Chapter Eighteen
THERE WERE WORSE places to be than inside Brian Juno’s cushy box at the Wizzard Theater.
Worse places like the minuscule town in Ohio in which Ivan’s parents decided to have their daughter, the minuscule house where they raised her, and the minuscule bedroom-slash-office they converted when a second child arrived twelve years after the first. Even as a kid Ivan knew that he was somewhat supplementary to the plan his parents made for their lives, and for his sister’s, so he endeavored to spend as little time in that house as necessary, and he succeeded.
The trick to staying out of the house was to make as many other people as possible desire his company.
When he was a kid, Ivan maintained a packed schedule of sleepovers, spaghetti dinners at the neighbors’ houses, camping trips, and anything else that kept him away from the borrowed feeling he felt whenever he crossed the threshold to his childhood home.
Invitations were his currency, and invitations only came when people wanted you around.
To his peers, Ivan radiated the kind of nice-guy coolness that makes teachers and authority figures disbelieve the stereotype of popular kids.
He knew everyone’s birthday, their favorite color, what games they played and how to beat them, and prided himself on making at least one person feel special every day.
To his neighbors he was a Good Kid, attending church on Sundays with one family, Saturday service at his town’s only synagogue with another, complimenting each casserole-bearing doyenne when they shyly unfolded the tinfoil lids keeping their post-service luncheon hot in the basement or meeting hall.
He found if he was pleasant enough and asked people questions that got them talking about themselves, no one minded when he declined to participate further in their religion because as far as Ivan was concerned, God was bagels.
Ivan grew up cooking with moms, memorizing all kinds of sports statistics to chop it up with the dads, smiling at the girls who rarely got smiles, and holding court with guys who weren’t sure if they wanted to kick him, date him, or be him.
He was good at being liked almost wherever he went, shapeshifting from one paragon to another, and it was fucking exhausting.
Rather, it had been exhausting. Recently Ivan had caught a break. A huge, Zora-shaped break. A girl, a whole, complicated, brilliant, outrageously hot girl who saw exactly who Ivan was underneath the countless layers of people-pleasing character work. And she liked what she saw. Eventually.
He knew when he met Zora that she was someone special.
At the time he assumed “special” meant “put on this earth to test me,” but looking back there was something else he’d felt when he first looked into her clever black eyes: he felt seen.
Back then the feeling was terrible—nothing he said or did charmed her or convinced her to give him the little bit of leeway he’d been cultivating with other people since he learned to talk.
Christ, she literally met him once before she decided to shoot him in the face, and he deserved it!
The night of the Fourth, when the fireworks had finished and the two of them walked back toward Lincoln Center, Ivan admitted to Zora how shook he’d been that day.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I thought about you,” he’d said.
The hundreds of people leaving Central Park after the fireworks had caught up with them, cocooning both Zora and Ivan in the cozy anonymity of a summer-drunk (and probably drunk-drunk) evening crowd.
“After Wizzcon. Couldn’t get you out of my head, really. ”
“Same,” Zora admitted. “Usually after I beat someone, I don’t think about them ever again, but you got under my skin like a splinter. At first I thought I just had a wildly overdeveloped sense of revenge—”
“You do. Inigo Montoya–ass.”
“—but that wasn’t totally the reason why. The memory just stayed frozen up there in my head. When you touched my shoulder, when you looked at me. I was just so … I thought it was angry? Though now I realize it was probably something else. Horny-angry. Horngry.”
That was the least sexy thing Ivan had ever heard, so he kissed her.
“I can’t pretend around you,” he’d said later, as they idled outside their building, too caught up in the heat of the day and each other to head inside just yet. “Scares the shit out of me.”
“I can tell,” Zora replied. “It’s hilarious.” Ivan laughed at that, imagining a sign attached to the left side of Zora’s chest. Do not enter, it read, invitingly. “I can’t pretend around you either. Or anyone, really. I’m a single-speed bike.”
“It’s the best speed. My favorite speed, my only speed. If it’s over the speed limit, I’m getting a ticket.”
“Relax.” Zora hadn’t meant it unkindly. She’d swung around on a No Parking street sign and used the momentum to kiss him again. “And, yeah, I do see the irony of my uptight ass telling you to relax.”
“Watch it,” Ivan said in the thankfully brief moments when her mouth wasn’t interrupting his mouth. “Just because you’re my fake girlfriend doesn’t mean I won’t fight you for talking shit about my fake girlfriend.”
“Oh.” Zora pulled away and tilted her head thoughtfully. “Right. That. Should we maybe—”
“Narrative consistency,” he’d reminded her. “Is just ‘girlfriend’ fine?”
She had sighed, rested her head on his shoulder (which, by the way, top five physical contact moment EVER), and grumbled into his shirt. “I guess. So now we’re real dating for clout? That’s …”
“Convenient,” Ivan admitted.
“I was going to say ‘worse,’” Zora corrected. “But sure.”
After slipping back into the dorm along with the massive rush of fellow students, they wound up on the couch.
The only light in the common room was coming from the illuminated menu screen for Super Smash Bros.
, which they would eventually play that night—now that they’d mastered working as a team, they could get right back to destroying each other.
Just not right then. There was more to talk about, and more important questions to ask.
“How did we not figure this out sooner?” Zora whined, quiet despite them having the dorm to themselves for the rest of the night.
“We’re dumb,” Ivan reasoned, his words partially muffled on account of his lips being pressed against Zora’s long, beautifully brown neck. “We’re so, so dumb.”
“The dumbest,” she’d agreed. “Kiss right above my collarbone.”
“And you’re bossy,” was one of the many words he’d said against her skin that night.
Ahem. But Ivan digressed. It was so much easier to maintain their romance hustle when it wasn’t a hustle at all.
The chemistry between himself and Zora hadn’t necessarily changed, but the whole vibe of their #content was totally different when they weren’t wasting time fighting the metaphorical moonlight.
They played better as well, with the Wizz-Algorithm skyrocketing both of them up in the ranks.
In short, absolutely everything was coming up Ivan.
At the end of August, Ivan looked forward to Zora taking her rightful place as Brian’s mentee, while he happily ascended to the captaincy of the New York Guardians League Online team.
Where his team would compete against Emilia and Jake, to whom he and Zora would continue to be compared, which would be bad because Ivan knew Emilia deserved a very wide berth when it came to him.
Nope. That was a tomorrow problem. Today, Ivan had leverage, ideas, and he had Zora.
“We need to talk,” Brian said within seconds of Zora closing the door behind her, leaving Brian and Ivan alone.
Well, that was never a good sign. Nevertheless, Ivan’s optimism refused to wane.
The fact that Brian had asked Zora to join them on their walk to his office was a positive sign that things were going the way he’d hoped.
Captaincy for him, and a mentorship for Zora, if they continued playing their cards right.
And assuming Brian Juno wasn’t about to do something wack, like right now.
Brian had a rolling table set up in front of his usual leather recliner and was hunched forward in his seat to tap at the keyboard of a Wizzard-branded laptop.
“You shouldn’t sit like that,” Ivan advised, eager to defuse the unusual tension in the room. “Terrible for your back.”
“I tell you what to do.” Brian’s voice was flat. Uncompromising. “Not the other way around.”
Ivan held his hands up. “Sorry, sheesh. Just looking out for your spine.”
“Look out for yourself,” Brian said, still short and cold. Ivan felt a sharp twinge behind his stomach. If everything was going as well as he thought, why did it feel like Ivan was about to get in trouble?
His answer came when Brian turned his laptop screen around. “Care to explain?”
Ivan squinted at the screen, his eyes not totally adjusted to the darkness from the brightly lit main hall, and made an informed guess: this was the backend of the summer academy members’ social accounts, which were technically owned by Wizzard.
Brian had pulled out some data and auto-visualized it in a chart that showed some line or other trending slowly down.
“Explain what?” Ivan asked.
“Explain why you and Zora’s metrics have been trending toward the toilet since the first week of July.”
“They are?” It was news to Ivan. “But our rankings have barely dipped.”
“And then there’s this.” Brian clicked around and pulled up another window, this one with comments on Ivan’s latest stream.
> Is anyone else kind of over Zivan?
> I miss when they kinda sniped at each other
> Booooooring.
> Are Zora and Ivan bad at science? Because they’re failing chemistry
“That last one’s clever,” Ivan flattered sarcastically.
“The problem,” Brian began, in a tone that suggested Ivan must have failed more than just chemistry, “is that we’re in the last week of this program and things need to start heating up, not cooling down.”