“Chelle, what do you think you’re doing?”
The kid mutters something to the paper placemat.
“Family drah-maaah,” Abel says. He chomps his Spicy Santa Fe wrap.
“What’s she up to?”
“Lord knows. Should we make a break for it?”
“She’ll get us back if we do.”
“Oh, Brandon—”
I smack his arm and point. Maxima’s hissing at the girl now: “You better, and right now, or I swear I will tell Mom what you and Daphne—”
“You’re such a hosebeast, Missy!”
“Maybe.” She spits out something else; it sounds like But I’m right.
Then she grabs the girl by the wrist and drags her over.
“Abel. Brandon. May I introduce my sister, Michelle.”
“Hey, Michelle.” Abel wipes a glob of salsa off his hand and sticks it out. She just whispers “hey,” her knuckles blanching on the chair back. She’s probably twelve or thirteen, but already she looks like the kind of person who shuffles through life expecting the worst. Her brown hair is cut in a messy bob and her lips are thin and grim and she has cute freckles that look like they landed on the wrong face.
“Let’s get comfortable, shall we?”
Miss Maxima sits and starts daintily loosening her sandwich from the plastic wrap. The girl drops into the chair next to hers and knots her arms. She’s wearing a giant ring with a bug trapped in amber. She shoots Maxima a filthy look, the same one I gave Nat the time she told her hot friend Mark that I wet the bed until I was nine.
“It’s egg salad, Chelle,” says Maxima.
“Uh-huh.”
“Remember the time you put a worm in my egg salad and I couldn’t eat it again for three whole years?”
“No.”
Maxima takes a big deliberate bite. She chews slowly, looking back and forth between Michelle and us. I wonder if this is some kind of twisted summer homework assignment for her college improv class. She’ll assign us characters next: Abel the rowdy drunk, me the rookie cop.
She swigs her coffee monstrosity and folds her hands on the table.
“So the thing about my little sister is, she’s always playing a big joke on me,” Maxima says. “See, she absolutely cannot let me have anything nice without messing it up—been like that since we were kids, right Chelle? Remember my Fairy of the Forest Barbie?” The girl glares at her lap. Her cheeks are on fire. “Anyway, this is how it is. Her stuff was always broken and dirty because she never took care of it, and my stuff was always nice because I did, and she never could handle it, so now she takes every opportunity to mock and undermine everything I stand for. Prime example: When I ran for senior class president, Michelle had to run for freshman rep too, and with this stupid Free Goldfish for All platform.” She narrows her eyes. “I guess it was a short leap from there to here.”
“Shut up, Missy,” Michelle mutters.
“Unfortunately, what she didn’t seem to get,” says Miss Maxima. “was that creating a fake fan shrine to her sister’s arch-rivals just might have larger repercussions than pissing me off.”
Under the table, Abel’s nails bite the back of my hand.
“I think you owe them an explanation, Chelle.” Maxima leans back. “Excuse me: hey_mamacita.”
Abels’ hand grips mine harder. I yank it away. This doesn’t make sense. None of it does. It’s a joke, a mean trick. She got this kid to play-act and later she’ll slip her a fifty while they snicker about our ashen faces, and when we get back to the RV the real hey_mamacita will have posted. So so sorry Abandonites, family emergency. I’m BACK! Here’s the next chapter.
“Don’t you have anything to say to them?” Maxima swirls her yogurt around. “I mean, you and your minions pretty much used these two pathetic souls like paper dolls and now look at them. They think they’re in love. See, this is why my FJ hates real-person-shipping; the fourth wall could crumble anytime, and then you’ve got a huge embarrassing mess on your—”
“Sorry,” Michelle whispers.
“That’s all?” says Maxima.
Michelle’s eyes flick up at us, just for a second.
My breath catches in my throat.
Then she shoves her chair back, throws her balled napkin at Maxima, and rushes for the exit.
“Close your mouths, you two. You’ll catch flies.” Miss Maxima licks yogurt off her spoon. “I’ve done you a service. You deserve to know the truth. Especially since you devoted so much of your valuable time to critiquing our fic this year.” She taps the spoon against her lip. “What did you say about mine again?—Oh, right: Hacky and derivative…”
She’s saying more, but I’m not listening. I’m pushing my chair back, stumbling through the maze of tables after Michelle Arnott.
***
She’s good at disappearing.
I check the gift shop, the pool, the corridors—everywhere I might hide if I had to run away. Nothing. Then I start checking stupid places. The men’s room. The slim space between the wall and the vending machine. The more places I check, the longer I can put off the full truth seeping in. hey_mamacita. Not real. Never was.
A joke.
I step up on the little wooden bridge that arches over the huge clear koi pond in the lobby. The blue and gray tiles on the floor of the pond are littered with pennies, dimes, quarters; my father would say That’s a lot of money to throw away on wishes. I’m jittering my fingers on the wooden railing, watching a pure gold koi get jostled by his big spotted pondmates, when a small dark silhouette ripples beside me. I hear the crunch of a plastic snack bag, catch a glimpse of an amber ring.
Now that she’s here, I think about running. But I don’t.
“Gummy bear?” she says.
I whisper, “How old are you?”
“Guess.”
“You look twelve.”
“I’m seventeen. But thanks. That never gets old.”
I shake my head. I can’t look at her. “Your profile picture…”
“Some random artist. I was in Baltimore last year and she let me take photos at Artscape. Gorgeous, right? I hate dreads and neck tats in general but on her…?” The bag crinkles and she says her next line with her mouth full. “If you’re going to be fake, at least be a badass, right?”
My tongue goes numb. I want to sit but my legs won’t move.
“You’re not going to sue me, are you?” she says. “I don’t think that’s legal.”
“Why would you do this?”
“You want me to like, explore my psychology?”
“Yeah. Please.”
“What am I, a Bond villain?” She drops a gummy bear into the pond and watches it sink to the bottom. “I don’t know, Brandon. It started out like, just making fun of Missy and her whole stupid shipping thing in the most ridiculous elaborate way, and then actual people started joining the community—like, who knew you had fans for real?”
“Thanks.”
“And so they like worshipped my fic and they started calling me their fearless leader and no one’s ever done that before because Missy always butts her way to the front of everything. It was like crack. Just having fans, you know?—Yeah, you do. So I just kept going bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper with it and—you know where this is going, right? Standard drunk-on-my-own power narrative?”
I glance at her. “I guess.”
“I feel like crap. I totally told whispering!sage I’d meet her at the Long Beach con. Like, why did I do that? You lie enough and all of a sudden it’s like lying is the language you speak and your first language starts to disappear.” Her eyes get bright and hungry. “God. That’s good. I wish I still wrote fic.”
She tries a smile. I can’t.
“Look, I said I was sorry,” she sighs. “What do you want? Money? I’m completely broke.”
“No…no.”
“Seriously—you can’t be surprised. Not really. People pretend all the time. You live online, pretty much everyone’s a character.” She points an eyebrow. “Even you. Right?”
“That’s different.”
“Why? Because shit got real and you’re all in love now?”
“Italics not necessary.”
“Oh, Brandon.” She crunches up the gummy bear bag. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but as the Internet’s foremost expert on you, I think you need some therapy.”