The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love

by Sarvenaz Tash

  Casey shrugs. “He was headed this way. I bumped into him near the room. Said he heard about the raffle just in time and snagged a ticket.”

  Of course he did. I wish you had to answer a trivia question or something before getting a raffle ticket. At least that way they could separate out the true fans who should actually be the ones getting into this make-good.

  “Okay, everyone,” an older man wearing a movie merch Althena T-shirt says from the mic at the front of the room. “Let’s get this part done as quickly and efficiently as possible. The screening will start at three fifteen and we will escort the raffle winners straight from here.”

  He presses a button on the laptop he has up on his podium. A series of about a hundred numbers comes up on the screen behind him. “These are the winning raffle numbers, picked at random by the computer,” he continues. “They’re in numeric order, so take a look at your tickets. If you have a winning number, please form a line here, to my right, and one of our staffers will take care of you.” He indicates the five people, also in official Althena movie merchandise, who are standing just below the stage.

  From all around me, I start to hear groans and sighs of disappointment, and I’m delighted to see that Papa Smurf’s is one of them. Satisfied that there is some justice in the world, I join everyone else in examining our tickets, squinting up at the board, trying to find a match.

  Neither Amelia, Joanna, Felicia, Casey, nor Devin has a winning ticket.

  But I do.

  0389213.

  I stare at the number in my hand and then at the number on the screen, back and forth, just to make sure I haven’t developed some sort of late-onset dyslexia. It’s Felicia who notices first, how the rest of them have all claimed they didn’t win, but I have just turned into a statue who can’t stop staring at the piece of paper in my hand.

  “Did you win?” she asks me.

  I look up at her and slowly nod.

  “Oh my God!” she squeals. “Graham won!” she tells the rest of the group, and Amelia and Joanna both shout in delight. Casey calls out, “Awesome!” and even Devin slaps me on the back.

  “Yes!” Amelia says. “I’m so glad it was you. You deserved it after Friday.”

  I smile at her slowly, but I’m still numb to my extraordinary good luck. And then a familiar voice comes from behind us.

  “I got your message,” Roxana calls out breathlessly. “What happened? Anyone win?” She and Samira both look like they sprinted over here.

  “Graham did,” Casey says.

  Our eyes meet. Roxana’s face breaks out into a genuine smile. “Oh my God! That’s great.”

  “You should go get in line, man,” Devin says, pointing toward the stage.

  But I feel rooted to my spot, and I can’t stop staring at Roxy. Despite everything going to hell, this weekend was supposed to be all about making her happy.

  The raffle ticket is still perched on my hand, and I look down at it, suddenly aware of a stunning truth. As much as Zinc means to me; as much as I nerd out over every bit of his oeuvre, or every new bit of gossip or paraphernalia that pops up online; as much as I’m obsessed by every aspect of it . . . I don’t even want to have this experience without Roxana.

  Chapter 24

  Going,

  Going,

  Gone

  “HERE. YOU TAKE THIS.” I grab Roxy’s hand and slap the winning raffle ticket into it before she realizes what’s happening.

  She stares down at it and then back up at me. “What are you doing? I can’t take this.”

  “You have to,” I say firmly.

  She sputters out a laugh. “I have to?”

  I nod. I’ve made up my mind, and there’s nothing she can say to change it. “I want you to.”

  She stares at me, the ticket still lying on her open, outstretched hand. “But why? Zinc is your all-time favorite writer, Graham.”

  “And he’s your all-time favorite artist,” I respond calmly.

  She shakes her head. “You won the ticket fair and square.” She goes to put the ticket back in my hand, but I hold my hands behind me, out of her reach.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Stop being ridiculous!” she says as she struggles to grab my arm. But being about nine inches taller than her is coming in handy at the moment.

  “Look,” I say, my arms held up in the air as if in surrender. “If you don’t take it, I’m just going to give it away to someone else here. Someone random. I’m serious.”

  She finally stops trying to grab my hands. “I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”

  I realize that Felicia, Casey, Samira, Devin, Amelia, and even Joanna are staring at us, but I have to tell her the truth anyway. Without alcohol this time and with an audience. “I wanted you to have the perfect weekend,” I confess. “Everything’s gone wrong. But this is the one thing that hasn’t. So please. Take it. For me.”

  Roxana’s big brown eyes stare into mine, and I wonder if she can tell I’m near tears. Whatever she sees there makes her look down at the raffle ticket one more time before asking me, “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Okay,” she finally says as she closes her hand around the ticket, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “But I just . . . I don’t know how to thank you . . .”

  “Just get on that line. Quickly,” I say as I point to the line of winners in the front, which has already started moving.

  “Oh,” she says hurriedly, and turns to head toward it. After a moment, she turns back and calls to me, “I’ll try to remember everything, so I can tell you all about it.”

  “You better. Everything.”

  She nods, and for a moment, I picture us in her backyard, her giving me every minute detail of the screening. And it’s almost normal between us. For now, I’ll have to take it, that hope that it will be.

  Before she turns back to her line, she glimpses her sister. “Sam? Are you going to be okay with the rest of the group for an hour?”

  “Of course!” Samira yells back. “See you after.”

  Roxana still looks dazed as she glances over at us one last time and then, finally, gets on the back of the line. Only a few moments later, a staffer comes over and scans her raffle ticket before handing her a different pass. Then Roxy shuffles with the rest of the line through a door at the back of the room.

  I imagine the rest of the group is still staring at me, but I’m luckily saved from any further inquiries by blessed Felicia’s cheerful voice. “So, what’s next on the agenda?” she asks.

  Casey pulls out his spreadsheet and takes a look. “Actually, I have a forty-five-minute lull,” he says. He takes out his regular Comic Con schedule and hands it to Felicia. “Anything here look interesting to you?”

  Way to go, Case, I think, impressed by his gesture . . . even if Felicia doesn’t quite yet grasp the significance of his giving her control over the schedule like that. She casually looks at her watch and then starts to read some options out loud. “Three thirty. We have a WWE Wrestlers Panel. LGBT in Comics panel. Designing a Board Game. The Sun Auction starts . . .”

  “Oh!” I say. “How about we check that out?” Both Felicia and Samira peer at me intently. “I swear I won’t buy anything,” I say with a smile. “But an auction might be fun to watch.”

  “I’m game,” Casey says.

  “Okay, let’s do it, then,” Felicia says.

  I ask Amelia and Joanna if they want to come along, and they accept. Almost as an afterthought, I realize it would be terribly rude not to also ask Devin, who says he’ll tag along.

  There’s too many of us to walk together through the crowd, so we end up sort of paired up and staggered. Felicia and Casey walk ahead of Samira and me. Somewhere behind me, I hear Devin start up a conversation with Amelia and Joanna. Naturally.

  “Hey, that was really sweet. What you did with the ticket,” Samira says to me quietly. “If I was writing this in a story, she definitely would’ve kissed you af
ter that.”

  I smile down at her. “Then I wish I was in one of your stories.” And who wouldn’t wish that? Certainly everyone here—dressed up as aliens, and wizards, and zombies, and superheroes—wants desperately to be inside a story, to be part of something more logical and meaningful than real life seems to be. Because even worlds with dragons and time machines seem to be more ordered than our own. When you live for stories, when you spend so much of your time immersed in careful constructs of three and five acts, it sometimes feels like you’re just stumbling through the rest of life, trying to divine meaningful narrative threads from the chaos. Which, as I learned the hard way this weekend, can be painfully fruitless. Fiction is there when real life fails you. But it’s not a substitute.

  We finally get to the auction spot, another large room that’s down a very long hallway from the raffle room. The front is mostly filled, but there are still some empty rows near the back, and we file into one of those. I end up with Samira on one side and Amelia on the other.

  There are a lot of different things being auctioned, everything from old artwork, to exclusive sketches done on the show floor, to props and memorabilia. A chair from the set of Star Trek: Voyager goes for almost ten grand. Conversely, a small but beautiful sketch of Harley Quinn by Jim Lee is practically a steal at $150.

  At one point, Amelia hits me in the arm and excitedly points out the lot that’s coming up next: the small collection of original Zinc work.

  I nod at her, and I know we’re both seething with envy as we see the two covers get some aggressive bids and counterbids, with the more iconic cover finally going for almost eight thousand dollars and the other one for nearly four thousand.

  “Do you think if I paid that guy twenty bucks, he’d let me just hold the cover for five seconds?” Amelia whispers to me.

  “You’ll never know if you don’t ask,” I whisper back.

  “Good point.”

  And then the final piece of the Zinc collection comes up and I watch as five people go head-to-head on what just yesterday I was sure I could make mine. The page gets a starting bid of $750 immediately, and within thirty seconds, it’s up to $3,000. A few people eventually drop out of the race, and our heads all bounce back and forth as we see an older, rotund lady and a skinny hipster with a Fu Manchu mustache duke it out all the way to the bitter end.

  It goes on for a good while, the room practically silent from held breaths, but finally, the hipster relents, and the lady snags the piece for $7,750.

  There is thunderous applause, and both contenders look flushed and sweaty, but the winner has a huge smile plastered on her face.

  Casey leans across Samira to speak to me. “It’s all for the best. It would’ve taken you forever to pay me off!”

  That’s true, but is it really all for the best?

  Maybe. And maybe one day I’ll be able to see that too.

  “ ‘Sometimes all we have is the knowledge that something extraordinary exists in the universe, even if we can’t be the ones to claim it. Sometimes that has to be enough,’ ” Amelia says, quoting Althena. My jaw drops and I wonder if all my thoughts are that transparent. It takes her looking wistfully at the auction winner to make me realize that she’s talking about the Althena pages. But she could just as easily have been talking about Roxana and me.

  Somehow I’ve found yet another connection to Robert Zinc’s words. Despite everything, I have to marvel at that. After all, it’s not every day that one finds yet another dungeon to explore deep in the heart of his most beloved fandom.

  Chapter 25

  A New

  Hope

  THE AUCTION IS STILL GOING on at a little before four, and Casey lets us know there’s a screening and panel he wants to get to that starts at four. “It’s for a new pilot, a show called Mr. Advantageous.”

  “Oh!” Samira chimes in. “That’s the one with Tim Fisher, right? Will he be there?”

  Casey glances at his schedule. “Yup.”

  “I’m in for that,” Samira says, eyes flashing in the giddy way of eleven-year-old girls.

  “Me too,” Felicia says, and I notice her expression isn’t too different.

  “Okay,” Casey says as he turns to me. “You?”

  Actually, I was just about to suggest getting out of here anyway, but not for Mr. Advantageous. “I think Roxana should be getting out of the screening soon. I might go hang around that room so she can give me the scoop.”

  “Oh, that sounds good! Mind if I go with you?” Amelia asks.

  “Not at all,” I say.

  “I’ll come too,” Devin chimes in, and I take note that he didn’t even ask.

  Joanna says she has to head home to study for a precalc test, so she splits for the exit, while Casey, Felicia, and Samira part ways with us a little bit farther along the hallway.

  Amelia and I are walking in step, but I’m aware of Devin’s tall shadow looming behind us.

  “So, Graham,” Amelia says. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to be blunt, because, well, I’m a city chick. But is there something going on between you and Roxana?”

  I start. I was not expecting that. I stare down at Amelia, who’s waiting patiently for my answer, and I laugh nervously before I give it to her. “Nope. Nothing,” I finally say. Because there isn’t.

  Amelia pauses. “But do you want there to be?” she asks shrewdly.

  I’m speechless for a minute. I also realize that behind us, Devin, who up to this point has been messing around on his phone, is now keenly listening.

  “I did,” I finally admit.

  “Did?” Amelia asks.

  “Do,” I correct myself after taking a moment to think it over. “But it’s not going to happen, I don’t think. So I’m trying to get over it.” I smile down at her with a faint shrug.

  She looks at me piercingly before she speaks again. “Well, I appreciate the honesty.”

  “Ah, honesty. It’s my fatal flaw.”

  “Truthfully, I appreciate a lot of things about you, Graham,” Amelia continues.

  “You do?”

  “Of course,” she says as she stays in step beside me but keeps looking up at me. “You’re smart and funny and crazy talented. And we have a lot in common. Not to mention, I think you’re hot.”

  I stop short, my mouth gaping. Devin bumps into me from behind, but I don’t care. “You think I’m . . . wait. What?”

  I honestly had no idea where this conversation was going, but I can truthfully say I was not expecting this. I stare at this girl—no, scratch that—this beautiful girl who just told me she thinks I’m hot, and for the next ten seconds, I’m pretty sure I’m about to wake up from this admittedly fantastic dream.

  “Please,” Amelia says with a smirk. “Piercing blue eyes. Thick black glasses. You’ve got a total Clark Kent/Superman vibe going on.” She grins at me, and I involuntarily touch my glasses, amazed that they actually seem to have served their intended purpose. “Are you really telling me you don’t know when a girl likes you?”

  I let out a short burst of laughter. She can’t possibly fathom how accurate she is with that observation. “I can say with one hundred percent certainty that—much like Jon Snow—I know nothing when it comes to that department.” I smile shyly down at her.

  “Well, to make it clear . . . I like you, Graham.”

  We’ve stopped walking, and we’re sort of in the middle of the hallway, but I’m too floored to contemplate etiquette right now. People stream around us like we’re a boulder stuck in their stream, and if they curse at us or even elbow us, I truly don’t notice.

  Forget beautiful. Amelia is brave, too. It only took three months, a lot of alcohol, and an annoying British guy for me to work up the nerve to tell the person I know best in the world that I love her. And this girl is laying it all out there for a near stranger.

  “So I guess I want to know if you want to go out with me sometime,” she
finishes.

  I stare at her, this girl who is not Roxy. I hardly know her at all. I don’t know her favorite foods or her least-favorite subject. I don’t know her comfort movie or even if she has one. I have no idea how many freckles are on her nose. And she knows just as little about me; I’m not her best friend. But then again, I’m not like a brother to her, either. As Felicia put it, I haven’t been put in that compartment.

  And now she’s waiting for an answer. “I . . . yes. Sometime,” I say without overthinking it. I’m surprised by my own words, but I also immediately know they’re the right ones. Yes, sometime, someday, and probably soon, I’ll be ready to get to know Amelia. I think I’ll want to try to start something together, on the same page, knowing we’re reaching for something more than friendship right from the start. What a novel concept.

  She smiles up at me, and we’re close enough that I can count the freckles on her nose. There are seven.

  “That sounds like an honest answer. See, one of your strong points.” She lightly reaches out and touches my hand, and I’m surprised by how exotic that feels—warm and slightly electric. Instinctively, I take my thumb and sweep it gently once over the back of her hand. And that feels pretty great too.

  We grin at each other, not noticing that the door to one of the rooms a bit down the hallway has opened up and people are streaming out. I don’t even see the short-haired brunette girl who’s made a beeline for us until she’s right at my elbow.

  “Oh my gosh, you guys.” Roxana is breathless. “Althena. The way she looked. Fiona Ruthers is exactly the right person to play her. And Noth. I know we were all skeptical about Malcolm Vreeland, but he totally surprised me. It was perfect . . .” She stops midsentence and I can tell she’s assessing something. Even though Amelia and I have sprung apart and aren’t touching anymore, maybe it’s how close we’re still standing to each other.

  I finally feel conscious enough of my surroundings to pull us all over to the side of the hallway.

  “Tell me more, tell me more,” Devin sings at Roxana, and she looks at him, blinking. Almost like she forgot about him. Then she looks back up at me, her eyes questioning.