Sometimes.
You know rainmaker?
Everyone knows rainmaker.
Hi.
No fucking way. I look up and he’s looking down, putting ketchup on his french fries like he said nothing of significance. There is no fucking way this kid sitting in front of me is THE rainmaker. The head honcho ofMonstrous Seafanfiction, the most popular person on the forums behind LadyConstellation, shepherd of a million fans. This is NOT the guy who winky faced at me last week.
I write:
NO FUCKING WAY.
and I hold it right under his nose.
He gingerly takes the paper from me.
I’ll message you later to prove it.
I almost believe you right now because people don’t lie about being RAINMAKER. Is this why you like Dallas so much?!
I became rainmaker because I liked Dallas, not the other way around.
I scan the cafeteria. Someone else must be witnessing thisright now. Someone elsemustbe in on this monumental revelation, because this doesn’t happen in everyday life. Rainmaker does not just wander into my school and drop a transcription ofMonstrous Seainto my lap.
But he has. And no one around us understands what has just happened. No one at the nearby tables knows who we are or what we’re sharing.
Right now, it’s only us.
Here.
Wallace takes the paper back and writes,What are you doing for Halloween on Friday?
Probably going to be dead in my grave because rainmaker goes to my school and I didn’t know it until just now.
He purses his lips together to hold back a smile.But really.
He wants to change the subject like that? Fine, whatever.Probably hiding in my room and watching the Dog Days Halloween special.
That DOES sound like the holiday of a lifetime.
Why, what are you doing?
There’s a bookstore my friends and I hang out in that throws a Halloween party every year. We’re going to dress up as MS characters.
I’ve seen tons of pictures ofMonstrous Seacosplay online—and it’s all pretty great cosplay, if I do say so myself. But I’ve never seen it in real life.
Let me guess. You go as Dallas.
Very astute. Anyway, I was thinking, if you didn’t have anything else to do,maybe you’d want to go. It’s a bookstore, so it’s not like the party gets wild, and everyone there is nerdy book people. If you don’t want to, that’s fine.
He wants me to go to a party. I haven’t been to a party since Kenny Smith from next door invited me to his birthday when we were eight, and that ended with me getting pushed into his pool and laughed at all the way home.
Can I think about it?
Yeah, of course.
I’m not going. I like to tell myself I might go—I like to tell myself I might do a lot of things—but I and my brain and everyone else know that I’m going to chicken out in the end and barricade myself in my bedroom with a plate of pizza rolls and my Netflix subscription.
