Now everybody’s actively staring at me. Dad smiles briskly at onlookers, trying to pull me aside.
“Scarlett, calm down.” He looks pained, like he’s the prom queen and I’m dumping a bucket of blood on him. He gives the Flannels a look and tries to take me aside into a quiet corner, shushing me. “This is why I wanted to talk to you—”
“Leave me alone,” I yell, backing away, knocking over a pile of his display copies. A fierce burning behind my eyes threatens to spill out any second. I can’t stand it in here for another minute, and I stumble out into the street without my coat, my whole body tingling all over with panic, trying to breathe through the sudden tunnel vision, feeling like I might throw up.
I am waiting for xLoupxGaroux to come get me, in a very public Starbucks where I most certainly can’t get chopped into tiny pieces and hidden under his floorboards. Luckily, he was on Gchat when I logged in from my phone and put out an SOS call. It took me a while to persuade him to meet me. He kept saying he didn’t think it was a good idea. But finally he relented.
“Scarface?”
I look up, shocked by the voice. An attractive, bigger, thirtysomething woman in a cute cardigan is standing over me, a preppy-ish trench coat folded over her arm.
“Umm, hi,” she says.
I feel like I may have stumbled into an alternate universe. “What?”
“You’re Scarface, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Real name?”
“Scarlett. You?”
“Maura.” She breaks into a really lovely smile. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”
We hug.
“Wow, I am just—I don’t know what I was expecting, but . . .”
Maura nods, understanding. “You assumed I was a gay man.”
“Kind of. Yeah.”
“There’s a really large contingency of lady slash fans, y’know.”
“Yeah, I do know that. Or, you know, intellectually, I was aware of that. I just . . . yeah. Looking back, nobody ever . . .”
“Asked me if I was a man or a woman? Yeah. It happens. Not that I’m making it clear myself.” She shrugs and sits down.
It all makes sense now, I realize, and say, “And that’s why you didn’t want to meet up with me.”
She sighs, stirring her coffee. “I was afraid if we met IRL, you’d be all surprised, and it would ruin everything.”
“I know the feeling.” I sigh.
“I hope I haven’t disappointed you.”
“Of course not!”
She raises her eyebrows—the exact expression I’d pictured on xLoupxGaroux whenever (s)he said “spill it” or “waiting for the truth.”
“No, really. Assuming things about people makes an ass out of you and me.” I stare into the swirling eye of my caramel macchiato. “Mostly me.”
We chat a little bit over our coffee. Maura tells me she’s a freelance graphic designer for a few major companies, but what she really wants to do is draw comics. We mourn Lycanthrope High for a while and finally get back to talking about ourselves IRL.
I give her the latest on Gideon and Ashley (whom Maura keeps accidentally referring to as Ashbot, sending us both into fits of giggles). I mention he was into Lycanthrope too and flaked on lending me some of the graphic novels.
Maura rolls her eyes.
“There’ll be more. God, so many. You won’t even remember him eventually.”
“Are you . . . with someone? Married?”
“God no. Single, dating.” Maura shrugs. “It’s so early to settle down, you know? There’s so much I haven’t done or haven’t seen. I still feel pretty young. Most of my IRL friends have had babies, and it’s like . . . I feel like entire friendships have devolved into just . . . trying not to say that their baby is ugly.”
I laugh. Relieved I’m not judging her, she laughs too.
“But I guess everything seems dull compared to the show, you know?”
“Totally.”
“I want a William.” She pauses, then adds, “And a Connor. And a video camera. I had really high expectations of New York. I thought this was where all the freaks go! No such luck.”
I laugh. “Right, I thought . . . Actually, I always thought I knew that I wanted to live in New York after high school. Now, I’m not so sure.”
“How come?”
I lower my voice, look her dead in the eye, and ask, “Isn’t everybody here kind of full of shit?”
She lets out an infectious laugh that makes the whole Starbucks shine for a minute.
“People are kind of full of shit everywhere,” she concurs. “But you’re a little young to be jaded already, aren’t you?”
“I think it’s the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I’m getting un-jaded.”
Whether or not Maura understands, she lays her hand on mine.
“Well, I’m always around if you want to talk. On or off Gchat.”
When we say goodbye at the subway, she asks if I’m going to tell the others on the board that we met.
“Do you want me to?”
For the first time, she looks vulnerable, like she doesn’t know how to answer. Before she does, I shake my head.
“It’s your story to tell.”