Chapters (53)
- Front Cover
- Letter from the Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- • One •
- • Two •
- • Three •
- • Four •
- • Five •
- • Six •
- • Seven •
- • Eight •
- • Nine •
- • Ten •
- • Eleven •
- • Twelve •
- • Thirteen •
- • Fourteen •
- • Fifteen •
- • Sixteen •
- • Seventeen •
- • Eighteen •
- • Nineteen •
- • Twenty •
- • Twenty-One •
- • Twenty-Two •
- • Twenty-Three •
- • Twenty-Four •
- • Twenty-Five •
- • Twenty-Six •
- • Twenty-Seven •
- • Twenty-Eight •
- • Twenty-Nine •
- • Thirty •
- • Thirty-One •
- • Thirty-Two •
- • Thirty-Three •
- • Thirty-Four •
- • Thirty-Five •
- • Thirty-Six •
- • Thirty-Seven •
- • Thirty-Eight •
- • ∞ •
- • Thirty-Nine •
- • Forty •
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Excerpt from Be Dazzled
- One
- Two
- About the Author
- Back Cover
“You’re Evelyn Odom’s kid, right? I grew up with your mom in Everett! We went to high school together! Oh, she must be so proud of you. She was always an eccentric one, too.”
“And I’m May Wu,” May says grandly, cutting off the conversation like a benevolent guillotine. I suffer through check-in, refusing to look at anyone else directly until the woman finally hands us our badges.
I pull May into Controverse, one determined step at a time. No matter what I make myself into, there is no escaping who I am. No amount of makeup will cover it. Not the thickest of latex. Not even platform heels make me big enough to escape my mother’s shadow.
But this weekend, everything will change.
As we enter Controverse, I start to breathe a little easier. These are my people. Geeks and weebs, but also a handful of nerds and a dash of dorks. The kind of people who sit through family dinners silently contemplating the fact that Carol Danvers got a haircut between appearances in the Captain Marvel movie and the final Avengers movie, which means that somewhere in the MCU, there are scissors powerful enough to cut the hair of a woman who has broken several spaceships apart with just her body. Without suffering a single scratch! Thanos should have grabbed those scissors and added them to his bejeweled oven mitt.
This is the con in Boston; it materializes every October, gathering together a million-person family made up of every fandom. Lately there has been a lot of Marvel and DC because of the movies, of course, but if we’re being honest, the anime contingent (to which I proudly belong) holds the con together. And then there’s the noble Star Wars fandom, which has more rules than a ballet academy for assassins. The Trekkies used to be like that, too, I hear, but now they spend most of their time chasing after their little grandkids, because all of them managed to couple up and start nerd families. Weird. Oh, and of course there are the Doctor Who people. Every single one of them put on their TARDIS dresses this morning thinking, “No one will see this coming.”
I kid. I like the Doctor Who people. But they get very, very angry if you don’t have an opinion about which one of the seemingly infinite number of actors who have played the Doctor was best. Oops.
Fandoms, families, fans—they form a buzzy, diverse congregation that makes the annual pilgrimage to the Boston Convention Center at the city’s seaport once a year to celebrate their mythologies and their lore and, of course, pay tribute to their gods.
And by gods, I mean cosplayers.