I share a bag of popcorn with Imogen’s beefcake of a brother while we watch from the edge of the showroom. Bran is back at the booth, hopefully hacking into the Twitter account. It’s just a few keystrokes, he assured me. Just ask for password retrieval, get a glimpse of the characters in the Twitter profile’s phone number, and go to work on a phone directory site. He stressed that there was a program to test out hundreds of thousands of phone numbers—or whatever. I’m not even going to pretend to understand it. I had half a mind to ask him to purge the entire account—delete every tweet until no trace remains—but that won’t help my narrative.

No, people already know that Amara is dead and Carmindor dies. What they don’t know is the ending to the story, and that is something I do not intend to give them. At least not yet.

Endings can always change.

Amara’s dress is the last piece of the plan. This part was my idea, actually. I don’t just want to expose Vance as the the insufferable jerk he is. If I’m going to back Imogen and save Amara, I need to convince the fandom that Amara needs to be saved.

Not only that, but I know that I would look like perfection in that dress. The new Amara in the dress she could never live up to. And in it I will prove to everyone that there are stories yet to tell, and stars to cross, and shipper wars to wage, and if a fandom can’t shift a narrative then nothing can.

At the beginning of all this I was against #SaveAmara, but now I realize that Imogen and I are on the same side. We both want meaningful narratives, less flavor-of-the-week female characters, more legitimacy as a genre. We want to save Amara—but we want to save our future, too.

“So what’ve I missed?” Dare asks, jogging up beside me. He has on a pair of Ray-Bans, as if that really disguises him in the crowd. People are doing double-takes the longer he stands beside me.

Imogen’s brother gapes at him. “You…you’re…”

“’Sup, my man,” Dare says coolly, and gives Milo the finger guns.

“I think I’m going to die,” Milo whispers.

Nerds. The lot of them.

I toss another piece of popcorn into my mouth. “Cause a distraction while Milo and I get the dress. You think you can do that?”

“Can I do that,” Dare scoffs and looks at me from over his Ray-Bans. “I was born ready.” He wiggles his eyebrows and saunters out into the hallway, opening his arms like, Ladies.

Honestly.