Ship It(75)

“So, you really liked Spider-Man, huh?”

“This is ridiculous, I’m not…” Jamie stands up, turns around in place, trying to decide what to do. “I don’t have to put up with this bullshit.”

“It’s weird, right? I feel like most kids like Batman the best,” I say, baiting him.

“Batman?! Are you kidding me, that douchebag?” he yells, whirling to face me. “Batman’s just a rich asshole with a fast car. Spider-Man had to work for what he’s got. He was just a scrawny, uncool little weirdo and look at where he is now.”

There it is.

“So he’s like you?”

He huffs through his nose. “I wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider.”

“But otherwise…”

“What, you want me to say it? Okay, yeah,” he admits, “he’s like me.”

“I want you to picture something for a second. Just a thought experiment. I know you feel like an underdog. The unlikely hero, growing up in Ohio, overcoming circumstance through talent and determination. But imagine if you were a teenager again, and instead of being a scrawny, uncool, nerdy kid, you were a scrawny, uncool, nerdy gay kid. Or…” I think of what Tess said to be about being black and queer, about how she has to battle a variety of prejudices. “What if you were all that plus black? Or disabled? Or trans? Or anything? Who would your superheroes be then? What costumes would you wear on Halloween?”

Jamie is shaking his head, already rejecting the premise. “I’d love to see a gay superhero as much as the next person. I hope they make one. I hope they make a bunch of them. But Smokey and Heart are already straight.”

“They don’t have to be. I don’t think they are.”

“If you care about gay characters so much, go make your own TV show.”

“I’d like to, but I’m too busy rewriting yours for you.”

“That’s it, yes! Stick to your fanfic. Love fanfic. Write fanfic. Great compromise.”

“Do you know how many people watch your show?”

“Not enough,” he sneers.

“You have a reach that is so, so much bigger than mine. With fanfic, I’m already preaching to the choir. They know what they’re going to get. But you. You have this opportunity to change everything. You can add more characters of color, more of every kind of diversity, with every new character you introduce. You have that power!” I lean forward and drill into his eyes. “And as for Smokey and Heart? What if you took these tough-guy characters that America thinks they already know, and you flip them upside down? ‘Hey guess what, these dudes were queer the whole time!’ It would be revolutionary! You have the chance to make a difference.”

“Wow,” Jamie says brusquely and stands up abruptly, starting down the row toward me. It’s such a sudden, unprompted move that I’m suspicious.

“Thank you, Claire! There’s so much I didn’t know about myself that I learn from people like you,” he snarks. As he approaches, I go the other way down a different row, keeping chairs between us. “I didn’t know that I was given everything in life, just because I was a straight white man. And here I thought I worked my ass off for it.” He picks up the pace. I start to walk faster, keeping my distance. Is he chasing me? “I didn’t know that I was upholding the patriarchy. I thought I was telling monster stories for an hour a week.”

Unable to catch up to me, he starts literally climbing over rows of chairs.

“What are you doing?” I ask, but he doesn’t stop. I start running down the row away from him, my heart beating.

“It’s people like you who think you own Demon Heart, but you don’t,” he yells.

“Jamie, stop it!” He’s scaring me now. He’s out of control.

He stands on a chair, one foot up on the back and roars, “You don’t get to decide what happens! I DO!”

He stops all of a sudden.

I watch him from two rows away as he steps off the back of a chair. Closes his eyes.

Then turns around and starts walking toward the door.

“Jamie?” I almost whisper.

He keeps walking, doesn’t even look at me.

“Jamie!” I say louder. “Where are you going?”

Still walking.

“I’ll send these tweets if you walk out that door!” The adrenaline is back, racing through my system.

He reaches the door, puts his hand on the handle, and looks back at me.

“I’m going to leave here and call my lawyer, who is going to call Twitter and shut down my account. And then he’s going to ruin you.”

He can’t do that. Call Twitter maybe, but he can’t “ruin me,” whatever that means. Can he?

“Oh, and, Claire?” I look at him from across the empty ballroom, my phone hanging helplessly from my fingers. “SmokeHeart is literally never going to happen.”

Then he leaves, the door closing behind him, and with it, my last chance.


I sit in the ballroom for a long time after that.

Maybe I pushed him too hard, maybe I shouldn’t have stolen his Twitter, maybe I shouldn’t have confronted him directly. It was a pretty extreme idea, I admit. And probably unethical. Boy, the nerd media would have a heyday writing thinkpieces about the entitlement of fans if they ever found out. I go over it in my brain again and again, and I see a million things I could have done differently, but I don’t know if any of them would have worked. Maybe there wasn’t a right answer. Maybe there’s nothing I could have done. Maybe this was all futile.