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
I give her a warning glare, and she stops talking. There’s one last reason why I’m here, but I won’t let it be the main reason. I won’t even let May say the reason’s name. I only want to hear his name when the announcers award him silver right before awarding me gold.
“I’m just saying that you can do this without him,” May says.
“We can do this.” I give her a small nudge, and the Pinehorn armor shakes as we start our walk out onto the con floor.
“I’m doing this for you, but remember our deal? I get Sunday to set up at the Art Mart. There are some top online artists here, and I’m aiming to make some friends.”
The Art Mart is where all the artist booths are set up, a huge room that bustles with shoppers looking for custom prints, gifts, shirts, phone cases, comics, and anything else you can imagine. It’s a small nuclear power plant of creativity and bootlegged shit. It’s May’s Mount Olympus, and this year she’s got a chance to drop in at one of the amateur booths on Sunday, where she’ll be selling merch for her recently kinda-famous webcomic, Cherry Cherry. As a fellow art-trepreneur, I couldn’t be prouder.
“Of course.”
As soon as we hit the con floor, I know we’ve nailed our look. Within two seconds, people are calling out famous lines from Deep Autumn. Kids rush over, asking if they can take pictures with us. A circle forms around us, but at a distinct distance, like the moss on our skin is contagious, like its spores might float through the hot air of the con and lodge in skin, throats, and eyes, burrowing into bones and turning them soft with rot.
Perfect. May and I are ready. We get into our practiced stances, but before anyone can snap a picture, May turns on her stilts and lumbers off.
People are confused. I’m confused. I run after her.
“May, what’s wrong?”
“We need to go.”
“What? We just got here.”
“Yeah, well, it’s urgent.”
I grab May’s arm through the joint of the costume. We need to build up excitement now if we’re going to have a reputation by the time we’re onstage in front of the actual judges. I want people in the audience to know us, to cheer for us. I want to be recognized.
“Shit, I wanted to warn you,” she says, stopping short as a commotion begins in the crowd behind us. Whatever she wanted to warn me about, it’s too late. I track the shouts. Is it Evie, here to take me home? How did she get here so quickly?
But it’s so much worse.