The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love

To Amy and Katie, for befriending a geek

when it mattered most.

And to Bennett, for putting love

in a whole new stratosphere.

“I KNOW WE'VE BEEN FRIENDS
for such a long time, Roxana. I only have about five years' worth of memories without you in them. But . . .”

Here's where the next panel would come. And in an ideal world, I'd ask Roxy herself to help me figure it out. She would sketch something, sometimes just a ghost of a line, and on the best of days, a dying ember would ignite and suddenly I'd know exactly what came next. I need her. I need her to help me figure out how to tell her I love her.

I know what it has to feel like: epic. But also sweet. Like the romantic subplot of a superhero movie. Like that rainy, upside-down kiss in
Spider-Man
. But knowing what something is supposed to convey and
actually getting it to do that is incredibly hard. Ask any writer.

My phone buzzes from my nightstand, a longer buzz than I'm used to. A phone call instead of a text? I see Roxana's hastily sketched self-portrait flash across my screen and feel an inexplicable panic flit across my stomach, blaring a run-on sentence like an LED display: Oh god something must be wrong if she's calling me is she dead she's dead or worse oh god she has a boyfriend now and they're getting married . . .

I try not to let this spigot of crazy flow out into my voice, but as it turns out, I don't get the chance to say anything.

“GrahamGrahamGraham, guess what? He's coming!” Her voice is completely out of breath, like my stepsister sounds after a track meet, and I have absolutely no idea what she's talking about. But I smile anyway. Probably one of the stars of the endless British TV shows she's always binge-watching is going to be in a Broadway play. I should check my bank account to see if I can afford a ticket anytime soon. I grab my iPad and hit the banking app.

“Who—” I start, but she doesn't let me finish.

“ROBERT ZINC.”

I stop typing mid-password, stunned. “Coming?” Coming where? Surely not to Long Island. Or even anywhere in the eastern United States. Or anywhere at all that could be pinpointed on a map. Zinc hasn't been seen, interviewed, or photographed since November 3, 1995. Not even five years ago when the reboot of
The Chronicles of Althena
happened. Not even six months ago when the film adaptation
was finally announced, cast, and actually shooting.

“To Comic Con. New York Comic Con. Go check the boards. Go check the boards now.”

I zip over to my laptop and type in:
z-men.net
. First message of the forum, in capital letters, is exactly what Roxy has just told me.

I can't believe it. Robert Zinc, creator of my favorite series ever and the J. D. Salinger of the comic book world, is coming out of hiding. Has agreed to an exclusive forty-five-minute,
in-person
Q&A. And it's open to the public at New York Comic Con
,
taking place three weeks from now only an hourlong train ride away. Roxy and I already have passes for the weekend, only . . .

“It's on Friday,” Roxana says, with an incredulous finality. “At three p.m.” Her voice is flat.

“Don't you think your parents would let you skip school for this?” I urge. “This is once in a lifetime . . . not even once in a regular lifetime. Once in a Time Lord lifetime.”

“Obviously. I know that. And
you
know that. But explaining it to Maman and Baba . . .” She takes in a deep breath. “But I will try. Oh, how I will try.”

In the meantime, I've frantically clicked over to the NYCC website, even though I'm positive Friday passes have already sold out (they have). Fine, I'll take care of that later. Right now, I need to figure out how getting into the Q&A is going to work.

It's just three sentences: “Robert Zinc, creator of the once-cult
The Chronicles of Althena
, will be sitting down for an incredibly rare Q&A with Solomon Pierce-Johnson, the director of the upcoming
The Chronicles of Althena
movie. This event will need exclusive wristbands that can be obtained Friday morning starting at 9 a.m. at the Javits Center. One wristband per attendee.”

“Right,” I say, my brain going into organizational overdrive. Once hologrammed thought projections become a reality, this will be the point at which a large spreadsheet will beam out of my forehead. “Nine a.m. tickets means we have to line up on Thursday night. Probably starting at nine p.m.” I have personally never done this before, but I know, generally, how tickets to hot panels work. If they're handing them out first thing in the morning, the die-hard fans will line up as soon as the previous night's convention closes. And really, who is Comic Con made of if not boatloads of die-hard fans?

Roxy sighs, then laughs a little bitterly. “No problem, right? Not only can I cut school on Friday to go, but I'll definitely be allowed to spend Thursday hanging out on a street. In New York City. Overnight. This is the start to an amazing fantasy series.” Roxy's parents are incredibly strict. She often chalks it up to them being, as she calls it, “maximum Persian.”

“We'll figure it out, Roxy. I promise,” I say fiercely, my brain spreadsheet starting a whole new tab for how to get Roxy to NYCC on Friday.

I hear her breathing relax a tiny bit and she laughs again, this time a little more freely. “All right, Graham,” she says. “I don't know why, but I believe you.”

I feel a jolt in my heart at her implicit trust in me, and then, suddenly, my virtual spreadsheet is a siren, flashing blue and red.

Comic Con? Robert Zinc? A weekend immersed in practically everything we love as individuals and together? This is it: the perfect opportunity to profess my unrequited love.

The spreadsheet explodes into confetti. Because maybe if the gesture is grand enough, and perfect enough, it won't be unrequited at all and
I
, Graham William Posner—lanky, pale, glasses, and with a penchant for fantasy worlds—will actually get the girl.

AS EXPECTED, I FIND FRIDAY
tickets for NYCC on eBay, no problem. well, other than the fact that Roxy and I may have cleared out most of our bank accounts for them. I want to insist on paying, to go along with my plan to sweep her off her feet, but she gives me a weird look when I suggest it, reminding me that it isn't her birthday or anything. I realize I have to play it cooler than that if I want to set this up right. I need to orchestrate it so that when the moment comes, she's surprised but, on the other hand, not so shocked that she completely loses it or anything. Kind of what my favorite book on writing says about how to end a story: make it unpredictable but also inevitable.

On Tuesday, I go over to her yard so we can have our weekly writing session. Most of the leaves on the trees are red and gold already, and the wind is getting crisper as September wanes, but we still have a few weeks left of sitting out comfortably on her deck, eating the fruit and nuts that her grandmother insists on bringing out to us. We don't get much work done today, though. We can't stop talking about what we'll ask Robert Zinc if there is somehow an open-mic Q&A at the end of his panel and we're lucky enough to get the chance to ask a question.

“How about ‘Where do you get your ideas?' ” I tease.

“Original,” Roxana shoots back. “Not to mention, it's not like you don't already know the answer to that, since it's one of about twenty questions he ever answered.”

I grin.

“ ‘Where would Althena be right now?' ” Roxana offers.

“Awesome one,” I agree. “Though I feel like copper670 already wrote the answer to that.” I've developed a theory that one of the z-men.net users is actually Zinc himself, incognito. He writes a lot of fan fiction that I've started recently calling just plain author fiction. It's that good, and it's completely in Zinc's style.

“Well, there's a question to ask him so that we can settle this debate once and for all. ‘Are you copper670?' ” Roxy slams her black marker down enthusiastically, leaving the panel she was working on half inked.

“But then what will you give me when I win?” I flash her a Cheshire cat grin.

She looks down at her sketchbook and runs her hand over the back of her hair. At the beginning of the summer, she took a picture of Mia Farrow in
Rosemary's Baby
to the salon and chopped off the waist-length hair she's always had. The cut accentuates her big eyes and long neck and is, plain and simple, stupidly hot, especially when she runs her hands through the buzzed part when she's thinking, which she does a lot during our writing sessions.

Now her lips purse to the side and she gets a mischievous gleam in her eye. “If you win, we can kill off Slammerghini.”

I nearly gasp. Slammerghini is one of her favorite characters of ours to draw, but I've had a problem coming up with good story lines for him for years. There's only so many ways a mage can turn himself into a jail cell to catch the bad guys, you know?

“Or how about if I win . . .” What I want to say is,
I get to kiss you.
And there is a moment when everything gets suddenly quiet, except for a soft breeze that releases a flurry of maple leaves between us. I stare into her big brown eyes, gleaming copper and gold as they reflect autumn back at me. I almost reach my hand out to touch her buzzed chestnut hair. I almost cup her cheek and just lean in and do it. It's almost a perfect moment.

But then I don't. I freeze. I look away a moment too late, and then Roxana looks away too, puzzled. And instead of everything being perfect and romantic and aligned exactly right, it's awkward and askew, like we've just missed an important beat in the story. It's
moments like this that make me wish life had second drafts.

“I think killing off Slammerghini is a pretty good deal, Posner. And if
I
win, we have to make a whole three-issue arc about him.” She picks up her marker again and goes back to cross-hatching Rewinder's cape.

And just like that, the moment is gone forever.

I obsess about it all week, feeling like I've failed everything pop culture has ever taught me about romance by letting the opportunity slip out of my hands. But after I've sufficiently beat myself up over it (three full days), I allow it to fuel my fire to make Comic Con even more perfect for the two of us. I sit out in my yard, staring at the back of Roxana's fence—at the gate that I made my dad put in there when I was nine so that we could get in and out of each other's backyards easily—and scheme out every detail. I print out maps of the Javits Center and schedules of the events, and start a list that is unabashedly titled “Things Roxana Loves,” with the goal of incorporating as many of the items into our weekend as possible. If things work out, by the end of New York Comic Con, my name will be on that list. I even reread all twenty-four issues of
The Chronicles of Althena
and take notes on all the most romantic bits—on all the perfect lines that Charlie Noth says to Althena as he falls for her.
“I have no idea what you really look like. But I still know you're the most beautiful thing I've never seen”
is a particular standout. Maybe I can incorporate an adaptation of that somehow.