How to Repair a Mechanical Heart - By J. C. Lillis Page 0,62
now. WTF??? :-(
lone detective: It’s true. She pulled all her Abandon fic down. Every single story. It’s like she never existed.
amity crashful: omg you guys. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK is going on?
lone detective: She abandoned Abandon. Heh.
I find her last post, from right before the Castaway Ball, and try to click through to her personal journal. I get a blue screen with an error message.
This journal has been deleted and purged.
She’s vanished. Every single chapter of “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart”: gone with the rest of her.
“O lamentations,” Abel sighs, hand to forehead. “hey_mamacita doesn’t love us anymore.”
I try to swallow. “Guess not.”
“Maybe Miss Max ordered a hit on her.”
“Heh.”
“Whatever shall we do without her literary genius to write us into being?” he snorts.
I hand his phone back and wipe the sweat off my palms, playing it off like I’m scratching my knees. I can’t let him see I care. Not this much. “Hope she’s okay,” I shrug.
“Are you kidding? She’s probably passed out from happiness somewhere.” Abel flops on his back and hangs his tongue out the side of his mouth. “I mean, what else is she going to do? We’re together now. Mission accomplished.”
Or maybe…
“What if something bad happened?”
“Pssh. Like what?”
“What if we embarrassed her when we told them we knew about them, and she got in her car all upset, and then—”
It would be your fault.
“Yeahhh, okay,” Abel smirks. “And what if she stayed in her house five minutes longer to watch our post, and then when she got to Starbucks the guy in front of her took the last scone so she had a bran muffin instead and choked to death on a raisin?”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. That’s your whole problem.” He kisses me on the cheek and yanks my Vegas cap over my eyes. “I’m sure your little fic friend is fine.”
“Why would she stand them up, though?”
“I don’t know.” He swings his legs off the bed. “She probably got bored. Maybe she found some repressed Star Trek vloggers who are even hotter than us and—ow! Dammit.”
He rubs his heel.
“What?”
He shakes his head, grabs something off the floor.
“Ugh, these things are so cheap. Can’t believe I paid ten bucks for one. Think fast!”
He throws it to me. It’s the mechanical heart from the Castaway Ball, a wide jagged crack exposing its insides.
“Do us both a huge favor, okay?” Abel says.
I flip the switch. The blue heart-light stutters, then winks out.
“Don’t get superstitious.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I’m shut in a bathroom stall at the Royal Court Inn & Conference Center in Salt Lake City, rubbing Plastic Sim’s head for luck.
Q&A with Della Wolfe-Williams. Fifteen minutes away. Since we woke up this morning, I’ve checked the Church of Abandon four times from my phone, trying to do it in secret places like these. I thumb through the few new posts.
Still no sign of hey_mamacita.
And this is on page 1.
thanks4caring: you guys plz don’t flame me but now that b&a are together for real I’m like a little bit over them…I think I just shipped them cause I thought it would never happen but now that it did I actually think they make kind of a bad couple…like there’s no way it’s actually going to last w/ them…probly mamacita thought so too lol
I just stand there with my back up against the door, reading and rereading that post and the eight others that “surprisingly, sort of agree” with her. I’ve seen this kind of thing before in fandom. Shippers slowly jumping ship, communities unraveling once their leaders disappear.
I shove it out of my mind. None of this matters. It’s fiction. You have a boyfriend, for real.
My phone shrieks at me. HOME CALLING.
I stuff it in my pocket and bang out of the stall.
***
“I’m so freaking nervous,” Bec says. “I’ll babble like an idiot. I know it.”
The three of us huddle by the stage in the cold Q&A room, ticking off the seconds till Della Wolfe-Williams. Bec’s Zara Lagarde action figure peeps out of her shirt pocket. She’s debating whether to wait in the autograph line after the Q&A, but I’m only half listening. The crowd is almost too calm. I glance back at the closed doors. Pull my sweatshirt tight around me. I feel like I’m waiting for something besides Della: a random gunman, a fire breaking out in the corner.
“She’s just a person,” says Abel. “Honestly? When I saw Ed Ransome in person my crush kinda eased up a tiny bit. Right Bran?”