looked good, right?”
“What?”
“The turkeys. I did a good job grooming them, didn’t I?”
“Yes, they looked good. But doing something right doesn’t give you license to slack off.”
Jeremy took a step back; he looked intensely uncomfortable. “You know what, I’m going to take the raccoons myself. Thanks for offering to help, Callie, but I can handle it.”
“But you can’t carry all these at once, and you don’t have time to make two trips before your meeting,” I said.
Jeremy looked back and forth between my dad and me like he had no idea what to do, and Dad finally sighed. “Just go. But from now on, make sure I don’t need you before you run off to help someone else, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I just wanted to get out of this room as quickly as possible. “Come on,” I said to Jeremy.
We left the trade show and headed toward the bridge to the hotel in silence. “You really don’t have to carry that all the way upstairs,” he said when we got to the elevators. “I’ll figure something out. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m in trouble anyway. It kind of feels like I’m always in trouble.”
“Yeah, but maybe—”
A little kid dressed in a tiny pleather catsuit came barreling out of nowhere, shrieking at the top of her lungs, and dashed right in front of Jeremy. He stopped short, and we both stared. A woman who must’ve been her mom chased after her, wielding a can of hairspray. “Beige, if you don’t get back here this instant, there will be no dessert tonight!” she shouted.
I watched until they were out of sight around the corner, and then I said, “Um … what the holy hell was that?”
Jeremy blinked. “I think there’s one of those baby beauty pageant things going on in D-wing.”
Sure enough, there were a couple more little kids in the hotel lobby, all dressed in sparkles and lace. Every one of them had ringlets so perfect they didn’t even look real. Then one kid reached up and scratched—under her hair.
“The toddlers are wearing wigs,” I whispered to Jeremy.
“That kid was named Beige,” he whispered back, and we both burst into horrified laughter.
By the time the elevator arrived, Jeremy and I were wiping tears from our eyes. Two teenage girls with badges for the fandom convention got in with us. One of them had a whole bunch of colored ribbons stuck to the bottom of her badge, one of which sported a tagline I recognized: Someday, your worst memory could be your best story.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you listen to A Thousand Words?”
Her eyes lit up. “Yeah! Do you?”
“It’s my favorite! I listened to it almost the entire twelve-hour drive here.” I turned to Jeremy. “It’s this really cool podcast. You should check it out.”
“You’re coming to the workshop tomorrow, right?” asked the girl.
“The what?”
“They’re going to explain their whole process, all the behind-the-scenes stuff, and answer questions and everything! And they’re going to broadcast the whole thing live on their website. Haven’t you heard them talking about it on the last couple of episodes?”
She was right—the hosts of A Thousand Words had been talking about a live show at something called WTFcon for weeks. “Oh my god, I didn’t realize that was here!” I said. “Maybe I could get away for a few hours? How hard do you think it would be to sneak in? I’m not registered for WTFcon.”
“Aw, that sucks—they’re actually been pretty strict about checking badges. Are you here for the drumming thing?”
“No, the taxidermy championships,” I said.
“Eew,” the girl said, and she and her friend both giggled.
It shouldn’t have mattered to me—I was never going to see them again—but it still gave me seventh grade flashbacks. I dropped my eyes to the floor. When the elevator opened on fourteen and Jeremy said, “This is us, Callie,” I gave the girls an awkward half wave and followed him out. I was relieved when the doors closed.
Jeremy unlocked room 1418 and let me go in ahead of him. My mom and I always used to unpack all our stuff when we stayed in hotels to make the space feel more like ours, but aside from a suit hanging in the closet, a pair of shoes on the floor, and a laptop and binder on the desk, his room looked untouched. Jeremy started loading the raccoons into the mini-fridge he’d brought, and I pulled open the curtains, revealing an air shaft and the side of an office building.
“Nice view,” I said.
“Oh yeah. I’ve got some seriously classy accommodations.”
“Well, you are super important. All those master turkey-stuffers are counting on you.” I sat down on his bed, which was covered in the same ugly fleur-de-lis spread as mine.
Jeremy shut the fridge. “You should probably get back downstairs.”
“Ugh, don’t make me.” I flopped backward onto the mattress. “Can you believe how crazy-controlling and uptight my dad was being? I was literally with him the entire day, and then I do a nice thing for someone else for ten minutes, and he completely flips out! It’s not like I was sneaking away to buy drugs or something. I thought he brought me to this convention because he actually wanted me here, and he’s been so rude to me the whole time. Did you know he yelled at me after we saw you at registration yesterday because I was ‘mocking him in front of a judge’? As if you’re going to take points off his turkeys because I made a dumb joke. You made a dumb joke, too! I’m sure he didn’t think you were being unprofessional.”
Jeremy smiled, but it looked a little pained. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you think you could maybe say something to him? Tell him I’m actually working really hard and he should be nice to me? We used to have so much fun at these things, and this time … well, you saw.”
Jeremy rubbed his hand over his close-cropped hair; I’d forgotten how he always used to do that when he was embarrassed or uncomfortable. “This is between you and your dad, Cal. I really can’t get involved.”
“But he actually listens to you. You’re like family.”
“That’s kind of what he’s saying, though, right? I can’t be family right now because I’m judging his work. I have to stay impartial. It sucks that you guys are fighting, but I can’t be in the middle of it.”
I shouldn’t really have expected him to stick up for me, but it still stung a little. “Fine,” I said. “I get it. But can I just stay here for, like, ten more minutes while you prep for your meeting? I won’t bug you, and I promise I’ll go back downstairs when you have to leave. But I just need a little more time away from him.”
Jeremy sighed. “Listen, I want to hang out, too. But now isn’t a good time, and I’m not going to hide you. I really am sorry, but you’ve got to go deal with this, okay?”
There was this sinking feeling in my stomach, like a gaping pit was opening up and swallowing my organs one by one. I’d had such high hopes for this convention, and nothing was going right, and I wasn’t even allowed to complain about how nothing was going right to the one person I thought was on my side. I was on my own, just like always.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I understand.”
“Come on,” said Jeremy. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”
The door shut behind us with a final-sounding slam, and as we walked down the hall side by side, all I could think of was the A Thousand Words ribbon on the WTFcon girl’s badge.
Someday, your worst memory could be your best story.
Maybe that was true. But right now, everything just sucked.
When Soleil flashed her name tag at the Wonderlandia meetup, pretty much everyone recognized her. Most people were as chill about meeting her as Merry had been—except this one trio of girls. They basically pounced on Soleil and started bombarding her with praise, and then showed up at the next panel we
went to and the one after that, and now, as we left the book-to-movie panel seven hours later, they were still following us.
I asked Soleil if she thought it was creepy. I mean, stalkers, right?
But she smiled beatifically and said, “Nah. They’re just nervous. Working up the nerve to talk to us again, probably.”
Us, I thought. Us, us, us.
As we approached the walkway that linked the convention center to the hotel, she added, “Bet you a dollar one of them asks us to hang out.”
I thought about this. It’d been seven hours. The whole time, they’d been glancing at Soleil—and, by extension, me—every four seconds or so. Like they wanted to make sure we were still there. But none of them had said anything since the meetup this morning.
“You’re on,” I said.
But as soon as we shook on it, I heard the distinct sound of walking-footsteps becoming running-footsteps.
“Told you,” muttered Soleil under her breath. “Get that dollar ready.”
“We’ll see,” I said, just before a hand reached out and tapped Soleil on the shoulder.
“Oh, hey!” she said, turning around with this look on her face like she was totally surprised to see the three girls there. “What’s up?”
“Um, well,” said the girl who’d done the shoulder-tapping. Her hair was almost as blond as Soleil’s, and her cheeks were bright red. She looked older than me, and maybe even older than Soleil. Her two also-probably-older-than-me friends hung back a few paces, watching us. “Well, so. Soleil and”—a quick glance at my badge—“Vanessa? We were wondering if maybe you wanted to, you know, maybe have a drink with us? Or maybe have dinner? Or whatever? Our treat, obviously, because … you know …”
Soleil smiled broadly, her eyes softening. “That’s so sweet of you.”
The blond girl—Aimee, Rochester, NY, said her badge—blushed even harder. “So you’ll come?”
Soleil glanced quickly at me, but I didn’t have time to weigh in before she said, “Well, Nessie and I are still figuring out our game plan for tonight, actually. And whatever we do, we have to head back to the room to freshen up first. So—”
“Wait,” said one of the other girls, a brunette whose name tag said Danielle, Buffalo, NY. “Nessie? As in the Ness who wrote ‘Carry Me Home’ with Soleil? That’s you?”
My face—no, my entire body—was on fire. But in a good way.
“That’s me!” I managed to reply.
Danielle from Buffalo looked back and forth between Soleil and me, eyes shining like she was about to cry. “Oh man, I didn’t know. I’m sorry, I should’ve— Okay, I know this is creepy, but I read everything you guys post on the boards. I ship you guys so hard.”
“Awww!” said Soleil, and slung an arm around my shoulders. “Hear that, Nessie?”
I was going to explode from sheer joy.
“And ‘Carry Me Home,’ right?” Danielle continued. “Just, that story! That story! It was … gah! I have so many questions to ask you guys!”
“Like what?” Soleil asked eagerly, as Danielle’s friends exchanged a knowing look behind her.
“I mean, there’s the gender stuff, obviously,” said Danielle. “Seven being gender-fluid was just so, so well done. But it was actually Five that really got to me. The part in the beginning, right? Where he goes to the Caterpillar’s dance club with all those other Spades, but he ends up just drinking in a corner by himself the whole time because he feels so awkward because he doesn’t know how to do the normal-social-person thing because he overthinks everything all the time? That part.”
“Aw, yeah, that’s one of my favorite scenes,” said Soleil.
This time, when I didn’t reply, it wasn’t because I was too happy to form words—it was because I’d written that scene. With the Five of Spades in the Caterpillar’s club. And I’d basically based it on how I felt every day at school. Hanging off to the side, not really talking to anyone, not understanding how other people seemed to feel so comfortable around each other and, sure, maybe drinking in the corner of a dance club wasn’t exactly the same as eating lunch in the school library—but it wasn’t exactly not the same, either.
“Was all that social anxiety stuff from, you know, personal experience?” said Danielle, lowering her voice.
“Dani, come on, that’s not something you can just ask,” said the third girl. Marziya, Buffalo, NY.
“No, it’s fine,” said Soleil, giving Marziya a dazzling smile. “And yeah, it was.”
I gave her a sidelong look because, yeah, it was definitely personal, but it was personal for me, not her. I took a deep breath, trying to work up the nerve to claim credit for that scene—but by the time I got there, Danielle was already talking again.
“I knew it!” she said. “Nobody writes stuff like that so well unless they’ve, you know, been there. Listen, you guys have to come for dinner with us, okay?”
“Maybe,” said Soleil. “Like I said, we’re not sure what the game plan is. But how about if you tell us your plans, and we’ll come if we can?”
“We were going to that fancy-looking Mexican place in the lobby,” said Aimee. “El Sol? Say seven o’clock?”
“El Sol,” repeated Soleil, smiling widely. “You know that means sun in Spanish?”
“Oh, ha, like your name,” said Danielle.
I snort-laughed; Soleil didn’t seem to notice.
“Yup,” she replied. “So, okay, El Sol, seven o’clock. We gotta run, but hopefully see you there!”
“Hope so!” said Danielle.
Soleil looped her arm through mine and steered me rapidly onto the walkway. “One dollar, Nessie. I win.”
“You don’t win.” Hey, look, apparently I was capable of speaking again, now that it was just me and Soleil. “The bet specifically said they’d ask us to hang out. At no point did any of them use that exact phrase.”
“Oh, stop being nitpicky,” said Soleil. “I totally won that bet.”
I rolled my eyes and dug a pair of quarters out of my bag. “You half won. So here’s half a dollar.”
She pocketed the quarters. “Close enough.”
Only when we were safely inside our hotel room, with the door firmly shut, did I say, “We’re not really meeting up with them, right?”
Soleil, who’d been beelining for the mirror, stopped dead in her tracks. “You mean you don’t want to?”
“You mean you do want to?”
“Hello, free dinner,” she said. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly rolling in cash.”
Neither was I. Sure, I had my mom’s credit card, but I would have to pay her back for anything over a hundred and fifty dollars. That wasn’t the point, though.
“I just thought we were going to the pool tonight,” I said.
“We can go after.”
“It closes at nine.”
She shrugged, grabbed an eyeliner pencil, and started applying it to her left lid. “Then we can go another night. Do you want some of my mascara?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “But wait: The pool tops cheering for Merry’s costume, but letting your fans buy you dinner tops the pool?”
“Merry?” she said absently. “Oh! Oh. The Boggart Snape person. Right. Well, obviously, yeah. Here, you should try some of this blue liner. It’d look so great on you.”
I sat on the bed, wondering if she’d notice my complete disinterest in her makeup tips. “Well, I still think the pool’s the way to go. It’d give us time to hang out, just us, you know?”
“Mmm,” said Soleil. “True.”
She didn’t seem too convinced, though, which meant clearly it was time to pull out the big guns. “Also … it would give us time to start thinking about our Creativity Corner project.”
The Creativity Corner was the super dumb name of the fanworks competition that would happen on the last night of the convention, three days from now. Anyone could enter, and the entry could be anything at all—a play, a reading, a drawing, whatever—as long as (a)
it was original and (b) it contained a tribute to something made by someone else.
Soleil and I had entered under my name, because hey, if there was one thing we both knew, it was that we worked super well together.
Her eyes widened in the mirror at the reminder, and she spun around to face me. “Ooh. Yeah. I’ve been meaning to tell you, I had an idea for that!”
Well, this was promising. “What’s the idea?”
“A dance piece,” she said.
“A … what?”
“A dance piece! Like a parody one! We dress up as characters that everyone knows, preferably characters that everyone ships, and we do a totally overwrought dance of, like, epic unrequited longing. You get me?”
“That’s kind of genius,” I said. “So, like, Five and Seven doing a pas-de-deux?”
“Exactly!” she said, clapping her hands together. “Except not Five and Seven. Wonderlandia’s fandom isn’t that big, so people might not recognize them. You don’t want to do something for a fandom that even the judges might not know, right?”
“Right. So we have to think bigger,” I said. “Like Frodo and Sam or something.”
“Exactly!” said Soleil again. “Or Finn and Poe from Star Wars. Or Dean and Castiel from Supernatural.”
“Or the Doctor and Rose from Doctor Who.”
“Or the Doctor and the Master from Doctor Who.”
“Which version of the Master? Dude or lady?”
“Like it matters,” she said. “Either way, the audience will eat it up.”
“So let’s get choreographing!” I said. “After we swim, I mean.”
“Oh, come on, not tonight,” said Soleil. “I already said I wanted to meet up with those girls.”
All the energy drained right out of me. “Really?”
“Like I said: free dinner. Plus, that one girl with the black hair— Crap, what was her name?”
“Danielle.”
“Right! Danielle. She wanted to talk about our story!”
“My club chapter in our story,” I added quietly.
“Yeah, exactly! Don’t you wanna hear what she has to say about it?” Then she paused. Looked over at me. “Oh, shoot, Nessie. Are you mad that I didn’t say it was yours?”
The Pros of Cons Page 7
