“Forgive me, babies?” she says when she reaches us. “I’m sorry. I’m hopeless.”
“Should have been your middle name,” Imani says, but she’s smiling, too.
Siggy’s dressed in her usual boho-chic style. She’s wearing a halter-top capri-length jumpsuit, gentle blue like her eyes. Her white-blonde hair falls in a sheet over her tan bolero jacket. Chunky ankle boots with peekaboo toes and a long bag-of-cloth purse finish out her look.
“You look so great,” I tell her.
Siggy smiles and does a little dip, like a curtsy. Her dangly earrings glitter and bob hypnotically.
I can feel the weight of Blair’s eyes on me, like a finger flicking my ear. Hot and stinging, and definitely something you ignore.
“Can you believe it? ZombieCon! Finally!” Siggy looks at the banners above our heads.
Honest excitement burbles up in my chest again, along with something darker, an I’ll show her that seeps out toward Blair. I grab Imani’s hand and Siggy’s hand.
Imani immediately grabs Siggy’s other hand, and our hands are twined in the middle of us, and I scream, as loud as I can, because we’re here, and I’m not going to let Blair ruin my day, or Scott, or the SAT, or my zits, or any of it.
And Blair should see that we don’t miss her, even if we do.
“ZombieCon!” I shriek, and Imani and Siggy scream and we jump up and down, laughing and screaming “Ahhhh!” and bouncing like a bunch of excited circus poodles, and there Blair is by herself, because she showed her stripes, didn’t she? And Imani and Siggy are on my side.
Karma.
Eat your heart out, Blair, I think, even though it feels dark and I feel a bit queasy with it. Gross and kind of like I can feel my heart shrinking and it’s not a good feeling. I still think it, anyway.
You shouldn’t have hurt me.
Who am I kidding? She doesn’t even care about me. I’m just trying to make myself feel better.
It works.
Because we’re still here, the three of us, and it’s finally ZombieCon! day, and it’s going to be amazing.
It’s going to be the best day of our lives, no matter what.
4
Hey, look, your friend arrived,” the security guards says, in a tone like maybe he hadn’t noticed even though we were all just screaming. His sardonic asshole setting is indecipherable from flirting, really.
He aims a smile at Imani, confirming it.
“Yes, she did!” Siggy says, and we ease back into the line, show our badges, get our bags searched, and walk through metal detectors before that’s it, we’re in!
The atrium is a large glass-walled semicircle, three stories tall. If you look up you can see the second-floor lobby railing cutting across the bottom edge of the circle and the third-floor railing above that.
We walk forward, craning our necks to look at the floors above us, taking in all this modern steel and glass and gleaming tile.
In the center of the atrium is a massive water feature. It looks like a hulking volcanic rock—the top stretches almost to the second floor. Waterfalls spill down four different sides, pouring in a loud rush from the bowl at the top.
“A bit tacky,” Imani says, even as we stop to admire the waterfalls.
“Noooooo, it’s beautiful,” I say.
“I love the orchids and the ferns. And the moss,” Siggy says. “I feel like we’re in a huge, fancy greenhouse.”
“So, you feel right at home,” Imani says, and I start coughing because it’s funny, and also true because Siggy’s house is simply covered with plants. Like every surface, window, and corner is bursting with green-growy things. Her mom, Lene, is an earth-mother type. She’s got white-blonde hair like Siggy, but she’s shorter and plump and gorgeous. She’s got the greenest thumb—so much so that it’s almost magical. I swear she can look at a droopy or yellowing plant and know precisely what’s wrong with it. I think plants perk up when she walks into the room.
Siggy gets her height from her dad, Harald, who, honestly, looks like a Viking or something; he’s this burly tall guy with red hair and a bushy beard. He’s so nice, though, gentle and boisterous both, with a hail-fellow-well-met laugh and whose favorite pastime is building miniature ships with Siggy’s little brother, Aksel.
It’d be pretty funny to hide one of their pirate ships somewhere in the massive water feature in front of us, tucking it into a fern for only observant people to find, like an Easter egg.
I tip my head up, taking in the tremendous size of the volcanic rock in the atrium.
“How’d they even get this big hunk of rock in here?” I ask. “They must have wide-loaded it down the interstate like a mobile home.”
Imani laughs. “I’d like to see that. But it’s poured concrete, June. Mom showed me a time-lapse video of the company that set up the molds and everything. They designed it with all the planters and maintenance panels and stuff.”
“Oh,” I say, and feel a bit disappointed that it’s not actually volcanic rock, carted all the way here from somewhere far away and sunny.
Then I picture a crew of construction people working on this one, beautiful thing, carving out places in concrete for hothouse flowers to grow.
“Can you imagine having that as your job?” I yelp. “Designing waterfalls! That would be so cool!”
Imani laughs, but it’s the warming kind that makes you feel like you’re lying in a patch of sunlight.
“Don’t ever change, June,” Imani says. “You see the good side of everything.”
She takes my arm and leads the way around the water feature.
Once past the huge rock, you can see the escalators that reach to the second floor, and then the third-floor escalators rising above that. Here the line of people entering the convention center splits into groups either heading to the open doors on the ground floor that lead into the exhibit hall, or riding up the escalators to the ballroom.
“Okay, let’s review,” I say as we wait in line to get on the escalator to the second floor.
Siggy claps, and Imani rolls her eyes.
“Ground floor?” I ask.
“Exhibit hall! Vendors! Autographs! Photo ops! Snack food!” Siggy rattles off the list like an A+ student.
“Good! Second floor?”
“Ballroom! Interviews and panels! Smaller panels in the banquet rooms! Dance party in the ballroom tonight!” Siggy says all in a rush.
“Excellent!” I praise her as we step onto the escalator.