Someone screams.
“Eeeeeeeeeee!” It’s a high-pitched scream. “Where have you been? Oh my god, it’s been forever!” I look over, and there is a murder of teenage girls in tank tops and shoes with heels and dangly earrings and different-colored eye shadow, and they’re all headed directly for us. The screamer, the leader, has her arms out and is descending on Tess.
“Oh, heyyyyy!” Tess says, clearly caught off guard. She shoots me a nervous look as she stands up and starts hugging all of them one by one. “Hey, guys, what are you doing here?”
“We’re just getting sushi! I thought you were visiting your grandma in Phoenix! Who’s this?” the leader asks, looking me up and down with a huge gleaming smile. Evaluating me.
“Claire, I want you to meet my friends! Harper,” she says, pointing at the leader, then working her way down the line, “Jillian, Augusta, Soraya. Everybody, this is Claire. She’s visiting from out of town.” Why do I feel like Tess’s voice just went up an octave? She motions at me to stand up, so I do, but my hands are just hopelessly by my side, because these look like the kind of girls who air kiss and I’m not going to air kiss any of them.
Tess’s friends don’t look at all like I thought they would. For one, they’re all white. And it’s not that I thought Tess could only have black friends or anything, but she’s from a big city. I kind of pictured a network-TV-supporting-characters rainbow-of-diversity thing. But they’re all of a type—weirdly pretty and too put-together to possibly have anything in common with me. These are not Tumblr people, they are Instagram people. Andrea Garcia people. Popular.
Why did I not see it before? This is why Tess doesn’t understand me. This is why she can’t be honest with her friends. She’s one of them.
They huddle around us like we’re all in a secret clique. One of them smells like perfume. Maybe all of them. Who even wears perfume?
“We’re just here to get our spicy tuna on,” Harper says, “but, like, did you notice there’s some kind of, what, Comic-Con happening right now?” She gestures around the restaurant, which is packed with con-goers and cosplayers and all kinds of nerds. “Like, hello, I’m trying to walk here, and everyone’s getting up in our way with their fake swords and crap!”
The other friends look around at the room like they can’t even believe their favorite sushi spot has been invaded. I frown at Tess. Her friends have no idea that we’re here for the convention, too. Tess subtly shakes her head at me: Don’t say anything. I roll my eyes.
“You girls want to sit with us? We were just about to start eating,” Tess says.
“Sure!” either Jillian or Augusta says, I’m not sure which one, and they slide into our booth. I really, really don’t want to do this, but Tess shoots me a look full of daggers, so I squeeze in next to Soraya.
“Oh my god, I totally thought that was that Benedict Cumber guy, but it’s a girl,” Harper says, pointing to a pretty good Sherlock cosplayer in the corner.
“Ew, really?” Soraya laughs. They all crane their heads to look. I glare at Tess—I literally can’t believe she’s not saying anything to these people, but she ignores me.
“It’s called cosplay,” I say matter-of-factly. “Hers is pretty good, if you ask me.”
They all gape at me. I can almost hear them saying to themselves, Who are you again? Tess clearly wants out of this conversation.
“It must have taken her a long time to put together a costume that good, don’t you think?” I ask, intently forging on.
“Uh, I guess so,” says Jillian/Augusta.
Harper turns her gaze to me. “So, Claire, how do you and Tess know each other?”
“Claire’s from Idaho, she’s just in town to visit me!” Tess says, wayyy too perky.
“Oh yeah? That’s a long way to come,” Harper says. Augusta and Jillian start grabbing sushi plates off the conveyor belt and setting them down in front of people. I don’t feel like eating a single thing right now. Harper keeps her eyes on me. She can tell I’m not like them.
“And you came to town because…” Harper prods.
Tess is practically begging me with her eyes not to tell them the truth, but it’s so dumb because her friends are clearly terrible. What’s the point of having friends if you’re just going to lie to them to pretend you’re as cool as they are? “I’m here to go to the convention, actually,” I say, watching Tess. “I love the show Demon Heart.”
All the girls glance from me to Harper to see how she’ll react.
“What’s Demon Heart?” Harper asks, all pretty and perky and cute. Tess is full-on glaring at me.
“It’s my favorite show,” I gush. I’m laying it on pretty thick. Tess can lie to her friends if she wants, but I refuse to. “It’s about this guy who hunts demons, and he’s secretly in love with this other guy, who is a demon, but he has a heart, so he’s a good guy. And every week they kill mystical beasts and send them back to hell, and oh my god, you have to watch it, it’s amazing.” Tess is going to kill me, but I don’t care. She should’ve done this a long time ago. “Well, actually, I said they’re in love, but they’re not actually gay on the show. That’s why I have to write fanfiction where they declare their feelings for each other and finally kiss and have sex and stuff.”
Harper’s eyes are wide, loving every minute of this. “Wow, Tess, did you know about all this?” she asks. I can tell she’s cracking up on the inside. I’ve seen that look from kids in my high school. They pretend to be interested in what you’re saying so that later on they can laugh and laugh. Right now Harper is feeling so superior. My lip curls at the way she’s judging me, and at how she would judge Tess if she knew the truth about her. No one should have to feel ashamed of loving a TV show, or reading fanfiction, and I hate that they make her feel this way. She deserves better friends than this.
I know I’m sitting on a social hand grenade and all I have to do is pull the pin and let it fly.
“Of course Tess knows about it,” I say. “She’s obsessed, too. It’s how we met!”
The grenade explodes. All the girls lower their chopsticks and stare at Tess. Harper’s eyes light up like this is the most delightful piece of information she’s heard in a long time.
I did the right thing, I know I did. But my stomach cannot stop turning over at the way Tess is staring, openmouthed, at me. Hurt and betrayed. I’ve never made anyone look at me like that before. But she should feel so free right now. She doesn’t have to lie anymore!
“It’s not like that,” Tess says to her friends.
“What’s it like, then?” Harper asks innocently.
“Claire, can I speak to you outside, please?” Tess says, standing up. All the girls watch her go. I flash them a fake smile and follow Tess outside, ready for whatever’s coming.
“What is your freaking issue?” Tess is practically yelling at me on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. People stream past us, some of them turn to stare.
I walk down the block, away from the windows of the sushi place. I don’t want her friends staring at us if we’re going to do this. “You should have told them a long time ago, Tess. You know that.”
“It was my decision to make. Mine.”
“Oh yeah? Like how it was my decision to tell Forest Reed what happened between us? You went ahead and took that decision away from me.”
“I already apologized for that, Claire, what do you want from me?”
“I don’t want you to be embarrassed of me. Of this!” I point at the convention center, towering above us just across the street. “I want you to be proud of the things you like.”
“It’s not that simple. They don’t understand this stuff.”
“What’s to not understand? You’re obsessed with a TV show. You draw sexy fanart of it. You read fanfic. It’s not that big a deal.”
“You don’t know anything about my life, okay? Look at my friends, I’m already different from them. I’m black, I’m queer, I don’t have a damn thigh gap. You think it’s easy going
through high school like that? I can’t just throw ‘draws sexy fanart’ into the mix and expect everything to stay the same.”
“If they’re really your friends, they won’t care,” I say.
“What would you know about friends?” she shoots back.
I take a step back.
Wow.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she says in a kinder tone, “but it’s true, there’s nothing stopping you from being the crazy, beautiful weirdo you are inside. Which is why you should just come out, Claire!”
“Tess, stop it.” She’s being too loud, people are going to hear her. I take another step back, but she doesn’t stop.
“Just do it! You’re clearly queer, so just own it.”
“Tess!”
“Say the words. Gay, gay, gay, bi, pan, lesbian, homo-sex-u-al.”
“I said stop it!”
“Claire?” a voice says nearby, and my chest seizes up. Because it’s Mom.
I spin around, and see she’s walking toward us, frowning, clearly able to tell something is wrong. Did she just hear that? How could she have not?
“Mom, we gotta go.” I intercept her and grab her arm.
“Hi, Tess,” Mom says before I start pulling her away.
“Hi, Trudi,” Tess says, then, with a dark look at me, she pulls the pin on her own grenade and lobs it at me. “Your daughter’s gay.”
We are quiet on the way back to the hotel. I don’t know what my mom is thinking. Is she giving me space to express myself? Or is she quietly swirling?
As we enter through the revolving door of our hotel and cross the lobby, I’m still shaking with anger at Tess. I can’t believe she would say that to my mom. Maybe I was wrong about her. Maybe she’s just as mean-girl bitchy as those trolls she calls her friends. Maybe I never really knew her at all. She said she wanted to be my friend? Well, forget that. Forget her. If this is what having friends is like, I’m better off without.
And then there’s that thing she said about me not caring about anyone but myself. Is that why I’m so hung up on queer representation? Of course I care about seeing more black characters, too. Don’t I? But why haven’t I been pushing for that as much? Or at all? How many things can I advocate for at one time? My ears burn as I realize I could have done more and I haven’t. Even if we do make SmokeHeart go canon, there’s still no one on the show who looks like Tess.
Mom and I step onto the elevator and the doors close. The silence is heavy. Mom quietly clears her throat.
“What?” I say sharply because I can’t take the quiet anymore, and I want her to get it off her chest.
“Nothing,” Mom says. “What?”
“Nothing!” I’m mad now. She’s playing games. The elevator dings and we step onto our floor. She swipes her card in our door and we walk in. I can’t handle the silence anymore.
“Tess and I had a fight,” I say, flopping back onto my bed and pulling my pillow over my face.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mom says. I feel the bed move as she sits down on the edge of it.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, my words muffled.
“Okay.”
I move the pillow a bit so I can breathe, but my eyes are still covered. “And I don’t want to talk about what she said.”
“Okay.”
Mom gives it a long moment before she says. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m starving,” I say miserably.
“Room service?”
“Room service.”
I get the chicken piccata and Mom gets the crab cakes, and we watch HGTV home renovation shows all night and she doesn’t try to make me talk to her, even when I crawl over and lie next to her in her bed instead of my own.
“A DOLLAR THIRTY-FOUR is your change.” The girl behind the counter hands me the money, then turns around to make my Peanut Buster Parfait. She doesn’t appear to recognize me, even though she seems like the right demo. Maybe she’s more of a Time Swipers type.
I haven’t had DQ in, god, I don’t even know how long. Probably since around the time I moved to LA. Dairy Queens are few and far between there for some reason, and besides, as my agent likes to tell me, “Your body is your résumé,” and these abs don’t make themselves. But honestly, I deserve this parfait. Jon Reynolds is never going to hire me after that disastertown of a panel yesterday. Not to mention the Demon Heart finale airs tonight, and unless our numbers are magically higher than they were all year, there’s no way we get a second season. And then that’s it. My career is over as soon as it began.
I imagine having to pack up my LA apartment, not that there’s much to pack up. I picture moving back to Oklahoma, all the kids I went to high school with crowing about how hotshot TV Boy came on home. I imagine my dad telling me over dinner, “We all knew it was a long shot. What’d you think, you were Steve McQueen, son? You ain’t nothing but prairie trash like the rest of ’em,” then heading out to the porch for a smoke.
As the girl comes back with my ice cream, I hear the door jingle. I look over to see three teenagers come in. I glance away immediately, but it’s too late. They’ve seen me. And they recognize me.
They start whispering and giggling right away. I take my ice cream and start for the door, doing my best to ignore them, but as I pass, I hear one of them whisper, “He really does like Dairy Queen.”
And another responds, “Do you think he likes Jasper Graves, too?”
Something shifts in my stomach. I stop walking. I turn and look at them. The trio of trembling girls stare back at me, wide-eyed and frozen.
“What did you say?”
They giggle nervously and huddle close to each other for safety, too starstruck to even speak.
I try again, harder. “Why did you just mention Jasper Graves?”
They look at each other, unsure.
My ice cream is sending rivulets of condensation down my hand and I suddenly feel ridiculous, standing in a Dairy Queen, holding a parfait, yelling at teenagers. What has my life become?
“It… it’s nothing. It’s just from a fic,” one of them finally gets out.
Of course it is. “Heart-of-lightness?” I confirm, and she nods.
I’m gonna kill Claire.
“I’M GLAD YOU got in touch,” Caty says as we sit down for lunch in the hotel restaurant. After my fight with Tess yesterday, I’m not sure I have any allies left besides her, and I want to brainstorm with her about how she thought yesterday’s panel went, and whether there’s anything else to do today. I didn’t have her phone number to text her, so I contacted her the only way I knew how—I posted on Tumblr asking her to meet me. And she showed up.
“Order anything you want,” she says. “I’ve got a company card.”
“Sweet.” When our waitress arrives, I don’t hesitate. “Can I please have a BLT and an iced tea and a side of mac and cheese?”
“You are very good at ordering,” Caty says, then tells the waitress, “Same for me, but sub pinot grigio for the iced tea, please.”
All around us, convention attendees mix with business-suit types in a weird swirl of conflicting fashion choices and hairstyles. But no one quite looks like Caty today, in a pink furry vest over a dark button-up shirt that’s covered in large pink flamingos, open so that her black lacy bra just peeks out the gap, and a wide-brimmed black hat. She makes me wonder if I should try to expand my wardrobe from just fandom tees, hoodies, and jeans.
“So talk to me. How are you feeling?” Caty says.
“Like crap.” I fiddle with the sugar packets. “The panel yesterday… I was hoping for a different reaction, I guess.”
“Well, I don’t know what you had in mind, but from a social media perspective it was a bonanza,” Caty says.
“Really?” The waitress delivers our drinks, and I start emptying sugar packets into my iced tea.
“Totally. Huge shock wave across Twitter and Facebook, and practically a sonic boom on Tumblr. You saw the media, right? BuzzFeed picked it up, and a bu
nch of other sites did, too. It’s all over the place. The video is so awkward, it’s hard to watch, but you kind of can’t look away.”
“So what’s it mean?” I ask. “What are they saying?”
“They’re saying they’ve never seen a fandom unite this way. Usually there’s infighting, self-policing, ship wars…”
“Demon Heart doesn’t really have any other ships,” I say. “All the women get killed off. It’s SmokeHeart or no ship at all.”
Caty shrugs. “And then of course there are the people who think fans are too entitled and they should just accept what they’re given and if you don’t like it, watch something else.”
I roll my eyes, I’ve heard that argument before. “No one would say that if we weren’t young and women. It’s like, when my dad calls in to sports radio to criticize some football coach for making a bad call, no one tells him he’s being too entitled and if he doesn’t like it, he should just go watch another team. His feelings are, like, automatically considered valid. So why aren’t mine?”
Caty laughs. “You’re good at this. Everyone on our team is feeling very optimistic for the ratings tonight, and that’s basically because of you.”
I scoff and take a sip of tea.
“I’m serious! You’re like this black hat publicist. If you ever want to go legit, let me know. I would be more than happy to get you an internship somewhere. I just want to make sure I stay on your good side.” She chuckles.
I always thought that after high school I’d go to college in the Northwest somewhere, maybe try to write books or something. The thought of moving to LA? Working in the entertainment industry? Trying to change things from within?
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“So.” She claps her hands together. “What did you want to talk about?”
The food comes and I talk between bites. I tell her how I was hoping the panel yesterday would pan out, how I only have one day left before I go home, how this is my last chance to convince Jamie. I have to figure out how to make SmokeHeart a reality—it’s my last shot.
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