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.