Ship It(67)

I imagine having to pack up my LA apartment, not that there’s much to pack up. I picture moving back to Oklahoma, all the kids I went to high school with crowing about how hotshot TV Boy came on home. I imagine my dad telling me over dinner, “We all knew it was a long shot. What’d you think, you were Steve McQueen, son? You ain’t nothing but prairie trash like the rest of ’em,” then heading out to the porch for a smoke.

As the girl comes back with my ice cream, I hear the door jingle. I look over to see three teenagers come in. I glance away immediately, but it’s too late. They’ve seen me. And they recognize me.

They start whispering and giggling right away. I take my ice cream and start for the door, doing my best to ignore them, but as I pass, I hear one of them whisper, “He really does like Dairy Queen.”

And another responds, “Do you think he likes Jasper Graves, too?”

Something shifts in my stomach. I stop walking. I turn and look at them. The trio of trembling girls stare back at me, wide-eyed and frozen.

“What did you say?”

They giggle nervously and huddle close to each other for safety, too starstruck to even speak.

I try again, harder. “Why did you just mention Jasper Graves?”

They look at each other, unsure.

My ice cream is sending rivulets of condensation down my hand and I suddenly feel ridiculous, standing in a Dairy Queen, holding a parfait, yelling at teenagers. What has my life become?

“It… it’s nothing. It’s just from a fic,” one of them finally gets out.

Of course it is. “Heart-of-lightness?” I confirm, and she nods.

I’m gonna kill Claire.


“I’M GLAD YOU got in touch,” Caty says as we sit down for lunch in the hotel restaurant. After my fight with Tess yesterday, I’m not sure I have any allies left besides her, and I want to brainstorm with her about how she thought yesterday’s panel went, and whether there’s anything else to do today. I didn’t have her phone number to text her, so I contacted her the only way I knew how—I posted on Tumblr asking her to meet me. And she showed up.

“Order anything you want,” she says. “I’ve got a company card.”

“Sweet.” When our waitress arrives, I don’t hesitate. “Can I please have a BLT and an iced tea and a side of mac and cheese?”

“You are very good at ordering,” Caty says, then tells the waitress, “Same for me, but sub pinot grigio for the iced tea, please.”

All around us, convention attendees mix with business-suit types in a weird swirl of conflicting fashion choices and hairstyles. But no one quite looks like Caty today, in a pink furry vest over a dark button-up shirt that’s covered in large pink flamingos, open so that her black lacy bra just peeks out the gap, and a wide-brimmed black hat. She makes me wonder if I should try to expand my wardrobe from just fandom tees, hoodies, and jeans.

“So talk to me. How are you feeling?” Caty says.

“Like crap.” I fiddle with the sugar packets. “The panel yesterday… I was hoping for a different reaction, I guess.”

“Well, I don’t know what you had in mind, but from a social media perspective it was a bonanza,” Caty says.

“Really?” The waitress delivers our drinks, and I start emptying sugar packets into my iced tea.

“Totally. Huge shock wave across Twitter and Facebook, and practically a sonic boom on Tumblr. You saw the media, right? BuzzFeed picked it up, and a bunch of other sites did, too. It’s all over the place. The video is so awkward, it’s hard to watch, but you kind of can’t look away.”

“So what’s it mean?” I ask. “What are they saying?”

“They’re saying they’ve never seen a fandom unite this way. Usually there’s infighting, self-policing, ship wars…”

“Demon Heart doesn’t really have any other ships,” I say. “All the women get killed off. It’s SmokeHeart or no ship at all.”

Caty shrugs. “And then of course there are the people who think fans are too entitled and they should just accept what they’re given and if you don’t like it, watch something else.”

I roll my eyes, I’ve heard that argument before. “No one would say that if we weren’t young and women. It’s like, when my dad calls in to sports radio to criticize some football coach for making a bad call, no one tells him he’s being too entitled and if he doesn’t like it, he should just go watch another team. His feelings are, like, automatically considered valid. So why aren’t mine?”

Caty laughs. “You’re good at this. Everyone on our team is feeling very optimistic for the ratings tonight, and that’s basically because of you.”

I scoff and take a sip of tea.

“I’m serious! You’re like this black hat publicist. If you ever want to go legit, let me know. I would be more than happy to get you an internship somewhere. I just want to make sure I stay on your good side.” She chuckles.

I always thought that after high school I’d go to college in the Northwest somewhere, maybe try to write books or something. The thought of moving to LA? Working in the entertainment industry? Trying to change things from within?

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“So.” She claps her hands together. “What did you want to talk about?”