MEG
BY THE TIME OUR PLANE LANDS, MY BRAIN LITERALLY HURTS FROM concentrating on not talking, so when our hotel shuttle arrives at the airport, I climb into the front seat and start chatting with the shuttle driver. He has a heavy accent and I only understand about half of what he says—something about his son or maybe the sun or maybe he got shunned and that’s why he moved here—but he listens while I tell him that this was my first time flying and the plane was smaller than I expected—no middle row like you see in the movies—and those recliner seats really don’t recline much, and they asked me to choose between cookies and pretzels, but apparently I stumbled upon a magical secret, because when I said I wanted both, I got both.
When we arrive at the hotel, I’ve gotten it all out of my system, and I manage to return to stony silence while Stephen-the-Leaver checks us in, then carries our luggage up to our rooms. When he suggests the hotel restaurant for supper, I just shrug.
At the restaurant, I hide behind my menu and watch the couple at the next table. They hold hands right up until their food comes, and then she trades half her chicken for part of his steak. After tonight, that’s going to be me and LumberLegs. Except I’m ordering the steak, because steak.
After we place our order, the waiter takes away our menus, and with nothing to hide behind any longer, Stephen-the-Leaver and I are forced to stare at each other. His deep-brown face is the same as it always was, and yet it’s different. His dark hair’s dotted with gray at the temples, and there are extra creases around his eyes. Probably laugh lines now that he doesn’t have to worry about raising a teenager anymore. At least not until Nolan and Kenzie grow up, which, let’s be honest, is probably never going to happen.
I wonder what other people think of us sitting here, both with the same shade of skin. We probably just look like a dad and his kid, but we’re not. We’re so very not.
“So, how’s school?” Stephen-the-Leaver asks.
“That’s it?!” I want to yell at him. “You’ve had this entire day of silence to think of an interesting, probing question about my life, and that’s the best you can come up with?!” Except I guess he doesn’t actually care about my life, not anymore. Maybe not ever.
“Fine,” I say. I’m not letting him ruin my evening. Tonight, I meet LumberLegs and my happily ever after starts. I don’t need Grayson or Stephen or any guy at all except LumberLegs.
“Meg, I don’t want to push this,” he says, pausing to chew on the insides of his cheeks like he always used to do whenever we kids were driving him bananas. “I’m not going to force you to spend every minute with me. The convention center is connected to the hotel, and I’m not going to follow you about, as long as you don’t leave the property and you’re back in your room by eleven. Okay?”
I shrug. “That’s fine.” By tomorrow, LumberLegs and I will probably have eloped anyways, and I’ll be long gone.
We spend the rest of the meal in silence. When I finish scarfing down my macaroni—because I had a brain fart while ordering and chose the three-cheese macaroni over a delicious steak—I stand up. “I’m going to the LumberLegs Q & A tonight,” I say. “I have to get ready.”
He nods, pulls out his wallet, and hands me two twenties. “You can’t buy my love, mister,” I want to say. Instead, I snatch them from his hand.
“Remember, be back in your room by eleven,” he says, which is my cue to leave.
It takes me forever to get ready, because my curls puff out in Ontario’s wetter air and I have to rake in way more styler than usual. Plus, my shirt is wrinkled and there’s no ironing board, only an iron, so I have to lug a chair over to the outlet and iron on that. By the time I get to the LumberLegs thing, carrying my Legs poster in its cardboard shell, I’m only half an hour early, and the line winds all the way out of the building and partway around the block.
Maybe a tenth of the people in line are in costume. Some are simple—purchased LotS swords, or elf ears and a cloak—but there’s one guy who’s gone full dragonlord, with scaly gold skin, retractable wings, and red armor painted with a black shadowdragon. “Dude, that looks amazing,” I say to him as I pass, and he does a dance that’s a perfect imitation of the dance Sythlight’s dragonlord does in game.
I tried texting Syth, but he won’t be at the con until tomorrow, so I take my place in line alone.
A white girl ahead of me in line by about twenty people is wearing the same shirt as me, but she’s just wearing jeans, while I have this super-adorable skirt and my silky-smooth legs. The snow’s all melted here, but a not-very-springlike wind zips down the street, commanding an army of goose bumps on my legs to stand at attention. But that doesn’t matter, because by the time I talk to Legs after the Q & A, I’ll be inside, warm, cozy, and de-goose-bumped.
Kat printed my ticket and pinned it to the inside of my sweater blazer pocket so I wouldn’t lose it—“What if I lose my sweater blazer?” I asked her, but she ignored me—so when a guy comes along the line to collect tickets, I rip it out and hand it to him, exchanging it for a wristband.
Not long after that, they open the doors and the line starts moving forward, thank Her Majesty the Queen, because I didn’t bring a coat and I’m pretty sure the goose bumps have spread to my arms and maybe even my stomach.
The doors open into the front of the room, beside the makeshift stage. The front several rows are already filling, but I spot a single seat in the third row that’s empty, which is the one upside of being here all by myself. I beeline toward it, holding my poster tube close to me so it doesn’t get crushed, weaving around a whole pack of white girls all wearing matching LumberLegs T-shirts. Then stop.
“Hey, watch it,” says someone behind me, and I sidestep out of their way. But not into the row. Because Grayson is sitting next to the empty seat.
Not Grayson, obviously.
Just someone who looks kind of like him, with the same shaggy brown hair, same eyebrows, same slouchy way of sitting. He looks up, and he really doesn’t look like Grayson at all—different nose, different eyes, different scrunch to his forehead—but all I can think of is Grayson’s bare chest against mine, his hand on my leg, his breath in my hair.
I leave the empty seat and let the crowd push me farther back into the room, where I file into a row somewhere in the middle and plop into a seat right behind a guy who’s a million feet taller than me. Crap on a stick. But the rows behind me are already filling in, and I’m not going to move and risk ending up way at the back. I slip off my shoes and tuck my feet under my butt on the chair, raising myself by a few inches. Thank goodness there’s a stage, or even my natural booster seat wouldn’t be enough.
I set just one end of my Legs poster tube on the floor, leaning the other against the chair, resting my hand on the top so I won’t lose it.
There’re still a few minutes before the Q & A is supposed to start. I could text Kat, but it seems unfair to remind her that she’s not here for this, the night I meet my future husband in person for the first time.
I turn to the girl next to me. She’s white, too. I thought there might be more black girls here, but so far every girl I’ve seen has been white or Asian—though now that I’m specifically looking, I spot a couple. “What’s your favorite Legs video?” I ask the girl.
She blinks at me through her heavy black eyelashes, like either she’s surprised I’m talking to her or she’s put on so much mascara she can’t see properly. She shrugs. “I’m just here because of him.” She points to the guy next to her, who’s looking at the con schedule on his phone, then turns away from me and stares at the phone, too, as if she finds it the most fascinating thing in the world, even though obviously she doesn’t.
The guy on my other side is talking animatedly to his friends. They’re all wearing track pants and look to be about twelve years old.
It’s fine, though. I need to get in the autograph line as quickly as possible after Legs is done, and I can’t have anyone distracting me.
I glance at my phone again and search through my email folder for the email Legs sent me. Sent me.
And then applause starts scattering through the room. I shove my phone into my sweater blazer pocket and sit up as tall as I can, leaning around the head of the guy in front of me.
Where is he?
The stage is still empty. And he’s not at either of the entrance doors. He doesn’t seem to be anywhere.
How did they know to clap? Did someone say something? Did I miss it? More and more people start clapping, and the noise fills the room like thunder, like a roaring waterfall, like the badlands tearing open into a rift. I join in, clapping as loud as I can. I should have brought a drum. With a drum, I could be the loudest. Louder than all these fools. Because everyone’s clapping now. Clapping and leaning eagerly forward in their seats.
And then he’s there. On the stage. Legs is on the stage! He scampers—no, scatters . . . no, saunters—across the stage to the table and mic in the center. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and even more muscular than he looks in his vlogs, and his black hair is slicked back in an almost Grease-like puff. And I am going to hear his jokes and banter and advice in person.
“Woo, LumberLegs!” I shout. Mascara girl glances at me through her curtain of blackness, but I don’t even care. LumberLegs is here. I am here. We’re together in the same room.
As the applause finally dies down, LumberLegs leans toward the mic and says something. Someone in the front row laughs, but no one else does because none of us can hear him.
“No sound!” shouts someone off to the side.
“Fix the mic!” shouts someone else.
Even from my place a dozen rows back, I can see Legs’s face turn bright red as he reaches forward and fumbles with the mic. Someone wearing a LotSCON polo shirt scurries across the stage, and they fiddle with it together.
An earsplitting screech echoes through the room as the microphone comes on, and everyone groans. The LotSCON staff member taps it, and the thud thud echoes through the room, so he falls back and LumberLegs tries again.
“Hi . . . I’m LumberLegs . . . I . . . play video games. For YouTube. On YouTube.” He fiddles with the drawstring on his hoodie. He seems uncomfortable, like the technical problems made him forget what he was going to say, or like he’s used to talking to people through a camera and seeing them in person is frightening, or like he’s actually an alien who’s been warped into LumberLegs’s body and told he has to do this event even though he hates public speaking.
Whatever the reason, he doesn’t look like the usual, confident Legs he is on camera. As his pause stretches into a full stop, discomfort ripples through the whole room, making people shift in their seats or play with their hair or fidget with their costumes.
Legs can feel it, I can tell. I want to hug him.
Instead, I cup my hands around my mouth and shout as loudly as I can, “To the rift!”
For a terribly long moment, the room is so silent, I can hear my words echoing off the concrete walls. But then a chorus of voices in the front shouts it out, too. “To the rift!” And then half the room is shouting it, and everyone is laughing, and Legs is rolling his eyes and saying, “You guys!” But his shoulders relax, and as his eyes roam over the crowd he’s grinning, and then for just a moment he’s grinning right at me.
He knows that it was me. Knows that I fixed it. We’re a team now. No more stupid Grayson—third row look-alike or real thing. It’s me and Legs forever.
And then he goes into his material, talking about how he got into YouTubing, how his Speed Run Fails videos went viral and propelled both him and the speed runs mod into fame, how his life has changed because of it—mostly for the better. People laugh a lot, because now that he’s gotten over his initial nerves, he’s just as funny in person as he is online. He’s just as perfect in person as he is online.
Partway through, Legs announces that he’s going to answer some questions, and I sit up, ready to hear the question I submitted to the Q & A’s online form about his ideal first date. I mean, it would be with me, obviously, but I want to know what we’ll do.
He starts off answering a bunch of questions I already know the answer to, since I’ve watched pretty much every one of his videos—multiple times. Which I get. Not everyone’s as big a fan as me, so it makes sense to start with the basics. What did he do before YouTube? Cooking school. What’s his most embarrassing moment? Vomiting in front of his crush in grade six.
Then a couple of silly ones he’s never answered before. Like what LotS baddie he’d be in real life: filthworm. Or where he’d live if he could live anywhere: Mars.
He has to be getting to mine soon.
But the next question asks for advice about how to decide what to do with your life. He rambles a bit about education and dreams and passion. “So just figure out what you’re passionate about. Something you can do because you love it, not because you expect someone to pay you for it,” Legs concludes. “Oh, and be awesome.”
And then he stands and says, “Thanks, everyone!” and then everyone’s standing and applauding, and Legs is walking off the stage, and my question hasn’t been answered, but LotSCON shirt guy is explaining that autographs will happen out in the hallway where they have a table set up, and I have to get there first, so I don’t have time to worry about what it means that he didn’t answer mine. I grab my poster and dart through the crowd, past mascara girl and her boyfriend, around the dragonlord, through a group of kids who are way too young to appreciate LumberLegs’s brilliance, and into the hallway.
Where the line is already stretching down the hall.
Lizard balls. I thought I was quick.
Once again, I take my place at the end of the line. I shift from foot to foot as I wait, my only encouragement the thought that Legs is probably finding this line just as boring as I am—until he meets me, of course.
I take my poster out of its cardboard sleeve so it’s ready to go. I watch more people in costume go by. An elf. Another dragonlord. A surprisingly accurate mutant rabbit.
And then, suddenly, I’m at the front of the line, and Legs is there with his perfect jaw and shining eyes. I wait for him to say that he recognizes me, but he probably doesn’t want to make the people behind me feel left out, because all he says is, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Meg. I’m your biggest fan. You might think it’s one of these other dweebs, but it’s not, it’s me.”
His sharp green eyes meet mine, and he grins his handsome grin, and for one long, perfect moment, my insides are melting and everything in the world is exactly as it should be.
Then he frowns, tiredly, reaches out to take my poster, and unfurls it onto the table just enough to reveal a small place to write. “What did you say your name was?” he asks without looking at me.
“Meg. With the turtle? I didn’t put him out in the snow, don’t worry.” Legs nods without looking at me and lifts his Sharpie. “And I just love your Speed Run Fails series.” I’m speaking so quickly it comes out as speedrnfls. “I practically pee myself laughing every time I watch it.”
He scribbles something on the poster, then rolls it back up and hands it to me. “I’m glad you enjoy them. I hope you have a good evening.” His gaze barely even pauses on my face before it shifts to the next person in line.
“Wait, don’t you remember—” I start to say, but the people behind me in line have already pushed forward and are telling Legs their names.
I should tell him my joke. I would tell him my joke if he’d just look up at me again. But he doesn’t. Doesn’t glance my way even once.
That’s it. My time with him is done. He’s on to the next fan. And then the next. I scan down the line, which has grown at least ten times longer. There are so many of them. With Legs’s face right in front of mine on my laptop or TV screen, it always feels like it’s just me and him, but it’s not. It’s me and him and his millions of other fans.
I step away from the table, fading into the crowd, just another fangirl among hundreds of other fangirls. Unless—I glance down at the poster in my hand. Did he give me his number? I unfurl the thin paper and find his Sharpie scrawl, hoping for numbers. A phone number.
There are no numbers. Of course there are no numbers.
Instead, right below the bubble-lettered “BE AWESOME,” he’s written:
Meg,
Be Awesome.
—Legs
Be awesome. Be. Awesome. How am I supposed to be awesome when I can’t even be noticed?
I want out of here. I push my way out of the crowd to the nearest door, then shove it open and burst out of the place.
I expect to step into icy winds and streetlights and passing cars, but the exit spits me out into a dingy, darkened hallway. The door closes behind me, muffling but not muting the happy chatter of all the stupid LumberLegs fans.
My phone reads 9:52. I’d planned to stay out past eleven just to tick Stephen off. I’d planned to stay out past eleven with LumberLegs. Maybe everyone here had the exact same plan.
Now, all I want is to be back in my hotel room, with some very loud music and maybe a bottle of expensive red wine. I wonder if room service would deliver it without carding me if I told them that my mom had just stepped out and would be right back.
If I ever even find my way back there. I trudge down the ugly, dark hallway, which probably leads to Mordor. Be awesome be awesome be awesome. The words pound through my head with every heavy step. If I was awesome, people wouldn’t keep leaving me. My friends. Brad. Brad’s friends. My birth dad. Stephen-the-Leaver. Grayson.
I turn a corner and go through a door and find myself at the edge of the hotel lobby. Which should be a relief, but every step feels like a slog as I hike through the lobby, past the front-desk clerks, who don’t even seem to notice me, to the elevators.
It’s this poster. This stupid, meaningless, very-not-awesome poster. It’s weighing me down with its epic blah-ness. A garbage can sits beside the elevators, and as the elevator dings its arrival, I scrunch up the poster and shove it deep into the trash, where it belongs.
The elevator doors open, and I step inside the gloomy, empty cube and stand by myself in the center of the dingy square of carpet. I am not awesome. If I was awesome, I wouldn’t be so miserably alone.
The doors open again, and I begin my trek down the just-as-gloomy, empty hallway to my room.
Except the hallway’s not empty. Outside a hotel room door—my hotel room door—someone is sitting on the carpet, back against the wall, knees pulled to her chest.
Kat.
She looks up at me as I draw near. Her winter coat is spread out under her like a picnic blanket, and a bulging backpack sits beside her. A strand of hair has slipped out of her ponytail to hang over her shoulder.
“Hi,” she says shyly, as if we’ve just met.
“What are you—why—how did you get here?” I slide down the wall, dropping into place beside her.
“Granddad,” she says. “And Luke. Oh, and this.” She holds out her fist and opens it to reveal a purple button. My button. The one I gave her the night of Granddad’s stroke.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I say. And then I lean into her shoulder and start bawling like a baby.