After getting snapped at on the trade show floor and totally dismissed by Jeremy, all I really wanted to do was take my fake cheese products back to my room, listen to old episodes of A Thousand Words under the covers, and pretend my dad wasn’t waiting for me downstairs. Talking to total strangers in the hallway definitely wasn’t on my agenda. But for some reason, looking at Vanessa’s downcast expression was actually kind of helping. It was nice to have proof that I wasn’t the only miserable person in this hotel.
Besides those beauty pageant girls, obviously. Those kids were going to need so much therapy when they grew up.
I wanted to hear more about Vanessa’s roommate drama, but I felt weird asking outright, so I started with, “Which con are you here for?”
She flipped her badge around and held it up. It was a WTFcon one with a bunch of ribbons stuck to the bottom, like the girl in the elevator: a couple of Harry Potter ones, one covered in spades and hearts and the words We’re All Mad Here, and a bright green one that said, All Hail the Glow Cloud. She didn’t have one for A Thousand Words.
“Cool,” I said. “You’re a Hufflepuff?”
“Yeah!” Her face lit up. “Are you? Were you at the meetup earlier? I didn’t get to go.”
“I’m not here for WTFcon. But I think I’d be a Ravenclaw.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said. “That’s cool. My older sister’s a Ravenclaw. Well, she says she’s a Ravenclaw, but I’m pretty sure she’s actually a Slytherin. Anyway. Which con are you doing?”
Annnd I’d totally set myself up for that one. If I told her the truth, she’d probably react like the last girl, and I’d ruin any chance I had of making a friend. Then again, making a friend here seemed pretty unlikely regardless, so what did it really matter? Even the people who were supposed to care about me weren’t on my side these days.
“I’m here for the taxidermy championships,” I said, and then I waited for Vanessa to laugh or scoot away like I had a contagious disease.
She didn’t do either. She just stared at me, eyes huge behind her green tortoiseshell glasses. “Wait, seriously?”
“Yeah? I’m not, like, obsessed with it or anything, but my dad pays me to be his assistant.”
She shifted a little, obviously uncomfortable. “Isn’t that … I mean, I’m not saying anything about you as a person, but … isn’t it kind of cruel? Killing all those animals?”
“Most of them die of natural causes, actually,” I said. I constantly had to explain this to people who thought taxidermists were animal-murdering psychos. “He does a little bit of work for hunters who eat the meat—deer and turkeys and stuff—but mostly he works for natural history museums. Like, a snow leopard will die in a zoo, and he’ll mount it for a display so people can learn about how awesome snow leopards are and why we need to protect them. He’s done work for the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History in New York and stuff.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said, visibly relaxing. “That’s way better. But … do you have to, like, touch organs and stuff?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
She shuddered. “I could never do that. I’d probably faint. I mean, organs. I can barely stay upright when I get paper cuts, you know? I’d be the worst vampire ever. Um, what I mean is … that’s pretty badass.”
I shrugged like it was no big deal, but I was feeling a little bit badass all of a sudden. That definitely wasn’t a feeling I’d had since I’d gotten here. “You get used to it,” I said.
My phone buzzed, and I dug it out to find a text from my dad. Almost here? Jeremy said he sent you back down five min ago. I stuffed it back in my bag without answering, the badass feelings evaporating in an instant.
“So, what happens at a taxidermy convention, exactly?” Vanessa asked. “Are there people cutting up dead animals everywhere?” She looked nervous, like she was worried she might stumble upon a zebra bleeding out in the hallway.
“Not really. There are demonstrations and seminars and a trade show and stuff, but the main thing is the competition. Everyone puts their best work in this huge ballroom, and a bunch of judges score it. It’s pretty amazing, actually. It’s like an entire museum all crammed into one room.”
“Huh. That actually sounds cool.” A little crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Wait, a taxidermy trade show? What do they sell?”
“You don’t even want to know.”
She laughed and took another chip. “Yeah, I probably don’t.”
“So, what do you do at a Harry Potter convention? Where’s your costume?”
“We don’t all wear costumes,” she said. “And it’s not only Harry Potter—it’s a multi-fandom thing. I’m mostly here for the fic stuff. Harry Potter, definitely, but also Wonderlandia and Yuri On Ice and Sherlock, at least before it sucked, and that old show Slings and Arrows and, ooh, recently I started writing Alanna fic. You know, those Tamora Pierce books? And—”
“Wait,” I said. “Did you just say you write … ‘fic’?”
Vanessa suddenly looked nervous again, and she pulled her curly ponytail over her shoulder and started twisting the end around her finger. “Yeah? A lot of people think it’s all sex stuff, but it’s really not, I swear. Mine is mostly—”
“No no no,” I said. “I don’t … what’s fic?”
She stared at me. “Fanfic? Fanfiction?”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Oh.” Her whole body relaxed, and she wiggled her feet a little, the sides of her bright red flats bumping together. “It’s when you take someone else’s characters and write new stories about them. I wrote this one Harry Potter fic where Luna steals a thestral and takes Neville hunting for magical creatures all over Scotland. Stuff like that.”
“People do that?”
She laughed. “Yeah. Tons of people. It’s kinda my entire life.”
“I mean, it sounds cool. I would totally read that Luna and Neville thing. Do you write stuff with your own characters, too?”
Vanessa shrugged and looked down. “Sort of. I mean, I’ve started writing about nine different novels over the past year, but … I dunno. I always get bored after a chapter or two. Plus there’s nobody reading it, you know? With fanfic, I post my stuff chapter by chapter, and people are all like, ‘Hey, gimme more!’ in the comments, so it keeps me moving.”
“Instant gratification,” I said, and Vanessa nodded. “So you have fans online?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Especially since I started co-writing with my roommate. She’s basically a fanfic celebrity. Everyone reads her stuff.”
“The same … um … roommate you’re hiding from?” I was pretty sure she had started to say girlfriend before, but I wasn’t positive.
“Yeah.”
“How come you’re avoiding her?” The chips were gone now, and I tipped the remaining crumbs into my mouth and crumpled the bag into a ball.
“I’m not avoiding her, really. It’s … complicated.” Vanessa sighed. “Okay, so here’s the thing. She’s not just my roommate. She’s kind of … she’s my girlfriend. Except we only met in real life for the first time yesterday. And things have been so crazy since we got here that we haven’t really gotten to hang out at all, just the two of us. So we were going to go to the pool tonight and start planning our project for the end of the con and, you know, have some alone time. But then these random people started fangirling all over her, and they invited us to dinner, and she went, and I … didn’t.”
I blinked at her. “You’re dating, but you only met each other for the first time yesterday? Is that even a thing?”
A defensive look came over her face. “Of course it’s a thing. We’ve been together for four months.”
“And you’ve seriously never seen her in person before?”
“She lives in New York. I live here. We have school, and plane tickets are expensive. It’s not like we can just take off and visit each other all the time.” She looked down at her shoes again. “Plus, it’s romantic.”
“Okay, but … your girlfriend, who met you for the first time yesterday and only has a few days to spend with you, ditched you to hang out with total strangers?”
Vanessa squirmed. “No, it’s not like that. She didn’t ditch me; she wanted me to come, too. I just didn’t feel like it. So technically, I guess it was me who ditched her? But the point is, those other girls were gonna buy her dinner and spend all night flailing about her writing, and how can you turn that down?”
“No offense, but I’d be pissed if someone did that to me. If you didn’t want to go, she should’ve stayed with you.”
“I don’t really blame her,” Vanessa said, like she was trying to convince herself. “She’s just not used to everyone paying this much attention to her in real life. So she’s basking in it because it’s new and exciting, you know? I’d probably do the same thing if people started treating me like I was J. K. Rowling.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve known you, like, five minutes, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t.”
“I dunno. Maybe not.” She toyed with her rubber Hufflepuff bracelet, printed with two badgers and the words JUST AND LOYAL.
We were both quiet for a minute, and then I said, “Okay, I know it’s not really my business, but … you’re sure you guys are actually dating, right? Not just internet-dating?”
Vanessa looked up at me again. “It’s the same thing. Dating is dating.”
“Well, it’s not really the same. And leaving you alone in a hotel doesn’t really sound like something a girlfriend would do. Has she acted more normal the rest of the time you’ve been here? Like, holding your hand and kissing you and introducing you to people as her girlfriend?”
“Not yet,” Vanessa said. “But like I said, we’ve been in crowds basically every second since we got here. And she’s pretty private about her relationship stuff. She’s not going to start making out with me in front of a million people, you know? Hence the need for alone time.”
“Doesn’t sharing a hotel room count?” I asked. “Or are you sharing with other people, too?”
“No, it’s just us,” Vanessa said, going a little pink. “But I think she hasn’t been in the mood to start anything yet.”
“So why don’t you start something? What do you have to lose?”
Vanessa shook her head. “No. No way. That’s not … I’m not … I don’t do that. It’d be too—I dunno. But if either of us is gonna do anything, it’ll be Soleil.”
This was getting weirder by the second. “Her name is Soleil?”
“Yeah.”
“Like Cirque du Soleil?”
“No, it’s French for ‘sun.’ It’s pretty.” Vanessa cleared her throat and straightened up. “Hey, I told you why my day sucks. How about it’s your turn now?”
“We need more chips if I’m going to think about that,” I said. I dug around in the bottom of my purse until I found a few loose coins and got up to put them in the machine.
“I’m really going to owe you,” Vanessa said as I sat back down and pulled the bag open.
“Who says I’m sharing this time?” She reached over and took a chip without asking, then smiled at me with bright orange teeth. I smiled back. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry into your business or anything.”
“It’s okay. But seriously, what happened to you? I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, obviously. But if you do, I can listen.”
As if on cue, my phone buzzed with another text from my dad. Where are you???
I thunked my head against the vending machine, and it made such a satisfying sound that I did it again. “My dad is being a total dictator, and when I asked for help from this guy Jeremy, who’s literally my only friend here, he totally blew me off.”
Vanessa took another chip. “That sucks. What’s he being a dictator about?”
“Long story short, I offered to help Jeremy with something really quick when I was supposed to be doing something else for my dad, so he got mad and yelled at me right in front of Jeremy and all these random strangers, which was awesome for my self-esteem, let me tell you. And then instead of just sucking it up, I asked Jeremy to talk to my dad for me because he never listens to anything I say. And Jeremy was basically like, ‘No, dude, I’m not getting involved in your family crap, deal with it yourself. Oh, look at the time, gotta go hang out with some dead ducks, see you never.’”
“Oof,” Vanessa said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” I scrubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Ugh, my dad’s still waiting for me downstairs at the trade show, and I just cannot with him right now. I’m sick of getting snapped at when I didn’t even do anything wrong. I wish I could just go home. Or hide out at your con. The hosts of A Thousand Words are doing this live show tomorrow morning, and it’s my favorite podcast of all time, but I’m going to be stuck in a seminar about stuffing weasels instead of learning about the thing I actually want to do with my life.”
“You want to make podcasts?” Vanessa asked. “That’s so cool.”
“Something in radio, yeah. I know it’s dorky.”
“It’s not dorky. I love podcasts. Night Vale and Thrilling Adventure Hour and The Heart, especially. What’s A Thousand Words? I’ve never heard of that one.”
“It’s basically a storytelling podcast. There are these two hosts, Anica and Rafael, and every week they pick a question—something really vague, like, ‘What are you worried about right now?’ or ‘What’s the last thing that made you laugh?’—and then they go around and collect stories from strangers. And when they chop them up and edit them together, they end up making a totally different story, and it’s just … really cool.”
“Nice. I’ll check it out.” Vanessa took the last chip and crunched it slowly. “What if you ditched your dad tomorrow and went to the podcast thing instead?”
“That would be awesome, but I really shouldn’t. He’s pissed enough at me already. And isn’t your con really strict about checking badges?”
“Yeah, but …” Vanessa reached up and pulled her badge over her head. The yellow lanyard got caught in her ponytail, and the buttons she’d pinned to it—We Need Diverse Books and Ovaries Before Brovaries and #yayhamlet—clanked together as she struggled to untangle herself. When she finally managed to pull it free, she held it out to me. “You can borrow this, if you want.”
I blinked at her. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. There’s some stuff I want to go to in the afternoon, but you can have it for the morning. I kind of want an excuse to lie low tomorrow anyway.”
The workshop was only an hour and a half. My dad would be in sessions all morning; it wasn’t like he’d need me for anything. I could just say I was going to a class in a different room, and as long as I met up with him afterward and spouted some taxidermy facts, he’d never know the difference. The family bonding I was hoping for clearly wasn’t going to happen, and neither was the fun hangout time with Jeremy. Maybe I deserved to do this one thing for myself to make coming all the way to Orlando worth it.
“You would give me your badge?” I asked Vanessa. “Fifteen minutes ago, you didn’t even know me.”
She shrugged. “I know you now.”
And the thing was? I kind of felt like she did.