The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love

by Sarvenaz Tash

  “Oh, I’m definitely an all-arounder,” I immediately answer, because I have given this a lot of thought. “I’m kinda into it all. Comic books, regular books, movies, video games, television. Also, you know, like, actual school.”

  “Show-off.” She’s raising her eyebrows at me. “Isn’t it funny, though? How it’s become kinda cool to self-identify as a nerd? I doubt our parents had that luxury.”

  “They definitely didn’t,” I say before going on to explain about my OG dad. “He’s got some stories that are straight out of, like, an episode of Saved by the Bell. I’m pretty sure there was a Kick Me sign involved.”

  Amelia laughs. “No way.”

  I nod. “The way he tells it, it’s a miracle he ever met and married a woman. A miracle that I’m even here. But get this, you want to know how he got the nerve to speak to my mom?”

  “How?”

  “They were in college by then, mind you, so I think things were a little better. But he’s in the park in the middle of campus, and he sees this pretty girl carrying this enormous book about . . . wait for it . . . Star Wars. And he realizes if he can’t get up the nerve to talk to her, then he is just a completely hopeless cause. So he gathers up all his courage and he marches over to her and does the impossible: strikes up a flirtatious conversation.”

  Amelia smiles. “That’s so cute!”

  “Yes, trust me. It was a real triumphant moment for him. Of course, the real kicker is that she was carrying that book because she was a cinema studies major, not because she was a huge fan or anything.”

  Amelia laughs. “But he stuck with it anyway?”

  I nod. “The OG may have been a shy nerd, but he’s also a stubborn one.”

  “That’s a really great story.”

  I nod. It is. I never tire of it, and after Mom was gone, I’d sometimes make my dad tell it to me at night, even when I was maybe too old for bedtime stories.

  “And that’s so cool about your mom,” Amelia continues. “I’ve actually been considering going to film school myself.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “Excuse me.” A voice interrupts our conversation. A short girl in a Superman shirt is smiling at us and brandishing a microphone. She gives me the once-over and then seems to be staring at Amelia’s chest, which is a little bit disconcerting.

  “I run a podcast, and we’re doing a special Zinc fandom compendium,” she explains. “Would you mind if I interview you?” She points toward Amelia again, and it’s only then that I realize she’s been observing Amelia’s T-shirt. “If you’re a fan, that is.”

  Amelia looks at me and I shrug. “Sure,” she says. “And yup, we’re fans.”

  I look ahead and see Roxy and Devin exiting the Block, not noticing that we’ve been held up. I don’t want to lose sight of them, but it would be rude to leave Amelia now, so I just make a plan to text Roxy and catch up with her again as soon as this is over.

  “Great!” the podcast host says. She turns on the little recorder attached to her microphone, looks down at some notes in her phone, and then looks back up at Amelia with a plastered smile. “A few easy ones. So do you think Zinc was well represented at New York Comic Con this year?”

  “Um, well, he was actually here. Which has never happened before. So I would say yes,” Amelia responds, throwing me a quizzical look. I shrug.

  “Great,” the girl says. “And how much of Zinc’s work would you say you’ve read? Like what percentage?”

  “One hundred,” Amelia says.

  “Really?” the girl asks.

  “Well, there really isn’t much of it,” Amelia responds, throwing me another look. “Unless you’re counting unpublished pieces . . .”

  “No, no. Got it. You’re a huge fan.” The girl says the word fan as if she really wants to say nerd . . . and not in a cool twenty-first-century way, but kind of like she’s a mean girl in one of my mom’s eighties DVDs.

  She looks up at Amelia again, and this time there’s something piercing in her gaze, like she’s a hard-hitting journalist about to throw a real curveball. “So if an alien came down to earth today, what do you think he or she would find most disconcerting about our legal system? Would it be pertaining to gun control, immigration, health care, or something else?”

  This time Amelia shoots me a fully alarmed look. “Er, what?”

  The girl doesn’t flinch. “If, like in your favorite fantasy story, an alien came down to earth,” she says more slowly, as if Amelia didn’t comprehend the question because of how fast she was talking, “what—”

  But Amelia stops her. “Um, okay. Right, I got the question.” She thinks for a second. “I’m not a legal expert and I don’t really see what this has to do with Zinc, to be honest, but I do think our gun control system is pretty broken.”

  “And how would you fix it?” the girl immediately asks. “I mean . . .” She stares down at her notes. “How would this alien maybe think to fix it?”

  Amelia gamely and astutely answers a couple more in the girl’s bizarre line of questioning, before cleverly saying she has another panel to get to.

  “Me too.” I jump on her gravy train when the girl looks as if she’s about to start in on me.

  As soon as we’re out of earshot, Amelia turns to me and laughs.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, but sneak-attack politics at Comic Con is a little low, don’t you think? Especially if you’ve clearly never even read your gateway series of choice.”

  “And obviously think it’s beneath you,” I point out.

  Amelia rolls her eyes.

  “Um, amazing answers, by the way,” I have to say to her. “If she’d cornered me, I think I would’ve made a run for it.”

  “Ha! Thanks. I try to keep up with the news and have opinions on things, you know?”

  I nod, a little awestruck. I have opinions on things too, but few of those things are part of what most would consider the real world.

  I’m about to ask Amelia to tell me more about her interest in film school when a peculiar movement catches the corner of my eye.

  We’re a few feet down from the pixel art booth, and when I look over, I see a tall, muscular guy with shoulder-length dirty-blond hair about to scamper away from it. The thing I could have sworn I just saw him do is something very strange: tuck a sword into his pants like there was a scabbard there.

  Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about anyone carrying a sword at Comic Con as part of a costume. But this guy is dressed in nondescript baggy jeans, an oversized sweatshirt, and a Yankees cap. Not to mention there’s just something about the way he’s skulking away that seems . . . off.

  More out of curiosity than anything, I find myself drawn back to the booth. “I just want to check something,” I say to Amelia as I quickly walk over. She follows me.

  “Excuse me,” I say to the girl behind the counter when I get there. “Weird question. But, um, did you just sell a Master Sword?” I’m looking at the display case in front, where Amelia and I were just admiring a life-sized Zelda sword beautifully rendered from hundreds of tiny pieces of plastic. It was priced at $900 and is not there now.

  The girl, who has dark hair and thick, sculpted eyebrows and doesn’t look much older than me, glances down at the case, and her eyes grow wide. She mutters something under her breath that sounds like it might be a curse in a foreign language, and then she looks up at me. Her heavy eyebrows furrow in an accusatory scowl. “You take?” she asks angrily.

  I put my hand up. “No, no!” I say. I look around and see the guy in the Yankees cap still ambling along, about to reach the end of the Block. “I think I saw him take it,” I say.

  She frowns as she looks down the aisle.

  “Well, come on, then! Let’s go catch up with him,” a voice next to me says, and suddenly Amelia is jetting off after the guy.

  “Wait!” I immediately run after her, but as we get closer to the guy, I can hear my pulse throbbing near my eardrum. Oh my God, w
hat is she doing? And what are we going to do once we catch up to this guy? Confront him?

  Amelia reaches him first, and she touches his elbow to get his attention. “Hey!” she says angrily. He turns around and stares down at Amelia, and I realize he looks far, far scarier up close. He’s at least a foot taller than her—he’s a few inches taller than me—and he looks decidedly mean. He has small blue eyes, a scraggly goatee, and a deep, ugly scar running down each side of his face.

  He’s glaring at Amelia, and with my eyes on his scars, I yell the first thing that comes into my head. “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

  When I say I yell it, I mean it. I swear, half the con comes to a halt, staring at me. There’s almost a hush in the Javits, and I think I can hear my line of regurgitated dialogue reverberate along the metal bars of the high ceilings.

  “Is this like Comic Con theater?” I hear someone whisper.

  “Shhh . . . I caught it on my phone!” someone else responds.

  Meanwhile, the thief’s glare is jumping up about ten notches in the menacing department and I have a feeling I’m about to pay for my knee-jerk—or should I say nerd-jerk—reaction to his face.

  But then we hear footsteps behind us. “He stole sword.” I look up to see the girl from the pixel art booth behind me. And she, thankfully, has a burly security guard with her.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” the guy says right away, still staring at me as if he’s memorizing my face.

  “He saw,” the girl says, pointing at me.

  I’m sure my cheeks are about the color of Superman’s briefs right now, but I think it’s too late to back down at this point. “I think he put it in his pants,” I mumble to the guard.

  He looks at Scarface. “Okay. Are you going to show us, or do we need to have a pat-down?”

  The guy sends one more angry look in my direction before reaching down and removing the sword from his pants. For a second, I’m actually scared he might run me through with it, before I realize that it is, in fact, plastic and that there are about a thousand witnesses.

  “Okay, come with me,” the guard says to the guy, grabbing his arm. He turns to the booth girl. “Do you want to press charges?”

  The girl nods emphatically.

  “Okay, then follow me to the security office,” the guard says before looking at Amelia and me. “I don’t think we’ll need the two of you.”

  He starts to lead Scarface away.

  “Thank you,” the booth girl says to me with a big grin. “That was very important, expensive piece.”

  I nod at her with a sheepish smile and then, realizing people are still staring, clear my throat and start to walk quickly away in the other direction.

  “Wait. Here. Take this as thank-you.” She lifts something from around her neck and places it in my hand. It’s a necklace made to look like three 8-bit heart containers in a row, the last heart only half full.

  “Oh, that’s not necessary . . . ,” I start.

  But the booth girl merely grins. “You can give to your girl,” she says, before turning on her heels and running to catch up to the security guard.

  From my side, I hear a gurgle of uncontrollable laughter.

  I turn to see Amelia nearly doubled over from the giggles. “I cannot believe,” she manages between fits, “that you just stopped a thief . . . with a Princess Bride line.”

  “It just . . . came out,” I say, laughing now too as we exit the Block. “I saw the scars on the side of his face and the goatee . . .”

  “And the first thing you thought of was Count Rugen?”

  “Um. Yes.”

  She laughs loudly again. “I freakin’ love it. You totally win the nerd card today. And not in a Saved by the Bell way.”

  She’s beaming at me, and I can’t help but grin back.

  Then she takes out her phone and looks at it. “Oh, man. I have to go. I know you probably think I’m a loner nerd and all, just tagging along with you, but I am actually meeting some friends now before my next panel starts.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s exactly the vibe that comes across with you,” I respond, in what I hope is clearly a sarcastic manner. “Loner nerd. Ready to tackle a thief who’s twice her size at a moment’s notice.”

  Her smile gets wider. “Tackle? Maybe. But defeat with classic movie lines? That is much more impressive.” She puts her phone away. “Hey, do you want to come with? My friends are pretty awesome. Just like your group.”

  “Oh, thanks!” I say. “But speaking of which, I actually should go find Roxana and Casey. You know, I can’t be the douche who just bounces the second another shiny new nerd comes along.”

  “Very noble,” Amelia says. “Can I get your number, then? Maybe we can meet up again later, or tomorrow?”

  We exchange numbers and part ways. I immediately text Roxy to see where she is, but I get no response. Then I try Casey. Ten minutes later and still nothing, so I conclude that they’re either at Artist Alley or one of the underground panel rooms, since cell reception is notoriously bad at both of those locales.

  It takes me almost half an hour to find them, but finally, I spot Devin’s perfectly coiffed hair atop his tall figure. And sure enough, Roxana is with him. Though I am relieved to see that Casey is too. Roxana is waiting in line for another artist, and Devin is flipping through her Althena sketchbook.

  “This is awesome,” Devin is saying. “It’s so clever to have one book dedicated to one character like this.”

  “Thanks!” Roxana responds. “I have some really amazing ones in there. Oh, that’s one of my faves you just passed, actually.”

  I alert them all to my presence, and they say hello before continuing their conversation.

  Fine, I self–pep talk as I watch Devin point out some technical detail about one of Roxana’s favorite sketches. But none of this will matter once I get the Zinc page.

  “So.” I turn to Casey quietly. “Do we have a deal?”

  Casey sighs. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. . . .” Of course he has. He’s Casey Zucker. The man is one big walking brain. “And . . . okay, yes. But just so I have a totally clear conscience . . . are you sure about this, man? It’s a lot of money.”

  “I’m sure,” I say gleefully, and hold out my hand for a high five.

  He eyes it suspiciously but doesn’t bring his own hand up. “Fine. Then tell me who’s ranked number one.”

  “Felicia,” I say without hesitation, because I know Casey is a man of honor and wouldn’t renege on the deal now.

  “Goddamn it!” he immediately responds before looking back up at my hanging five in exasperation. “I should have guessed that” is his next remark. And then, “Why does she have to be so perfect? Seriously, how can I possibly exploit a weak spot in her?”

  He’s right, of course. “I’ll help you figure it out,” I promise, though I also currently have no brilliant ideas on that front either. He sighs but finally bestows on me a weak high five.

  As one of Roxana’s favorite fictional detectives would say, the game is afoot!

  I get a ping on my phone and find a text from Amelia.

  Dude. You must look at the trending topics on Twitter right now.

  I open the app and scroll down the list of trending topics. I stop when I see #InigoMontoyaSmackdown.

  Must be a coincidence, I think. It couldn’t be . . .

  But when I click on the topic, a series of tweets come up, most of them retweeting a video.

  A video starring a tall, lanky redheaded kid screaming a Princess Bride line at one scary-looking dude right in the middle of NYCC.

  Chapter 17

  What’s

  Hair Got

  to Do

  With It?

  “AGAIN. WE HAVE TO WATCH it again,” Roxana says. They’re crowded around my phone, replaying the now apparently viral video.

  I groan. “How many times do you need to relive my humiliation?”

  “Humiliation?” Roxa
na says to me, blinking. “This is awesome.”

  “Really, dude. This is amazing,” Devin confirms.

  “You, like, saved the day,” Roxy continues. “At Comic Con. If only you were wearing a cape.”

  I offer her a half-smile. “Charlie Noth doesn’t do capes.” In truth, I don’t really know how to feel about the video. I mean, I am a little embarrassed, and the attention is bewildering. But it’s also sort of cool. And most of the tweets and comments on the video are about how great it is, not what a dork I am (though, of course, there is some of that, too. This is the Internet, after all).

  Casey, of course, wants to know the logistics of how I came up with that line. The video is too far away to make out the guy’s scars-and-goatee combo, so I have to explain how my mind seemed to automatically project the Princess Bride villain onto him.

  “A study in visual association,” Casey concludes.

  “Oh, hey. Here. Do you want this?” I take the pixel heart necklace out of my pocket and present it to Roxana—nonchalantly, as if it hasn’t been burning a hole as soon as the booth girl told me it was for “my girl.” “Spoils of my victory,” I add.

  Roxana takes a look into my palm. “Oh, wow. That is so cool,” she says as she fingers the three hearts sitting next to each other on the bronze chain.

  I gently push my hand in her direction, nudging her to take it. “It’s yours.”

  “You sure?” she asks.

  I smile at her. “I mean, I know it matches my hair and all, but I’m thinking you’ll probably get more use out of it.” I’m making jokes to mask the fact that my own heart is beating faster. After all, presenting the girl you secretly love with jewelry—even plastic jewelry—is no everyday occurrence.

  “Well, thanks! This is awesome.” She immediately clasps the chain around her neck, and I know I’m beaming at it, feeling like the happiness of seeing Roxy wear the literal hearts I just gave her might actually have the magic power to fill that last heart container right up. My pulse almost drowns out Casey as he tells us he needs to go, to keep to his schedule.

  Eventually, I calm down enough to remember that Roxana and I have a Breaking into Comics panel at three o’clock and, as a bonus, I signed us up for a special critique by the duo leading it: Morgan Donnelly and Brandon Park, who also happen to be two of our creative team idols.