“Ooh, Cadmus and Sim.” Augie Manners rubs his hands together. “The bazillion dollar question. Right?”
Girly cheers clash with some baritone boos. Abel gazes at the side of my face and smooths a wisp of hair off my forehead. I catch an eyeroll from Bec. She looks away fast, goes back to her camera.
“I think,” says Manners, “that humble ole me is going to kick that question to the lovely and very intuitive ladies here in the audience. Should I?”
“Cheater,” Abel grouses, but he’s grinning.
More cheers; an awwwww yeah that was probably louder than the shouter intended. Augie Manners steps up to the lip of the stage and hunches down, hands on thighs.
“A’ight, ready? Ladies who think Cadmus and Sim didn’t do the ol’ coitus androidicus in the crystal spider cave, lemme hear you put your hands together.”
A sprinkle of claps and a low frat-boy howl.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Now if you think they totally boned, make some noise!”
Full-on eardrum assault.
“Whoa nellie!” Augie Manners shouts, trying to quiet the crowd a little. “I guess that’s a yes, guys!”
“Guess so,” I say.
“Sounds clear to me,” says Abel.
“How ‘bout you two guys? What do you think?”
We glance at each other. He set us up perfectly.
“We’re…actually not sure yet,” Abel fibs.
“Yeah. We’re, uh, trying to keep an open mind, right?”
“Absolutely. Cause you know, sometimes you think you feel one way—”
“—and then something changes and you realize you might have been totally and completely wrong.”
We indulge in some moony eye contact. I hope retro robot’s filming; they’ll go nuts for this. I see Bec out of the corner of my eye, shaking her head like a mom watching her kids gorge on blueberries despite warnings of tummyaches and purple fingers.
“That is so true, you guys,” Augie Manners says. “So true. Awesome! Okay, any other questions for me before I hit the Alamo?”
Abel pinches me. “Did you see that?” he hisses.
“What?”
“His eyes, like, lingered on you!”
“They did not.”
“Did too.”
I pinch him back. “Maybe it’s my quiet yet forceful magnetism.”
“Is that from a fic?”
“Yep.”
“Whose?”
“No one’s. Forget it.” It’s weird. I can’t even say her name.
Onstage, Augie Manners shouts “Know what? You all win!” He opens up his hippie sack and flings a huge handful of Castaway Planet trading cards into the crowd, and then another and another till chaos breaks out, everyone squealing and shoving while the silver-backed cards snow down. Abel and I dive right in, trying to get our hands on the good ones: Sim in his charging dock, Cadmus brave and bloody in the Starsetter wreckage.
“Brandon!”
“What?”
He dangles a card from the cave scene.
“Oh God!”
He mimics the Meaningful Look in the photo and makes a wet kissy noise. I flick a card at him sideways. He flicks one back. It nicks my ear. I put up my fists and he yelps and takes off and this is what it feels like to chase a boy, no fear or shame or anything, just the two of us gasping and laughing like kids as we zigzag the ballroom and skid around chairs and run right into the shiny gold badge and foreboding beige shirt of Johnny Law.
Johnny Law is what my dad calls cops, or anyone in a vageuely coplike uniform. He’s probably the only person who uses the term with hushed respect and not irony: Slow around this bend; Johnny Law hides out there. If I ever get a call from Johnny Law saying you’ve been drinking…
“You two,” says the security guard. “Hold up.”
My stomach knots. Johnny Laws make me nervous, even when I haven’t done anything wrong, and even when they’re frog-eyed and freckled with a friendly broom of orange bristles right below the nose.
“He started it,” Abel says. “He’s a terrible influence.”
I smack him. “Sorry, sir,” I say. “We’ll stop running. I guess we got—”
“No no no. That’s not it.”
“Oh.”
“It’s Mr. Manners. He’d like to see you backstage.” Johnny Law lets out a tiny sigh and loosens his stiff brown tie. “It’s, uh. Urgent.”
***
The corridor smells like chlorine and coleslaw. We follow Johnny Law past the glassed-in pool and seven or eight closed doors. The change in his pocket jing-jangs like cowboy spurs.
Abel’s going omigod omigod.
“I know,” I whisper.
“My heart’s going supernova.”
“What do you think he wants?”
“You.”
“Really?”
“Maybe.”
“He’s got a girlfriend.”
“He could be bi.”
“This is crazy.”
“Eh. Maybe he’s just a fan.”
“Of us?”
“We have fans!”
“What, so he sits around in his trailer watching fan vlogs?”
“Maybe he’s bored.”
“Maybe he ships Abandon.”
He shoves my shoulder. I crack up.
“Guys—guys.” Johnny Law makes a simmer motion. “He asked that the room be kept quiet, okay?”
“Yeah. No problem.” Behind his back, Abel gives me an exaggerated shrug, eyes wide and laughing.
The door we go through has a VIP sign taped to it, but the meeting room inside doesn’t look too special. There’s a bunch of long tables and folding chairs with convention equipment scattered around—stacks of crinkled programs, empty boxes with bubblewrap crumpled beside them. Johnny Law marches us up to a partition of flimsy black curtains. One of the curtains has a paper sign pinned to it: ACTORS LOUNGE. QUIET PLEASE!!
I hold my breath as he nudges the curtain aside. Augie Manners is right there, right in front of me, so close I could take three steps and touch his arm. It’s so weird. Usually he’s covered with grease from trying to patch up the Starsetter, or he’s roasting a sand rat over the crew’s campfire, his fingers caked with dirt and blood. Now he’s nibbling from a tray of rolled-up deli meats, wearing noise-canceling headphones and reading some book called Still Life with Woodpecker.
“Heyyyyy, guys,” he says. “Come on into mi casa here.”
The guard’s like, “Should I stay?”
“Naw, they’re cool. Right?”
“Definitely,” says Abel.
Johnny Law looks us up and down like he expects to see us in a lineup later, but he leaves. When he’s out of sight, Abel immediately dorks out:
“Mr. Manners I just want to say we’re such huge fans of the show, like since episode one, and I know we have this vlog and we kind of make fun of things a little but for real, just being able to be here and meet you is amazing and we—”
“Awesome, yeah, that’s sweet, man.” He’s looking at me. He steps closer and rests his hand on my upper arm. Dutch Jones, I tell myself. His hand. My arm.
“Lemme ask you something, okay?”
“Sure.”
“It’s gonna seem…” He shakes his head. “ …totally out of the blue.”
“Okay.”
“Can I have your shirt?”
“My—”
“Yeah, not the blue button-down thing, that’s like J.C. Penney or some shit, right?”
“I don’t know…”
“This t-shirt.” He opens up my button-down and ogles the tee underneath. “Ohhhh, yeah. Oh, baby. Ka. Ching.”
My starstruck-ness starts to fade; he smells like old socks and this is really pretty goofy. The shirt he’s salivating over is a baggy old Bob Dylan concert tee, and it’s not very sexy. The image on front is a foursquare grid—three of the squares hold cartoon outlines of faces, and then the fourth one is filled in with Dylan. There’s a rip near the neckline and it’s been washed about five thousand times, so I can’t imagine what he wants with it.
Manners cracks open a beer. “My mom, right, is this huuuuuge Dylan fan, like she’s got a Scottie dog named Zimmy and she makes these giant replicas of his album covers with bottle caps and everything—Beer?”