A Skeleton in the Family (5 page)

T
he next couple of days were pleasantly occupied. I met with my Tuesday-Thursday classes, had lunch with Charles, and visited a craft store to pick up supplies for Sid. Madison stayed busy with homework and texting friends new and old, while Sid worked on his ensemble. All three of us were up bright and early Saturday morning to go to McQuaid for the con.

Fortunately for my budget, Madison had decided not to cosplay, or as most people would say, she wasn't going in costume. Instead she would be wearing jeans and a carefully chosen geek-chic T-shirt—specifically the one with the Pokémon/My Little Pony crossover character My Little Ponyta. To further identify her favored fandoms, she had a messenger bag with an assortment of pin-back badges.

As for Sid, I stashed his costume and Sid himself in the back of the minivan while Madison was in the shower. He and I had concocted a detailed plan for getting him into the convention without her seeing him, but we needn't have bothered. I'd barely pulled into the parking lot when Madison hopped out of the van, and said, “Cosplay chess is starting, and I've got to go meet people! I'll text you!” Then she was gone.

That meant I could save my ninja skills for another time, and instead openly pulled out the garment bag and the wheeled suitcase from the van before heading for my parents' office. Once I was inside with the door locked and window blinds down, I zipped open the suitcase. “The coast is clear.”

“Thank goodness,” Sid said with an audible gasp. “I couldn't breathe in there!”

He really hated riding in the suitcase. It was a hard-sided bag with a pattern that had been advertised as antelope, but looked like bacon to me.

“Coming to the con was your idea,” I reminded him. “And since when do you breathe?”

He ignored me as he pulled himself together, something I hadn't seen for a while, and it never ceases to amaze me. One second he was a pile of bones, and the next he was connected again and climbing out of the suitcase. It only took him a few minutes and a little help from me to put on his costume.

Shinigami from
Soul Eater
, also known as Lord Death, wears a black-hooded robe with lots of jagged edges and a kind of black lightning bolt on top of his head. The robe covers everything but his face and hands, which was why the character was a great choice for Sid.

In a touch of irony that made me snicker, Sid was actually wearing a stylized skull mask over his normal skull face because Shinigami is a cartoon. Besides which, he needed to disguise the fact that there was nothing in his skull but dust.

Shinigami's hands are flat, oversized, and have only four fingers—I think they look more like hockey gloves than anything else—and he uses them to administer his signature move: the Direct Noggin Shinigami Chop. Since Sid was hoping to do some chopping in order to stay in character, he'd made his hands out of foam rubber to avoid damaging anybody.

The shoes were the hardest part. Sid's bony feet are close to the length of a normal person's, but don't have the meat to fill up a shoe, so we'd had to pad them with more foam rubber, put socks over them, then jam them into my father's black snow boots. It didn't look stable, but Sid managed it well enough.

“How do I look?” he said when he had it all on.

“Like death.”

“Perfect!”

I handed him his name badge. I'd gone to the convention's registration table Friday afternoon to sign up the three of us, telling Madison it was to avoid standing in line on Saturday when in fact it was to hide the fact that I was buying three badges instead of just two. So as soon as Sid and I made arrangements to meet later on, he was ready to go, and after I made sure the coast was clear, he slipped out of the office. I waited a few minutes before I followed to make sure nobody knew we were together.

As I walked across the quad several yards behind him, I could tell from the spring in his step that Sid was having a wonderful time being out of the house. I'd really neglected him for the past few years, but it wasn't easy for me to tend to him when I was living elsewhere, not to mention the fact that Madison was my priority for tending to. From some of the things Sid had said—and hadn't said—I was realizing that while Mom and Phil hadn't exactly ignored him, neither had they made lots of time for him. He was lonely.

Watching him as he encountered his first batch of fellow cosplayers on the quad, I decided I was going to have to get him out more, no matter how much of a pain it was going to be. By the time we both reached the student center, the building where most of the con's events were being held, Sid was surrounded by people and he was posing for photos and happily performing the Shinigami chop. He was having so much fun he didn't even notice me passing by.

I picked up a program book and found a quiet corner in which to look over the schedule of events. There were signing sessions by people I'd never heard of, panels on manga and anime with which I was unfamiliar, and classes in creating costumes. I decided to forgo those pleasures to visit the artists' alley, where artists of all skill levels were hawking wares ranging from prints of anime characters, pin-back badges with obscure jokes, crocheted Pokémon characters, hand-crafted jewelry, and an amazing assortment of T-shirts.

I took my time making the rounds, not that I had much of a choice. The room was packed solid with excited otaku. It must have taken me a solid hour to make my way past all the tables, and I was on my way out when I ran into Madison and a group of friends clustered around a table labeled Interrobang Studios.

“Mom,” she said, “Kevin Bolk is here!”

I racked my brains, trying to remember why the presence of Kevin Bolk was so wondrous. Fortunately for my mom cred, I caught a glimpse of a picture of a character I recognized from a book Madison had left lying around. “The guy who does
Ensign Sue Must Die
?”

She nodded. “He's taking commissions for sketches, but he's almost booked up. Do you think we can—?”

“How much?”

She told me. “Can we afford it?”

I probably shouldn't have, but I am nothing if not a rapid rationalizer. I'd just started a new job, the security deposit for my old apartment had taken care of my most pressing bills, and we were going to be saving a lot of money by living in my parents' house. “Sure, we can swing it.” I pulled the money out of my wallet and got the requisite kiss before she turned away to talk to the revered artist.

I escaped to the hallway, where there was actually enough air to breathe, then made a circuit of the dealers' room. Another glance at the program book confirmed that I wasn't missing anything I wanted to see, so I found a table at the campus deli counter—creatively named Campus Deli—where I could pull out my laptop and pretend to work while I watched people go by.

Despite my ignorance about most manga—my experience was pretty much limited to Pokémon, Sailor Moon, and Speed Racer—I felt at home in the crowd. I was an old-school nerd myself:
Star Trek
, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Still, a nerd is a nerd is a nerd. I idly speculated for a few minutes about putting together a research project about generational nerd culture—which books were considered essential to different age groups. Then I remembered how many papers I'd be grading for the next few months and the concept seemed much less compelling.

Deborah wasn't wrong when she tried to push me to publish more—along with attracting fat grants, publishing research was the tried-and-true way for achieving tenure. I'd just never been able to manage the research in addition to the heavy adjunct teaching loads in addition to being a single parent. Sleeping took up an unreasonable amount of my time, too. So instead of outlining a brilliant project, I spent the next few hours reading up on the next month's classes so I could be more than one day ahead of my students.

I saw Sid go by a few times, and he even gave me a friendly chop, to the amusement of the other attendees. Madison wandered by, too, but just long enough to grab half the order of nachos I'd intended to hog all to myself. My daughter has a highly effective radar system for sensing when I've scored junk food. Fortunately I'm used to her methods, so I kept the M&M's hidden until she'd zoomed off again.

About mid-afternoon, as I was wondering if there were more comfortable seats available elsewhere in the building, I saw adjunct-slash-reporter Fletcher Wildman making his way through the crowded hall, stopping now and then to take photos. I waited to wave until his viewfinder was aimed in my general direction, and he came over.

“May I join you?” he asked.

“Please do.” I shoved my accumulating trash to one side so he wouldn't feel like he was sitting down at a garbage heap. “Are you here as an otaku or as a reporter?”

“Definitely as a reporter, and I'm hoping otaku isn't some obscure insult.”

“Yes and no, actually. In Japan, it's a derogatory term for anime and manga fans—like a nerd or a geek—but American fans call themselves otaku proudly. So no insult was intended.”

“That's good to know.” He pulled out a long, spiral-bound pad labeled
Reporter's Notebook
. “How do you spell that?”

I told him.

“Can I assume you're an otaku yourself?”

“I'm afraid not. I've never mastered the technique of reading books backwards, which limits my enjoyment of manga substantially. I'm here with my daughter.”

“Damn, I was hoping for a guide to this strange new world in which I've found myself.”

“I can help you with the basics—I've taken Madison to quite a few anime cons.”

“That would be great,” he said and, with a total lack of subtlety, checked my left hand for a wedding band, earning points by looking pleased by the seductive sight of my bare finger.

I gave him the same treatment, and was glad to see that his ring finger was equally exposed.

Fletcher said, “I'm really out of my comfort zone, and I'm not at all sure what these people are dressed as. They are photogenic, though.”

“Cosplay is a big part of the anime/manga scene,” I said, and launched into an overview of the tropes of the field, mentioning some of the most popular fandoms and identifying some of the characters walking by, including Sid in his robe. Fletcher scribbled furiously, and suddenly I realized I'd been talking for a solid half an hour. “I'm sorry—I went into lecture mode, didn't I?”

“No, no, this is great. My editor wants a long feature, and I didn't know where to start. Can I buy you a drink to thank you?”

“A Diet Coke would be great.” After all, I'd been talking a long time.

“You got it.” When he returned, he bought a couple of extra-large chocolate chip cookies, too, and since it would have been churlish of me to reject his offering, I graciously accepted one.

“I take it that anime conventions aren't part of your usual beat,” I said in between bites.

“My editor doesn't believe in beats—she thinks a reporter should be able to cover anything from a car crash to a city council meeting to a high school football game.”

“Which means she doesn't have to hire as many reporters.”

He nodded. “Back when I had a beat of my own, it was business. I'm a whiz at IPOs, zoning legislation, and retail strategy. Ask me anything.”

“I'll take your word for it. How did you end up at the
Gazette
?”

“Newspapers aren't exactly a growth market. I got laid off, and had to decide if I wanted to try TV, learn to blog, or go for a smaller paper. I thought I'd prefer the newspaper, but I don't know if I'm cut out to be a general reporter. Next weekend I'm covering a kids' soccer tournament and I know less about soccer than I now know about anime. I don't suppose you—?”

“Sorry, Madison always took drama classes during soccer season. But if I might make a suggestion?”

“Please.”

“You've got a class full of would-be journalists, and chances are that several of them play or have played soccer. Give it to them as a class assignment. You might have to do some editing, but still, you'll get the article and they'll get a publication credit.”

“That's brilliant!”

“Moderately,” I conceded, “but it's an old adjunct trick. I've let students critique one anothers' compositions to cut down on my grading, and let them guest lecture on short stories and poems. They learn a lot, and it saves me work. A win-win situation. I've even worked deals with other adjuncts. I realized I had a class full of kids who didn't know what it meant to fact-check, so I had my students critique papers for a bunch of history students, who then helped my students learn basic research techniques. It took some coordinating, but both classes started producing better work.”

“Wow. You know all the tricks.”

“Only because I've been an adjunct ever since I got out of grad school. McQuaid is my—” I paused to count it out on my fingers. “McQuaid is my seventh college.”

“And I thought college professors had it easy with the tenure system.”

“Once upon a time, sure, but more and more schools are using adjuncts to save money. They don't pay us as much, they can hire and fire as class sizes change, and they only provide minimal benefits. From a business perspective, it makes all kinds of sense.”

“What about the adjunct's perspective?”

“Most of us would kill for tenure.”

Fletcher blinked.

“Well, we'd maim for it, anyway.”

“I had no idea. You know, this would make a great article. Something meaty, with depth.”

“I can't see the
Gazette
running it. McQuaid is one of their regular advertisers.”

“True, but there are other places I could try.” He glanced at his watch. “Unfortunately, I've got to get going to make today's deadline. I'm so glad I ran into you. This has been really helpful.”