I looked down at my feet, clicking the toes of my red shoes together. “Well, not mad. I just. I would’ve said something myself, but—but you guys were talking so fast. I dunno. I’ve never actually talked, like face-to-face, with someone who’s read my stuff.”
Well, except Merry, this morning before the panel. But talking to Merry had been different, somehow. Easier.
“So you can say something when we’re at dinner.” She reached out to give my shoulder a squeeze. “How often is it that you get to hang out with fans? Besides, it’s Mexican food!”
“So?”
“So … well, you’re Mexican, right?”
I cringed, because oh my god, what in the world was up with her? She was never this thoughtless online. “Uh, half Mexican. Also half Irish. So.”
“So we’ll see if they have corned beef and cabbage. Whatever.”
“Hey, come on. Don’t be …” I hesitated because, well, this was Soleil. The fandom queen of calling people out on stuff exactly like this. “Don’t be stereotype-y,” I said, and slightly hated myself for it. I was the worst social justice warrior ever.
“Oh. Sorry.” Before I could figure out if she was actually sorry, though, Soleil went back to her makeup. “But you should still come. It’ll be fun.”
The problem was, she was right. It would be fun. They’d buy us food and shower us with compliments, and we’d talk about “Carry Me Home” and eat enough guacamole that we’d maybe die of avocado poisoning, and it would be surreal and wonderful and everything I’d come to WTFcon to do.
But it would also be a whole lot of attention, and what if it ended up being just like before? When Soleil and Danielle had done all the talking before I could even think of what to say? I didn’t want that again. Right now, all I wanted was some alone time with Soleil. I wanted space to be all flirty with her like I was online, and I wanted her to be thoughtful and kind, the way she was online, and more than anything I wanted her to kiss me already.
“Nessie?” said Soleil, who’d started on her lipstick while I’d been sitting here, considering what to say.
“You go.” My voice came out kind of wobbly. “I’m gonna go to the costume contest.”
Soleil’s eyebrows shot up—but she wasn’t nearly as surprised as I was. What I’d meant to say was, I’ll stay here and order room service and go swimming by myself. But now that I’d said the other thing, I found that it was a pretty appealing idea. Maybe I didn’t want to watch Soleil soak up even more attention from her fans, even if some of that attention was technically aimed at me—but I also didn’t want to be the pathetic loser who waited alone in a hotel room for her girlfriend to come back. If she was going to do something cool, then so would I.
“Is this because I said the thing about Mexican food?” she said. “Listen, that was dumb of me. Like, Microaggressions 101 level dumb. But I already said I was sorry, okay?”
“It’s not that,” I said, even though maybe, yeah, it was a little bit that. But what I said out loud was, “Merry asked me to come.”
“Oh, right, Merry,” said Soleil, rolling her eyes.
I frowned. “What’s wrong with Merry?”
“Nothing at all.” Soleil shrugged and turned back to the mirror again, poking at her already-perfect eyebrows with an index finger. “Do what you want, and we’ll catch up later. I was just hoping we could spend some quality time together, that’s all.”
I was hoping the same thing, I thought—but obviously didn’t say it out loud. Murmuring a quiet goodbye, I patted my pocket to make sure my hotel key card was still there, then headed for the elevator.
Only once I’d reached the lobby downstairs did I realize something very important: I’d left my bag in the hotel room.
I swore under my breath, which made this nearby woman shoot me a look. The kind of look that made me want to swear again, louder, just to see how angry I could make her. Except she had a little kid with her, and my family, while not anti-swearing in general, was absolutely anti-swearing-around-small-children.
Besides, the sight of this particular small child stole any lingering swears right out of my mouth.
She couldn’t have been older than five or six, and she was dressed in what could only be described as … well, a disco ball. Except dress-shaped instead of round. There was a matching silver barrette in her blond hair, and gobs of silver eye shadow that shone gaudily against her pale skin. And she was wearing heels. Tiny, silver, little-girl heels.
When she saw me staring at her, she gave me a pink-lipsticked smile that looked a hundred percent practiced.
The woman, seeing this, took the little girl’s hand. “That’s a stranger, Delancey, honey. Remember what Mommy said about strangers?”
“Ignore them!” said the disco ball, in a voice like lollipops and sunshine and newborn puppies.
“That’s right,” said her mom, shooting me another look. “Save your pretty smile for the judges.”
I fled.
Despite the thick crowd in the lobby, nobody joined me in the elevator, which meant it was an express ride back up to the fifteenth floor. The doors slid open and I started marching back toward 1502 … but slowed down as I got closer to the room.
I hadn’t been gone that long. Soleil was probably still in there, fixing flaws in her makeup that only she could see. And did I really want to see her again so soon? While I was still kind of annoyed at her, and probably vice versa?
I thought about heading back toward the elevators, but there were faint voices coming from that direction now. Girl voices. Soleil hadn’t given our room number to the Fangirl Trio, had she? I couldn’t remember. And encountering them again, right after she’d chosen them over me, was the very last thing I wanted to do.
For a second, I felt this primal urge to escape. To go into my room, lock the door, and wait for Soleil to meet me online so we could talk, the way I did almost every day after school, except I obviously couldn’t do that now, and what in the world did people do when even the internet wasn’t an escape option?
Right between 1506 and 1508, there was a little doorless room with a vending machine and a thingie for ice. It wasn’t much, as far as hiding places went, but it was something. So I slipped inside.
And promptly sank to the floor, because what was I even doing?
Seriously, after all the effort I’d put into begging my parents for registration money and time off from school? All that time poring over the WTFcon schedule and making plans with Soleil? All that stuff for all those months, and this was where I’d ended up: sitting on a cold, tiled floor in front of a vending machine.
On top of that, I’d given all my change to Soleil, so I didn’t even have money for Doritos, which were literally the only food in the universe that never failed to make me feel better.
“Oh,” said a voice from somewhere above me. I looked up, totally prepared to ask Soleil, very politely, to leave me alone—but it wasn’t Soleil.
Hovering in the doorway, looking at me with no small amount of surprise, was a girl I didn’t know. Pale skin. Wavy reddish hair. Tall. Her gaze flicked from me to the vending machine, then back to me again, which made me realize that I was basically blocking her path. Politeness warred with the desire to stay exactly where I was. And instantly lost.
“You can step over me,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Cool, okay.”
But once she’d stepped over my knees and given the machine a quick once-over, she looked down at me again. “Are you all right?” She said it kind of like she felt she should say it, not like she really wanted to know.
“I’ll probably live.” Wow, what a stupidly melodramatic thing to say. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t mind me.”
“You don’t look like you’re fine,” said the girl.
Ugh, this sucked, this suuucked. I was so pathetic that strangers stopped to take pity on me. “Totally fine. A hundred percent fine.”
A pause. “Then why are you on the flo
or?”
The answer slipped out before I could actually decide whether I wanted to give it: “Because I’m waiting for my girlfr—uh, my roommate to leave, so I don’t have to see her when I go back to get my bag, which I forgot in our room, and which contains my wallet, which I need in order to get dinner.”
And then my stomach growled, like it wanted to prove a point. It growled so loudly that the redheaded girl actually laughed. It was kind of rude, but it also made her look a lot friendlier.
“Sorry,” she said immediately. “I didn’t mean …”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“God,” she said, slumping against the vending machine. “I swear, Mercury’s gotta be in retrograde or something. Your life sucks, my life sucks, everything sucks. I bet even if I hide in my bed for the rest of the night, that’ll end up sucking somehow.”
I straightened up again. “Your life sucks, too? How come?”
“No reason. It’s nothing. Never mind.” Her face closed off, and she shook her head sharply and shoved her hand into her pocket. “Sorry. You look like you have enough problems. You shouldn’t have to deal with my craptastic life.”
As she pulled a bunch of loose change from her pocket and started slotting coins into the machine, it occurred to me that I actually kind of wanted her to tell me about her craptastic life. But only kind of. Because this wasn’t some FicForAll forum, where I could just be like, “Rant away!” and she could be like, “Here are all my problems!” and I could be like, “Sending hugs and virtual cookies!” and we could go back to talking about Five and Seven and their epic romance.
It didn’t work that way in real life. Or maybe it did. But that was just the thing: I had no idea how it worked in real life. It wasn’t like I was drowning in friends, and I was the baby of my family, so I didn’t really have much experience comforting people face-to-face.
So I kept quiet and watched her as she punched in the numbers for the snack she’d selected.
The machine whirred, and a bag of Doritos fell from its row.
Doritos.
Suddenly, I was sure that I was about to cry.
It must’ve shown on my face, because when the redhead turned back to me, she suddenly looked all concerned. “Seriously, you’re not okay, are you? Hey, you want me to get you some of these, too?” She held up the chips.
“Oh god, no,” I said. “I don’t need Pity Doritos. I’m really okay. Thanks, though.”
She considered me for a moment, then she settled down on the floor beside me. “Have some of mine,” she said, ripping open the bag. “That way they’re Friend Doritos, not Pity Doritos, and I don’t have to go back downstairs yet.”
She shoved the bag at me, and I really wanted to refuse, because of politeness or something—but the smell of all that fake cheese was too much to resist.
I took a chip and ate it. So did she. For a moment, we both crunched in reverent silence.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m Callie,” she said, holding the bag out to me again.
“Good to meet you,” I said, taking another chip. “I’m Vanessa. Call me … actually, no, just call me Vanessa.”
After getting snapped at on the trade show floor and totally dismissed by Jeremy, all I really wanted to do was take my fake cheese products back to my room, listen to old episodes of A Thousand Words under the covers, and pretend my dad wasn’t waiting for me downstairs. Talking to total strangers in the hallway definitely wasn’t on my agenda. But for some reason, looking at Vanessa’s downcast expression was actually kind of helping. It was nice to have proof that I wasn’t the only miserable person in this hotel.
Besides those beauty pageant girls, obviously. Those kids were going to need so much therapy when they grew up.
I wanted to hear more about Vanessa’s roommate drama, but I felt weird asking outright, so I started with, “Which con are you here for?”
She flipped her badge around and held it up. It was a WTFcon one with a bunch of ribbons stuck to the bottom, like the girl in the elevator: a couple of Harry Potter ones, one covered in spades and hearts and the words We’re All Mad Here, and a bright green one that said, All Hail the Glow Cloud. She didn’t have one for A Thousand Words.
“Cool,” I said. “You’re a Hufflepuff?”
“Yeah!” Her face lit up. “Are you? Were you at the meetup earlier? I didn’t get to go.”
“I’m not here for WTFcon. But I think I’d be a Ravenclaw.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said. “That’s cool. My older sister’s a Ravenclaw. Well, she says she’s a Ravenclaw, but I’m pretty sure she’s actually a Slytherin. Anyway. Which con are you doing?”
Annnd I’d totally set myself up for that one. If I told her the truth, she’d probably react like the last girl, and I’d ruin any chance I had of making a friend. Then again, making a friend here seemed pretty unlikely regardless, so what did it really matter? Even the people who were supposed to care about me weren’t on my side these days.
“I’m here for the taxidermy championships,” I said, and then I waited for Vanessa to laugh or scoot away like I had a contagious disease.
She didn’t do either. She just stared at me, eyes huge behind her green tortoiseshell glasses. “Wait, seriously?”
“Yeah? I’m not, like, obsessed with it or anything, but my dad pays me to be his assistant.”
She shifted a little, obviously uncomfortable. “Isn’t that … I mean, I’m not saying anything about you as a person, but … isn’t it kind of cruel? Killing all those animals?”
“Most of them die of natural causes, actually,” I said. I constantly had to explain this to people who thought taxidermists were animal-murdering psychos. “He does a little bit of work for hunters who eat the meat—deer and turkeys and stuff—but mostly he works for natural history museums. Like, a snow leopard will die in a zoo, and he’ll mount it for a display so people can learn about how awesome snow leopards are and why we need to protect them. He’s done work for the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History in New York and stuff.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said, visibly relaxing. “That’s way better. But … do you have to, like, touch organs and stuff?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
She shuddered. “I could never do that. I’d probably faint. I mean, organs. I can barely stay upright when I get paper cuts, you know? I’d be the worst vampire ever. Um, what I mean is … that’s pretty badass.”
I shrugged like it was no big deal, but I was feeling a little bit badass all of a sudden. That definitely wasn’t a feeling I’d had since I’d gotten here. “You get used to it,” I said.
My phone buzzed, and I dug it out to find a text from my dad. Almost here? Jeremy said he sent you back down five min ago. I stuffed it back in my bag without answering, the badass feelings evaporating in an instant.
“So, what happens at a taxidermy convention, exactly?” Vanessa asked. “Are there people cutting up dead animals everywhere?” She looked nervous, like she was worried she might stumble upon a zebra bleeding out in the hallway.
“Not really. There are demonstrations and seminars and a trade show and stuff, but the main thing is the competition. Everyone puts their best work in this huge ballroom, and a bunch of judges score it. It’s pretty amazing, actually. It’s like an entire museum all crammed into one room.”
“Huh. That actually sounds cool.” A little crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Wait, a taxidermy trade show? What do they sell?”
“You don’t even want to know.”
She laughed and took another chip. “Yeah, I probably don’t.”
“So, what do you do at a Harry Potter convention? Where’s your costume?”
“We don’t all wear costumes,” she said. “And it’s not only Harry Potter—it’s a multi-fandom thing. I’m mostly here for the fic stuff. Harry Potter, definitely, but also Wonderlandia and Yuri On Ice and Sherlock, at least before it sucked, and that old show Slings and Arrows and, ooh, recently
I started writing Alanna fic. You know, those Tamora Pierce books? And—”
“Wait,” I said. “Did you just say you write … ‘fic’?”
Vanessa suddenly looked nervous again, and she pulled her curly ponytail over her shoulder and started twisting the end around her finger. “Yeah? A lot of people think it’s all sex stuff, but it’s really not, I swear. Mine is mostly—”
“No no no,” I said. “I don’t … what’s fic?”
She stared at me. “Fanfic? Fanfiction?”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Oh.” Her whole body relaxed, and she wiggled her feet a little, the sides of her bright red flats bumping together. “It’s when you take someone else’s characters and write new stories about them. I wrote this one Harry Potter fic where Luna steals a thestral and takes Neville hunting for magical creatures all over Scotland. Stuff like that.”
“People do that?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Tons of people. It’s kinda my entire life.”
“I mean, it sounds cool. I would totally read that Luna and Neville thing. Do you write stuff with your own characters, too?”
Vanessa shrugged and looked down. “Sort of. I mean, I’ve started writing about nine different novels over the past year, but … I dunno. I always get bored after a chapter or two. Plus there’s nobody reading it, you know? With fanfic, I post my stuff chapter by chapter, and people are all like, ‘Hey, gimme more!’ in the comments, so it keeps me moving.”
“Instant gratification,” I said, and Vanessa nodded. “So you have fans online?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Especially since I started co-writing with my roommate. She’s basically a fanfic celebrity. Everyone reads her stuff.”
“The same … um … roommate you’re hiding from?” I was pretty sure she had started to say girlfriend before, but I wasn’t positive.
“Yeah.”
“How come you’re avoiding her?” The chips were gone now, and I tipped the remaining crumbs into my mouth and crumpled the bag into a ball.
The Pros of Cons Page 8
