Just outside the door of room 1502, I paused and took a deep breath and forced myself not to run away and hide, no matter how much I wanted to. Except I didn’t really want to because … well, because this was it. After eight months of writing together and six months of being best friends and four months of dating, this was the moment I was finally going to meet my very first girlfriend face-to-face.
Soleil had arrived at the convention center’s hotel about half an hour ago, while I was still on the road, which I knew because she’d sent me a text saying Guess where I am??? accompanied by a selfie that she’d just taken with a Fun Things to Do in Orlando brochure—the kind of brochure you only ever saw in hotels.
Taking out my phone, I turned around and positioned myself so the room number was right over my head and I angled the camera just so. I snapped a pic and sent it to Soleil, accompanied by the same text she’d sent me earlier: Guess where I am???
Within seconds, the door flew open—and there she was. Exactly as beautiful in person as she was online.
Soleil was about my height, but that was where the similarities ended. While my skin was medium-brown, hers was super pale. While my hair was aggressively curly and, again, brown, hers was straight and shiny and corn-silk blond. She wore eyeliner and lip gloss, and even her clothes—just a plain black T-shirt, jeans, and boots—looked like they’d been picked out by a Hollywood costume designer.
But my embarrassment about my lack of makeup skills and my hand-me-down jeans only lasted half a second, because that was when Soleil flung her arms around me and squeezed me like her life depended on it, and I kind of hoped her life depended on it, because right then mine definitely did.
“Nessie! Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re a real live person!”
I laughed into her shoulder because, oh god, I couldn’t believe she was real, either. Especially since, you know, most real people were boring and annoying and watched TV shows without immediately logging on to FicForAll to look for fanfiction of their favorite characters. They didn’t speak Internet, and they didn’t speak Fandom.
And none of them, absolutely none of them, ever called me Nessie.
She probably knew it, too, because probably none of her real-life people called her by her screen name, either. Probably they just called her Sarah.
“Soleil,” I said, and we squeezed and squeezed, and I breathed deeply. She smelled like something floral. Well, fake-floral. But pretty.
For a minute after we finally broke apart, we looked at each other. Just looked. And I wondered if this was when we were supposed to kiss.
“You look nothing like your avatar,” she said, and stepped back a little and, okay, maybe it wasn’t time for kissing yet. “Thank god.”
I laughed. My avatar on the FicForAll boards was the Loch Ness Monster, which came from my screen name, Ness, which was short for my real name: Vanessa.
“Neither do you,” I said, because obviously a person looking like a smiley-faced sun was totally an option.
“Har har.” She stepped back a little and took me in from head to toe, which was kind of awkward but also a little bit great. “God, look at you! You’re so cute!”
“Cute?” I said, feeling my cheeks go hot. Maybe it was time for kissing.
“Yeah,” she said. “Your shirt. It’s adorbs. Where’d you get it?”
Adorbs. That was an internet word that I’d never heard anyone use in real life and, oh god, this was finally happening. After almost eighteen years of being stuck in classrooms with people who basically didn’t speak my language at all, I was finally meeting my own people.
“My cousin made it for me,” I said. “She’s seven.”
Soleil nodded. “Hence the puffy paint.”
“Yeah, hence the puffy paint.” With my index finger, I traced the bright yellow words: I <3 Harry Potter. It had been a birthday gift last year.
“Super cute,” she said again. Then her eyes flicked over to the mirror, which was hanging over the tiny desk. “Ugh, I’m so gross. You wouldn’t believe the flight I had. I had to sit next to this horrible sweaty woman, and baggage claim took decades, and the line for cabs was like eighteen miles long. You know.”
“That sounds like the worst,” I said.
Seriously, I was so lucky that I hadn’t had to fly here. My family lived right outside Orlando, so it had only taken my parents about forty-five minutes to drive me to the convention center and, sure, it was forty-five minutes of them lecturing me about internet creepers, reminding me to call them at least once a day, and threatening to ground me if I drank anything alcoholic—but that was still way better than an eighteen-mile-long cab line.
Although it probably would’ve been way worse if I’d told them that Soleil was my actual girlfriend instead of just my online best friend. If I’d said all that, they probably wouldn’t have let me come at all. Not because Soleil was a girl—they were totally cool with me being gay—but because they had a strict rule about only dating people who were still in high school, and Soleil was in college and, sure, she was only a freshman, but still.
“Hey,” said Soleil. “Wanna help me pick out an outfit?”
“An outfit? You’re not wearing that?”
She laughed. “God, no. These are travel clothes. You don’t change into the good stuff till the con actually starts. I mean, it’s not like you’re wearing that to the welcome dinner, right?” She meant my shirt. The same shirt she’d called super cute twenty seconds ago.
“Um. Should I not?”
“A Harry Potter shirt? Sweetie. Come on.”
Okay, clearly I was missing something. “Wait, do you mean you have a costume instead? Because I didn’t plan on—”
“No, no, no!” She laughed, waving her hands expansively. “God, I’m sorry. I was so excited about meeting you, I totally forgot this is your first convention. You don’t know the rules.”
“Rules …?”
“Well, okay, not like literal rules rules. More like … things that you’re just supposed to know. Like how you don’t wear shirts for mainstream fandoms—except if they’re old enough to be vintage. Otherwise, the smaller the fandom, the better the shirt.”
“So, like, a Wonderlandia shirt would’ve been okay,” I said. That was the web series that Soleil and I wrote our fanfic about: a low-budget Alice in Wonderland–inspired thing that she and I both loved beyond all reason.
“Exactly,” she said. “But let’s be honest: advertising your fandom at all is kind of cheap. The really classy thing to do is just walk around looking fabulous. You get me?”
My limbs suddenly felt heavy. How could I possibly have known all that? It was the same thing that happened on a daily basis at school, where you walked in one morning and ninety percent of your classmates had suddenly decided that side ponytails were fashionable again, or that wearing purple was no longer cool. Nobody ever said these things out loud, but somehow everyone knew—or at least, ninety percent of everyone knew, and the other ten percent, which always included me, were left to fend for themselves. It was social Darwinism at work, and it was pretty high on the list of reasons I liked the internet better than real life. Online, no matter what rules you followed and what you looked like and what you wore, there was a place for you.
I’d found my place on the message boards of FicForAll, my favorite fanfiction website, where fanfic authors from all around the world posted their stories, critiqued and praised each other’s work, and talked about their fandoms. The result: friendships that were thousands of times stronger than anything born of being shoved into a high school classroom with a bunch of people who had nothing in common except an age and a zip code.
FicForAll was where I’d met Soleil. She was the most popular ficcer in the Wonderlandia fandom—so popular that whenever she posted new fic, other people then wrote fanfic of her fanfic. Including me. I’d written a little sequel to one of her best stories, and she’d liked it so much that she’d asked me to co-author her next fic, and obviously I’d agreed, because who wouldn’t, right? Not only would it be fun, but also, what better way to get more readers than to start writing with someone as popular as Soleil? But then we’d actually started talking about more than just fandom stuff, and we had everything in common, and—
Well, we had most things in common. Not everything. Because she was apparently part of the ninety percent of people who always knew what to wear.
“Nessie? Are you okay?”
I blinked. Somewhere in there, Soleil had stopped laughing. Now she was watching me like she was afraid I might faint or throw up or something else totally dumb.
“Yeah,” I said, giving her a no-big-deal shrug. “I just … I didn’t know there’d be rules.”
Saying so made me feel about five years old, but it was the truth, and Soleil and I were nothing if not truthful with each other.
Her face brightened, and she came over and grabbed my biceps with surprisingly strong hands. “Don’t worry about it. Look, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, okay? I’m just all hyped up from the flight and from meeting you and from standing in that ridiculous registration line! Oh my god, you’ve gotten your badge already, right? Isn’t it such a madhouse over there?”
“It so is!” I said, instantly feeling a million times better now that we were on common ground again. “I mean, I was expecting the cosplayers, but did you see all the fake animals? I think there are like twelve conventions happening at the same time.”
“Four,” said Soleil. “I checked. And they’re not fake; they’re part of a taxidermy convention.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “That’s an actual thing?”
“Can you even believe it?” she said gleefully. “And as far as I can tell, it’s a hundred percent white, cisgender, rich, middle-American men who think feminist is the worst F-word there is.”
And there she was. The Soleil I knew and loved. The girl who went on biweekly message-board diatribes against the dangers of the gender binary and why monogamy was an outdated concept and the importance of diversity in fiction. Especially diversity in race and sexuality, both of which I had pretty strong feelings about, because obviously.
“Morons,” I said. “Let us go forth and avoid them like the plague.”
“Absolutely,” said Soleil. “But first, we don our armor.”
She darted over to the giant black suitcase she’d put over in the corner, and when she opened it, a huge tangle of clothes spilled out—far more clothes than would ever be necessary for a convention that didn’t even last a full week.
She considered for a moment, then reached in and pulled out a shiny midnight-blue thing and unfolded it and held it against her body. “How about this one?”
It was a dress. A seriously short dress, with black lace along the neckline and straps so thin that they looked ready to snap.
“Too much?” she asked.
“Is it too much? You’re the one who knows the rules. Not me.”
She shrugged, letting the dress sag as she dropped her arms again. “Well, rules is maybe an exaggeration. But there’s a sort of … expectation that the welcome dinner on the first night is where everyone dresses to the nines.”
“I thought the welcome dinner was for the cosplayers to show off their costumes,” I said.
“But we’re not cosplayers, now, are we?” said Soleil.
My stomach did a little flip. “No, but … um, see, I didn’t bring any fancy clothes.”
“Ohhhh.” Soleil looked me up and down for a second, all quietly and thoughtfully and still not sexily but soon, soon, hopefully soon. “Well, we’re probably the same size, right? Or at least close enough? I mean, I brought enough dresses to feed an army.”
“Not to mix metaphors or anything,” I added, and smiled with relief and, oh good, Soleil was smiling back. “Really, you’ll let me borrow something?”
“Nessie, oh my god, of course I will!”
With her newfound mission alight in her eyes, she tossed the lace dress aside and crouched in front of her suitcase and rifled through her clothes like a raccoon through a trash can.
“Try this on,” she said, tossing me a bundle of red fabric.
I caught it, then froze. Was I supposed to change in the bathroom, or right here in front of her? Before I could decide, though, Soleil pulled her top off, and then her boots and jeans, and then she was standing just a couple feet away from me in a pink bra and matching underwear, like it was nothing, like she did this all the time, and—
And, just, holy crap, she was so pretty.
But if she could act like this kind of intimacy was no big deal, then so could I. I undressed, too, and put on the red dress while she tried on a yellow one, and we zipped each other up, and I tried not to shiver at the feeling of her fingers against my back, and mostly I actually succeeded, which, go me.
We looked in the mirror, and Soleil said what we were both thinking:
“Nope.”
I laughed, and we took off the dresses and tried on different ones. I tried not to think too hard about being almost-naked in front of her. I tried not to notice if she was checking me out.
Twenty minutes and several changes later, Soleil and I stood side by side in front of the full-length mirror. She was in the midnight-blue dress, which hugged her figure in a way that managed to be both inviting and intimidating. And me? I was in a shiny black dress that had beaded blue flowers strewn across the bodice, and a halter top that actually made my boobs look kind of great, and a skirt that flared out when I twirled. She’d even done our hair and let me borrow some eyeliner and given me some of her bright pink lip gloss to wear for the evening.
We looked like we were about to go to prom.
“You likey?” she asked.
“Me likey,” I replied.
“I’m glad it fits you.” She gave my dress a fond look. “I bought that last month, for the Easter party where I met my boyfriend’s parents.”
“Wait, what?” I said, turning to look at her face-to-face instead of face-to-reflection. “You have a boyfriend?”
“Dave, yeah.” She frowned a little as she met my eyes. “Oh wow, have I not told you about him?”
I shook my head and wiped my hands on my hips and willed my palms to stop sweating. “How, um, how long have you been, you know … together?”
“Only a little while. Like, not even three months.” She smiled, kind of tentative, kind of worried. “Sorry, I thought I told you already.”
I breathed out, long and slow, and instructed myself not be jealous of this Dave person. There was no reason to be jealous, because I’d known all along that Soleil didn’t believe in monogamy, and I knew that meant she and I weren’t exclusive, even if I, personally, had no interest in dating anyone else.
Besides, she’d just said three months. She and I had been together for almost four, which meant I had a full month on Dave, plus, hey, maybe the fact that she hadn’t bothered mentioning him to me meant that he just kinda wasn’t worth mentioning. Right?
Right.
So I swallowed down my stupid jealousy. “Cool. Dave. Okay.”
“The point is,” she continued, “his parents love me. And it all started at that party, with this dress. So it’s got, like, positive karma all over it. You get me?”
Oh, now I got it. The dress had positive romance-karma, so obviously she was loaning it to me, which was maybe a little weird, sure, but also totally sweet.
“I get you,” I said, and offered her my arm. “Shall we go dazzle everyone with our fabulousness?”
“Let’s!”
Soleil took my arm, and together we emerged from our hotel room like butterflies from a cocoon, and it didn’t matter that Soleil was part of the ninety percent. It didn’t matter that she had a boyfriend she’d never told me about or that we hadn’t kissed yet. The only thing that mattered was that I was finally breathing the same air as the person I cared about most in the world.