“I’ll be okay,” Alex said, projecting a false confidence he didn’t even know he could fake. “I just need to get into the panel room and take out my sketchbook. Or play more AoZ.”
“You got it, kiddo.” His dad smiled and stood up, knowing better than to touch Alex in moments like this. “Let’s rock and roll.”
Alex took a deep breath as he hopped off the escalator. Doodling always managed to chill him out. Soon.
GeekiCon staffers ushered their family forward through the convention center’s second floor. Long hallways lined with doors upon doors, all leading to their own gigantic panel rooms. Suddenly, Alex felt he was deep in the belly of the whale. He’d read that happened to a guy once in a really old story. (Gross.) That’s what it felt like here, shoved into a big belly of a hot, sweaty, stinky animal and jostled around with the rest of its stomach contents.
Alex knew he wasn’t making this sound pleasant. He’d watch the way his mom’s face would change when he described things this way, so he tried not to. He tried not to even think about any of it.
Think nicer things. Try to make eye contact. Here for a good reason.
Alex was a little spoiled, and he knew it; with his parents’ PROFESSIONAL badges and Julie, their publicist, he and his sisters never had to wait in line to get into cons. But what with the losing-the-pencil fiasco this morning, and then Fi changing her outfit nine times, and Dad misplacing the hotel key, and Mom spilling her latte on her blouse and having to swap shirts with Fi in the elevator, they were cutting it pretty close on making it to their parents’ panel.
“Hey, Alex,” Cat said suddenly. Alex looked up to find Cat’s phone was being shoved into his face. “I’m uploading the cosplay video. Thirteen points, here we come!” Alex watched the time-lapse video they’d shot of Cat getting into her costume this morning. Faster than life, she snapped a black-and-purple cape around her neck, quickly freeing her bouncy, blue-tipped curls from under its confines. Alex watched her jump into her loafers, painstakingly hand decorated with comic-book pages. Onto Cat’s back, gingerly, went a backpack made entirely of vegetables. Their mom had driven them to the twenty-four-hour grocery at two in the morning to create that monstrosity as stealthily as possible. Their mom was pretty cool, sometimes.
And the video actually looked good. But then, Cat always did have a good eye for those kinds of shots.
“Nice one.” Alex managed a smile. “Do you have the Hall M passes?”
“Yes, I have the Hall M passes, Alex; stop asking!” Cat sounded exasperated, probably because Alex had already asked her that same question at least twenty-five times before they’d even reached the con. But he figured it couldn’t hurt to check again. The passes were worth their weight in gold, and they’d only gotten them because their parents knew someone who knew someone who owed them a favor. (They were basically impossible to come by.) The passes would allow them to skip the legendarily epic Hall M line. Cat and Alex would’ve had to get into that line days ago without them. With the passes, they were good to go.
“Okay.” Alex shrugged. “Just checking—”
“Holy bananas.” Cat cut him off. “Alex, it’s them. It’s them. It’s Team Dangermaker.”
That got Alex to stare out into the crowd. Sure enough, Cat was right (she is that, very occasionally). Standing semi-concealed by a big group of Star-Troopers were Team Dangermaker, the four-person team who’d won the Quest the last three years running. Dahlia, Fox, Rey, and Malik were as close to internet royalty as a person could come without being an actual movie star. They were the very definition of BNFs—Big Name Fans. Everyone wanted to be friends with Team Dangermaker online, but they were notoriously cliquey. Almost no one was good enough to make it to their level of nerd cool and even fewer people had ever seen them IRL. Alex creeped their page with equal amounts of admi
ration and jealousy. There weren’t many photos of them online, but Alex had managed to piece together that they were teens: a girl, a guy, and two enbys (which Alex knew was Dahlia and Fox’s way of saying “nonbinary,” or someone who fell into their own category outside or somewhere between “boy” and “girl.”). But they were the superstars of the Quest world, and looking at the crowd gathered around them, Alex knew that had to be Team Dangermaker. Like Cat, he just knew. And he and Cat would do their absolute best to dethrone them this year.
… But they were still really, really cool.
His family kept moving forward and Alex lost sight of Team Dangermaker. He looked back down at his console. One more escalator and crowded hallway to go. More people he’d have to touch. And then … well then, at least, he could focus on the Quest.
3
Fi
“I still really can’t believe there are this many total and complete nerds in the world,” said Fi, stepping on to the escalator and surveying the floor beneath her, packed nearly wall to wall with humans. “Every year I think, “I must have imagined it. It wasn’t that many people, was it? But then I show up here again, and sure enough, somehow it is that many people. The people have multiplied.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cat said, not bothering to look up from her phone. “We get it. You’d rather be with Ethan and his weird friends.”
“Ethaaaan…,” Alex teased dreamily, also engrossed in his game.
Fi rolled her eyes because, yeah, they were totally right. Not that Ethan Chaudhuri was her boyfriend or anything, because he wasn’t. He was the captain of the varsity boys’ soccer team, and he did have a British accent on account of his fairly recent move to America, and he also was on the quiz bowl team, which was nerdy but kind of in an endearing way. He definitely wasn’t Fi’s boyfriend. But he might be, if her parents would just let her go on this entirely not-a-big-deal camping weekend that the rest of the cool people in tenth grade were going to.
Well, the entirely-chaperoned-not-a-big-deal camping weekend that she was shocked to have been deemed chill enough to be invited to, considering she was just a ninth grader.
And if she didn’t go, that would be it. The end. Coolness killer. Deleting-Instagram-level social-status destroyer. Babysitting her nerdcore siblings this weekend was supposed to prove to her parents that she was responsible enough to go, and Fi was willing to put up with the extreme body odor and even-extremer weirdos all weekend if it meant going on that camping trip.
“What would Ethan think of that shirt, anyway?” Cat asked, in a way that would have been innocent if not for that annoying-as-heck little smirk on her face, illuminated by the glow of her phone.
Fi looked down as she stepped off the escalator, panicking all over again about the coffee-stained leopard-print blouse she had literally taken off her mother’s back to save her a day of extreme embarrassment. She looked like a hundred-year-old mom who didn’t know how to hold a travel mug. It was her least cute look of all time, a world away from her big, soft tees. She didn’t throw this term around lightly, but Fi was basically a hero, thank you very much. More of a superhero than any of the costumed nerds at this con.
Still, it was certainly not the epitome of cool she was hoping for today—and would definitely not be ending up on social media (unless it was, like, artfully shot from the collarbone up, or she stooped to using that extremely nerdcore con filter to cover it up).
“At least I’m not wearing those shoes,” Fi shot back. The only part of Cat’s outfit that wasn’t all costumey were a pair of loafers that she’d stuck comic-book pages all over with craft glue. Incredibly uncute.
“They’re a Quest item.” Cat waved her off. “And thank you for reminding me to upload a pic of them; that’s nineteen whole points.”