Which gives me an idea; I can get out of here by doing what Cody wants. I stride up beside the couch and smack Cody on the arm. “Hey, loser, I’ll get that camera for you. Where is it again?”
Both Legs and Willow look at me in surprise. Cody narrows his eyes at being called loser, but only says, “Great. It’s the Canon PowerShot. I got it out of my bag last night to show Ben and didn’t put it back. I think it’s in the living room on the coffee table.” Right. Beside all his beer cans, probably. He glances at his watch. “Rush and get it now, and you can make it back in time to man the camera for our panel.”
Instead of snapping at him for bossing me around, I simply say, “Will do,” give him a smile, and give Legs a pointed look as I move toward the door.
He hops to his feet. “I’ll join you. I could use a walk.”
No one else pays any attention as we grab our coats and head out into a back hallway, then hurry outside, away from any fans who might stop Legs.
Once we’re out in the bright sunlight, Legs raises an eyebrow at me. “So, you really want to do a favor for your brother, huh? What’s the plan? You going to grab the wrong camera to tick him off or something?”
“No . . . I just—I offered because it looked like you needed to get out of there, okay?” Something about admitting that I did it for Legs make my cheeks flush hot.
“Oh!” Legs says, and gratitude pours out of him in a way that makes all his muscles relax. “Well, thank you then. And I’m sorry I’m so obsessed with thinking about Brian right now.”
“You’re not—”
“I am. It’s not just thinking about Brian, though, that’s got me down. When someone tells you something like that—that they don’t want to be friends with you anymore—it makes you question everything about yourself.”
I want to say something encouraging, but if he didn’t even talk to their dickhead friend after Brian asked him to—if that’s the part of the story he’s not telling me—then maybe that’s something he should be questioning. I don’t say that, though. Not now, when he’s grieving. “Hey, so I was talking to Z,” I say, trying to distract Legs from the heaviness of his thoughts. “Know what Cody told him when Z warned him a joke was offensive?”
“What?”
“He said Z was just jealous of his subscribers.”
Legs frowns. “He must have been joking, right?”
It’s my turn to frown. “You have got to stop believing the best in people,” I snap, and Legs’s dark eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Sorry, it’s just—I know it’s hard to believe, but sometimes when people say bad things, they mean them.”
“And sometimes they don’t,” Legs points out quietly.
And sometimes people don’t say anything at all when they should, I think. If no one is willing to speak up, if no one is able to get Cody to listen, my own brother could end up in jail. Or at the very least, go on making his crude jokes forever. That thought alone is enough to make my stomach twist with nausea. I wish I never had to hear him make another sexist joke. I find it hard to believe that not one of his subscribers feels the same way.
“Hey, does Cody make crude jokes when you guys do videos together?” I ask Legs.
Legs considers my question. “No more than the average guy, I guess.”
“Really?” I ask, my voice full of skepticism. “But he makes them all the time with you guys in person.”
“Yeah.” Legs groans with apparent annoyance at Cody before continuing. “Remember, though, that we’re performers. We turn on and off parts of ourselves every time we record or stream. While somehow still being real, approachable human beings.” He sighs.
“Right.” Apparently Cody shuts off his dickness the same way Legs shuts off his sadness.
Legs and I walk in silence as we pass a wrap place that’s channeling the scent of bacon directly onto the sidewalk. Legs stops for a minute to study the place. “Z said he and ShadowWillow haven’t eaten,” he says, changing the topic. “I think I’ll stop here on the way back and grab them some wraps.”
I want to ask more about Cody, but I don’t want to dwell on how Legs hides his sadness from viewers. It must be exhausting. “Good idea,” I say, breathing in the crispy goodness for a moment before we get going again.
“Hey, so funny story,” I say, helping with the topic change. “I messaged this girl from my school that Cody dated, and like an idiot, she did exactly what I warned her not to do. I thought Cody was the one at fault there, but maybe you’re right and Cody’s not always the bad guy.”
“You messaged Cody’s ex-girlfriend?” Legs asks, sounding like I just told him I messaged the president’s private number. “Are you guys friends or something?”
“No. She’s new and quiet and hangs around with the cheerleader girls, though I don’t think she is one. I just wanted to help her out. Women helping women, you know?
“Oh, and I guess I messaged her to make sure Cody hadn’t, I don’t know, date-raped her or something.” I’d almost forgotten about why I messaged her in the first place. “He didn’t, by the way.”
As we stop at a red light, Legs shifts from foot to foot, not looking at me.
“What? What is it?” I demand. “Tell me.”
Legs shrugs. “I don’t know. Was that—was it wise? Messaging her like that?”
I cross my arms. “Why wouldn’t it be? I’m not afraid of talking about the hard things with people.” Like you are, I almost add, but don’t.
“No, I just mean . . . what if he had done something terrible? What if it was the worst night of her life and all of a sudden the perp’s sister is messaging her demanding to know what happened?”
“I didn’t say it like that,” I snap, though admittedly at the moment I can’t remember exactly what I did say. I’m sure it was fine, though. Wasn’t it?
The light changes, and we both move forward, Legs a split second after me. “Sorry, I shouldn’t assume,” he says. “You probably worded it carefully and thoughtfully.”
“Right!” I say. “Exactly.” Though even as I say it, I think of the panicked rush I wrote that first message in, on the plane. I slip my hands into my pockets to hide them from the wind that still feels like winter. Then something occurs to me: “Hey, look at you,” I say, taking a hand out and smacking his arm. “You just called me out on something!”
“Yeah, and I feel terrible about it,” Legs says, and he’s so serious about it that it makes me laugh.
“But now I’m going to look at those messages I sent Janessa and see if I could have worded them better,” I say as I decide to do just that. “You’re making a difference. That’s what I want. For the world to be better. For Cody to be better. For us all to be better.”
“Me too.” Legs bumps his shoulder lightly against mine as we walk. “Though can’t we avoid making people feel worse about themselves in order to get there? Can’t we build people up instead?”
I swallow back a lump in my throat as I nod noncommittally. I really want to agree with Legs on something. And yeah, I do want to build people up.
But sometimes you have to burn them down first. Sometimes you have to burn whole villages to the ground before you can build something better in their place.
And I’m sure Legs doesn’t agree with me on that.
So I just nod as a sadness settles into my stomach. Because if Legs and I are pointed in completely opposite directions, how could we ever come together in the middle? How could there be any hope for an “us” at all?
Eleven
SamTheBrave
A TEXT COMES IN FROM MOM WHEN I’M GRABBING A SLICE OF PIZZA IN THE food court.
How’s it going, Sammy love?
By “it,” she means my quest to get Code to check out my channel. If I told her about not asking ShadowWillow, would she be proud of me, or would she be disappointed that I didn’t even try?
No sightings yet. Just finished wereboar vs mutant rabbit panel. Having fun. Meister panel’s in under an hour.
Th
e Band-Aids on my fingers are starting to annoy me—I can usually only handle wearing them for a few hours at a time—so I toss them in the garbage and then look around the food court. The tables are all full of groups of people eating together. A few tables away, a group of kids around my age gets to their feet, and I hurry over to grab the table before someone else does. There are three of them—two girls and a guy—and they’re laughing at some joke as I slip into one of the three empty seats they leave behind.
Maybe someday that’ll be me and Dereck and Jones. For now, I eat alone, the same way I do at school. I suppose there are some things that even the magic of LotSCON can’t fix.
I text with Mom a bit more—she’s spent the morning checking out the CN tower—then Mom signs off to head to the bookstore, and I need to head to line up for the Team Meister panel.
Except there’s a new bump on the underside of my left arm, halfway between my hand and my elbow. It’s tiny. Not quite a pimple, just an imperfection. I know that tearing it from my skin won’t fix it, won’t make the wrong right. I know this in my brain, but my brain has about as much control over my fingers’ actions as over my dick’s reactions.
I outline it with my stubby fingernails, trying to get a grasp on it, mapping out the perimeter. I’m a surgeon preparing to extract a tumor, a gardener planning to dig up a weed. Slowly, carefully, I dig my sharpest edges in. Remove the wrong, bit by bit. Remove the part of my skin that doesn’t belong.
I do not want to bleed. I never want to bleed. I take my time, move carefully, try to get it right.
I bleed anyway. Surprise, surprise.
I sigh and fish a Band-Aid from my pocket, rip it open, and pat it on, pressing down to stop the blood.
When Mom first noticed the bloody Kleenexes that found their way into our bathroom trash can more and more often, she thought I was cutting myself, which I guess scared her because apparently depressed people who don’t seem outwardly depressed are the most at risk or something.
I’m not depressed, though. I told Mom that, and some test Dr. Murphy made me take confirmed it.
It’s not sadness that makes me peel off my skin, that makes bits of skin and blood find their way under my nails like I’ve been in a brawl. I don’t do it to hurt myself. (In fact, when it hurts, that’s sometimes enough of a trigger to get me to stop.) I don’t want to do it at all. My fingers do it anyway.
I grab my phone and check the time.
12:40.
Crap. Crap crap crap. I wanted to be in line for the panel twenty-five minutes ago!
Stupid picking trances ruining my life.
I shove the last remains of my pizza crust and paper plate onto the tray and dump them in the trash, then rush out of the basement food court, consulting my program, trying to read the map and weave around people at the same time. I wish I could be my LotS character instead of bumbling down the hall as my own oversize self. I feel too big and too slow.
I pound past a group of archers, down a hallway, past that sexy mutant rabbit girl from this morning, up the escalator, past the shadowdragon, and down a wide hallway. And there it is: the very very very long line.
It starts at the auditorium entrance and stretches down both sides of the hall to somewhere completely out of sight—in both directions. I don’t even know which way I should walk to find the end of it.
Crap.
If I end up near the very back of the room, that’s fine, but with this line, I might not even get in at all. If I don’t, I could hang around and hope I see Code when he leaves, but what am I going to say then or later at the autograph signing if he asks what I thought of the panel? What kind of fan am I going to look like if I admit that I didn’t line up early enough?
I choose a direction and start to walk in it, though before I get more than a couple of steps, I hear, “Sam! Hey, Sam!”
I don’t know who’d call my name like that, so it’s almost certainly not directed at me, but I turn anyway, because it’s instinct or something.
And there, maybe fifteen people from the entrance, are Mark and Leroy, waving frantically at me. Well, Mark is waving frantically. Leroy meets my eye and salutes me, then goes back to looking at the program he’s got in his hand.
I stride over. Maybe they know which direction the end of the line is in. “You guys got new programs,” I say.
“Yeah, turns out they’re practically throwing these things at people over in the registration area,” Mark says. “I told Leroy he should get his own this time in case I lose mine again, but he refused because apparently he doesn’t need one.”
We both look over at Leroy, whose face is buried in it, and share a grin.
“Needing one is not the same thing as wanting to look at yours because I’m bored,” Leroy says into the book.
“He’s got a point,” I say. “Hey, do you guys know where the end of the line is?”
“Who cares! Join us!” Mark steps out of the multi-people-thick line to make room for me in it.
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I don’t want to butt in line.” I glance at the people behind them, who are sitting on the ground, huddled over their phones, paying no attention to us at all.
“I’ve seen a lot of people join other people in line,” Leroy says without looking up. “It seems to be socially acceptable.”
I look down the long, thick line. I hate butting in line, because it completely disrespects all the people who weren’t lost in eating pizza and tearing their skin apart and who actually managed to make it here on time, but nerd people are good people, and maybe Leroy’s right and they wouldn’t care.
“Okay,” I say, stepping into the space Mark made for me. “Thanks.” I finger the edges of my newly placed wrist Band-Aid, waiting for the angry mob to tar and feather me—but when I glance around, no one’s even looking at me. At school, if you saw me with a couple of people, you’d assume that they were threatening to dickpunch me—a threat that rarely comes true, but never fails to make my balls shrivel up in fear. But here, I realize, people probably assume that Mark and Leroy were simply saving a place for a friend, and for some reason the thought makes my heart go sort of squishy. Not that I’d admit that to anyone.
“Man, this line is so long,” I say to Mark, since Leroy’s now busy copying something from the program onto his arm.
“They should be letting us in soon,” Mark says. “Hey, pull up one of your videos for me to watch.”
“Oh, um, yeah, okay,” I say, because if I’m going to have the guts to show one to Code, I should be up to showing one to Mark. Besides, maybe he’ll want to subscribe.
I get out my phone and flip to the highlights video I pulled together last night. It’s only seven minutes long, and it includes a sped-up montage of the hours and hours I spent expanding my castle over the rift and herding the shadowwolves (and dying a lot). After the montage is the footage of me and Jones—my trap, then my realization that I’ve trapped myself, too.
I’m pretty pleased with how the video turned out, and the positive comments on it keep coming in—even more than usual, I think—but as I hand over my phone, my stomach twists. I’ve never watched someone watch my videos before.
Mark has conjured headphones out of somewhere, and he plugs them in and pops the earbuds into his ears, then presses Play.
It’s less intimidating to watch than I expect, because by about one minute in, Mark is laughing so uncontrollably that the people around us keep glancing over. I don’t even care that they’re staring; that’s my video that’s making him laugh like he’s a voice actor for a studio laugh track. When people comment things like “LOLOLOL” on my videos, I assume the video maybe made them smile a bit, and they’re saying LOL because that’s internet speak for “This was okay and I sort of half smiled once or twice, and I’m going to write this to be polite,” but maybe when they’re watching, they really are laughing out loud. My heart grows a half dozen sizes larger at the thought.
When the doors open and the line starts moving forward, Mark’
s only partway through the video, but instead of putting it away, he shuffles along behind me and Leroy, headphones still in his ears, eyes on the phone, chuckling regularly. Leroy and I nab three seats in the second row, and as Mark slips into his seat beside us, he lets out one big guffaw that fades into giggles as he pulls his headphones out.
“That was hilarious, man,” he says. “That setup . . . it must have taken you forever! And those deaths . . . and the realization at the end! Top-notch. We definitely have to connect you with Code.”
“My turn,” Leroy says, holding out his hand.
I’ve somehow ended up sitting between them. Leroy reaches across me to Mark and trades his program for the phone, like holding both would be too much to juggle—though he keeps his pen—then slips the earbuds in and slides the video back to the start.
“You’re most definitely going to end up famous,” Mark says. “You have got to sign my program. Maybe date it, too? This thing’s going to be worth a million bucks someday.”
“Uh, yeah, sure, if you want me to,” I say, and he hands his program to me, then reaches over and takes the pen from Leroy’s left hand. He gives it up easily, never looking away from the screen.
Turns out it’s hard to focus on signing your name when you’re busy watching a guy watch a video you made out of the corner of your eye. Leroy doesn’t laugh the way Mark does—loudly and freely—but his mouth keeps twitching up at the edges, and when I die for the third time while herding shadowwolves, his bony shoulders shake with silent laughter.
When a LotSCON volunteer gets onstage and announces Team Meister, the place erupts in applause and hooting and cheering. I clap, too, but instead of looking at the stage, I find myself watching Leroy, who presses Pause and takes the earbuds out of his ears. He’s partway into the bit where Jones is taunting me.
Fan the Fame Page 11