“Luca.”
“What?”
“It’s cool. You’re good. You can watch me work later, okay?”
His arms tighten around my waist. His nerves settle. Mine don’t, but I try to play it cool.
“Is that an invitation?” he whispers, lifting my chin toward him.
The afternoon sun fills the narrowing space between us with golden light. We close over it until it’s just a glowing seam between two things, finally joined.
Nine
Now
We’re led from the conference room to an elevator, then up to a hallway with windows overlooking the con floor. From above, there’s no trace of the calamity we caused. In the open areas, people are back to taking photos with cosplayers. On the other side of the hall, we can see down into the aisles of displays and booths. The density and color of the slowly churning crowd gives the dizzying impression of some sort of multicolored seascape. A coral reef carpeted in anemone, an invisible tide keeping it all moving.
“Wait here,” Madeline says, leaving us in the hall. The guards go with her, and Luca and I are left before a pair of double doors. We stand there in silence for a long time. Surely whoever we’re waiting on has better things to do than attend to two delinquent boys. The moments become minutes, the awkward silence in the hallway emphasizes everything left unsaid between Luca and me.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally.
I turn away from him, pretending to look out over the con floor. The glass is tinted; probably no one can see us. I watch Luca’s reflection, but he keeps his eyes down as he talks.
“I should have made sure you were okay with us using your idea. It was shitty of us to develop something you came up with. I really thought she checked. I’m sorry.”
I watch him in the reflection, and finally he looks up at me. I look away, back out over the crowd.
“And if it’s any consolation, the judges thought it was good, but simple. They called it ‘sensational,’ but, like, not in a good way. I’m not even sure what they meant.”
“In this case, it means provocative. Like, you took an idea and made it edgy. Shock value, basically.”
“I knew I could get you to talk by giving you a chance to make a jab at me. Feel better?”
We make eye contact in the reflection of the window now. It reminds me of one of my earliest memories of us: We’re sitting in my studio, watching each other in the glass cabinets and waiting to see who will make the first move. Who will start the story of our together.
We’re so far from that now.
“Not really,” I say.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I can’t help it. I turn and look Luca dead in the eye.
“What I said to you was shitty. It was even shittier to say it in front of all those people. I was mad, and I was trying to leave, and my mouth…just got the better of me. But now it doesn’t matter who’s the better builder, because we’re both done for.”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. He actually shrugs, as though this is one of the many cons he was planning on getting kicked out of today. And his cavalier attitude slaps me like a frigid wave. I’m breathless with perspective, suddenly. For most people, this is a fun activity. It used to be just fun for me, too, but recently it’s felt like so much more. Like everything. Without the Craft Club sponsorship, was any of this even worth it? The only silver lining is the boon of followers I’ll probably get from being the infamous moss creature who made a mess.
I know that now is the time to hold myself together, but I start to cry. I’m here with Luca, the boy I loved and the boy who broke my heart, and we’re alone together for the first time in months. All those feelings—I forced them into my work, my craft, my dream, into shaping my future. But now, with that future going up in flames, the prison I built around those feelings is gone. They’re free to surge forth, and they do so with the full intensity of the day they were hatched from my breaking heart.
Luca hugs me, and I let him. I don’t worry about the mess I’m making of my makeup or the streaks of green and black that smear over his biceps and chest as he embraces me.
“I’m sorry, Raff,” he says. “But you’re going to figure out a way to fix this. You create stuff, remember? You can make anything. And that means you’ll find a way to make this right.”
I pull away, dabbing at the tears stinging my eyes. I badly want to rip off this prosthetic nose, but I need a special releaser chemical to do so. Still, it’s started to peel, probably from all the frowning. And as I force down sobs, petals and leaves drift from my crown and fall to the floor. My careful costume is coming undone.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say. “I’m sorry I’m so angry. I can’t help how I feel.”
“Me neither,” Luca says.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I still feel a lot for you, and I don’t know what to do with it all. Inaya and I are close now, but we’re just friends. We just cosplay together. But you and I were more, and I think about it a lot. I think about you a lot. And…”
“And what?”
“And I know it’s terrible timing, but I still really want to kiss you. But only if you say it’s okay.”
Through the window past Luca, the crowds are cheering as someone takes up a microphone. We can’t make out the words through the thick glass, but we can sense the excitement vibrating in the silence. I pretend the cheers are for us.
It’s okay.
I imagine saying it. But I don’t say it, because just then, the double doors open.
“Boys,” says Irma Worthy.
Luca and I push apart. I laugh—actually laugh in shock at the sight of Irma Worthy appearing out of nowhere.
She’s smiling at us like I’m not a sobbing mess covered in literal moss and leaves.
“Well, sounds like you created quite the scene down there,” Irma says.
“We’re sorry. It won’t happen again. If you allow us to keep our passes—”
“Keep your passes?” Irma throws back her head and fills the hallway with a crackling cackle like snapping electricity. Her curls bounce as she shakes off the amusement. “You think I came here to confiscate your badges? Honey, I have a job. And it’s not that.”
Her laugh surrounds us. She puts out her hands for us to take, which we both do without hesitating, as though she’s our mother. She leads us over to the windows so we’re all watching Controverse from above together.
“Listen. I understand the hard work that goes into these projects, probably better than most,” she says. “I know the time and money a person’s got to spend if they want to make something, or make something of themselves. More than anything else, I respect that effort. Maybe too much. I look at all this”—she gestures at Controverse—“and sometimes I have trouble seeing it as an experience. As a convention. I tend to focus on the parts instead of the whole. The time, the effort, the creativity. The people. I see all of them, and all of their work, and sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture we’re all creating together.”