If I ever see Mark again, I’m telling him he’s wrong about the ten seconds. It’s been longer than that already.
“Uh, Sam.” It’s silly to stammer about my own name, but at least I didn’t accidentally call myself Sammy boy.
The program is thin and flimsy, so she makes me turn around and uses my back as a hard surface. I shove away the thought of how hot that is, because that’s not what this is about.
“There you go,” she says once she’s finished. She hands the program back to me. “Are you having a good convention so far?” She’s even kinder than I expected her to be, and I try to slot this feeling away in my brain. If I ever make it big with my channel, who she is right now is who I want to be: someone who makes nerds feel even more comfortable in this nerdy world of ours.
I nod. “It’s fantastic.” I wish she was more of a streamer instead of mostly a YouTuber only, so I could ask her to check out my Twitch channel for herself; then I wouldn’t need Code at all. “I love this place.”
She grins. “Me too. It’s bananas how magical it is.”
Maybe I really could ask her to show my videos to Code, like Jones said.
Maybe she’d do it.
Except something about that feels gross; it might seem like I wasn’t interested in her autograph at all, just using her to get to Code. Which is definitely not the case. I adore her videos.
As if she can read my mind, she leans in and says quietly, “Thanks so much for your question today. It was fun to answer one that wasn’t about Code.”
Welp, that cinches it. “I love your channel,” I tell her truthfully, and she grins big.
“It was really nice to meet you!” she says, which feels like the thing I should be saying to her, but before I can say that, she’s gone, hurrying down the hall after her friends.
I watch her walk away, then realize I’m staring at her hips where her long, fitted shirt perfectly hugs the curve of her body, and I make myself stop watching her walk away.
I pull out my phone and stare at Jones’s last message:
Ooh, are you going to ask her to show Code your videos?
I’m not sure how best to explain why I didn’t. If I told Jones that I was worried about Shadow’s feelings, Jones would probably laugh in my face and tell me that when I have a few hundred thousand subscribers like Shadow does, that’s when I can worry about her feelings. Or maybe she’d tell me that I’m being sexist in some way. Am I?
Instead of trying to explain at all, I simply say, Nah. Timing wasn’t right.
Jones writes back immediately; a chicken emoji pops up on the screen.
I roll my eyes, but she can’t see that, so I write, Ha ha.
I am not a chicken. I’m doing the right thing. That’s different.
I glance down at the program and realize that Shadow actually wrote something instead of just signing her name.
Sam,
Thanks for coming to our panel and for your super-kind question!
Dream big!
♥ ShadowWillow
I read through the words again. My big dream right now is to have Code check out and promote my channel.
But I did the right thing, and that’s what’s most important. Isn’t it?
Nine
ShadowWillow
I CATCH UP TO Z, STILL GRINNING FROM THE RUSH OF SIGNING ANOTHER autograph—and this one for an actual fan of me, not just Code. Not that I don’t love signing autographs for the CodeShadow shippers, too. I’ll happily sign autographs for anyone who wants one. Though maybe one day it’ll be mostly fans like that kid. I can dream.
Z looks up from his phone as I fall into step beside him and the others. “The guys are here,” Z says. “And Lainey says Legs is in the VIP room, so I think I’ll tell the guys to head there. You want to join us?”
Would I like to hang out with a bunch of famous YouTubers in a room where only VIPs are allowed to go?! “Of course!” I practically shout, and he quirks an eyebrow. “Did that come out too loud? I’m having a good day.”
Gray and Marley announce they’re heading for the food court, and I beg Marley for a photo with her in her impressive cosplay before they go—though it doesn’t take much begging. Her face goes all shiny with happiness when I rant about how much I adore the elven crest stamped into her vest. “I love careful craftmanship,” I say, and she tells me about the hours of work that went into it as Gray holds up my camera and we pose.
Z jumps into the picture at the last minute, and I joke-yell at him for blocking the crest with his very tall head, and then we take another picture with Z properly posing just behind us. When I check the picture after and discover that Z’s giving us both bunny ears, I don’t even care. It really is a good day.
We say goodbye to Gray and Marley and head toward the VIP room—a place that I have access to not just because I’m with VIPs, but because I am a VIP! Bananas! (Claire says I use that word too much, but sometimes things are just really really bananas, okay?!)
And that’s when I realize: “So, is Code going to be there?”
“Should be,” Z says. “I think they all came over here together.”
“Right.” I force my smile to stay on my face, but I feel like my heart is pounding through my teeth. This is it, then. I’m finally going to meet him in person, face-to-face.
This could be the big turning point in my career—well, the second one. That tournament was the first. And I want this one to add to that one—triple or quadruple it, even, and this time actually keep up the momentum.
I want more of this. More signing autographs, more questions from people in awe of my skills, more conventions surrounded by awesome people and brilliant cosplayers and fellow baby skunks just like me. I’m willing to work my butt off and do what I need to do to achieve it.
I want a reason to tell my dad that when I start university in the fall, it makes sense to go to school part-time, because getting a degree is important, but so is ensuring that my hopefully millions of subscribers stay entertained and interested. I want the advertising money to pay not only for school but for me to move out of my parents’ basement altogether. I don’t think Dad could complain about that. I think he’d be proud of that.
I want success.
But if Code and I don’t hit it off, there’s a good chance none of that will happen. Because I’m not playing up my relationship with Code if there isn’t even the possibility of one. I’m not making something out of nothing; I need there to be at least a spark.
We weave through the crowds, passing a girl in a sexy mutant rabbit costume—not a monster that I’d normally think of as sexy, but she makes it work—and a guy with some shoulder pads and a foam sword who I think is trying to pass as a dwarf. “Do you ever cosplay?” I ask Z.
He shakes his head. “I’m basically all thumbs.” He holds up his hands as if he’s showing me proof. “I’d try to make a badass elf costume and end up as a wereboar.”
“I mean, frothing wereboars are actually sort of cool.”
“Not the frothing kind. Just a regular old smelly wereboar. Smelly because I’d forget to shower because I’d be too busy trying to figure out how I superglued fuzzy brown fabric to my nose.”
I laugh. “No cosplaying for you, then. We can’t have you damaging your particularly exceptional nose. I mean, it’s probably your best feature.” It’s a joke, obviously, but now that I’m looking at it, he does have a genuinely nice nose—it’s long and thin, like him, and it’s dotted with tiny freckles that are so adorably delicious I want to sprinkle them on my ice cream sundae.
“Right?!” He taps the freckled bridge. “They should put this thing in a museum—except preferably not cutting it off my face, which I guess means I’d have to sit there in the museum, so I really hope they’d feed me, and I don’t know where I’m going with this, so do you cosplay?”
It takes me a moment to register the question at the end of his ramble. I shift my purse on my shoulder. “I dabbled in high school. I love trying to turn f
iction into reality. It’s like waving a magic wand at a page or a screen and giving a character life—and the more accurate and detailed the result, the stronger your magic must be, you know?
“I haven’t done anything this past year, though. I didn’t really realize that until right now. I’ve been so busy with YouTube stuff that I haven’t had time for much else.”
He nods. We’ve stopped in the hallway beside a LotSCON-volunteer-monitored door that must be a back door to the VIP room. I must be even more nervous to meet Code than I thought, because I don’t feel quite ready to go in. Z doesn’t move to go in either. “So are you not in school then? Or working?”
“Just YouTube,” I say. “I know I need to go to university. I mean, even if my channel takes off, that won’t last forever, so I need something to fall back on.” Apparently Dad has gotten into my head, because I’m reciting one of his lectures practically verbatim—and believing it. “But I have no idea what I want to do. I’m eighteen; how am I supposed to know what I want to do with the rest of my life? That’s a very long time to be stuck as an accountant or a surgeon or something.”
“You know you want to do YouTube, though.”
“That’s about the only thing I know. I’d do YouTube for the rest of my life if I could. Which is why my parents let me take one year—but one year only—to work on building up my channel. In the fall, I’m off to university no matter what—if I want the education fund they’ve saved up for me and if I want to keep living in their basement, that is.”
“Lucky,” Z says. “Your parents sound great.”
“Yeah. They are,” I say, and I mean it. “What are you going to school for?”
His mouth quirks into a grin. “Accounting,” he says, and then he marches up to the LotSCON volunteer—not Lorne this time—shows him his badge, and holds the door for me with a flourish of his arm.
I laugh for about the millionth time this morning, then show my own badge and head inside.
We’re entering the room from a different direction than last night, and it takes me a moment to orient myself. The chairs by the other door, where Legs sat last night, are now pulled into a circle and filled with people I don’t recognize. Z steps past me and heads in the opposite direction, toward a couch and armchairs around a coffee table. A couch and armchairs filled with Team Meister!
They’re all there—all except Oz, of course, who’s in Australia. Code, Noog, Ben, and some older non-Meister guy I don’t recognize, plus a non-Meister guy I recognize but don’t remember the name of. Off to the side, Legs, Lainey, and Wolf are standing in a little half circle, chatting. Z basically runs over to them and wraps Legs in an enormous hug before Legs has time to realize what’s happening. When Legs reemerges from being smothered, though, he’s grinning. Z puts his arms around both Legs and Lainey. He starts to wave me over with the hand resting on Lainey’s shoulder before she reaches up and swats his floppy hand off her shoulder.
I force my gaze away and look back toward Code, who looks up at me at the same time. He smiles, which makes me smile, which means we’re both just staring at each other smiling, which is super dorky but also really really good news. “Willow!” he says at last, his voice a little too loud and deep for this tiny room. “Join us!” He gives Noog beside him a shove. “Dude, stop being a jerk. Give the lady your seat.”
Noog hops up, apparently not at all offended. “My lady,” he says in his slightly nasally voice, gesturing toward his abandoned seat.
I’m suddenly unsure what to do with my hands. I wrap one around my purse strap and let the other hang loose at my side, hoping it looks natural and not like a zombie appendage, as I stride over, step over the other guys’ legs, and slip into the seat beside Code.
The couch is worn and very spacious, and I catch my critical error immediately; I’ve plopped down in the middle of the cushion instead of on the left side close to Code, which means there are miles of space between Code and me. We could fit a whole family of skunks between us.
Still, I’m close enough to see the tiny scar just above his right eyebrow and the way his cheeks ball up like cherries when he grins. Which he’s still doing. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say back. And a million words pass between those two simple hellos—or at least, I think they do, until Code turns away and starts telling the guy across from him a story about someone on the plane who thought he knew Code from the movies, leaving me alone in my seat on this couch, with a million miles between us. Crap.
It probably means nothing. Maybe he promised to tell the guy that story and doesn’t want to be rude and ignore him. Maybe he has a good reason for ignoring me now. Maybe.
Code stretches his arm out across the back of the couch as he rambles on. If I was closer to him, his arm’d basically be around me. But it’s not. Not even a little bit.
I have got to do something. I look around. The coffee table is strewn with mostly empty takeout containers, phones, and that bag of dried bugs from this morning that Noog was going to use to challenge another YouTuber to a contest. It looks like they’ve all just eaten—the takeout, not the bugs—which means that if I want to keep hanging out with them until their panel, I’m probably skipping lunch. It’s a good thing I stuffed my purse with granola bars.
Noog’s gone off to dig through a bag in the corner, but Wolf, Legs, Z, and Lainey are standing nearby, and it occurs to me suddenly that they couldn’t sit even if they wanted to. There aren’t enough chairs. I mean, they’re chatting away and don’t look like they want to, but still, I could use this. “Hey, Lainey,” I say, and she turns to me. “There’s lots of room on the couch if you want to sit. I could scooch over.”
She crinkles her nose like she can smell the invisible family of skunks. “I’m good, thanks.”
Before I can consider whether her aversion’s to me or to sitting generally or to something else, Z’s hopping over Ben’s feet, stepping over the coffee table, and smooshing himself between me and the guy on my other side who I really should have introduced myself to. I squish over to make room for him, and even though I was technically the evil mastermind behind the whole thing, suddenly being hip to hip with Code makes my heart pound so loudly, I’m sure that everyone can hear it. Especially Z, who I’m now hip to hip with on my other side.
Code doesn’t stop his story, though, and for a moment I think it’s all over and I’ve lost, but then Code’s arm, spread along the back of the couch, touches lightly against my shoulder and stays there—not in a “his arm’s around me” kind of way but close enough that I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, it’s intentional.
A grin spreads across my face. I let myself breathe in the magic of this moment only briefly before opening my purse and pulling out my phone so I can snap a picture of myself squashed between two Team Meister members, on a couch, at a LotSCON convention, where I was just a featured panelist.
Well, I try to snap a picture, but it’s mostly my face, extra big, and the sides of theirs.
“Here, can I help?” Code asks, interrupting his own story to take my phone from me, his fingers brushing against mine. His arms are a bit longer than mine, so in theory he should capture a wider picture, but with his other arm still on the back of the couch behind me, he can’t actually reach that far, and his attempt at a picture isn’t much better than mine.
I laugh and good-naturedly snatch the phone back from him. “Here, Z, maybe you can manage better,” I say, passing it over. And sure enough, with his extra-long arms, Z captures all three of us perfectly in the picture.
“It’s vlog time,” Noog announces as I thank both Code and Z and put my phone away. Noog has resurfaced from the bag in the corner, holding a camera.
“Dude, you’re so much better at remembering to vlog than I am,” Code says. His arm is still behind me on the couch, touching ever so slightly against my left shoulder blade. “Codesters are always complaining I don’t vlog enough.” He pauses for a moment, then shouts at his sister, “Hey, Lainey, new job
for you: you’re in charge of filming my vlogs now. Can you head back to the house and get the Canon PowerShot camera? It’s in the living room, near the computers where we were streaming last night.” He glances at his phone. “If you go now, you’ll easily make it back in time for our panel.”
He wants her to walk all the way back to the Meister Manor to get his camera for him? If one of my brothers tried to boss me around like that, I’d smack him. In fact, I’d probably smack both of them, to make sure the other one didn’t get any ideas.
Lainey doesn’t smack Code, just frowns. “That’s a long walk. Can’t you use your phone or Noog’s or something? There’s like a dozen cameras lying around here.”
“Mine’s better, though.”
She glances at the camera in Noog’s hand, then back at her brother. “Isn’t it the same as Noog’s?”
“Yeah, but it’s mine. Come on. I’ll buy you something in the vendors hall. There’s like some nerdy purses in there or something, right?”
At the mention of nerdy purses, her eyes narrow into a death stare. “A thousand dollars. Pay me a thousand dollars, and I’ll do it.” Guess she’s not a fan of nerdy purses. I love a good nerdy purse—though like Lainey, I don’t love being asked to do something the asker is perfectly capable of doing. But Code is probably nervous about making it back in time for his panel.
He laughs, but there’s anger bubbling beneath it. “Do you have any idea how much I’m already paying for you for this trip?”
“Yes, I know exactly how much, because you’ve told me a hundred times. No deal.” There’s a reason I’d never work with or for my brothers; it’d probably look exactly like this.
“And heeeeeeeeeeere we have the VIP room at LotSCON!” Noog’s high-pitched vlog intro saves us all from sibling-related nuclear warfare as Code throws on a cocky smirk for the camera. Lainey turns her back on Code, dismissing him. I slide farther back into my seat—bumping into Code’s arm with my neck. He doesn’t move his arm, and I don’t move my neck, and this is it, we’re about to be in a vlog smooshed together on a couch. If this doesn’t stoke the rumor fires, I don’t know what would.
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