bailed on your demogorgan costume after spending weeks on it in favor of Princess Bonecrusher, which is still pretty amazing but also shows off your—”
“Stop!” Mel said. “Yes! There’s a guy.” Her shoulders dipped. “Two guys. Maybe.”
I snorted and laughed without meaning to. “Two guys? Who’re you and what’ve you done with Emelda?”
Mel flinched when I called out her full name. “It’s not like I’m trying to get with both of them at the same time. They’re best friends. I met them at the Magic: The Gathering tournament last month that you were supposed to go to with me but bailed on like the punk-ass bitch you are.”
“I didn’t bail,” I said. “I was grounded.”
“Still a punk-ass bitch,” Mel said in a singsong voice.
“Stop stalling and tell me about the guys.”
Mel was looking vulnerable in a way I wasn’t used to. She was my Amazonian warrior queen. Nothing anyone did could get through the shields she kept up. But there she was looking both guilty and giggly at the same time, like one wrong word could ruin her. It was a weird thing, but I kind of got where she was coming from.
“It’s not that complicated,” she said. “I met Andy and Tade, and I really hit it off with Andy. We spent two hours talking about everything, and he had an amazing deck.”
My eyebrows raised.
“Built around necromancy,” Mel said. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“My mind lives in the gutter. You know that.”
“Anyway,” Mel said. “Tade was sweet, but he was kind of quiet, and I didn’t think much of him. Before we left, we all traded numbers. Getting more than a one-word reply from Andy was harder than completing the tubular level in Super Mario World, but Tade started blowing up my phone at all hours of the day and night, making me laugh until I cried.”
“So Andy was cool in person, but Tade was good on the phone?”
Mel nodded. “Yeah. And they’re both here, and they’ve both been hinting that they kind of like me, and I like them too, but I don’t know which one.”
“Which means you want me to go to the dance with you so I can meet them and tell you which one you should make out with.” I sighed dramatically. “I mean, I guess I can fit that in my busy schedule.”
“You’ll go?”
I had zero interest in going to the comic-con ball and watching a bunch of awkward dudes in Captain America costumes try to work up the nerve to talk to girls in anime costumes. But Mel needed me, and I couldn’t say no.
“Sure.”
Mel jumped up and down, clapping her hands. “You’re going to have the best time! I promise!”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be a blast.”
“What’s wrong?”
I did my best to shake off the mood that’d fallen over me. “Nothing.”
Mel cocked her head to the side and planted her hands on her hips, giving me that look that told me I was a silly fool for thinking I could pretend nothing was the matter when something clearly was.
“It’s just . . . I don’t know. It’s not fair that you’re flirting with two boys and I can’t even find one. And it’s not fair to you for me to think it’s not fair because it’s not like you should remain chaste just because I’m a hopeless troll who repels boys, but I can’t help feeling sorry for myself because I’m a selfish asshole.”
“You’re not an asshole.”
“Or selfish?”
“You’re not an asshole.”
I slapped Mel’s arm. “Thanks a lot.”
“If you don’t wanna go, I’ll tell Andy and Tade we got other plans—”
“No,” I said. “We’re going. One of us deserves to be happy.”
“What about the guy you’ve been talking to?”
I hadn’t heard from Dean since he’d answered my question about being ace. He hadn’t seemed upset about it, and his answer had felt so beautifully honest—like he’d peeled away all the artifice he surrounded himself with and showed me a tiny true piece of his soul—but the longer I went without hearing from him, the more worried I got that I’d pushed too hard on something sensitive. I hadn’t opened the app since we’d gotten to the convention because I was afraid I’d see in place of his username.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s nothing there.”
“It didn’t seem like nothing.”
“We don’t even live in the same zip code, and there’s too much shit in the way.”
Mel was giving me another look, but I couldn’t decipher it.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just trying