He laughed. “What?”
“I’m trying to figure out why you wear all black sometimes.”
“Maybe I’m really gothy and dark”—he smiled—“but only on certain days.” Cath couldn’t imagine Levi ever being gothy and dark; he had the smilingest face she’d ever seen. He smiled all the way from his chin to his receding hairline. His forehead wrinkled up, his eyes twinkled. Even his ears got into the action—they twitched, like a dog’s.
“Or maybe I work at Starbucks,” he said.
She snorted. “Really?”
“Really,” he said, still smiling. “Someday you’ll need health insurance, and you won’t think working at Starbucks is funny.”
Levi and Reagan were always doing that to Cath—reminding her how young and na?ve she was. Reagan was only two years older than Cath. She wasn’t even old enough to drink yet. Not legally. (Not that it mattered on campus; there was booze everywhere. Wren already had a fake ID. “You can borrow it,” she’d told Cath. “Say you got hair extensions.”)
Cath wondered how old Levi was. He looked old enough to drink, but maybe that was just his hair.…
It’s not that Levi was bald. Or anywhere near bald. (Yet.)
But his hairline came to a peak on his forehead, then retreated, dramatically, above his temples. And instead of letting his hair hang down or forward, to minimize it—or instead of giving up and wearing it really short, like most guys would—Levi swept it straight up and back in a sloppy blond wave. And he was always messing with it, drawing even more attention to his wide, lined forehead. He was doing it now.
“What are you working on?” he asked, pushing his fingers through his hair and scrubbing at the back of his head.
“Studying in silence,” she said.
*
Cath had only posted one chapter of Carry On, Simon this week, and it was half as long as usual.
She usually posted something to her FanFixx page every night—if not a full chapter, at least a blog entry.
The comments on her page all week had been friendly.… “How are you?” “Just checking in.” “Can’t wait for the next post!” “Gah! I need my daily Baz.” But to Cath, they felt like demands.
She used to read and respond to every comment on her stories—comments were like gold stars, like May Day bouquets—but ever since Carry On, Simon took off last year, it had all gotten too big for Cath to manage. She went from getting around five hundred hits per chapter to five thousand. Regularly.
Then one of the heavies on the biggest fansite, Ficsation, called Carry On “the eighth-year fic”—and Cath’s FanFixx page got thirty-five thousand hits in one day.
She still tried to keep up with comments and questions as much she could. But it wasn’t the same anymore.
She wasn’t just writing for Wren and the friends they’d made in the old Snowflakes forums. It wasn’t just a bunch of girls trading birthday fics and cheer-up fics and cracked-out “I wrote this to make you laugh” stories.…
Cath had an audience now, a following. All these people she didn’t know, who expected things from her and questioned her decisions. Sometimes they even turned against her. They’d trash her on other fansites, saying that Cath used to be good, but she’d lost the magic—that her Baz was too canon or not canon enough, that her Simon was a prude, that she overwrote Penelope.…
“You don’t owe them anything,” Wren would say, crawling onto Cath’s bed at three in the morning and pulling Cath’s laptop away. “Go to sleep.”
“I will. I’m just … I want to finish this scene. I think Baz is finally going to tell Simon he loves him.”
“He’ll still love him tomorrow.”
“It’s a big chapter.”
“It’s always a big chapter.”
“It’s different this time.” Cath had been saying this for the last year. “It’s the end.”
Wren was right: Cath had written this story, Baz and Simon in love, dozens of times before. She’d written this scene, this line—“Snow … Simon, I love you”—fifty different ways.
But Carry On was different.
It was the longest fic she’d written so far; it was already longer than any of Gemma T. Leslie’s books, and Cath was only two-thirds of the way through.
Carry On was written as if it were the eighth Simon Snow book, as if it were Cath’s job to wrap up all the loose ends, to make sure that Simon ascended to Mage, to redeem Baz (something GTL would never do), to make both boys forget about Agatha … To write all the good-bye scenes and graduation scenes and last-minute revelations … And to stage the final battle between Simon and the Insidious Humdrum.
Everyone in fandom was writing eighth-year fics right now. Everyone wanted to take a crack at the big ending before the last Simon Snow book was released in May.
But for thousands of people, Carry On was already it.