Below, read the first chapter of the upcoming novel.
Well, what’s worse than being vaporized?
Whatever it is, that is what she’d do to me.
Credit: Sourcebooks
Some might think I’m being dramatic.
Which, okay, fine.
Maybe they’d be a little right.
But mostly, they’d be wrong.
This is Evie f–king Odom here.
The self-made millionaire artist turned gallery director.
But in my opinion, Evie is just sort of evil.
Evie would hate it.
So, to survive her wrath, I hide my crafting and my cosplaying.
And I pretend I don’t spend hours fashioning incredible costumes out of hot glue and household hardware.
Basically, I do whatever I can to avoid Evie’s particularly flamboyant form of hate.
What Evie hates, she destroys.
It’s sort of her thing.
For a while in the early nineties, she was famous for hating and destroying replicas of her work.
Usually she did this in front of an audience, often for a lot of money.
People scream and scatter in our wake.
Maybe someone loses an eye.
I don’t know, I don’t care about injuries.
She thinks May and I are camping.
Out in the Blue Hills of Massachusetts, like some plucky settlers of CATAN!
They lower their phones and drift apart, letting us pass to the front of the crowd.
“Raffy, will you just calm down for two freaking seconds?”
I certainly will not.
“Come on, they just want photos with us.”
“You’re not even on your stilts, and we still need to do final touches.”
It needs to look real, like little organic puffs."
“That’s the title of your memoir.
The Little Organic Puff, by Rafael Odom.”
There’s a lot to do.
I don’t want anything hitting social until we’re perfect."
Not ideal, but necessary.
Lucky for us, the bigger cons now have changing rooms so people can suit up on location.
This is why I have a rolling suitcase.
“But the moss are you sure I need to wear it?
It’s itchy, and besides, my mask nearly covers my whole face.”
“Yes, I’m sure.
It’s all about being fully in character.
The judges will appreciate the detail if they ask you to remove the mask, which they will.
You’ll see.”
May scrunches up her eyebrows.
“Fine, fine, you might mold me,” she says.
“Sometimes I think you get off on these things, Raff.”
“May, gross.
And so are you.”
Gay people do all sorts of things.
They wear, like, harnesses and leather straps.
Just out and about."
“So do horses, but no one kink-shames them.
Now drop it.”
She murmurs, “Oh, you’re able to bet I’ll drop something.
And I’m sure you’d love to watch me pick it up real slow.”
May basks in my discomfort.
If I weren’t so anxious, I’d be laughing and joking around, too.
But I am anxious.
I’m always anxious about something, but on competition days, I’m anxious about everything.
It doesn’t get any bigger than this, so nothing is going to calm me down.
Not listening to music.
Maybe tranquilizers, but probably not.
Once I win, I’ll relax.
And other businesses are starting to tap into the young, influencer-driven craft market, too.
She says that any artist worth their paints is guided by talent and instinct.
She didn’t need college to be a success, after all.
And it’s a major point of pride for her.
(She has many points of pride; she’s a sea urchin of prideful points.)
I’m less prideful and far less pointy.
I know I need to go to art school.
And I will need money to pay for art school.
And, to a lesser degree, I will need money for food and Crunchyroll dot com.
I’m not just here to win a competition or my mother’s respect.
At the end of the day, I’m after one thing: a future, on my terms.
We’re at the tables where they give out the badges.
I pull my ID from the pocket I smartly sewed to the inside of my robe.
“Raphael Odom,” I say.
The lady looks at my ID, then at me.
My face barely shows beneath a hooded robe clotted with fungus and ferns.
But then the registration lady’s scrutiny breaks into gleeful recognition.
“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.”
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 platforms boots 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.
Without suffering a single scratch!
Thanos should have grabbed those scissors and added them to his bejeweled oven mitt.
And then there’s the nobleStar Warsfandom, which has more rules than a ballet academy for assassins.
Oh, and of course there are theDoctor Whopeople.
I like theDoctor Whopeople.
And by gods, I mean cosplayers.
Trust me, cosplay is the cool thing to do at these events.
Costumes don’t just transform the people wearing them; they transform the world around them.
But not just regular screaming.
I mean full-on, throaty, anime-power- up screaming.
It’s something else.
And, admittedly, some spite.
I always said to May, Why doesn’t anyone brush out their wigs?
Do they like looking like microwaved showgirls?
I could do so much better.
And she was finally like, Okaaaaay, then why don’t you?
So now I do.
And I was right.
I’m great at this.
But that count is going to double by the time I’m done with this year’s Controverse.
Just about all the criteria changes from year to year, except one: People must compete in pairs.
Controverse famously considers cosplay a team sport.
Enter May and myself.
The character designs are nuts.
Perfect for a team of cosplayers looking for a recognizable but difficult build.
I straighten May’s helmet and step back to admire my work.
In her place is a creature hunched atop four clawed-footed legs that bristle with pine cone scales.
It looks powerful and decrepit and diseased at the same time.
“Perfect,” I tell May.
“You look pretty good, too,” she says from beneath the mask.
My character the Spring Keeper is mostly human-shaped.
The image of health.
We are totally transformed.
We are for sure going to qualify.
“Remember the poses?”
“Of course.”
“And the cues?”
“And you could walk okay?”
“For a girl in a forty-pound costume, balancing atop four stilts?
But Raff, next time can I be the one in the pretty mushroom dress?”
I barely acknowledge her sarcasm as I unfasten and refasten one of her straps for the eighth time.
I’m afraid that the moment I decide we’re ready, everything will fall apart.
“Relax, Raff.
Listen, this is going to go well,” she tells me.
A force a smile (a small one I don’t want to risk dislodging my prosthetic cheekbones).
I hope she’s right.
Everything every dream of mine, every winking whim rides on proving I can do this without Evie.
In spite of her, in fact.
“And listen.”
May’s voice turns solemn.
“Raff”
“You know I don’t want to hear about him.”
“Yes, but Raff”
I give her a warning glare, and she stops talking.
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.
“We can do this.”
“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.”
It’s a small nuclear power plant of creativity and bootlegged shit.
As a fellow art-trepreneur, I couldn’t be prouder.
As soon as we hit the con floor, I know we’ve nailed our look.
Within two seconds, people are calling out famous lines fromDeep Autumn.
Kids rush over, asking if they can take pictures with us.
May and I are ready.
I run after her.
“May, what’s wrong?”
“We need to go.”
We just got here."
“Yeah, well, it’s urgent.”
I grab May’s arm through the joint of the costume.
I want people in the audience to know us, to cheer for us.
I want to be recognized.
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.
A new couple has entered the room.
I see a girl slinking across the floor, stalking her prey.
Not a girl a deer.
It’s an expert job.
She is dressed as Bambi’s mother, shot dead and now risen with undead vengeance.
I know this without even seeing her partner, because it’s my idea.
Down to the bloody ribbons, it’s all my work.
My drawings come to life, splayed out before me on the Controverse floor.
How could this happen?
Who took this from me?
But I know who.
I follow the eyes of the crowd to where her partner lies on the ground.
But he’s laughing.
His smile is what slaps me.
A smile that wins everything and everyone over.
A smile that won me over for a long time, too, until it vanished from my life.
Luca Vitale is here.
Given how much TV I watch, I know tropes.
We hurt each other.
The hard kind of hurt that doesn’t heal up quickly.
I’ve clung to that hurt for a long time.
It’s what has kept me going; it’s what got me here.
But when I see him, the hurt abandons me, leaving behind an overwhelming, disorienting nostalgia.
When I see him, I see us.
How we came together, what we created together, what we ruined together.
I see our every moment, and at the same time, I see us unraveling all at once.
