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.