I yank open a drawer, grab a random handful of undies, and drop them into the suitcase. “Done. Now what poster should I take?”
“You’re taking a poster?”
“Yeah, for Legs to sign.”
“Won’t there be things there for him to sign? Like postcards and stuff?”
I shrug. “I’m not risking it. Besides, getting him to sign one of my posters is cooler. So which one?”
Kat looks around at my walls, then points to the one above my bed with Legs’s cartoony head and “BE AWESOME” in big bubble letters.
“That is the correct choice,” I say, then hop up onto my bed and pull it carefully off the wall.
“How are you going to pack it?” she asks.
Lizard balls. I didn’t think of that. “Maybe if I roll it . . .”
“Wait here.” Kat hops off the bed and disappears out the door. Her footsteps clomp down the stairs, fade away, then clomp back up again. When she returns, her hands are full of cardboard, probably from our recycling bin in the kitchen.
As I roll up the poster, Kat rolls up some cardboard. It takes a few tries to find a piece that’s rollable, but once she does and secures it with some tape, I hand the poster to her, and she slides it into the cardboard shell. “Perfect,” she says, handing it back to me.
“Awesome,” I say, then give the thing a quick hug before dropping it into my suitcase.
When I look up, Kat’s studying me. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.
She’s been asking that since the science fair. It’s starting to drive me bananas. I got another B on my last math test, the snow has melted enough that I can skateboard outside, Mom is so happy about my math marks and the A+ on our science project that she’s letting me miss an entire day of school to fly to LotSCON, and tomorrow I start dating LumberLegs. How could I be anything but okay?
I scrunch my face up at her.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “Sorry. I’ll stop asking. Just have fun tomorrow, okay?”
“Well, duh,” I say.
When Stephen comes to pick me up the next morning, I leave my suitcase on the porch for him to carry—screw feminism; he’s not getting away with less work—and climb into the backseat of his car. It smells like sweat and wood shavings, just like it always used to. I roll down the window and stick my nose out into the wet air.
Stephen lowers my suitcase into the trunk, then slams it shut. Mom doesn’t have to be at her office until eleven, so she’s on the sidewalk to see us off. She hands a folded sheet of paper to Stephen, which he sticks into the front pocket of his shorts, and then waves at me. I duck my head back into the car.
When Stephen climbs into the driver’s seat, I expect him to tell me to get into the empty front seat, but he doesn’t—just turns on the car and pulls out of the driveway. He doesn’t say anything at all, except, “Got your passport?” Which I do. Mom made me check before I went out the door.
He flicks on the radio to a station I wish I hated, and some mellow song, which I know all the words to but can’t remember who sings it, bursts out of the speakers behind my head. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, not quite to the beat. His hairy dad-legs stick out from his khaki shorts. In this moment, I could almost forgive him.
“What did my mom give you?”
He turns the radio down. “What?”
“The paper. She handed you a paper.”
“Oh, just a consent form. To make sure you can travel with me.”
Right. Because he gave up all rights to me. “Turn the music back up, please,” I say. Then I don’t say a single word to him for the rest of the drive, the check-in at the airport, or the entire flight.
KAT
I WISH MEG WOULD TEXT ME, JUST ONCE, TO LET ME KNOW SHE’S OKAY. But of course, I don’t really want her to text me, because she’s on a plane and it’s possible cell phones really do interfere with the plane’s instruments, and when you’re defying gravity and sitting in a heap of metal thousands of feet above the earth, there are some things you don’t take chances on.
“Are you practicing to be in the Queen’s Guard?” Granddad’s question floats through the kitchen door behind me.
Then Mom’s: “Shouldn’t you be in school? I thought you didn’t get out until two on early-dismissal days.”
I’ve been standing, frozen, at the kitchen table, one hand resting on my math textbook, the other clenching my message-less phone, for I’m not sure how long. Five minutes? Ten?
I turn around. Mom and Granddad stare at me from the kitchen door. I didn’t even hear them come in. I swear Granddad used to be taller than Mom, but hunched over his cane, he’s more than a foot shorter. Behind him, Mom holds out one arm as if ready to catch him if he falls.
“English teacher didn’t show up for class,” I explain. “So I came home.”
Last time that happened, in Ontario, I sat in the empty classroom for the entire period, working on my homework and worrying about whether the teacher was in a car accident or had a heart attack or hit her head and was wandering around somewhere with amnesia. This time, I just got up and left with everyone else.
Granddad shuffles into the room. He has managed to get movement back in his left leg after the stroke, but the foot still drags a little, like it’s full of rocks nobody’s thought to remove.
“Well, that’s great,” Mom says. “You can watch your granddad while I go out and run a few errands.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” he says as he inches across the room.
“I know, Dad. That’s not what I meant.” She picks up a huge stack of papers—a textbook proof, probably—from the kitchen counter. “I’ll be home in time for supper. Pizza okay?”
I nod, and Granddad just grunts, and then she’s gone.
Despite his foot full of rocks, Granddad has made it over to the kitchen table. He pulls out a chair and lowers himself into it. He sets his hands on the table, causing his bony shoulders to rise up as if his saggy-skinned turtle neck is receding back into its turtle shell.
“So, why the long face?” he asks.
“I don’t—”
“You look worried. Is it school? Math test? Boys?” He says all three with a straight face, though his eyes do twinkle just a little at the last one.
I unclench my fingers and set my phone down on the table. “It’s Meg, I guess.” I can’t think of any reason not to tell him.
“Your short, chatty friend?” he asks, as if I have oodles of friends over all the time and he can’t keep them straight, though of course, he knows exactly who she is. “She has spunk. I like her.”
I nod. Clench, then unclench my fists again.
“So, what’s the problem?” Granddad asks.
Where do I even start? How do I explain why it worries me that the science project made her so manic about school that she actually started passing? Or that she still hasn’t told me why she and Grayson broke up? Or that she hasn’t spoken to her ex-stepdad for months but went on a trip with him anyways? Or that sometimes, when she talks about dating LumberLegs, I think she might not be joking?
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s like—it’s like she’s standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to leap and soar and show off her bright, feathery wings. Except she doesn’t have wings. She just has arms. And I can’t tell her that. How am I supposed to tell her she doesn’t have wings?”
Granddad nods his turtle head, as if my rambling actually makes sense. “But if you don’t tell her . . .”
“She plummets to her death.” I sigh and pull out a chair, leaning on the seat with one knee.
Granddad’s forehead creases. “This is just a metaphor, right? Meg’s not actually leaping? Or dying?”
“Right.”
“Great. I love metaphors.”
I straighten my phone and my textbook so they’re perfectly aligned. “So, what should I do?”
He taps the fingers of his good hand on the table. “Well, you’re going to have to tell her. About the wings,
don’t you think? Or maybe not even about the wings. Just whatever she needs to hear to keep from jumping.”
I settle fully into the chair, slumping against its hard back. “That’s the problem. I think she already jumped.”
Granddad massages his deadened left hand with his right one. I wonder, if I took his left hand between my own, would he feel it? He says it’s getting better, but I’m not sure what that means. He looks up at me, straight on, his blue eyes shining.
“Well, then—can you catch her?”
Up in my room, I lean against the icy window, staring blankly out at the straggling piles of snow that just won’t go away. Granddad’s words echo in my ears, and ideas flutter through my head before realizing that they, too, lack wings and can only plummet and die.
Meg is the ideas person. The brainstormer. She is cantaloupe thrown from roofs and speed runs for science. I am questionnaires and control factors.
Maybe I can buy her a nice card. Or bake a cake. Maybe a sleepover when she gets back late Sunday night, even though it’ll be a school night?
I wander over to my bed and settle onto it. Pick up Meg’s purple button—the one from the hospital—off my nightstand and twirl it between my fingers. Run my thumb over its waxy smoothness. Clutch it tightly in my fist, the way I did when Meg shoved me through that hospital door. When I walked through that hospital door.
I bolt to my feet and down the stairs. “Granddad!” I shout. “Granddad!”
I know what I have to do.
CHAPTER 23
MEG
BY THE TIME OUR PLANE LANDS, MY BRAIN LITERALLY HURTS FROM concentrating on not talking, so when our hotel shuttle arrives at the airport, I climb into the front seat and start chatting with the shuttle driver. He has a heavy accent and I only understand about half of what he says—something about his son or maybe the sun or maybe he got shunned and that’s why he moved here—but he listens while I tell him that this was my first time flying and the plane was smaller than I expected—no middle row like you see in the movies—and those recliner seats really don’t recline much, and they asked me to choose between cookies and pretzels, but apparently I stumbled upon a magical secret, because when I said I wanted both, I got both.
When we arrive at the hotel, I’ve gotten it all out of my system, and I manage to return to stony silence while Stephen-the-Leaver checks us in, then carries our luggage up to our rooms. When he suggests the hotel restaurant for supper, I just shrug.
At the restaurant, I hide behind my menu and watch the couple at the next table. They hold hands right up until their food comes, and then she trades half her chicken for part of his steak. After tonight, that’s going to be me and LumberLegs. Except I’m ordering the steak, because steak.
After we place our order, the waiter takes away our menus, and with nothing to hide behind any longer, Stephen-the-Leaver and I are forced to stare at each other. His deep-brown face is the same as it always was, and yet it’s different. His dark hair’s dotted with gray at the temples, and there are extra creases around his eyes. Probably laugh lines now that he doesn’t have to worry about raising a teenager anymore. At least not until Nolan and Kenzie grow up, which, let’s be honest, is probably never going to happen.
I wonder what other people think of us sitting here, both with the same shade of skin. We probably just look like a dad and his kid, but we’re not. We’re so very not.
“So, how’s school?” Stephen-the-Leaver asks.
“That’s it?!” I want to yell at him. “You’ve had this entire day of silence to think of an interesting, probing question about my life, and that’s the best you can come up with?!” Except I guess he doesn’t actually care about my life, not anymore. Maybe not ever.
“Fine,” I say. I’m not letting him ruin my evening. Tonight, I meet LumberLegs and my happily ever after starts. I don’t need Grayson or Stephen or any guy at all except LumberLegs.
“Meg, I don’t want to push this,” he says, pausing to chew on the insides of his cheeks like he always used to do whenever we kids were driving him bananas. “I’m not going to force you to spend every minute with me. The convention center is connected to the hotel, and I’m not going to follow you about, as long as you don’t leave the property and you’re back in your room by eleven. Okay?”
I shrug. “That’s fine.” By tomorrow, LumberLegs and I will probably have eloped anyways, and I’ll be long gone.
We spend the rest of the meal in silence. When I finish scarfing down my macaroni—because I had a brain fart while ordering and chose the three-cheese macaroni over a delicious steak—I stand up. “I’m going to the LumberLegs Q & A tonight,” I say. “I have to get ready.”
He nods, pulls out his wallet, and hands me two twenties. “You can’t buy my love, mister,” I want to say. Instead, I snatch them from his hand.
“Remember, be back in your room by eleven,” he says, which is my cue to leave.
It takes me forever to get ready, because my curls puff out in Ontario’s wetter air and I have to rake in way more styler than usual. Plus, my shirt is wrinkled and there’s no ironing board, only an iron, so I have to lug a chair over to the outlet and iron on that. By the time I get to the LumberLegs thing, carrying my Legs poster in its cardboard shell, I’m only half an hour early, and the line winds all the way out of the building and partway around the block.
Maybe a tenth of the people in line are in costume. Some are simple—purchased LotS swords, or elf ears and a cloak—but there’s one guy who’s gone full dragonlord, with scaly gold skin, retractable wings, and red armor painted with a black shadowdragon. “Dude, that looks amazing,” I say to him as I pass, and he does a dance that’s a perfect imitation of the dance Sythlight’s dragonlord does in game.
I tried texting Syth, but he won’t be at the con until tomorrow, so I take my place in line alone.
A white girl ahead of me in line by about twenty people is wearing the same shirt as me, but she’s just wearing jeans, while I have this super-adorable skirt and my silky-smooth legs. The snow’s all melted here, but a not-very-springlike wind zips down the street, commanding an army of goose bumps on my legs to stand at attention. But that doesn’t matter, because by the time I talk to Legs after the Q & A, I’ll be inside, warm, cozy, and de-goose-bumped.
Kat printed my ticket and pinned it to the inside of my sweater blazer pocket so I wouldn’t lose it—“What if I lose my sweater blazer?” I asked her, but she ignored me—so when a guy comes along the line to collect tickets, I rip it out and hand it to him, exchanging it for a wristband.
Not long after that, they open the doors and the line starts moving forward, thank Her Majesty the Queen, because I didn’t bring a coat and I’m pretty sure the goose bumps have spread to my arms and maybe even my stomach.
The doors open into the front of the room, beside the makeshift stage. The front several rows are already filling, but I spot a single seat in the third row that’s empty, which is the one upside of being here all by myself. I beeline toward it, holding my poster tube close to me so it doesn’t get crushed, weaving around a whole pack of white girls all wearing matching LumberLegs T-shirts. Then stop.
“Hey, watch it,” says someone behind me, and I sidestep out of their way. But not into the row. Because Grayson is sitting next to the empty seat.
Not Grayson, obviously.
Just someone who looks kind of like him, with the same shaggy brown hair, same eyebrows, same slouchy way of sitting. He looks up, and he really doesn’t look like Grayson at all—different nose, different eyes, different scrunch to his forehead—but all I can think of is Grayson’s bare chest against mine, his hand on my leg, his breath in my hair.
I leave the empty seat and let the crowd push me farther back into the room, where I file into a row somewhere in the middle and plop into a seat right behind a guy who’s a million feet taller than me. Crap on a stick. But the rows behind me are already filling in, and I’m not going to move and risk ending up way at the
back. I slip off my shoes and tuck my feet under my butt on the chair, raising myself by a few inches. Thank goodness there’s a stage, or even my natural booster seat wouldn’t be enough.
I set just one end of my Legs poster tube on the floor, leaning the other against the chair, resting my hand on the top so I won’t lose it.
There’re still a few minutes before the Q & A is supposed to start. I could text Kat, but it seems unfair to remind her that she’s not here for this, the night I meet my future husband in person for the first time.
I turn to the girl next to me. She’s white, too. I thought there might be more black girls here, but so far every girl I’ve seen has been white or Asian—though now that I’m specifically looking, I spot a couple. “What’s your favorite Legs video?” I ask the girl.
She blinks at me through her heavy black eyelashes, like either she’s surprised I’m talking to her or she’s put on so much mascara she can’t see properly. She shrugs. “I’m just here because of him.” She points to the guy next to her, who’s looking at the con schedule on his phone, then turns away from me and stares at the phone, too, as if she finds it the most fascinating thing in the world, even though obviously she doesn’t.
The guy on my other side is talking animatedly to his friends. They’re all wearing track pants and look to be about twelve years old.
It’s fine, though. I need to get in the autograph line as quickly as possible after Legs is done, and I can’t have anyone distracting me.
I glance at my phone again and search through my email folder for the email Legs sent me. Sent me.
And then applause starts scattering through the room. I shove my phone into my sweater blazer pocket and sit up as tall as I can, leaning around the head of the guy in front of me.
Where is he?
The stage is still empty. And he’s not at either of the entrance doors. He doesn’t seem to be anywhere.
How did they know to clap? Did someone say something? Did I miss it? More and more people start clapping, and the noise fills the room like thunder, like a roaring waterfall, like the badlands tearing open into a rift. I join in, clapping as loud as I can. I should have brought a drum. With a drum, I could be the loudest. Louder than all these fools. Because everyone’s clapping now. Clapping and leaning eagerly forward in their seats.
Kat and Meg Conquer the World Page 23
