Ship It(79)

“Claire—”

“I said I already told you!”

“You haven’t told me shit about yourself, cupcake. Not really.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it is, Claire. What is your sexuality?”

She shakes her head at me, pissed. Her hair, stringy and falling in her eyes, her jaw tight, she growls, “What’s yours?”

My neck stiffens. “You think you know, do you?” I say. I put the pizza down in the doorway and dig my phone out of my pocket and hold up the page. “Yeah, I read all about it in, what’s it called? ‘Sugar and Cream’?” Claire goes pale. “This is a major breach of trust. You don’t write sex scenes about someone you know.”

“How’d you find that?” Claire takes a step back, unsteady now. “That’s fiction,” she says.

“It has my name on it—and Rico’s. It has things I said to you in confidence. You made up shit about my dad.” My voice is low, but I know she hears it. She drops her gaze now.

“It’s just a story. Lots of people write RPF, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“This isn’t about that and you know it. People know you know me. They’re going to think my dad beat me.” I pull my T-shirt up and show her my back. “See? Nothing. No scars. But that doesn’t matter now, does it? No, none of that matters as long as people get to read about me banging Rico in my trailer on my birthday.”

“Everyone knows it’s not real,” she says.

“Do they? Because I’m not sure you know. Rico and I aren’t in love, Claire. We’re not secretly having sex. We’re not making out after hours. We’re. Not. Gay.”

She shakes her head at me and curls her lip. “You’re such a homophobe, and you won’t even admit it.”

“No, I’m just straight. There’s a difference.”

“If this was about you and some hot female costar, you wouldn’t give it a second thought,” she spits out at me. “This is entirely about your own internalized bullshit. Well, get over it.”

“You wrote porn about me.”

“They’re just dicks, you dick!” she shouts, throwing her hands up and grasping the back of her head. I’m worried people are going to start coming out of their rooms. She rubs her hands over her head and down her face, growling in frustration. Then she straightens her glasses. “I’m going home.”

“So glad we talked. Thanks for the sympathy,” I say. “Don’t worry about me, I can always go on unemployment.”

She stares at me, her eyes narrowed, full of spite. “I’m glad they killed you instead of Heart,” she says quietly. “At least Rico doesn’t hate us. I’m pretty sure he even shipped it.” She starts down the hallway, mumbling, “I hope whatever role you land next gets you the kind of fans you actually want.”

She turns the corner and she’s gone, finally.


MOM LOOKS UP from her book when I make it back to our room.

“How’d it go?” she asks. I don’t answer, I just haul out my duffel bag and start packing my things. My cheeks are hot, but I’m not crying anymore. I don’t have any tears left for this.

Mom sits up in bed, getting that worried-mother expression. Oh, now she’s worried. Where has she been this whole time? Why did she spend so much time learning how to LARP and not enough time telling me not to do foolish things like feeling things for other people and caring about stuff?

“I want to go home,” I say.

“What’s wrong, honey bunny?” She follows me into the bathroom where I start grabbing my toiletries. “What happened?”

I shove everything into a plastic bag and brush by her into the main room where I stuff the bag into my duffel. “I just… I thought they would understand me here. But they don’t. None of them do.”

Mom rubs my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

I flop onto the bed, partly just to get away from her. “I want to leave. Can we leave now?”

She must see that I’m serious, so she calls the airline and changes our flight, and within a few hours we’re at the airport waiting for our plane back to Boise.

I don’t want to open Tumblr, but I know I have to.

My notifications are chaos. I don’t read the discourse; I’m not interested anymore. There was a time when I would have started typing an angry screed about everything that’s happened, but it turns out it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

Nothing I did helped at all. It only made everything much, much worse.

I open a text post and stare at it. What do I even say about all this?

Sleepy passengers walk past us, pulling suitcases and clutching paper cups of hot tea. My mom snores slightly in the next chair. I tip my head back and lean against the cool glass of the windows behind me. I gaze up at the night sky above the airport.

Finally, I type: I’m sorry. SmokeHeart is dead and it’s my fault. I never meant for it to turn out this way.

I publish it and wait a few minutes for enough people to reblog it to ensure it’ll get out there.

Then I go into the settings and delete my blog.


THE ANXIOUS ENERGY keeps running around inside me until I can’t stay in my hotel room anymore, so even though it’s past midnight, I decide to go for a walk.