Ship It(14)

Taking my place at the end of the line, I lean against the wall, pull out my phone, and run my fingers over the fading Demon Heart stickers on the case. I get to see Smokey and Heart soon! It’s almost too much, so I open Tumblr, but I’m too jittery to actually look at my dash, so I open my email, but there’s nothing new, so I open Facebook, but I hate Facebook, so I reopen Tumblr. My own personal endless loop of being an anxious person with a phone in public.

“Here you go.” A voice forces me to look up from my phone. It’s the girl behind me in line, she’s handing me a clipboard with a name/email signup on it. “In case you want to join the Demon Heart mailing list.”

I’m totally already on the Demon Heart mailing list. Obviously I’m on the Demon Heart mailing list. But the way she smiles at me flusters me for some reason.

“Oh, okay,” I say, and start putting my info down anyway.

As I scribble my email address, I can feel her watching me. I glance up, and she looks away. She’s black, and her hair is shaved short on the sides, but the longer tight curls in back and on top stick out in every direction, including over her forehead into her eyes. She’s not in cosplay. Or if she is, it’s for, I dunno, Pretty Little Liars or something. She’s wearing a gray dress that curves over the top of her body but is flowy at the bottom, with little orange foxes dotting it. I finish writing my info and pass the clipboard down the line. I kind of want to say something else to her, but what is there to say? Besides, she probably already has friends here. She looks pretty and put-together, and she has a very cool haircut. There’s no way she’s not popular.

I pull my phone back out and open Tumblr, but as I scroll, I can feel her looking at my phone. When I glance back at her she blushes, caught in the act.

“Sorry,” she says, and gives me an apologetic smile. She’s wearing the brightest pink lipstick I’ve ever seen. I don’t wear lipstick, couldn’t even imagine wearing that shade. But on her it looks perfectly natural, like she sells it with confidence alone. She busies herself straightening her skirt over her hips, smoothing the wrinkles out. When she looks at me, I’m still watching her hands move across her legs. Now it’s my turn to be embarrassed.

“Sorry,” I say. Then I laugh, because this is dumb, and then she laughs, thank god.

“This is my first convention,” she says, almost like she’s apologizing for something. But she has nothing to apologize for. It’s weird to see someone wearing such confident lipstick be nervous. Like they don’t go together.

“Me too,” I say.

“Oh, good!” she says. “I just assumed everyone here had already done this before.”

“Not me.” And then I run out of things to say. I feel my cheeks warming, so I look away, and then I click open my phone again, needing an excuse to stop talking to her.

“I… I love that gif,” she says, nodding at my phone.

I glance at the screen, open to Tumblr. The gif is from a scene in the Demon Heart pilot. One of the first moments I picked up on the presence of something extra in Smokey and Heart’s relationship. Smokey’s been tracking a demon the entire episode, until he finally corners it at an abandoned warehouse (because of course it’s an abandoned warehouse). They have a foot chase through all the shadows and the towering, vaguely industrial equipment, and up onto the roof, until the demon jumps off and lands three stories down on the ground, leaving little old human Smokey stuck up top. The demon pulls himself to his feet, unharmed, and looks up… and that’s when Smokey recognizes the demon is Heart, his old acquaintance. They share a long, subtext-fueled look, until Heart escapes into the shadows and Smokey is forced to grapple with what he’s just seen. That look is what got the pilot a first-season pickup. And that look is what captured the heart of, well, me, and probably everyone else in this line right now. What was in that look? What did it mean? Where was this headed? That’s the whole thrust of Demon Heart. So yeah, it’s an important gif.

“It’s one of my favorites,” I say, and I watch in amazement as her shoulders relax.

“Me too,” she says, then adds, “I’m Tess.”

“Claire.” Until now, she’s been grabbing one elbow across her body, her sleeveless dress showing off her arms, wide and soft and this deep smooth brown and just out there like they belong out there. Sleeveless dresses—another thing I couldn’t imagine wearing. How does she make it look so easy? But now she lets go of her elbow and reaches over. I slip my phone in my pocket and shake her hand, which is cool and soft. Her smile spreads across her entire face.

“It’s nice to be around people who get it,” she says. “My friends, they don’t do, you know…” She waves her hand around. “This.”

It’s my turn to comment on whether my friends do hand wave this or not, but… friends? Yeah, no. I guess I have Joanie, and my parents, and none of them get it.

I say, “Heh.” Vague enough to sound like I’m agreeing without offering any additional information. I wish I hadn’t put my phone away, because now would be a good time to start looking at it again. I want to try to extricate myself from this conversation, but I also don’t. Tess is much easier to talk to than anyone at my high school, and I get the feeling I could start talking about anything at all and she’d be happy to join in. But I’m somehow paralyzed by what to say next. Obviously she likes Demon Heart, so we could talk about that, but everything I think to say sounds stupid. So, you like Demon Heart, huh? Ugh, dumb. Who’s your favorite character? Agggggh, gross. For a fleeting moment there, I had become one of those chatting, social people in line I was intimidated by before and I want that feeling back. Finally, I come up with something and before I lose my nerve, I just blurt it out.