Fan the Fame

  Dedication

  To my parents,

  who taught me to work hard.

  And to Lorne, who helps keep me from

  working myself to death.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One: Lainey

  Two: SamTheBrave

  Three: ShadowWillow

  Four: Lainey

  Five: SamTheBrave

  Six: ShadowWillow

  Seven: Lainey

  Eight: SamTheBrave

  Nine: ShadowWillow

  Ten: Lainey

  Eleven: SamTheBrave

  Twelve: ShadowWillow

  Thirteen: Lainey

  Fourteen: SamTheBrave

  Fifteen: ShadowWillow

  Sixteen: Lainey

  Seventeen: SamTheBrave

  Eighteen: ShadowWillow

  Nineteen: Lainey

  Twenty: SamTheBrave

  Twenty-One: ShadowWillow

  Twenty-Two: Lainey

  Twenty-Three: SamTheBrave

  Twenty-Four: ShadowWillow

  Epilogue: Lainey

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Anna Priemaza

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  @LumberLegs: Heading to LOTSCON! NERD CONVENTION WOOOOOO! About to board the plane! TO THE RIFT! Oops I mean, TO THE CON!

  [2.3K likes]

  One

  Lainey

  THEY’RE CALLING THE GIRL MY BROTHER, CODY, UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED a slut. It’s all over social media. I’m not even friends with her, and still it makes it onto my feed. I scroll through the posts on my phone as Cody and I hover in the Boston airport near our gate, travelers rushing past as he flirts with yet another girl who’s asked for his autograph. Not that there are that many girls who ask; Cody has several million YouTube subscribers on his gaming channel, but the majority of those fans are male.

  I skip past another post about Janessa, my seventeen-year-old classmate who allegedly slept with my situationally famous twenty-one-year-old brother. Apparently someone overheard her talking about it in the bathroom. That’s the way they phrase it: she slept with him, which makes her a slut. Never mind that Cody is the one who started it all, asking me about “that hot girl with the boobs” one day when he picked me up after school. And never mind that one of the posts says she was crying about losing her virginity, while when I asked Cody about her, he called her “just another hookup.”

  At least it’s only my classmates who are talking about her. Judging by the way Cody flirted with every pretty, made-up girl he crossed paths with at the Boston gaming convention we were just at, his fans don’t even know Janessa exists.

  “Lainey! Stickers!” Cody barks at me now, and I hit the power button on my phone and shove it back in my pocket, returning to the job I’m supposed to be doing.

  The Asian teen girl Cody’s talking to is younger than I had registered out of the corner of my eye, maybe fourteen or so. She looked older at a glance because even in a winter coat, she actually has a figure. Lucky. My boobs didn’t start growing until I was fifteen, and they grew for maybe six weeks, then decided that was enough and called it quits, the lazy jerks.

  Cody must not have been flirting with her after all; she’s only a kid.

  As she grins at him, I want to tell her that she needs a new hero, but instead I sigh, pull a Codemeister sticker out of my pocket, and hand it to her, making her squeal before she goes running excitedly back to her parents. That’s what I do as Cody’s gaming convention roadie: hand out swag, carry his stuff, keep my mouth shut. In return Cody’s paying me two hundred dollars in cash, room, food, and flights, and the chance to get out of our tiny prison of a town for my entire March break. We’ve just finished at PAX East in Boston and are headed to Toronto for LotSCON, the convention for the video game Legends of the Stone.

  When Cody invited me along, I jumped at the chance to get away from home. In my defense, since Cody moved out a few years ago, I’d forgotten that spending large amounts of time with my brother sometimes makes me want to strangle him.

  Cody has wandered back to our seats at the gate to rejoin Noogmeister, another of the six guys in the famous YouTube gaming group Team Meister. “If Lainey wasn’t here,” Cody tells him, “I’d totally have boned that.”

  I whirl around, cutting off Noog’s laugh with my glare. Until this trip, I hadn’t realized how often Cody makes jokes like that to his friends—or how often they egg him on just by laughing. “Cody!” I whisper-shout. “That girl’s like fourteen!”

  “So?”

  I march toward them. “So you’re twenty-one. That’s illegal!” And gross. And so inappropriate. I thought it was bad enough that he apparently charmed a seventeen-year-old into sleeping with him.

  Cody rolls his eyes. “Lainey, don’t be a buzzkill.”

  “A buzzkill? I’m not trying to kill your buzz, I’m trying to stop you from being such a dickhead.” I regret the words as soon as they escape my mouth. If there’s a way to get through to Cody, it’s not by calling him a dickhead.

  “A dickhead? Really, Lainey? Am I going to have to tell Mom to have a bar of soap ready when you get home?” He’s joking, but there’s an edge of anger under his words.

  Simply the mention of Mom’s soap bar makes my own anger stretch tight inside me, like an elastic band. When we were kids, Mom’d wash my mouth out for failing to “talk like a lady,” while Cody could say the exact same thing as me and Mom wouldn’t bat an eye. But I’ve learned from experience that getting angry at Cody only makes him shut down, so I ignore the anger and backtrack instead. “No, sorry, I’m just a bit wound up because people are calling Janessa a slut.”

  “Who?” Cody asks.

  I throw my hands up. “Are you serious? Janessa! From my school! Blond hair, big eyebrows, quiet as a mouse. You apparently slept with her. Ringing any bells?” I barely know the girl, since she only moved to our school a year or two ago, but I’m not about to identify her to Cody by her boob size.

  Cody puts his own hands up in surrender. “I’m joking! Of course I remember who Janessa is.”

  I glare at him. “Did you really sleep with her? She’s my age! People are calling her a slut because of it.”

  Cody shrugs. “It’s not my fault people are jerks.”

  Noog stands and steps up to us. “She slept with this guy?” he asks with a sneer, pointing his thumb toward my brother. “Then she is a slut for stooping that low.”

  “Hey!” Cody smacks him in the arm, and then Noog smacks him back, and then they’re both laughing.

  Dickheads.

  Cody and I have fought for years about the obnoxious things he says, but I hadn’t realized how bad things have gotten. Or maybe they’ve always been this bad, and I never realized it.

  After seven days of listening to Cody joking crassly about girls to his friends, a sick feeling has built up in my stomach along with the usual rage that bubbles there. Because I’m fairly certain that if Cody doesn’t change his ways, his jokes are going to turn into his reality, and he’s going to end up the headline of some big new #metoo scandal.

  Or, I realize, thinking of that fourteen-year-old he joked about banging, even end up in jail.

  And though sometimes I want to knee my brother in the gut, I don’t want him to end up in jail.

  I should talk to him. Or get someone else to talk to him. Or something.

  Right now, though, he and Noog are still grinning from their abhorrent jokes and all I can picture is how their heads are basically hamster dicks. Tiny, hairy hamster dickheads. Which, uh, is maybe not the best way to start off a heart-to-heart with
my brother.

  So instead, for now, I simply give them both the finger and then stalk away.

  I’m on the plane and about to buckle my seat belt with a satisfying click when LumberLegs appears beside me in the aisle. He’s not on Team Meister—though he’s just as famous—but he spent most of the time at PAX East with us. I knew he was headed to LotSCON, too, but I hadn’t realized he was on our flight. Most of the guys left last night.

  “Would you mind switching?” he asks the woman to my right. “I was hoping to sit with my sister.” He gestures toward me and holds his ticket out to her, his dark-brown hair flopping charmingly over the edges of his rectangular face.

  She agrees, and then we’re all standing and doing an awkward dance around each other as LumberLegs stumbles into his new seat beside me.

  “Sister?” I echo as Legs fumbles for his seat belt.

  “Friend,” he corrects. His knee bumps mine as he pulls one of the seat belt buckles out from under his butt. “Didn’t want her to say no.”

  My cheeks flush hot, even though he’d just as likely have switched to sit with one of the guys if they were in coach. Anything to keep from sitting alone. The sadness that he won’t talk about oozes out of his pores like garlic, though none of the guys have seemed to notice so far. “You just took the middle seat and gave her the aisle,” I point out. His knee is still touching mine, and I feel an urgent need to establish that I am most definitely not his sister. “She wasn’t going to say no.”

  He stretches out his legs in the tiny space—or at least tries to—and the release of pressure on my leg is an absence I wasn’t expecting to feel. He shrugs. “Couldn’t risk it.” He lets all his limbs relax, taking up so much more space than the petite woman who was there before him, not that I mind. We’ve been texting a lot since I helped Cody out for a single day of a convention in Columbus six months ago, and I spent more time with him at PAX East than with anyone else.

  “You don’t fly first class like Cody?” I ask. My brother is settled into his comfy, spacious seat a couple dozen rows up. Legs might have a million or so fewer YouTube subscribers than Cody, aka the high and mighty Codemeister, but a million less than several million is still several million.

  Legs shakes his head. “Waste of money.” His knees almost touch the seat in front of him.

  Cody has been a YouTube gamer since I was a preteen, and absurdly famous for almost as long, and I grew up assuming that other big-name YouTube gamers would be just as pretentious as him. But then I started getting to know Legs and Z and some of the other guys, and it turns out that not every famous person is a douche. Some famous people actually make pretty good friends.

  “Code didn’t buy you a first-class ticket?” Legs asks.

  I shake my head. “No, thank goodness. I don’t think I could handle sitting with him and Noog after they were just joking about sleeping with a fourteen-year-old.” These trips make me feel like an elastic—sometimes stretched to my limit and ready to snap, other times relaxed and at ease. It all depends on who’s around.

  Legs’s dark eyebrows furrow together. “I’m sure they didn’t mean it like that.”

  I frown. I like Legs a lot, but he’s too quick to assume people didn’t mean to cross a line. Too quick to see the good in people and ignore the bad.

  “Maybe” is all I say. But now I’m thinking about how easily Cody steps over those lines, and that sick feeling in my stomach is back. I pull out my phone and stare again at those posts about Janessa. What if Cody’s already stepped over lines, and not just the small, sleazy ones, like dating some girl four years younger than him who’s still in high school? What if he’s already stepped over the big, red, flashing lines without even realizing it? What if Janessa was crying in the bathroom about losing more than her virginity?

  I pull up Janessa’s profile and hit the link to send her a private message. The flight attendant is probably about to tell us to put our phones on airplane mode, so there’s no time for careful wording and subtlety.

  I type: Hey Janessa, I’m probably the second-last person you want to talk to, but I need to know: Did my brother cross any lines with you or pressure you to do anything you didn’t want to? I . . . just needed to check.

  I hit Send before I can change my mind, and then I stare at the screen until the flight attendant does indeed come on the loudspeaker and tell us to put our phones away. There’s no response from Janessa, no sign that she’s even read it. I shove my phone into my backpack as the plane starts to roll slowly away from the gate and the stewardess starts to tell us all how to survive in the event of certain death.

  Why do I feel so sick to my stomach?

  Oh, right, because I just messaged another girl to check whether my brother raped her. Because over the past week, that’s something I’ve come to fear my own brother might be capable of doing.

  I sink back into my seat, into my fear. Beside me, Legs sinks into his sadness, his whole body slouching with a sigh. We’re quite the pair.

  I’m not sure what Legs is sad about, but his sadness follows him everywhere. One late night at PAX, I was waiting for Cody, sitting on a bench outside the hotel bar where Cody and Noog and Ben were getting the level of drunk where the latter two would joke right in front of me about how screwable I was, just so they could laugh when Cody tripped over his feet as he threatened to punch their faces in. Which is probably only my third-least favorite level of drunk.

  Anyways, I was sitting there trying to read a book on my phone over the ruckus coming from the bar when Legs slipped onto the bench beside me, mumbling something about how I shouldn’t be sitting out there alone so late. He was trying to be a hero by keeping me company, I think, but even heroes can have broken bones and broken hearts, and as we leaned into each other’s shoulders, I had the distinct feeling we were holding each other up.

  I bump Legs’s shoulder now. “Hey, did you hear about the bill that was proposed this morning?” Sometimes the best way to take your mind off your own problems is to think about the world’s problems. And does it ever have problems.

  Legs shakes his head, and I tell him all about the newest idiotic bill that was introduced in Congress this morning, and Legs listens, because that’s one good thing I’ve learned on this trip: some places, people listen. Back home, no one listens to anyone or anything except that stupid news station. Oh, and their pastor. And while Dad’s pastor’s all right, Mom’s is a prick. Maybe if I lived with Dad instead of Mom, I’d actually like going to church.

  “Will you call your senators about it next week?” I ask Legs. I’m still two months away from being old enough to vote, while Legs has been able to vote for over a year.

  “If you tell me what to say again.”

  “I’ll find another script online.”

  At that moment, the wheels of the plane lift off the ground, and Legs and I both turn to watch out the window as the city below becomes smaller and the clouds become larger, as we head north to Toronto. And I tell myself that the sick feeling in my stomach is simply motion sickness.

  I can’t check my phone again until we land, which is going to make this flight feel long, but at least I’m sitting not with Cody but with Legs, whose actual leg has settled against mine again. He plugs his headphones into the armrest between us and holds out one earbud to me. “Want to watch something with me?”

  I have my own TV screen, my own controls, my own headphones in my pack at my feet. I ignore all that and accept his earbud with a smile, and together we relax and watch a stupid comedy for the rest of the two-hour flight.

  I check my phone as soon as we land, but there’s still no response from Janessa. She’s probably avoiding social media altogether, but I can’t shake the fear that she’s seen my message and doesn’t want to tell me the terrible truth. “Everything okay?” Legs asks, and I force myself to smile and nod.

  When we find our way through customs to the baggage carousels, Cody is waiting for us. He’s still wearing his blue knit beanie and gray hood
ie, and he’s already pulled on the bulky coat he brought specifically “for the Canadian cold,” even though the temperature here’s not going to be much different than home.

  “Legs, my man!” He holds out a fist for Legs to bump, as if we didn’t all just spend the last six days together.

  Once they’ve bumped fists, Cody turns to me. “You’ll get the luggage?”

  I cross my arms. “Obviously.”

  “Great! Noog’s gone ahead to hail a cab. I’ll hit the pooper!” And with that, he ambles off in the direction of the bathroom, free of having to worry about getting his own luggage, because he’s a world-famous YouTuber—sorry, “content creator”—and he’s got his roadie sister to worry about things like that.

  Legs and I head off in the other direction, toward a couple of elderly women wearing bulky scarves so bright that it’s like they’ve magically rerouted all the color from their white hair and pale skin into the yarn. Their elbows are linked, and they lean on each other as they wait for the baggage carousel to start doing its job and delivering up some luggage instead of going around and around and accomplishing nothing. We settle in right behind them, because we’re both tall and have a perfect view of the conveyor belt over their heads, but also because we’re probably thinking the same thing—if these brilliant women need help with their bags, we’ll be here to give it.

  I check my phone for a response from Janessa about five more times before the carousel finally blares with an obnoxiously loud horn and starts vomiting up luggage from its depths. “What does yours look like?” I ask Legs, thankful for the distraction.

  “Hmm?” He’s staring off toward the back wall.

  “Your luggage. What does it look like?”

  He snaps back to the present day. “Oh! That’s mine. The very first one. Lucky day!” He slips into the crowd and returns moments later with a simple black rolly suitcase.

  “You up for tonight’s FAQ panel?” I ask him as he leans against his suitcase with his hip. Legs is the opening act of the entire convention—a fact that I’m sure makes Cody seethe inwardly with rage. But I doubt Cody could handle a whole FAQ session all on his own. He needs a video game or his Team Meister bros to riff off of.