Fan Service

Chapter 10

10

Alex and Rowen both had homework on Monday after school let out, so they headed to the library. As they made their way to the second floor, Rowen’s eyes flicked over to the teen section. They seemed to relax only after confirming the LGBTQ+ lit table was still there.

“You know Ms. Carlotta was on the news last week telling book banners to kick cans.” Alex leaned down to nudge their jean jacket–clad arm.

“Yeah,” Rowen said, casually fluffing their turquoise bangs. “I know.”

Carlotta Jenkins was the lead librarian and one of the only out elder lesbians Alex knew in town. She’d been with the Tompkins Library since it opened in 1967. There were plenty of hateful people in this town, but Alex tried to identify and point out adults fighting the good fight for Rowen’s sake.

Alex lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know she threatened to kick me out once in high school?”

Rowen’s amber eyes went wide. “For what?”

Despite their own sterling school record, Rowen loved stories about Alex getting in trouble.

“For carving my initials under my favorite table in the back. In hindsight, I am deeply ashamed of defacing library property.”

“Wow. You were such a nerd,” Rowen said after insisting Alex show them.

Still am , Alex thought as they both crouched underneath the right corner table and Rowen pressed their fingertips against the paper clip–carved divots she’d once gouged in the wood.

How else did you explain staying up late last night watching her Arcane Files DVD box set like it was 2008?

Alex had conveniently forgotten just how dreamy Devin was when he was younger. He’d been so green in those early seasons. Almost innocent. As if helping her dad with yard work and pushing her up against the wall of her own coat closet last night wasn’t offensive enough.

Her favorite thing about those early days of his playing Colby was that he clearly didn’t think he was good yet. Any casual viewer could tell he was thrilled to be there, his performance all raw experimentation and commitment to the bit. And sure, sometimes it was over-the-top, but that had been the thing that made him great as Colby: he hadn’t been afraid to look silly, running around growling at fictional criminals. He leaned into Colby’s journey to accept and master himself as a werewolf like it was Hamlet .

Gus Rochester might have had a few standout episodes as Asher, but of course it was easier to play the straight-man copilot to the eccentric werewolf. Devin’s belief in Colby and his struggle single-handedly kept the whole show from being a parody of itself. And now he was doing it again: selling the supernatural in a way that gave Alex no choice but to buy in.

While Rowen started a book report on Animal Farm , Alex tried to brainstorm ideas. The problem was that so much of Colby’s trials on the show involved straight-up torture. Even more than Alex remembered. Brian Dempsey and the other writers really had a fetish for beating him up.

In theory, Devin Ashwood wasn’t a stranger to the concept of “no pain, no gain.” He graced the cover of Men’s Health a few years back and talked ad nauseum about how he and his trainer ordered a replica cannon from Scotland so that Devin could push it up a hill.

Maybe Alex could look up some kind of Olympic training regime. Didn’t Michael Phelps eat like fifteen pizzas a day? Devin would love that.

“Soooo.” Rowen nudged Alex’s knee under the table. “I heard Devin Ashwood is in Tompkins.”

“What? Where?” Alex tensed as if Rowen had read her thoughts. Rookie mistake.

“Cassidy Nowicki was bragging at lunch about how he saw him in the checkout line at the grocery store.”

“Sounds fake,” Alex said, pretending to type on her computer like a movie extra.

“Apparently,” Rowen continued, “when the cashier asked what he was doing in Tompkins, he said he’s in town to work with you as preparation for some top secret movie project.”

“He didn’t.” Alex understood wanting to give an alibi for being in town—but the racehorses were right there.

Rowen shrugged.

“I’m just relaying information…unless it’s true.” They narrowed their eyes, making their forehead freckles converge into one über-freckle in the center.

“Fine. We are working together.” If she and Devin were gonna show up as “fake friends” around town, they’d need a passable origin story. This worked. Barely.

“Wait.” Rowen slammed their book shut. “You’re actually hanging out with a celebrity? What is he like?”

Well. In some ways, Devin Ashwood was exactly what she’d imagined. Thanks to his ego, Alex was now living her very own version of She’s All That .

Except in this case, the popular guy didn’t even pretend he found her fuckable.

It shouldn’t matter that Devin Ashwood wouldn’t deign to fake date her. But Alex’s heart, built for yearning, had never cared about rationality.

Why did he have to go and win over her dad? Of course the man would find Alex’s Achilles’ heel without even trying. She’d never get over her dad’s beaming while Devin devoured his “special recipe” vegan chili.

Alex couldn’t believe all the ways she was still susceptible to him, like he’d been engineered in a lab to make her weak.

She groaned and settled on the only truth she could stomach revealing.

“He’s a big dirtbag puppy.”

“Interesting,” Rowen said, narrowing their gaze.

“What’s interesting?”

“Oh, nothing.” They pretended to pick lint off their T-shirt. “It’s just that puppies are cute.”

“No.” Alex sputtered, arguing with objective truth. “They keep you up all night and poop on the floor.”

Rowen tapped two fingers against their lips. “Would you describe Devin Ashwood as adorable? Cuddly? Do you want to pet his head and let him lick your face?”

“I am a cat person,” Alex said, with as much authority as she could muster.

She didn’t want Rowen to know about any shameful, crush-like feelings she might harbor against her will. It was too embarrassing, too juvenile, too cliché.

Oh, being in forced proximity with the hot actor from your favorite television show made you squirm?

Oh, his voice is so deep in real life that when he stood close you swore you could feel it reverberating against your skin?

For a split second there, you imagined what it would be like to kiss him?

Absolutely mortifying.

Alex was already self-conscious enough about the kind of example she set. She was supposed to be a role model and mentor for Rowen. But why would they trust that she knew anything about being a successful adult when Alex had so little to show for her thirty-four years?

“So what are you guys working on?” Rowen leaned forward on their elbows. “Is it a movie? Is Kristen Stewart gonna play you?”

“Please, we look nothing alike.” Alex flipped Rowen’s copy of Animal Farm back open and handed it over. “And I seriously can’t tell you what we’re working on. I signed an NDA and everything.” Thank god.

Rowen made a face. “What’s an NDA?”

“A nondisclosure agreement. It means he can sue me if I tell you.” Alex wouldn’t have revealed Devin’s secret anyway, even though she didn’t like keeping stuff from Rowen. It was too big. Too personal. Too…raw.

Rowen tsked. “That’s convenient.”

Alex tapped the worn cover of Animal Farm . “If you go back to writing your thesis statement, I promise to draw some new merch designs for the band before your big show at the end of the month.”

Rowen grinned. “Deal.”

Once she’d confirmed they were actually working and not on YouTube, Alex went back to her own laptop.

Ever since that brainstorm session with Cam and Eliza yesterday, she couldn’t stop thinking about how, and more importantly why, Devin’s werewolf experience followed the same rules as Colby’s.

All this would be so much easier if she could lay everything out for them. She’d thought about it the other night, her thumbs hovering over her phone. But while it was one thing to speculate about a celeb, Alex no longer had the same distance from Devin that she used to. Each day he became more real to her. Betraying his trust now would mean more than risking his payout by breaking the NDA.

She had to figure this out on her own.

Everything Devin had shared with her so far about the physical and mental manifestation of the wolf followed Brian Dempsey’s vision to a T, starting with his one-of-a-kind origin. In every other werewolf story, they were either born or bitten. But no. Dempsey had to use a real, extremely rare scientific phenomenon.

As the archive’s mod, Alex had spent decades of her life cataloging Brian Dempsey’s pedantic monologuing. She wasn’t proud of knowing all the tricks to finding his most obscure interviews. But being a fandom archivist was like riding a bike: strange and unnatural. Anyway, she remembered how to search.

Kids today didn’t appreciate the art of creating a keyword bouillon.

“Brian Dempsey” + “Super Blue Blood Moon Eclipse” + “Origin”

Alex scanned the results page and recognized the titles of indie blogs that Brian and the other writers used to drop in on whenever there was a new season to promote. Taking a deep breath, Alex trudged forward into the bowels of Brian Dempsey’s self-proclaimed genius.

Two hours and two bags of Rowen’s homemade trail mix later, she began to despair. There were only so many times she could read the ramblings of a cis het white guy before her eyeballs started to bleed.

Scanning what felt like the millionth TV zine, Alex hit command F on autopilot.

Q: One of the things that sets The Arcane Files apart from other werewolf stories is the origin. What made you decide to tie Colby’s transformation to a real but exceptionally rare type of moon?

BD: I’m about to get a little personal here.

Alex rolled her eyes. If Brian Dempsey started talking about how he hand sharpened all his writing pencils again, she was bailing.

BD: Obsession with the moon runs in my family. It’s a bit of a folktale passed down across generations, but my great-great-grandfather Zachariah Dempsey was convinced he was a werewolf. I guess he somehow figured out that his home was at the exact sublunar point of the last super blue blood moon eclipse and he was adamant that meant fate had chosen him.

Wait, what? Alex leaned forward, scrubbing at the screen with the sleeve of her chambray, but the words didn’t change.

Q: So you used your family folklore as inspiration for the werewolf world-building on The Arcane Files ?

BD: Yeah, exactly. I went home for Christmas break during my senior year at NYU and I’m trying to write my pilot, you know how it is, when down in my dad’s basement I find all these journals about my ancestor’s “werewolf powers” just sitting there. So I start going through them, and the details are wild. I mean, they jump off the page. It was so clearly nonsense, but at the same time, I knew it would make a great TV show.

“Oh my god.” Alex put her face in her hands. Bright lights flashed behind her closed eyelids. Somehow the idea of the werewolf lore of The Arcane Files , the rules of which she’d carefully cataloged over the course of decades, not being fictional was harder to believe than Devin Ashwood standing in front of her with claws and fangs.

Was it possible? That Devin’s werewolf experience wasn’t simply mirroring Colby’s, but that they were one and the same?

Anyone can be a werewolf, but there can only be one. The voice-over that played at the end of the opening credits rang in her ears.

The wolf blood moon eclipse came once every 150 years, but the sublunar point would change every time.

Could the right set of coordinates rob you of your humanity?

With shaking hands, Alex pulled out her phone and texted Devin for the address of the last place he remembered going on the night of the full moon.

Once he replied, it was easy enough to put the address in Google Maps and pull the coordinates. To Google for the last full moon’s sublunar point and confirm the match.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” It was wild that Brian Dempsey’s mining of his family history for world-building hadn’t been a bigger story in the fandom. That Alex herself hadn’t cataloged it at some point in her quest to compile a single source for show lore. But scrolling further through the same interview, she found the culprit. The reason she and so many others had likely glazed over Brian Dempsey’s signature self-important rambling if they found themselves on this tiny, obscure blog littered in the detritus of the old web.

At the bottom of the interview, Dempsey heavily hinted that fans could expect to see a “culmination of the long-simmering tension between Colby and Nathaniel in season eight.” Classic BD queer baiting. He knew how many fans tuned in every week hoping to see their favorite blatantly implied ship made canon.

The promised “culmination” never came to fruition, of course. But the fandom lived for those kinds of crumbs back in the day. It was a sick cycle and just one of the many reasons Alex had complex feelings about her love for The Arcane Files , even all these years after its demise.

“?‘Just when I think I’m out,’?” Alex quoted under her breath, “?‘they pull me back in.’?”

“You know,” Rowen said, “for someone who brought me here to work on my English paper, you sure are randomly exclaiming a lot.”

“Sorry,” Alex said, sheepish. “It’s been a really weird couple of days.”