“What did you tell me to wear?”
She steps over a pair of leopard-print tights and starts weeding through the pile on the bed, laying the odd item over her arm like a store clerk. When she finishes with the bed and starts searching the floor, I climb onto the bed and push the heap to the end to use as a pillow. Something sharp pokes my arm, and I pull out a belt and throw it on the floor.
Kat should be packing her bags too, to come with me, but if she can’t, she can’t. I don’t have it in me to fight it.
After an eternity, Kat hands me a small bundle. I spread the items across my lap, one by one. Short patterned skirt. My Pizza and Winglings T-shirt, with its cartoon of winglings sharing a pizza. Plain navy leggings. Sweater blazer.
“Geek chic,” she says.
“No leggings,” I say, tossing them on the floor. “I have to show off my legs. But yeah, it’s good otherwise. Thanks.” It’s perfect, really. Sexy in a commitment, long-term-relationship, I-want-to-play-LotS-with-this-girl kind of way.
She settles onto the bed beside me, close enough that her shoulder bumps into mine. Apparently, she’s gotten over the fact that I’m still not wearing any clothes. She takes the outfit from my lap and folds each piece neatly. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“Okay?” I stand up. “I’m amazing. Tomorrow I’m going to meet LumberLegs and he’s going to ask me on a date and then we’re going to live happily ever after.” I grab a random shirt from the floor and pull it over my head.
“Okay, but what if it doesn’t go that way?”
I grab a pair of jeans off the floor. “It has to. I have it all planned out. Right after the Q & A, he has an autograph signing. I’ll be one of the first ones to show up at his table, and I’ll remind him about the turtle email he sent me, and he’ll remember me, and when he does, we’ll chat for a bit, and then I’ll tell him that LotS joke I made up, the one about the wereboar, except I’ll stop just short of the punch line and he’ll be all like, ‘What? What did the wereboar say?’ and I’ll be like, ‘Call me later if you want to know,’ and then I’ll leave him my number and slip away, and the joke—and my charm and sexiness, of course—will play through his head all evening so he’ll have to come find me later, and I’ll tell him, and he’ll laugh really hard in that hyena way he does, and then we’ll leave together. Or something like that.”
“Good plan,” she says, then throws me a pair of socks. I wasn’t even going to bother with socks, except now that I’m holding them, my feet do feel a little cold. I start to pull them on. “Hey, you don’t actually—” Kat says, then breaks off, patting the neat pile of clothes in her lap a couple of times before continuing. “I mean, this is just like your LumberLegs wedding fantasy, right?”
I laugh. Turquoise dresses, beach in Maui, photos at sunset—it’s going to be amazing! “Exactly like that,” I say.
“Okay, just checking. Well, sounds romantic,” she says. She strides to the corner of the room and places the folded stack of clothes in the suitcase I’ve thrown open. Then she starts plucking a few other things off the floor—my favorite pair of jeans, a knit sweater, pajamas—and folds them into the suitcase. “Have you packed underwear?”
I yank open a drawer, grab a random handful of undies, and drop them into the suitcase. “Done. Now what poster should I take?”
“You’re taking a poster?”
“Yeah, for Legs to sign.”
“Won’t there be things there for him to sign? Like postcards and stuff?”
I shrug. “I’m not risking it. Besides, getting him to sign one of my posters is cooler. So which one?”
Kat looks around at my walls, then points to the one above my bed with Legs’s cartoony head and “BE AWESOME” in big bubble letters.
“That is the correct choice,” I say, then hop up onto my bed and pull it carefully off the wall.
“How are you going to pack it?” she asks.
Lizard balls. I didn’t think of that. “Maybe if I roll it . . .”
“Wait here.” Kat hops off the bed and disappears out the door. Her footsteps clomp down the stairs, fade away, then clomp back up again. When she returns, her hands are full of cardboard, probably from our recycling bin in the kitchen.
As I roll up the poster, Kat rolls up some cardboard. It takes a few tries to find a piece that’s rollable, but once she does and secures it with some tape, I hand the poster to her, and she slides it into the cardboard shell. “Perfect,” she says, handing it back to me.
“Awesome,” I say, then give the thing a quick hug before dropping it into my suitcase.
When I look up, Kat’s studying me. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.
She’s been asking that since the science fair. It’s starting to drive me bananas. I got another B on my last math test, the snow has melted enough that I can skateboard outside, Mom is so happy about my math marks and the A+ on our science project that she’s letting me miss an entire day of school to fly to LotSCON, and tomorrow I start dating LumberLegs. How could I be anything but okay?
I scrunch my face up at her.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “Sorry. I’ll stop asking. Just have fun tomorrow, okay?”
“Well, duh,” I say.
When Stephen comes to pick me up the next morning, I leave my suitcase on the porch for him to carry—screw feminism; he’s not getting away with less work—and climb into the backseat of his car. It smells like sweat and wood shavings, just like it always used to. I roll down the window and stick my nose out into the wet air.
Stephen lowers my suitcase into the trunk, then slams it shut. Mom doesn’t have to be at her office until eleven, so she’s on the sidewalk to see us off. She hands a folded sheet of paper to Stephen, which he sticks into the front pocket of his shorts, and then waves at me. I duck my head back into the car.
When Stephen climbs into the driver’s seat, I expect him to tell me to get into the empty front seat, but he doesn’t—just turns on the car and pulls out of the driveway. He doesn’t say anything at all, except, “Got your passport?” Which I do. Mom made me check before I went out the door.
He flicks on the radio to a station I wish I hated, and some mellow song, which I know all the words to but can’t remember who sings it, bursts out of the speakers behind my head. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, not quite to the beat. His hairy dad-legs stick out from his khaki shorts. In this moment, I could almost forgive him.
“What did my mom give you?”
He turns the radio down. “What?”
“The paper. She handed you a paper.”
“Oh, just a consent form. To make sure you can travel with me.”
Right. Because he gave up all rights to me. “Turn the music back up, please,” I say. Then I don’t say a single word to him for the rest of the drive, the checkin at the airport, or the entire flight.