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For a couple of hours, nothing else went wrong. I went to my table in Artists’ Alley to do drawings whose proceeds went to literacy. A few fans asked me to draw “Average Chloe.” A larger number of people lined up to have me draw Swoonie. I did so with mixed feelings.
Ardis and Sarah arrived at 2 p.m. so we could stroll through the dealers’ offerings and then lineup for a major media panel. Once again, they were in full cosplay costumes.
It was time for a general turnover at Artists’ Alley. Nobody worked the Artists’ Alley tables all day every day unless they had absolutely nothing else to do at a comicon. Usually, we sublet our tables to others for the hours we weren’t using them. I was glad I’d only signed up for a few hours. I’d been hopping every day so far. Sitting and autographing isn’t taking a rest, nor is drawing what a fan demands all that easy.
We passed a table selling crystals that looked exactly like mine. As a joke, Sarah bought half a dozen and put them all around my neck. “We’ll mix them up. You’ll never be able to tell the difference.”
I forbore to explain that the real jewel burned. I filled them in on the adventures my Dimensional Diamond had taken me on since we’d last met. They swallowed it all without doubting me.
“What about Leslie? What’s up with that situation?” Ardis asked.
“You heard about it, too?” I asked.
“I saw a tweet about her announcement yesterday,” Ardis said. “How do you feel about it?”
“Should I arrange to have her arms broken?” Sarah asked.
When she said things like that, I never knew if I should take her seriously. “Uh, no need.”
I looked at Ardis and Sarah, my good friends, and caught my lower lip under my upper, trying not to say anything.
“Are you going to cry?” Sarah asked. Her expression was curious, not sympathetic. She wasn’t the crying type herself.
I shook my head. Then I burst out in a snort. I couldn’t help myself.
“What?” Ardis said.
“C’mon. Spill.” Sarah nudged me, not a gentle nudge, either.
I broke. “She’s an idiot. She burned her bridges at CP over a mere one-year contract with FC.”
“You’re kidding.” Ardis’s jaw dropped.
I shook my head. “Nope. She’s a trusting soul.”
“Wow,” Ardis said. “She had to know Eric shafted you despite you being his girlfriend. Why does she imagine he’ll treat her any better?”
I repeated Leslie’s naïve boast that she was the better known artist and had a fan following. My pals thought that was a hoot, too.
“She’ll get well known for her short tenures at not one but two major comic book companies. Let her reputation recover from that,” Ardis said, smirking.
We agreed that Leslie probably deserved what was likely to be her rocky fate at Eric’s cool hands. I’d even considered whether he was romancing her to influence her decision. A polite term for what he and she might be doing. I would not put it past him. Although according to him our relationship didn’t give me the standing to expect fidelity.
We’d exhausted the topic, and I was exhausted thinking about Eric and his unknowableness. “I’ve got some interesting news that no one knows about yet,” I said. I told them about my deal with Jason Dellon.
Sarah’s eyes about popped out of her head. “Your big break. This could be huge for you.”
“Or I could bomb out in yet another arts arena.”
“You’re not as wet behind the ears as you were a few years ago,” Ardis said.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Nobody could stay that naïve. Listen, whatever happens out there, it’ll be a great experience. Your name recognition will increase, too.”
Ardis was cooler. “You’ll have to make the effort to publicize your adventure. People can get swallowed up in Hollywood. They make lots of money and work hard on big projects, but their reputations don’t grow beyond L.A. Remember Gordon Moldoff? He was in art school with us, a couple of years ahead. He went out to L.A. and no one has heard of him since. Watch out for that, if you want to keep your career going in more than one pond.”
Ardis was a good friend and her warning made sense, not that I wanted to jinx an experience I hadn’t even begun yet.
Sarah said, “Forget the endgame. We’ll come visit you and expect a full tour.”
“Deal,” I said. “If I’m not living in my car.”
“You don’t have a car,” Ardis pointed out.
“True, and I also don’t have an apartment. I hear California is crazy expensive. My big bucks salary might not be enough for both a car and an apartment.”
We joked some more as we tore through the dealers’ room, commenting on silly toys and super cute t-shirts, and finally having a good time without any threats looming over us.
We’d made it to the show floor, the main concourse, when someone said, “Look, they’re interviewing Max Schwartz for TV.”
We stared up at the mezzanine, which had a glass-enclosed overhang where the big stars were interviewed by the media, while we hoi polloi down below could watch. The bright lights for television alerted the crowd when a publicity moment was happening, so we could gawk all the more and look even more idiotic as the background for the shoot. Some comicon attendees carried large poster board signs and stood in groups where the cameras would pick them up when the crowd was panned.
“He’s hot,” Sarah said.
“I met him this morning,” I said, the kind of thing one says while thinking of something else. Had I seen a pop of light from the roof of the mezzanine glass? A red flash, gone in an instant. There it was again, farther down the side of the glass box. “Something’s wrong.”
“What is it? What do you see?”
“Look. There!” I pointed. “A light running over the edge of the glass. The corner of one piece of glass where it attaches to another. Why would it do that? What could it be?”
“An LED embedded between the layers? I’ve heard of them but never seen it before.” Sarah guessed.
“We’d better step back. It’s a laser cutter heating up the anneal of the glass to the PVB, so the whole box breaks,” Ardis said. “Delaminating is very dangerous. The glass could blow, or shatter, or slide apart.”
“Not again,” I wailed. I grabbed for the Dimensional Diamond, but my hand grasped the wrong one. Nothing happened. I couldn’t tell the chains apart. “Help me,” I cried. “Which crystal is the real one?” I clawed at my throat.
Sarah pulled one out as my hand groped for one after another. “Try this one.”
It did nothing.