KAT
THE CONVENTION CENTER SWARMS WITH PEOPLE, BUT IT’S OKAY BECAUSE they’re all nerds like me, and because Meg has her arm through mine, so it’s pretty much impossible to get separated and lost. (Universe, please don’t take that as a challenge.)
We stayed up late last night—talking, and watching Friends reruns, and eating salt-and-vinegar chips and Rolos and Kit Kats from the vending machine—but I don’t feel tired. I am at LotSCON. In Toronto. With my best friend. Who looks more alive than she has in months. Her eyes are still red-rimmed from all the crying, but whatever powerless darkness kept trying to move in there is completely gone.
“What do you want to do first?” I ask. “We could go to the vendors’ hall or the play-testing area, or go line up for that panel.”
“Are you kidding? You know Syth is here, right? You have to go meet him!”
“Uh, no, that’s okay. Maybe if there’s time later. Let’s just go to—”
“Dude! You went to the airport and rode on a plane and found my hotel room and sat in a dark hallway for hours all by yourself. You can definitely manage to say two words to a guy you’ve already talked to about a million times.”
One heart attack . . . two be brave . . .
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I’ll send him an email.” I pull out my phone before I can lose my nerve. “No guarantees that he’ll get it in time, though. What should I tell him? I could meet him somewhere tomorrow. Maybe at two, after the cosplay contest?”
Three I can do this . . . four I can—
“I already texted him. I told him you’d meet him at the food court at eleven.”
“Oh. Okay. Um. Okay.” I lock my phone, stick it back in my pocket. “Wait, eleven today?”
“Correct. Let’s go.” She steps away from me and gestures for me to follow her like I’m a small child.
“Meg, that’s in like ten minutes!” Whatever bravado I felt a moment ago is gone. My hands are instantly clammy. Five stutter . . . six awkward silence . . . seven I can’t do this . . .
Meg grabs my arm and pulls me through the convention center. My feet move as if they’re disconnected from my brain. Because my brain is saying, “No, abort, abort! Stop! Don’t move!” But as Meg guides me along, my feet just keep moving.
Then we’re at the food court. I don’t know how we got here, because I didn’t see the vendors’ hall or the information booths or the bathrooms, or anything other than the hazy outline of my ballet flats. I force myself to look around.
It’s not even really lunchtime yet, but the food court is already buzzing with people.
Eleven I can’t do this . . . twelve overcooked pizza . . . thirteen I can’t do this . . .
“How’re we supposed to even find him?” I ask, a little more frantically than I would like. “I don’t even know what he looks like.”
“I sent him your picture like a million years ago. He’ll find us.”
“You what?”
“There. See?” She points.
A lone guy in jeans and a blue knit sweater is winding his way through the crowd, only a few tables away. I can feel Meg stepping away from me. “Don’t leave me,” I whisper, but when I look over my shoulder, she’s grinning at me in a way that makes me think, just for a moment, that I actually can do this.
Then she’s gone.
And then he’s here.
He’s tall, and scrawny thin, with white skin, blond hair, and a spattering of freckles across his nose. Behind his thick-framed glasses, his brown eyes are warm. He’s cute, in a nerdy sort of way.
“Kat?” he asks.
“Dan?”
He holds out his hand, and we shake, like we’re having a business meeting, which for some reason calms me a little.
He pushes his glasses up with one finger. “I thought you weren’t coming to this.” It’s strange hearing a voice I know so well coming out of a stranger’s mouth. We’ve never used video chat. I worried that he’d be too handsome and I’d be terrified to talk to him. And sometimes, on days I’m not so proud of, I worried that he’d be too ugly. But he’s neither.
“It was a last-minute thing,” I say.
“You haven’t been online in a while. I was starting to worry. Is everything okay? Like, with Meg?”
I’ve been so busy worrying about Meg lately that I’ve barely had time to play. “Yeah, I think it is now. Thanks.”
We talk for a few minutes about nothing—about the convention, about the friends he came with who are off at some panel, about the weather—and as we do, the voice starts to fit better and better with his face, like when you’re staring at a Magic Eye and you finally get your eyes to relax, and suddenly the 3D picture pops into view.
“Hey,” he says, pushing his glasses up again, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you my good news.”
“Good news?” I parrot.
“Yeah.” He puts his hands on his hips, then into his pockets, like he’s not quite sure what to do with them. “I got accepted to the University of Alberta. In Edmonton.”
My heart and my throat and my stomach all constrict at once. If he came out to Edmonton, then he’d probably want to meet in person again. Which would be okay, I guess, but then what if we started dating, and he liked me, but then he stopped liking me, and then we stopped dating, and then he was stuck in the endless winter of Alberta with no family nearby for four whole years and it was all my fault?
“I mean, I wouldn’t come out there just ’cause of you or anything, of course,” he says quickly, as if he can read my mind. “But, you know, they’re the only ones who’ve offered me a scholarship so far, so, um, it’s the obvious choice.”
I don’t mean to frown. I don’t mean to feel sad at all, but I do, suddenly. He’s coming out for the scholarship, not for me. I look down at my feet. “That’s cool.”
“But Kat?”
I look up at him. His eyes are so deliciously, perfectly warm, like hot fudge. “Yeah?”
“If I did come out there—I mean, to Alberta—I mean, to go to school and stuff—would you, um, would you go on a date with me?”
I bite my lip, then stop. Meg is always telling me to stop that.
One balloons . . . two rainbows and lollipops . . . three newborn kittens . . .
“I—yeah, I would. If you asked me.”
He grins. His smile is a little crooked, the kind of imperfection that only makes him more adorable.
I’ve talked to Dan for hours at a time on VoiceChat, but suddenly, I can’t think of a single thing to say.
Meg bumps into my side, coming out of nowhere. “Hey, Syth,” she says.
“Meg, hey.” He’s still grinning.
“We were going to go to the Wereboars versus Mutant Rabbits panel,” Meg says. “Want to join us?”
“Sure. If that’s okay.” He looks to me for confirmation, and I nod.
Meg loops her arm through mine, and then we’re off, with Dan trotting along after us. The conference room’s already filling up when we arrive, but we manage to find three empty seats in the fourth row from the back, and we file in—Meg, then me, then Dan. His knee bumps against mine as he sits down next to me.
As the panel starts, Meg leans toward me and whispers in my ear. “Dude, why are you smiling?”
“Oh, shut up.” I elbow her in the ribs. She just winks at me.
But I am smiling. I’m smiling because my best friend is beside me, because I’m at a super-nerd convention, because I survived a deathly plane ride to get here, and because, as the panelists begin to debate whether a wereboar or a mutant rabbit would win in a fight, Dan slips his slightly trembling hand into mine.
MEG
WEEKENDS ARE WAY TOO SHORT. LIKE, SERIOUSLY, THEY SHOULD PASS A LAW to make them longer, because who likes them that short, really?
Sunday evening, Kat and I are in the airport, waiting for our flight in the deathly boring seating area at our gate. All they have is chairs and a television too quiet to hear. Whoop-de-do. Would it kill them to maybe bring in some musicians or dancers? I’d even settle for a magician.
Kat doesn’t look bored. She’s just staring off into the distance, grinning stupidly. It’s better than her thinking about the flight, though. She already puked once this morning thinking about having to fly back alone, but after some negotiating at the check-in counter, complete with some particularly charming arguments from yours truly, we managed to switch the flights around so Stephen took her spot and she could fly back with me, and she’s been better since then. Less white face, more googly eyes.
When we saw Stephen—Dad? I haven’t decided if I should go back to calling him that—off at his gate, I let him hug me again, and that was okay. He still smells of sweat and wood, even after being away from the shop for an entire weekend. I don’t know how he does it. Maybe next time I’ll hug him back. Maybe.
I texted Grayson yesterday. Nothing rambly. Just, I’m sorry about before. I thought he wasn’t going to respond, but this morning my phone chirped with his reply. Me too.
Kat’s still grinning. I elbow her for like the hundredth time.
“Shut up,” she says, for like the hundredth time. Then she sits up straight. “Oh my gosh, Meg, look. Over there.”
I try to follow her finger, but the airport is busy with people. A middle-aged East Indian man buying a newspaper and a chocolate bar. Two young white kids running up and down the enormous hallway, shrieking with laughter as they chase each other in a seemingly lawless game of tag. A young white woman knitting a fuzzy orange scarf without even looking at her needles. I have no idea where Kat wants me to be looking.
“Come on.” Kat hops up and hurries away. I grab my bag and hurry after her. She weaves through the shrieking children, loops around a Starbucks kiosk, and marches toward another gate, stopping just short of the last row of chairs. She looks down at the guy sitting in the final seat. His legs stretch out less than a foot away from her.
It’s LumberLegs. Holy bananas, it’s LumberLegs.
His slick black hair practically sparkles with gel as he looks up at Kat and me, who are just standing there, staring at him. “Um, hi?” he says.
Kat’s mouth clamps shut. The muscle or whatever it is under her chin moves, as if she’s trying ventriloquism. Trying and failing. She looks at me, wide-eyed, as if to say, “Dude, it’s the world’s most hilarious video-game player, LumberLegs, our idol, remember? You’re the voice of this operation. Hurry up and say something before he thinks we’re a couple of creepy, mute stalkers and calls the police.” Or something close to that.
I put on my toothpaste-commercial-iest grin. “Hi,” I say. “We are big fans. Like, the biggest. Can we get a picture with you?”
He shrugs. “Sure.” He gets to his feet, shoving his duffel bag under his chair. I pull out my phone and recruit the curvy white woman two seats down, who’s watching us with a grin, to take a picture.
She has to back up to get us all in the shot. As she does, Legs turns to me. “Hey,” he says, “weren’t you at my autograph signing Friday night?”
It’s all I can do to keep from squealing. He remembers me.
I shake my head. “Nope. Wasn’t me.”
“Say cheese,” says the woman with the phone. Legs puts his arms around each of our shoulders, and all three of us—me and Kat and LumberLegs!—say, “Cheeeeese.”
The woman hands the phone back to me. “I snapped a couple,” she says.
“Thanks,” I say. Then to LumberLegs, “Thanks so much.”
He nods. “No problem.” He lowers himself back into his seat, checks for his duffel bag, then, almost as an afterthought, flicks us a two-fingered salute. “Be awesome.”
“We will be,” Kat says, finding her voice.
“We are,” I say. Then I take hold of my best friend’s arm, and together we cross the airport to board a plane back home.