Once Upon a Comic-Con: Geeks Gone Wild #3

by Dallen, Maggie

  I’d been so convinced that it would happen. I mean, I had approximately zero doubts that he’d see that we were perfect together. It would have been the perfect start to the year.

  But it wasn’t meant to be, and that was totally fine.

  Ryan had always been on my radar. We hung in the same groups, went to the same parties. He was on the football team and was a prominent member of the team. On top of that, he had decent grades, a great smile, and the potential to help me make prom queen.

  And before you get the wrong idea, no I wasn’t obsessed with becoming prom queen or anything. Although, in all honesty I was a little bummed to miss out on homecoming queen. I mean, I was happy for Margo, obviously, but that didn’t change the fact that I’d been positioning myself to receive that honor for years.

  My mother won all those contests and it was understood that I would as well. My father liked to tell his parishioner friends that I was the spitting image of my mother, and I tried my best to live up to that.

  Anyway, that was all water under the bridge. Que sera, sera and all that. Jason started dating Margo and I moved on. No big tears or anything. When I shifted my attention elsewhere I found Ryan everywhere I turned. Apparently he’d had a crush on me for a while and I’d never known. So now we were a happy couple and it all worked out just great.

  I looked down at the silly bear and grinned. It was better than great. Everyone who passed us was looking between me, the bear, and my boyfriend. This was one of those displays that made it clear to everyone that I was loved. How sweet was that?

  “I had no idea you were such a romantic,” I said.

  “Yeah, well…” He threw an arm around my shoulders and started to lead me to class. He didn’t finish his sentence and I didn’t expect him to. What Ryan excelled at in the smiles and romantic gestures department, he lacked in the words arena. He wasn’t much of a talker, and that was fine by me.

  I didn’t need a talker, just a boyfriend. And that was what I got.

  So yeah, receiving a teddy bear from my new boyfriend before the first class of the day? It seemed like a promising start to an amazing day.

  I was wrong.

  Things took a turn at lunch. I walked into the cafeteria to find people staring at me. Like, more than usual staring. Like, I had something on my face staring.

  “Um, Taylor?” I sat down beside one of my friends but I noticed that she was not only not staring, she wasn’t even looking at me.

  I looked around the table and only Cara met my gaze. Cara wore the kind of smirk that always made me anxious. When she smiled like that, someone got hurt.

  Usually one of her friends.

  Cara had daddy issues. And maybe mommy issues. Honestly, a psychiatrist would’ve had a field day trying to sort through all of her many issues. That had to be the cause of her vindictive, catty nature, right? Healthy, well-adjusted people didn’t act like that.

  “What’s going on, guys?” I asked the table at large.

  There was a long silence as looks were exchanged and my stomach sank. My smile, however, never faltered, not even when Taylor finally answered. “You were tagged.”

  That set everyone off. Marlesa started giggling, Tiffany let out a snort of laughter, and Cara…well, Cara gave me the sort of wide-eyed apologetic look that said she wasn’t sorry at all. “It was just a joke!”

  ‘It was just a joke’ was how Cara excused all of her mean girl moves. Never once did it occur to her that her particular brand of humor rarely, if ever, left anyone else laughing.

  Well, that wasn’t true. Right now, her friends were laughing, all right, and they were clearly laughing at me.

  Acid churned in my belly but I wasn’t overly concerned. I mean, it was only a matter of time, right? That stupid #GeeksGoneWild hashtag had become a weapon in the hands of people like Cara and Joel. Natural-born bullies, they really didn’t need much incentive at all to pick on others…even their friends.

  Just last week Cara had tagged Taylor in a supremely unattractive photo in which Taylor’s eyes were half-closed and her face was distorted into a grimace. She’d been laughing, but Cara’s tag claimed she was just a spaz.

  Lovely, right?

  So, while I wasn’t exactly eager to find whatever unattractive pose Cara had caught me in, I was ready for it. I braced myself with a smile. “Okay, let’s see it,” I said, my tone teasing as I wiggled my fingers in Taylor’s direction. She had her phone in hand and I had no doubt the offending photo was on her screen right now.

  Taylor bit her lip and cast a quick look in Cara’s direction. That did little to help the feeling of dread that was creeping over me. It’s fine, I told myself. My reputation could recover from one silly unphotogenic moment.

  I’d laugh it off. I’d smile and roll my eyes and in a day or two any whispers and gossip would blow over. I’d seen pretty much every girl at this table weather the #GeeksGoneWild storm—some better than others—and I would too.

  Cara must have given some sort of signal of assent because Taylor passed over the phone with a look that was at once guilty and malicious. Like she couldn’t wait to see my response but some glimmer of humanity made her feel just a little guilty about that fact.

  Or maybe she just recalled how it had felt last week when she’d been in this exact same spot. She might have felt some empathy but there was no doubt she was relieved that it was happening to someone else this time, and who could blame her?

  I summoned up every ounce of acting power I had to ensure that my smile remained in place. I readied myself for the eye roll and the sigh that said I was above all this nonsense.

  Then I looked at the photo.

  My heart stopped. My breathing came to a halt as my lungs froze in my chest. This…this could not be happening.

  The picture was of me, all right, but I wasn’t making an ugly face or caught unawares by Cara’s ever-present phone camera. Nope. I was posing for this shot, and I was smiling. Beaming, really. I actually looked pretty good…even if I was dressed up as Supergirl.

  That’s right, Supergirl. As in Kara Zor El. As in Superman’s cousin. As in one of my all-time favorite superheroes.

  But none of that mattered now because it was just starting to dawn on me that everyone in the school must have seen this photo. If they hadn’t already, they would soon. And once they did…my secret was out.

  I liked comics. No, it went beyond that. I loved them. I devoured them. But a long time ago I’d realized that it didn’t fit with my image. Especially the cosplay part. I mean, it was one thing to read comics—I might’ve been able to make that work for me, but to go to conventions? To dress up and play pretend?

  That was so not the sort of thing the head cheerleader would do.

  As I stared at the picture I realized belatedly that my smile had fallen. I’d forgotten all about the sigh and the eye roll because my body had gone into a state of shock. That had to be what this was. My blood was cold, my bones had turned to ice. I wasn’t just embarrassed, I was…betrayed. Violated, even.

  Did that sound melodramatic? Sorry. It was just that this was one area of my life that was mine. It was the one space where I could be myself and not worry about my image or my reputation or hold back any emotions. This was the one area of my life where I’d been free.

  And now it was over. I’d been outed, and it would never be the same. I just knew it. It would no longer be my refuge or my safe haven because Cara had gone and ruined it.

  Now everyone knew and while maybe I could laugh it off, I didn’t want to.

  “Where did you get this?” My lips were frozen and the words came out quiet and monotone. It was then that I realized the table full of girls around me had gone deathly quiet.

  I looked up to see varying degrees of pity and cruel amusement. I sought out one particularly cruel gaze in particular. “Cara,” I said softly. “Where did you get this?”

  The girl didn’t even have the grace to look sheepish. Because I knew where she’d gotten this. Off my
phone. How did I know? It didn’t exist anywhere else. I never posted my comic-con photos anywhere, but I vividly remembered asking my friend Thea to take this picture with my phone at the last convention we’d gone to in Atlanta this past summer.

  I’d thought I’d been so smart, keeping the photos offline and my trips to conventions on the down-low. I guess it had never even occurred to me that Cara would stoop so low as to snoop on my phone.

  She lifted one shoulder in a lazy shrug. “What’s the big deal, Julia? Worried Ryan won’t worship at your feet when he finds out his perfect cheerleader is actually a giant geek?”

  I stared at her with a partially open mouth. I’d seen Cara be snide before, and she’d never tried to hide her nasty side from me, but I’d never seen this.

  This was something else. The look in her eyes was something close to hatred and it left me feeling like I’d been sucker punched.

  Cara broke the silence with a sigh and an eye roll, but hers wasn’t filled with tolerant amusement like mine would have been. Hers was all haughty disdain. “Come on, girls. Let’s let Julia mope on her own for a while.”

  And then they were gone. Just like that, the group of girls I’d been sitting with every day at lunch were gone. Not one of them stuck around to ask if I was okay or to show the slightest sign of loyalty. Or friendship.

  I was alone in the middle of the cafeteria, and everyone was looking at me.

  No, they weren’t just looking. I glanced around and I saw the stares, the smirks, the laughter.

  They were laughing at me.

  I watched Jason cut through the crowds and by the frown he wore I just knew he’d seen the photo and the hashtag. He sank onto the bench seat to my left. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” My voice sounded weak even to me but I managed a smile. It came out of habit, really.

  Margo joined us a second later, and then Luke, and finally Suzie dropped into the seat across from me with a sympathetic little smile.

  “You okay?” Luke asked.

  Honestly having the class clown be all serious like that made me want to cry. I forced a smile instead. “Of course.”

  “It’s okay if you’re not,” Suzie said.

  I gave her another smile, this one a little more genuine. I didn’t know Suzie well but she’d always been nice to me. “Thanks.”

  “I’m going to kill Cara,” Margo said.

  Judging by the look in her eyes, I believed her.

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but not necessary.”

  “Are you kidding me? The girl has been terrorizing her ‘friends’ for months now,” Margo said, using air quotes around the word friends.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, searching for some sort of consolation. “I’m sure she only acts this way because she’s hurting.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “How can you still be so nice?” Margo finally said.

  I took a swig from my bottle of water before responding. What could I say? Avoiding conflict was second nature to me. I might’ve been hurting but getting angry wouldn’t do anything to help.

  Even as I thought it, a little part of me rebelled. I felt anger stirring in my belly now that the shock was fading. I ruthlessly squelched it.

  Image was everything, right? And I was nice, dang it. I was kind and understanding, and I didn’t do drama.

  “It’ll blow over,” I said, more to appease this misfit band of saviors than anything else.

  “Of course it will,” Jason said with a reassuring squeeze of my shoulder. “This will be old news in no time.”

  A silence fell over the whole table and I wondered if I was the only one doubting Jason’s conviction. I mean, sure Taylor’s ugly photo had faded into oblivion pretty quickly, but my photo came with questions. The background was clear—I’d been standing in front of a comic-con sign, for heaven’s sake. It was basically a photographic announcement of my rabid fan status.

  I was a fan of comics, I shouldn’t feel bad about that, and I didn’t. Comics were a totally legitimate form of art and entertainment, and anyone who believed otherwise didn’t know what they were talking about. But knowing that didn’t exactly make the whispers and stares going on around me easier to take. It also didn’t ease this hollow feeling that had taken over every time I thought about how my one secret, only-for-me escape had been taken away from me. And by someone who was supposed to be a friend.

  Then there was the fact that the girls who were supposed to have my back had just walked away from me when I needed friends the most. Years of being the kind, supportive squad leader who was always there with a shoulder to cry on when they were dumped or fighting amongst themselves. Years of loyalty to those girls and look where it had gotten me. Maybe not for long—I’d be back in my rightful spot soon enough, but I couldn’t deny that their rejection today had stung. A lot.

  So no, I wasn’t embarrassed by my love of comics. But I was hurt.

  “Can we just talk about the fact that our very own Julia Farrow is a comics fan?” Luke said.

  I found myself facing a bunch of smiling faces.

  “I find you about a million times more likeable right now,” Suzie said, a glint of mischief in her eyes.

  “Seriously,” Margo added. “This is the best news ever.” She leaned over and lowered her voice. “But now you know you’ve got to cross over to the dark side, right?”

  I arched my brows and looked to Jason to explain.

  “They’re claiming you as a geek,” he said with a funny, dopey little grin as he looked at his girlfriend.

  That look right there? Swoon. I mean, I was totally over that crush but whenever I saw the way he looked at Margo it did make me wonder. What would it be like to have someone look at me that way?

  I shook my head. What was I thinking? Ryan totally looked at me like that.

  Ryan. The thought of him had me breathing out in relief. He’d be by my side until this blew over. And Jason and his friends were in my corner. All I had to do was smile and shrug and say of course I liked comics. Who didn’t? Just because I liked them a little more than most was hardly something to be ashamed of.

  “My question is, why did you keep it a secret?” Luke asked.

  I stared at him. That was the question, wasn’t it? If it wasn’t something to be ashamed of then why did I go to such lengths to hide my obsession? I shifted in my seat as I played with my hair.

  Before I could respond, Suzie elbowed him in the side. “That’s rich coming from you.”

  “Hey,” he said, pretending to be hurt as he rubbed his side.

  “I don’t recall you rushing off to tell the world about your MageLand addiction,” she said.

  “Fair enough.” He turned to me. “Question officially retracted.”

  I let out a little sigh of relief. They were all being so nice to me right now so they deserved the truth. But the truth was hard to explain. These guys didn’t seem to care what anyone thought, and I did. Not in a low self-esteem kind of way, but in a very practical way.

  Perception was key and I’d spent a lifetime managing the way the world saw me. I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t want to live any other way. What I had was working for me. It might have felt a little restrictive at times, but that was the price of living in the eye of the public, wasn’t it? My mother’s job as a local news anchor and my father’s role as pastor had ensured I’d be in the spotlight and I’d learned how to live that way.

  Comics and those conventions had been my outlet. My freedom.

  I realized now as I stared down at my water bottle that I wasn’t nearly as upset about the laughter around me as I was terrified that I’d lost the one world where I could be truly and completely free.

  “You okay?” Margo asked, reaching a hand out to squeeze mine.

  “Yeah, totally.” My smile was back in place in a big way. I was pretty sure no one was fooled but playing the happy card was kind of my default setting.

  Never let ’em see you cry, right? That was the main thing. Emoti
ons had a time and place—and the lunchroom cafeteria? This was so not the time or the place.

  “I should go,” I said. “I have to grab my books before next period.”

  They all watched me and their obvious sympathy was equally heartwarming and annoying. I hated pity and I didn’t need their empathy. This would blow over. No big deal.

  I made it through my next two classes without incident. Sure, people might have been giving me funny looks but I met them all with a big smile and that seemed to do the trick.

  See? No big whoop.

  Cara and the others steered clear in the hallway and that was just fine by me. I’d be back on top of the social hierarchy in no time at all. I just had to ride it out. And unlike Taylor, I wouldn’t cave to tears in the face of a little mockery. Nope. I was all smiles all the time.

  My face hurt by the time last period rolled around but that was a little price to pay for the fact that the snickers stopped along with the stares.

  “Hey babe,” Ryan said as I came up beside him at the end of the day. “How’s your day?”

  “Great,” I chirped. Great. Just great. He hadn’t sought me out this afternoon and that was fine. I didn’t need anyone checking up on me because I had this handled. I totally had this all under control.

  If his answering smile seemed a little forced, that was fine. We both smiled through it as he walked me to my car.

  Tomorrow would be easier.

  Chapter Three

  Matt

  Valentine’s Day was for suckers. Once upon a time Suzie and Margo agreed with this assessment but ever since they’d gone and fallen in love?

  Not so much.

  “You have to come to the dance tonight,” Suzie was explaining to me as I watched the two of them get ready in Suzie’s bedroom.