Ship It(21)

I don’t trust my voice, so I give her a nod that says I understand.

She takes a deep breath. Her gaze lands on Rico, who’s finding the carpet very interesting in the far corner of the room. “Rico, you got anything to add?” she calls to him.

He looks up at her like he just noticed she was there and says brightly, “Sure am looking forward to Portland!”

Oh right. We have two more conventions ahead of us. Can’t wait. Rico gives me a little shrug. Then I see his eyes raise up over my shoulder, and I turn to find Caty standing in front of me.

“Hi,” she says with a big smile. “Ready for your first tweet?”


BY THE TIME Mom returns, I’m deep into episode seven, digging into a room-service cheeseburger and reciting along with my favorite lines.

“I’ll keep coming for you ’til the dirt hits my chest,” I murmur with Smokey, and I feel that familiar lightness as they stare into each other’s eyes, this long, loaded look.

Just. KISS. For crying out loud!

Mom comes back from wherever, barging into the room in a fluffy towel. “My god, the sauna in this place. I love the city,” she says, interrupting the moment. She slides onto the bed next to me, her hair still wet. “How’d it go?”

“Fine.”

She frowns and looks me over. Then she picks up my jeans, which are lying on the bed, and holds them in front of me. “You took your pants off?”

“Yeah,” I mumble.

“Okay, tell me what’s up.” She knows, of course, that pants are critical shields against the outside world and are only to be removed for showers and sleeping and times of great emotional distress.

I sigh, but I know the look in her eye, and she won’t leave me alone until I tell her what happened. “I asked a question. I asked about SmokeHeart.”

“Oh!” She clutches a hand to her chest. “And?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She gets that sad mom face and rubs my knee. I can tell she doesn’t really know what I’m talking about, but she’s searching for something to say anyway. I wish she’d just leave it alone. “I’m sorry, honey bunny, I know that was a big moment for you,” she says. “But hey, the important thing is you got up there and tried, right?”

I wish I hadn’t. If I had just kept my mouth shut, I would be perfectly happy living in fantasy land right now, still believing that my ship might go canon. I would still have hope. Instead, I’m publicly shamed and humiliated. So. Yeah. Great. I tried. Whoop-de-do. Look where it got me.

When I don’t say anything, she picks a new topic, whacking my leg. “Tell you what, how about tomorrow we go to that Thai place on the way home? A little pad see ew solves everything, right?”

“Sounds good,” I say, even though at the moment I can’t really bring myself to care.

“Okay, you hang in there, kiddo. I’m gonna change clothes.” She leaves me alone, and I let out a long breath. It’s so much more exhausting being around people when you’re sad, especially when they’re not as sad as you.

As soon as she’s gone, I open up Tumblr to scroll through my dash. I search for pan-labyrinth and find Tess’s blog so I can follow her. She has a cool layout, very cute and well designed. Her bio says:

tess || she/her || pan || p much just demon heart atm.

She’s… pansexual. I know the word, I’ve seen it around Tumblr enough times. It means she’s attracted to all genders. It means she likes girls.

I’m a girl.

I think about the way Tess wouldn’t stop looking at me, the way she kept trying to make a conversation happen between us. I think about how my fingers trailed along her soft, round hand as I borrowed her pen.

Is it possible that Tess might like me?

But I’m not gay, so why do I care? This is literally the dumbest thing to be freaking out about.

I remember how her legs looked really cute in her dress today. I’m allowed to think that and not be gay. There’s no rules that say I can’t think other girls’ legs are cute. She has objectively cute legs. It’s just fact, not opinion. I wonder if she thinks my legs are cute. Maybe if I didn’t wear old, dirty jeans all the time, she’d be able to see them. Ugh, I hate my clothes. Why don’t I own anything that fits me right like Tess does? I’d never be able to pull off a cute patterned dress. Not like she can. She did tell me she liked my T-shirt, though.

I spend a moment remembering her laugh when I pinched Smokey’s and Heart’s faces together. I look down at my shirt, which I’m still wearing, and the memory floods back to me. The feeling of being funny. The feeling of being understood.

I scroll down to see what she reblogs, but I don’t get very far before I find it. My breath catches. Everyone’s already been talking about it for hours, but I’ve been too mopey to check Tumblr and I almost missed it.

Forest tweeted. To his almost 100,000 followers.

His first message? Thanks to everyone who watches Demon Heart and comes to conventions to support us. Your passion is why we keep making the show.

Maybe I’m being narcissistic, but is that tweet about me? Did Forest Reed just make his first tweet ever about me? It sounds like it was vetted by about fifty PR people before he published it, but still. Forest Reed might have just subtweeted me.