The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love (22 page)

You have got to be kidding me.

But just as I feel my eyes burning with the desire to create a thundercloud right above that horrendous hat, a cheerful voice calls out, “You made it!” and I turn to see Amelia and Joanna approaching us.

“Yes!” I say, waving my raffle tickets and feeling happy for the distraction
from the social injustice of
that guy
being here. “Just in time. Thanks a billion for the text.”

“Of course!” she says, and smiles at me. “I hope you get in.”

I realize Amelia and Felicia weren't properly introduced before, so I do the honors.

“Are you a big Zinc fan too?” Amelia asks.

“Not really,” Felicia says. “But if I win, I think I know of a few I can sell my ticket to for an exorbitant price.” She winks to show she's kidding, and Amelia laughs.

“You could definitely make some quick cash,” Amelia says.

“You're right, you're not perfect. You're evil,” I say to Felicia.

“Mwahahahaha,”
she responds, her villainous laugh way more impressive than I would ever have expected.

“The casting is a total joke.” Papa Smurf's obnoxious voice rings through the room again. “Please. I mean, Malcolm Vreeland? Really? Everyone knows musicians can't act. Plus how are they going to get around all the plot holes the original series already has?”

“Is that guy for real?” Amelia asks incredulously. I look at her appalled face and immediately feel relieved that someone can share in my disgust.

“You have no idea,” I tell her before I go on to explain his behavior on the Zinc line, how he was part of the bum rush, and how he got into the Zinc panel anyway.

“There should be a special place in nerd hell for guys like that,” Amelia declares once I'm done with my story.

“Agreed. Like he has to spend all of infinity stuck in his most hated fandom.”

“Complete with plot holes,” Amelia adds, eyes gleaming.

“And miscast actors.”

“Only he's now a mute—and can't say a damned thing about it.”

“And also armless, so he couldn't go type anything on a forum, either.”

“Only there are no forums . . . except for the gushy kind. And
only
the gushy kind,” she finishes with a flourish. “Emoji hearts everywhere.”

I grin.

In a few minutes, we're joined by Casey, who, somehow, also has Devin in tow. It's almost three and still no sign of Roxana. She must be sticking the fan fiction panel out to the end. I hope she at least got one of our messages.

“How was the toy reveal?” I ask Casey.

He sighs. “They blabbed on and on so long I had to leave before they actually showed off the figure,” he says, clearly frustrated.

I indicate Devin with my head and lower my voice. “How did you pick him up again?”

Casey shrugs. “He was headed this way. I bumped into him near the room. Said he heard about the raffle just in time and snagged a ticket.”

Of course he did. I wish you had to answer a trivia question or something before getting a raffle ticket. At least that way they could separate out the true fans who should actually be the ones getting into this make-good.

“Okay, everyone,” an older man wearing a movie merch
Althena
T-shirt
says from the mic at the front of the room. “Let's get this part done as quickly and efficiently as possible. The screening will start at three fifteen and we will escort the raffle winners straight from here.”

He presses a button on the laptop he has up on his podium. A series of about a hundred numbers comes up on the screen behind him. “These are the winning raffle numbers, picked at random by the computer,” he continues. “They're in numeric order, so take a look at your tickets. If you have a winning number, please form a line here, to my right, and one of our staffers will take care of you.” He indicates the five people, also in official
Althena
movie merchandise, who are standing just below the stage.

From all around me, I start to hear groans and sighs of disappointment, and I'm delighted to see that Papa Smurf's is one of them. Satisfied that there is some justice in the world, I join everyone else in examining our tickets, squinting up at the board, trying to find a match.

Neither Amelia, Joanna, Felicia, Casey, nor Devin has a winning ticket.

But I do.

0389213.

I stare at the number in my hand and then at the number on the screen, back and forth, just to make sure I haven't developed some sort of late-onset dyslexia. It's Felicia who notices first, how the rest of them have all claimed they didn't win, but I have just turned into a statue who can't stop staring at the piece of paper in my hand.

“Did you win?” she asks me.

I look up at her and slowly nod.

“Oh my God!” she squeals. “Graham won!” she tells the rest of the group, and Amelia and Joanna both shout in delight. Casey calls out, “Awesome!” and even Devin slaps me on the back.

“Yes!” Amelia says. “I'm so glad it was you. You deserved it after Friday.”

I smile at her slowly, but I'm still numb to my extraordinary good luck. And then a familiar voice comes from behind us.

“I got your message,” Roxana calls out breathlessly. “What happened? Anyone win?” She and Samira both look like they sprinted over here.

“Graham did,” Casey says.

Our eyes meet. Roxana's face breaks out into a genuine smile. “Oh my God! That's great.”

“You should go get in line, man,” Devin says, pointing toward the stage.

But I feel rooted to my spot, and I can't stop staring at Roxy. Despite everything going to hell, this weekend was supposed to be all about making her happy.

The raffle ticket is still perched on my hand, and I look down at it, suddenly aware of a stunning truth. As much as Zinc means to me; as much as I nerd out over every bit of his oeuvre, or every new bit of gossip or paraphernalia that pops up online; as much as I'm obsessed by every aspect of it . . . I don't even want to have this experience without Roxana.

“HERE. YOU TAKE THIS.” I
grab Roxy's hand and slap the winning raffle ticket into it before she realizes what's happening.

She stares down at it and then back up at me. “What are you doing? I can't take this.”

“You have to,” I say firmly.

She sputters out a laugh. “I have to?”

I nod. I've made up my mind, and there's nothing she can say to change it. “I want you to.”

She stares at me, the ticket still lying on her open, outstretched hand. “But why? Zinc is your all-time favorite writer, Graham.”

“And he's your all-time favorite artist,” I respond calmly.

She shakes her head. “You won the ticket fair and square.” She goes to put the ticket back in my hand, but I hold my hands behind me, out of her reach.

“I don't care.”

“Stop being ridiculous!” she says as she struggles to grab my arm. But being about nine inches taller than her is coming in handy at the moment.

“Look,” I say, my arms held up in the air as if in surrender. “If you don't take it, I'm just going to give it away to someone else here. Someone random. I'm serious.”

She finally stops trying to grab my hands. “I don't understand. Why are you doing this?”

I realize that Felicia, Casey, Samira, Devin, Amelia, and even Joanna are staring at us, but I have to tell her the truth anyway. Without alcohol this time and with an audience. “I wanted you to have the perfect weekend,” I confess. “Everything's gone wrong. But this is the one thing that hasn't. So please. Take it. For me.”

Roxana's big brown eyes stare into mine, and I wonder if she can tell I'm near tears. Whatever she sees there makes her look down at the raffle ticket one more time before asking me, “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Okay,” she finally says as she closes her hand around the ticket, and I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. “But I just . . . I don't know how to thank you . . .”

“Just get on that line. Quickly,” I say as I point to the line of winners in the front, which has already started moving.

“Oh,” she says hurriedly, and turns to head toward it. After a moment, she turns back and calls to me, “I'll try to remember everything, so I can tell you all about it.”

“You better. Everything.”

She nods, and for a moment, I picture us in her backyard, her giving me every minute detail of the screening. And it's almost normal between us. For now, I'll have to take it, that hope that it will be.

Before she turns back to her line, she glimpses her sister. “Sam? Are you going to be okay with the rest of the group for an hour?”

“Of course!” Samira yells back. “See you after.”

Roxana still looks dazed as she glances over at us one last time and then, finally, gets on the back of the line. Only a few moments later, a staffer comes over and scans her raffle ticket before handing her a different pass. Then Roxy shuffles with the rest of the line through a door at the back of the room.

I imagine the rest of the group is still staring at me, but I'm luckily saved from any further inquiries by blessed Felicia's cheerful voice. “So, what's next on the agenda?” she asks.

Casey pulls out his spreadsheet and takes a look. “Actually, I have a forty-five-minute lull,” he says. He takes out his regular Comic Con schedule and hands it to Felicia. “Anything here look interesting to you?”

Way to go, Case,
I think, impressed by his gesture . . . even if Felicia
doesn't quite yet grasp the significance of his giving her control over the schedule like that. She casually looks at her watch and then starts to read some options out loud. “Three thirty. We have a WWE Wrestlers Panel. LGBT in Comics panel. Designing a Board Game. The Sun Auction starts . . .”

“Oh!” I say. “How about we check that out?” Both Felicia and Samira peer at me intently. “I swear I won't buy anything,” I say with a smile. “But an auction might be fun to watch.”

“I'm game,” Casey says.

“Okay, let's do it, then,” Felicia says.

I ask Amelia and Joanna if they want to come along, and they accept. Almost as an afterthought, I realize it would be terribly rude not to also ask Devin, who says he'll tag along.

There's too many of us to walk together through the crowd, so we end up sort of paired up and staggered. Felicia and Casey walk ahead of Samira and me. Somewhere behind me, I hear Devin start up a conversation with Amelia and Joanna. Naturally.

“Hey, that was really sweet. What you did with the ticket,” Samira says to me quietly. “If I was writing this in a story, she definitely would've kissed you after that.”

I smile down at her. “Then I wish I was in one of your stories.” And who wouldn't wish that? Certainly everyone here—dressed up as aliens, and wizards, and zombies, and superheroes—wants desperately to be inside a story, to be part of something more logical and meaningful
than real life seems to be. Because even worlds with dragons and time machines seem to be more ordered than our own. When you live for stories, when you spend so much of your time immersed in careful constructs of three and five acts, it sometimes feels like you're just stumbling through the rest of life, trying to divine meaningful narrative threads from the chaos. Which, as I learned the hard way this weekend, can be painfully fruitless. Fiction is there when real life fails you. But it's not a substitute.

We finally get to the auction spot, another large room that's down a very long hallway from the raffle room. The front is mostly filled, but there are still some empty rows near the back, and we file into one of those. I end up with Samira on one side and Amelia on the other.

There are a lot of different things being auctioned, everything from old artwork, to exclusive sketches done on the show floor, to props and memorabilia. A chair from the set of
Star Trek: Voyager
goes for almost ten grand. Conversely, a small but beautiful sketch of Harley Quinn by Jim Lee is practically a steal at $150.

At one point, Amelia hits me in the arm and excitedly points out the lot that's coming up next: the small collection of original Zinc work.

I nod at her, and I know we're both seething with envy as we see the two covers get some aggressive bids and counterbids, with the more iconic cover finally going for almost eight thousand dollars and the other one for nearly four thousand.

“Do you think if I paid that guy twenty bucks, he'd let me just
hold the cover for five seconds?” Amelia whispers to me.

“You'll never know if you don't ask,” I whisper back.

“Good point.”

And then the final piece of the Zinc collection comes up and I watch as five people go head-to-head on what just yesterday I was sure I could make mine. The page gets a starting bid of $750 immediately, and within thirty seconds, it's up to $3,000. A few people eventually drop out of the race, and our heads all bounce back and forth as we see an older, rotund lady and a skinny hipster with a Fu Manchu mustache duke it out all the way to the bitter end.

It goes on for a good while, the room practically silent from held breaths, but finally, the hipster relents, and the lady snags the piece for $7,750.

There is thunderous applause, and both contenders look flushed and sweaty, but the winner has a huge smile plastered on her face.

Casey leans across Samira to speak to me. “It's all for the best. It would've taken you forever to pay me off!”

That's true, but is it really all for the best?

Maybe. And maybe one day I'll be able to see that too.

“ ‘Sometimes all we have is the knowledge that something extraordinary exists in the universe, even if we can't be the ones to claim it. Sometimes that has to be enough,' ” Amelia says, quoting Althena. My jaw drops and I wonder if all my thoughts are that transparent. It takes her looking wistfully at the auction winner to make me realize that she's
talking about the
Althena
pages. But she could just as easily have been talking about Roxana and me.