Chapter 7
Will was in the screaming cupboard for less than a minute before he heard the bell chime over the front door of the shop. The screaming cupboard at Gilroy Sons Rare Secondhand Books long predated Will’s employment there, as integral to the smooth running of the place as the stacks of musty volumes on its cramped, crowded shelves. On his first day, April had even pointed it out during the “grand tour” of the narrow, single-floor space, as if giving him directions to the loo: “Stockroom on the left, little fridge and kettle at the back—we take it in turns buying milk—and then we’ve got the screaming cupboard next to the sink.”
“Sorry,” Will cut in. “Screaming cupboard?”
April had just given him a bright smile and said, “You’ll see.”
At the time, he thought she was joking—after all, how stressful could selling secondhand books possibly be?—but gamely ate his words after having his first customer-related meltdown, making full use of the shop’s screaming facilities within a week of starting.
It wasn’t that the job came with a particularly heavy workload, or even that Yvonne Gilroy, widow to one of the “ Sons,” was a bad boss: She mostly left Will and April to their own devices. But he had underestimated the challenges of dealing with the more finicky collectors, and the painstaking work of verifying provenance before they would even consider making a purchase, not to mention the chancers who would come in with their childhood copies of The Famous Five, complete with Crayola scrawls and missing pages, expecting a windfall and kicking up a fuss when none was forthcoming. Bookselling was still retail, after all, and the average customer seemed to still be under the impression that they were always right.
Aside from inventory, these fruitless, maddening conversations took up the lion’s share of Will’s working day. But rarely was he ever truly rushed off his feet: In between the occasional “decompression session” in the screaming cupboard, he was still able to spend hours behind the counter reading some doorstopper or surreptitiously planning his next gig. Frankly, he wasn’t sure how the Gilroy family made any money at all and was nursing a suspicion that rare books were simply a less conspicuous front for money-laundering than vape shops and bubble tea.
Today’s visit to the screaming cupboard was a combination of hangover—Will started each of his nights at the Village with the intent to stay sober, but like any family, the local gays were easier to love with a drink inside him—and lingering embarrassment from his run-in with Ry.
The chime of the door that drew Will back to the present signaled the arrival of April, who was placing two coffees and a bag of pastries on the counter as Will emerged.
“My hero,” he whispered, as much to the coffee as to April.
“I got you, girl,” she said, brushing imaginary dust off the shoulder of what looked like the latest addition to her collection of X-Men T-shirts. Storm! it proclaimed. Mistress of the Elements! Paired with April’s Black Girl Magic choker, it gave the overall impression of somebody who enjoyed making pathetic white men cry on the internet. Which Will happened to know was her second favorite pastime, after ranking comic book superheroes by their bums. It was a list with ever-changing criteria, from size to pertness to number of appearances on the page, with a whole separate appendix detailing how well the artist seemed to understand the mechanics of the human body. April regularly sent him posts from her blog, and because Will was a good friend, he would always dutifully contribute a click toward her traffic. And while he didn’t always read the entire thing, he certainly enjoyed the pictures.
Between sips of an Americano, Will regaled April with the story of last night.
“I can’t believe I met Patrick Lake and Audra Kelly with a skew-whiff tit,” he moaned around a mouthful of pain au chocolat. Because yes, seeing his ex had been awkward, perhaps even a tiny bit painful, but the thing he kept going back to about last night wasn’t Ry and his unexamined shame around engaging in queer culture. It wasn’t the parallel-universe version of Will that Ry had plucked out of a Planet Fitness to be his new boo. It wasn’t even the crooked breastplate, although that last detail did still smart a bit.
It was the look Patrick Lake had given him, for just a second, before turning to get into the car. A movie-star smile was all well and good, but Will had spent enough time performing in his own little corner of the world to know that they never quite reached the eyes. Patrick Lake had smiled at him as if he really saw him and, even more, was pleased by what he saw.
Or maybe that had just been the poppers. Either way, it didn’t matter. Small-town drag queens and big-time actors didn’t make the most natural bedfellows, and even if Will was a little bit lonely, and Patrick Lake looked like the platonic ideal of masculinity as sketched by Leonardo, it was also evident that he was a Big Straight. And that was a game Will refused to play, because nobody won. A crush on a straight guy was permissible in the very early and confusing years of figuring yourself out and no later, he reasoned. In fact, fancying a straight man was much like fancying a celebrity: unlikely to get you anywhere. So why couldn’t he stop thinking about that smile?
“Think of it this way,” said April. “Wonky boobs or not, you saved the day. Stopped a couple of superstars from being mobbed by a horde of drunk gays. Give yourself some credit.”
“Hmm,” Will said, going through the short stack of messages Yvonne had left on Post-its next to the phone. Somebody inquiring as to whether their grandfather’s Jeffrey Archer collection might be worth “a bob or two,” the window cleaner calling to reschedule, and a request for something called…
“The Omega Issue?” He said it as a question, picking up the scrap of paper and turning to April. “Why do I feel like I’ve heard of that before?”
April’s face lit up. “You actually do read my blog!”
“Huh?”
“That thing is like the Holy Grail for nerds,” April explained. “It’s said to contain the original ending to Captain Kismet’s first twelve-issue storyline, before Wonder Magazine decided the character was worth keeping around and rebooted his origin story. Can you believe that? They almost didn’t realize what they had on their hands. Without Captain Kismet, none of the Wonderverse would even exist.”
“You mean we almost didn’t live in a world where the only thing at the cinema every summer is a three-hour showcase of CGI that exists solely as a marketing ploy for the post-credit scene that teases the next three-hour origin story?”
“Don’t be such a cynic, it’ll give you crow’s feet.” April slid a miniature Danish to her side of the counter in admonishment. “These stories mean a lot to people, Will. When Walter Haywood first came up with the character of Richard Ranger, the Second World War was barely in the rearview mirror. All that pain and loss…Captain Kismet was like a beacon of hope. A reminder that standing up for what’s right is always worth it, no matter the cost.”
“In other words, propaganda.”
“You really can be such a grumpy wretch, you know that?” April took a sip of coffee. “All of that was seventy years and a couple billion dollars ago, of course. Before Wonder Comics stripped back all the nuance and turned him into this hypermasculine power fantasy. There was one storyline last year where he basically acted like a police officer, protecting the status quo and the property of his millionaire friend when aliens invaded. There are a whole bunch of fascists who treat him like a mascot for the American dream. By which they mean a straight cis dude’s right to do whatever the hell he likes without reproach. Of course, these are the same people who think Jesus was a white guy.”
Everybody had their respective areas of passionate research. Will’s were Project Runway—discounting the newer seasons—and Taylor Swift. Margo claimed to know so much about wine that he often suspected her of faking it, although she could clock a corked Shiraz at twenty paces. Jordan was a walking encyclopedia when it came to LGBTQ+ history, frequently using that knowledge to bolster or rationalize his more outlandish pronouncements. For April, it was all things superhero. She lived and breathed this stuff, could deliver a TED Talk at the drop of a hat on how depictions of people of color in Wonderverse comics had evolved alongside shifting social attitudes in the twentieth century. The glee with which she spoke about alternate timelines and heroic archetypes was one of the many things that Will loved about her. And it was this love that softened his ire as April devoured the last remaining pastry, maintaining eye contact with him the entire time.
“Reparations,” she quipped, with her mouth full. It was a joke she liked to make often, and the first time she’d said it to Will he had nearly choked to death on white guilt.
“So you don’t think there’s much chance of us tracking down this Omega Issue, then?”
April shrugged. “There’s no proof that there was even an official printing, let alone that any copies made it over here from the States. If we did manage to find one, it’d probably be out of this client’s price range.”
“In other words…?”
“A lot of work, for which Yvonne would be very unlikely to reimburse us,” April summarized.
“Message received,” Will said, screwing up the paper along with the empty pastry bag and tossing both into the bin under the counter.
After work, Will made the short walk down to the Bullring outdoor market, where Margo still insisted on buying all of her vegetables before going to the MS Food Hall for her “nicer bits.”
“I knew it! Thief!” she shouted as Will approached, because he had not done any washing in a while and had simply picked up her pilfered shirt from his bedroom floor that morning, given it a cursory sniff, and put it back on.
“I only steal from the best,” Will said, grinning with what he hoped was sufficient charm.
“You look tired.” This came not from Margo but from her teenager. Dylan loitered slightly behind Margo, swathed in black, at a carefully gauged distance so nobody would dare presume they were here helping their mum shop. Dylan had been so sweet a mere matter of months ago. Now they wore all black and spent most of their time mangling chords with their mates in a band called the War on Christmas.
“Hey, Dylan, nice to see you can venture out of your room from time to time,” Will said loudly. “I was beginning to think you were a vampire.”
“Sun ages the skin,” said Dylan. “I figured you’d know that by now.”
Little bitch, Will thought proudly. Ever since declaring over a game of Monopoly that they were exploring their nonbinary identity, Dylan had stepped up their shade game. Will liked to think he could take some credit for that, but every now and then Dylan would remind him just how ruthless a disaffected teen could be.
“My skin is more snatched than the Lindbergh baby,” Will replied.
“What’s that?” Dylan asked, tilting their head. “How old are you again?”
“Dylan, be nice to your uncle,” said Margo. “He doesn’t live with us anymore, his natural immunity to your barbs is diminishing.” She kissed Will on the temple and held up a basket of tomatoes. “Do these piccolos look like they’ll last the week?”
“They look so ready to go the distance I might buy a ring.”
“You’re in a good mood.”
“I am. I fought my hangover and I won. Also, you are going to freak when I tell you who I met last night.”
He trailed behind his sister, launching into the tale. Margo barely looked up from the aubergines she was examining when he mentioned Patrick Lake. Will wondered at first if she was really listening, or if last night did not make as good a story as he thought.
Margo, it turned out, was listening; she just wasn’t impressed. Which was in keeping with her entire personality.
“The first Kismet movie was awful,” she said. “Me and Dylan watched it on our last film night.”
“Aww, you guys still have film night?” Will teased.
“Barely ever!” Dylan protested, clearly mortified by the idea that anyone would know they still spent Sunday nights curled up on the sofa under a blanket with their mother.
“I never saw it.” Will shrugged.
“He was quite good in that other thing, though,” said Margo, holding up a punnet of mushrooms in each hand for scrutiny. “I forget what it’s called. You know, the action thing.”
“You could quite literally be describing anything.”
“She means the spy thriller,” said Dylan, tone exhausted. “The Bullet Journal.”
“Do you have dinner plans?” Margo asked, handing Dylan her tote bag, which was now brimming with fresh produce.
Will thought of his empty fridge and his near-empty bank account.
“I was thinking I might grab myself some sushi,” he said.
“Nice. Ten Ichi?”
“Tesco.”
“Absolutely not.” Margo gagged. “Supermarket sushi is the pits, Will. You don’t get to eat like a poor student when you never actually went to uni.”
“The reduced-to-clear aisle is actually a very happening spot this time of day,” said Will. “Lots of eligible divorced dads. Come with me. You never know, you might meet someone.”
Just as he had hoped, Margo grabbed Will by the shoulder and steered him toward the indoor fish market. “There’s a great place here where you eat at the counter,” she said. “We’ll all go. My treat. I’ve decided I can’t be arsed to cook.”
“Yes!” Dylan pumped their fist, then immediately acted like they hadn’t. Will smiled.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, not even bothering to try to sound genuine.
Margo just shook her head. “Supermarket sushi. Honestly, Will. You need to want more for yourself.”
Will allowed himself to be led into the hall, stomach already rumbling at the thought of a dragon roll. Maybe some seaweed. Ooh, and that tasty fried-pumpkin thing he liked. Perhaps afterward, he would go back outside to the rag market and eye up some fabric for his next costume.
Who needs movie stars, he thought, when you’ve got a sister who’ll pay for dinner?