Fan the Fame Read online

  “The FAQ’s tonight?” Legs asks, and my throat constricts. Maybe Legs can’t handle a panel on his own, either—at least, not in his current state. But then he laughs. “I’m kidding. It’ll be fine. All I have to do is . . . stop thinking.”

  “Right. Stop thinking. Easy.”

  “Easy-peasy,” he says.

  “You’re right. Just use dorky words like easy-peasy the whole time, and you’ll have all of LotSCON eating out of the palm of your hand!”

  He laughs, and then Cody’s suitcases start showing up on the carousel, and then so do the badass old ladies’ bags (and they don’t need our help at all), and then we’re heading back to Cody, his bags of clothes and electronics and swag all piled on a luggage cart. All I’ve got with me is my carry-on, which I balance on top.

  Cody’s black marshmallow coat is so big and fluffy that for a moment I don’t notice the ball of fluff in his arms—until it reaches its snout up and licks him right on the mouth, making him laugh and snuggle its black shape closer.

  “Cody, why do you have a dog?” I ask.

  He grins and scratches the puppy behind the ear, fingers disappearing into soft black curls of fur. “Offered to watch her while her mama used the bathroom. Isn’t she beautiful? Here, hold her.” And then he’s reaching out and settling her gently into my arms and we’re four and eight again and holding our brand-new gray and white schnoodle, Terra, for the first time, together. When she died last year, Cody cried more than when our grandmother died the year before, and when I reached out to take his hand as Dad buried her body, he let me.

  Cody releases his grip on the wriggling bundle, and I bury my face in the soft fur of her back to hide the tears that suddenly prick my eyes. I want Cody to be this Cody always—the one who is kind and gentle and compassionate.

  “Maybe I should get a dog,” Cody says, and for a moment I picture a saggy-tongued bundle of energy racing around his apartment and tagging along when he visits Mom’s place or Dad’s place. Cody might be a substandard human in a lot of ways, but he’d be an excellent doggy daddy.

  Except: “You probably travel too much,” I point out.

  His thoughtful smile falls. “You’re right.” He reaches out and takes the puppy back from me, gently. “I could never put you through that kind of stress,” he says to her, scrunching his face into hers. Proof that Cody’s not entirely unreachable; he does listen to reason sometimes. Just not when it matters most.

  “Well, good,” Legs jumps in, “because I’m pretty sure her owner’s going to want her back.”

  Cody laughs and looks over his shoulder at the girl in her twenties who’s walking toward us carrying a dog kennel. A girl with skintight jeans, red hair, and flawless makeup, who Cody most definitely flirted with. I step back and put a hand on our luggage cart while Cody hands the dog back to her, saying something I can’t hear that makes her laugh.

  My phone pings then, and I whip it out. There’s a reply from Janessa. Finally.

  No, he didn’t. Are people saying he did?

  My shoulders sag with relief. There’s still time to save Cody from himself.

  I slip my phone away and step forward to where Cody’s talking to the girl. “Hey, we’ve got to go,” I tell him.

  He smiles at the girl. “It was nice to meet you. Take care of this cutie.” He gives the dog a last scratch behind the ear and then turns to join Legs and me at our luggage cart. And that’s it. Not a single crude joke or flirtation or final turnaround to give the girl a lewd wink.

  My heart pulses with hope as we start to push the cart forward. Maybe Cody’s not as far gone as I thought. Maybe I can still stop him from making big mistakes.

  “Hey, Cody, can I talk to you about something?”

  “Sure!” He’s so chipper. In the past, when I’ve tried to call him out on things, I’ve been angry, and then he gets angry, and then we both end up yelling at each other. But this time, I’ve chosen the perfect moment. This time, maybe he’ll actually listen.

  I find the words carefully. “Earlier, when you said that thing about that girl . . . well, that crossed a pretty big line. I mean, she was just a kid.” I can see Cody’s face starting to cloud over at my accusation, so I quickly change tack. “I mean, I know you wouldn’t actually do anything inappropriate,” I add, desperately wishing I could fully believe that. “But even just laughing about things like that can encourage sexual harassment and rape culture, you know? It’s harmful to women. Harmful to me.” Legs’s shoulder bumps into mine then, and I can tell by the way it doesn’t draw away that it’s intentional. A little bump of support.

  The cart slows as we near the exit. Cody turns, puts his hand on my shoulder, and looks me in the eye. For one long, hopeful moment, I think he gets it. I think that this is it, I’ve finally gotten through, and he’s going to apologize and start his growth into a better person. His growth into the hero his viewers deserve.

  Instead, his round face grows even rounder as his expression unfolds into the grin of someone choosing to dismiss the seriousness of the moment. And then he says, “Lainey, one of these days, you’re going to have to learn what a joke is.”

  Yeah, and one of these days, I’m going to punch my own brother in the nose.

  Two

  SamTheBrave

  IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, AND HERE’S HOW I’M SPENDING IT: DOING HOMEWORK AT Opa’s dining room table, same as every other Friday evening when Mom works the long shift. The seconds tick loudly by on the intricate wooden cuckoo clock on the wall. There’s still a full hour before Mom comes to pick me up, assuming the thing’s set to the right time. I can’t check it against my phone because my phone’s sitting by the front door in the basket I have to put it in every time I come over.

  I look up from my science textbook as Opa enters the room. His hatred of technology makes him seem a million years old, but he doesn’t look it. He walks with shoulders tall and broad and chin jutting out like always, and though his hair and goatee might be going gray, it doesn’t show amid the blond streaked with the odd strand of red.

  “No plans tonight?” he asks as he settles into the chair across from me.

  I do have plans—I’m streaming Legends of the Stone at eight—but that’s not the sort of plan Opa means. I tried to explain streaming to him once—how I’m not just sitting alone at my computer playing a video game, and instead have viewers watching me, interacting with me—but he still thought it was an antisocial waste of time. I wonder if he’d feel different if I had thousands of viewers instead of only a dozen or two at a time. Probably not.

  If Mom wasn’t working tonight, she could have driven me to LotSCON now instead of waiting until tomorrow, and then I would have had even better plans. Though I don’t know that Opa would consider going to a video game convention—alone—to be any better. And besides, if I had gone to LotSCON tonight, I’d have missed my stream, and the internet advises small streamers trying to grow their channels to choose a regular streaming schedule and stick with it. That and get a really high-quality microphone, which Mom gave me for my birthday over a year ago.

  Just the thought of trying to explain all this to Opa is exhausting, so instead I simply shake my head in answer to his question. No plans.

  He taps his fingers on the table, each tap thudding heavily against the thick, dark wood, out of sync with the cuckoo clock. He narrows his eyes as he studies me, as if my lack of plans personally offends him. “Sam, you’re a likeable young man,” he says. “You’re smart, and you can tell a mean joke. If you just put your phone away, got your head out of those video games, and cleared up your face and maybe muscled up by joining the hockey team, you should have no problem making friends.”

  I duck my head toward my science textbook, focusing my gaze on electrons and protons instead of on Opa’s face.

  Right, if I freed myself from the apparent ugliness of my body, I’d have absolutely no problem making friends. No problem except one: everyone at school knows I’m Opa’s—aka Mr. Dietrich’s—
grandson, and everyone has had their phone confiscated by Mr. Dietrich at some point or another. And since they can’t take their anger out on Opa, I get to enjoy the threats, name-calling, and body checks into lockers instead. Once, when Opa confiscated Brad Hemsworth’s phone for a full week, the guy tried to dickpunch me. He missed, barely. I had a big purple bruise the shape of a hamburger on my thigh for weeks.

  “Don’t do that. It’s a disgusting habit,” Opa says, and I realize my fingers have found their way to a pimple on my chin.

  My mottled skin flushes hot as my hand drops into my lap. There’s a dot of blood on my finger from the pimple. Already, my fingers are itching to find their way to a tiny bump of skin on my wrist and scrape it off.

  Disgusting.

  Habit.

  I can free myself from the latter word, at least. I close my eyes and conjure up my psychologist’s words. “It’s not just a habit, Sam. It’s a mental disorder related to OCD.” When I started meeting with her a few months ago to start cognitive behavioral therapy, her words were a relief. There was a reason, suddenly, why my fingers roam my body searching for imperfections to tear from my skin, why I can’t control it even when I try. And it’s not just because I’m weak, either, but because something is wrong in my brain in a diagnosable way: I have dermatillomania, aka excoriation disorder, aka skin-picking disorder.

  Her words don’t give me relief now, though, because they might take away the second word, but they don’t take away the first: disgusting. My disorder is disgusting.

  Before either Opa or I can say anything further, Oma glides into the room, carrying with her the scents of schnitzel, apple, cinnamon, and dish soap all at once. “Apfelkuchen?” she asks in her soft, raspy voice, and I look up as she holds out a slice of her melt-in-your-mouth apple cake.

  “Thank you.” I take the plate of pale cake topped with apple slices and baked to perfection and my mouth instantly waters.

  “I took this to our seniors’ potluck yesterday, but your opa made me save you a slice.”

  I look at Opa, who smiles. “I know it’s your favorite,” he says.

  That’s the thing about people: they’re complicated. Opa would be easy to hate if all he ever did was take away my phone and call me a fat slob. But then he does something like this.

  Opa stands to his feet. “Well, we’d better get out of here, Inge, and let the boy finish his homework. His teachers tell me he’s on track to be on the honor roll this year.” He beams at me.

  I smile back, first at Opa, then at Oma. “Thank you,” I tell them both. Then I take a bite of sweet, sweet apple cake and bury my head back in my textbook as they leave the room. Admittedly, that’s the one good thing about my time at Opa and Oma’s: finishing my homework early means stress-free weekend plans. And Opa might not consider them worthwhile, but this weekend I have big, big plans. And with this apple cake, surviving the forty-five minutes until my weekend starts for real just became a lot easier.

  When Mom picks me up, she lets me spend the first few minutes checking messages on my phone, as always. There aren’t many. A couple of YouTube comments and a message from Jones confirming that we’re playing Legends of the Stone tonight at eight p.m. EST. She’s in Atlanta, so we’re both in EST, but we always throw the EST on there for Dereck, who’s in Australia. It’s Saturday morning for him, and he’s got a cousin’s wedding to go to, so tonight it’ll just be me and Jones and the nefarious plot I’ve been working on all week.

  Yep. And I’m getting you back this time, I type.

  Her reply pops up right away: We’ll see.

  I ignore the little surge of electricity that pulses through me and make sure to send back the tongue-sticking-out emoji without the wink. Jones is one of my only friends. I can’t risk losing her because she thinks I’m flirting with her, especially when I know she has a boyfriend. She sends the same one right back, which for some reason makes me laugh.

  “Are you excited for this weekend?” Mom asks as I slip my phone back into my backpack. She’s still in her nursing scrubs—well, the turquoise pants anyway, plus a plain white T-shirt—with her brown hair pulled up in a simple ponytail. She looks the way she always does at the end of her twelve-hour shifts—a little more rounded at the edges, like every muscle in her body is giving in to exhaustion.

  My stomach lurches with nerves. “I’m not sure excited is the right word at the moment,” I admit. I catch my fingers before they quite make it to the scab on my wrist, and instead pick up the fidget ball we keep in the cupholder. This one is tennis-ball-sized, forest green, textured with small bumps, and squishy like a stress ball.

  “Oh, come on, Sammy boy. Code is going to love you. And your videos.” She reaches over and pats my knee.

  “If I can even get him to talk to me.” I let the bumps of the fidget ball find their way between my fingers as I wrap my hand around it.

  “Well, you’ll have lots of chances to try.”

  I squeeze the fidget ball as tightly as the knot of nerves in my stomach. “Only two. The panel and the autograph session.”

  Mom puts her blinker on to turn left. “And maybe you’ll just see him around at the convention.”

  “Yeah, I mean, trying to talk to him when he’s standing two urinals down from me in the bathroom sounds like a great idea.”

  She laughs. “I’m sure you wouldn’t be the first one.”

  I laugh too, then stop abruptly and squeeze the fidget ball even tighter. “Oh man, what if I actually do something as stupid as that?”

  Her own laugh dies off naturally, but her voice stays happy and encouraging. “You won’t. You’ll charm him immediately, Sammy love. He’ll be itching to watch your videos.”

  This has been my plan—our plan, really, since Mom was fully on board from the beginning—ever since Codemeister was announced as a LotSCON guest months ago and I watched one of his streams for the first time, my stomach knotting with envy as his chat log buzzed with the energy of thousands of simultaneous viewers joking, spamming, and asking questions.

  It’s not that I’d never seen a stream like that before. I watch LumberLegs sometimes, and his are like that, and I’ve watched Wolfmeister once or twice, but they both only stream live once in a blue moon, and it’s a big event. Codemeister streams multiple times a week and still manages to bring out the big crowds every single time.

  And since I also happen to stream multiple times a week but on opposite days from Code, his viewers would be the perfect audience for me.

  “Imagine if it works, and he shouts out your channel to his YouTube followers,” Mom says now.

  “Twitch followers,” I correct her.

  “Right,” Mom says. She doesn’t use Twitch, which is for livestreaming, while YouTube is for posting videos that can be watched anytime. Our deal is that Mom’s allowed to watch the carefully edited highlights videos, which I post on YouTube afterward, but not my livestream itself. I get too self-conscious and jittery if I know she might be watching, even though she’s my biggest fan and would never say anything negative.

  Twitch is where I most want to build up followers, though. I like posting videos to YouTube; I love streaming to Twitch.

  Maybe, just maybe, I’ll gain a few new biggest fans this weekend, though. Convincing Code to give me a shout-out to his viewers is a long shot, maybe—probably—but since I can’t seem to break three hundred followers on Twitch, I have very little to lose and a practically infinite amount to gain.

  Mom crosses the bridge over our small lake that’s more like a river and passes the side road leading to the high school. You can’t quite see the weirdly shaped brown building from here, but I can feel the weight of its presence like the Dark Lord of Mordor in Lord of the Rings. In fact, I feel a lot like Frodo when I’m there—trudging alone through swampland with Sauron’s eye ever searching for me—except I have no Samwise at my side. No Gollum either, since even Gollum hates getting his phone taken away, apparently.

  Thanks, Opa.

  I b
reak the silence that’s settled over the car. “Can’t I just stay home when you’re working the long shift? I can make my own supper. I can make both of us supper and have it ready for you when you get home.”

  “Oh, Sammy. I know it’s not exactly fun going to Opa and Oma’s.” She sighs. “And heaven knows my dad isn’t the easiest to get along with.” She and Opa are always arguing about one thing or another; maybe she’s going to let me do it. But then she says, “But they’re family,” and I know I’ve lost. Family trumps everything. It’s the reason she and Opa spend so much time together even though they fight all the time. It’s the reason she’s been driving me the two hours to see my dad once a month for my entire life, even though he and I have nothing in common and don’t think about each other at all between visits and scheduled phone calls. And now it’s the reason I’m probably going to be stuck having supper with Opa and Oma when Mom works the long shift for the rest of my life.

  Oh well. I don’t have to worry about them for the rest of the weekend. And in just half an hour, I’ll be streaming. I pull out my phone again and post a reminder on all my social media sites.

  I get one reply right away, from BlastaMasta742: Yessssss! It’s going to be epic!!! Can’t wait!!!!

  I guess I could call BlastaMasta742 a regular, since he or she hasn’t missed a single stream the past two weeks, even the secret one that I didn’t post about on social media so Jones wouldn’t see it and find out what I have planned for our Legends of the Stone battle tonight.

  Legends of the Stone took the sandbox concept that Minecraft made so popular and brought it to another level, with incredible graphics, finely tuned fighting mechanics, and high stakes; if the players on a server don’t work together to fight their way through, defeat, and close up the rifts that spawn randomly throughout the world, the world becomes more and more unstable, making buildings slowly fall apart and items disappear.