Don't Cosplay with My Heart Read online

  To the boy in comics I like the most.

  Which when I wrote this book was you.

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One–Summer: Angeles Comic Con

  Chapter One

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two–Fall: HeroQuest Con

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three–Winter: Team Tomorrow Fan Event

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Team Tomorrow

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Four–Summer: San Diego Comic Con

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  It’s no wonder when I see the cheap Gargantua mask I picked up on Free Comic Book Day this past spring on my desk, I put it on and leave it on when I am called down to dinner. Gargantua, my favorite character from Team Tomorrow, is ten feet tall and so is the size of my being pissed off at everything right now.

  “Take that mask off, Edan,” my dad says when he sees me.

  “No,” I say. “You can’t force me to.”

  I make myself comfortable at the table. I feel indestructible. He cannot say anything to me with any authority.

  “Edan. It is impossible to eat with that on,” he says.

  “No, it’s not, see.” I shove the fork into my mouth and chew big and exaggerated. Truth be told, the plastic does cut into the side of my face a little, and it’s a bit hard to chew, but not enough to make eating impossible.

  Nothing is impossible for Gargantua. You don’t have to have read every Team Tomorrow comic book to know that.

  Right now in my heart, it is like a classic superhero battle between good and evil. It is every feeling all at once run amok. I could go down either path.

  “Let Edan be,” my mom says quietly.

  “This is one of my last dinners with my family, Mel,” my dad says. “I want it to be nice.”

  No matter how delicious the food is in front of us, no matter how many candles are lit, this is not going to be a nice dinner at all.

  The past few months, there have been quiet rumbles in the family. My dad has been different. Cagey. It started with fights with my mom behind closed doors. Then there were late-night sneak-outs for meetings at the office and worried long phone calls at strange hours. And now it’s all come out. “There’s an inquiry at the corporate head office,” he explains, and Dad has to be sequestered.

  “You shouldn’t have gotten involved with this mess,” my mom’s voice warbles.

  My dad is with a company that deals with payroll for Hollywood productions, and from what I can understand from all of his recent overexplaining and question dodging about the situation we’re in, some of the money meant for one place went to pay for another place and some of the money didn’t get to where it was supposed to end up at all. And now that it’s been discovered, he’s the one left holding the bag.

  “Why aren’t Mark and Bobby and Lawrence and Tyler part of the inquiry?” Her voice may be cracking into a million pieces, but she slams the table with her hands with the force of a person wielding superhuman strength when she asks the question. It startles everyone because it is so unexpected.

  “You have to understand the corporate structure,” Dad says, trying to mansplain things to her. “There’s a hierarchy. The team has a plan for how this is going to roll out. I’m going first.”

  My mother snorts.

  “I was a senior VP at a production company once upon a time,” she says. “I know how these things go.”

  Mom pushes her full plate away from her.

  “I just can’t,” Mom says, and then it’s as though all of a sudden the fight she had in her just winks away.

  I adjust my Gargantua mask and then push my plate away in solidarity.

  “May I be excused?” I ask, even though everyone here at this table knows that no one needs permission to do anything anymore. I cannot get into trouble, because whatever he’s allegedly done is way worse than anything that I’ve ever done or likely will ever do.

  Unless I go totally rogue like Gargantua did when she was betrayed.

  She was one of the original members of the team until she left and changed from good to bad and then back to good-ish again.

  Gargantua was fierce and did terrible things when she turned against the team. But can you blame her? When they fought their enemy, Split Second in the Time War, a choice was made by Team Tomorrow to save the area where New Big City would one day be from winking out of time. It was a cold calculation meant to cause minimum damage to the team, but the result was that Gargantua’s whole history was wiped out of time. The team tricked her into sacrificing her past so they could save the future. It was for the greater good, but it devastated her and altered her view of the world.

  Gargantua went rogue and systematically destroyed the life of one of her former team members’ relatives in revenge.

  But of course, that just left her hollow. Most people will go along with anything to keep their past and keep their friends. Maybe that’s why Dad was acting like it was all going to be all right. Maybe it’s easier.

  Instead, Gargantua became a woman without a past and without friends. But that was only until they rebooted the team and started back at issue 1. In comics, the stories always change.

  My dad looks from Mom to me, and back to her again. He shakes his head from side to side sadly. He doesn’t even try to use his charming smile on us.

  There is only raw truth served up at this table now. And it’s pretty ugly.

  “Do what you want,” he sighs. He knows he’s lost this round.

  My mom and I both quit the table, leaving him looking small and crumpled as he sits alone.

  Mom goes to bed, even though it’s only 7:00 p.m.

  I head to the family room to play video games. Only exploring fantastical realms and destroying evil aliens can get me through the night. This time while I’m playing the game, I do something that I never do. I make all the bad choices. The ones that get me totally into the personality red rather than the blue. I am evil.

  It feels really good to not follow my regular path.

  Maybe it’s the Gargantua mask that makes me bolder in my game-playing choices.

  The most interesting thing I notice is that all these parts of the story I had never seen before in
this game, my third play through, open up. It is as though I am playing a whole new game and becoming a whole new me.

  Maybe I need to be her more and me less.

  This kills a few hours, which feels good, but I still have the whole summer to save. Usually, we go on some family trip somewhere. But now that my father will be away, this summer is different, and we’re going nowhere and everything feels hard. Not as hard as losing your past hard. Not as hard as going through something totally horrifying hard. Just emotionally hard.

  I power down the game and go to my room and try to figure out how to save my summer. That’s what Gargantua would do. She is self-rescuing.

  “Make your own fun,” I say, repeating the mantra that my best friend, Kasumi, always says. I wish she was here and not in Japan for the summer. “Make your own fun,” I say again, flipping on my tablet and surfing the net.

  I search for things to do for free (or nearly) in Los Angeles in summer.

  “Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring.”

  I reject one thing and then another and then another.

  “There is no fun!” I bellow to the action figures and Funko dolls that live stuffed to the brim on the shelf in the corner of my room.

  That’s when I see an ad, while catching up on a gaming news site, that Angeles Comic Con is coming to Los Angeles.

  It reminds me that Kasumi, who knows about everything cool before anyone else and thinks of things that we should be doing or start doing, had mentioned Angeles Comic Con. She was bummed that she’d be in Japan when it happened and emailed to say we should try going to a comic book convention sometime in the coming year. I agreed.

  I’ve never been to a convention before. Not that I haven’t wanted to go. I like nerdy things. It just hasn’t been a thing I’ve done yet. Angeles Comic Con is not a big con. It’s medium size. Just enough celebrity guests but not the biggest ones. Not the hottest exclusives but cool ones. It’s not like the legendary San Diego Comic Con, which is on every nerd’s bucket list, but it is local and something excellent to do this summer.

  Kasumi’s not here, but I could go. I could check it out. Do a kind of scouting mission for us. I scroll through the guests and events. It’s every kind of thing that I am into. But I still hesitate because I don’t know if I want to do something like that alone. It seems like something that wants to be shared. But my scrolling stops and my mind is made up when I land on their big news announcement of the day. They are going to have a panel with the cast of the upcoming Team Tomorrow film!

  That settles it. How could I sit here in my Gargantua mask and not go?

  This Angeles Comic Con is something I want to do.

  Team Tomorrow. My favorite comic book ever. I lift my hand up to touch the mask I’m still wearing.

  I start doing searches on Gargantua and pinning pictures to my various boards and posting them on social media. One website leads me to another to another, and I start learning all kinds of things about Gargantua and the history of Team Tomorrow that I didn’t know, and I thought I knew it all.

  With an icon like Gargantua and a team like Team Tomorrow, it’s pretty easy to fall into a wormhole of information. I get lost for hours. The more I learn the deeper I go.

  She’s a true antihero.

  I may be self-rescuing, but it’s always nice to have Gargantua in your corner.

  Gargantua is here to save me.

  Team Tomorrow has been around since 1952. It was created by Jeanne Bernier and Hal Ritko, a husband and wife team. They met overseas during the Korean War. Jeanne was a Franco-Canadian nurse and Hal worked on the newspaper doing war cartoons. They married and moved to New York, where Hal got a job drawing comics for World Comics (WC). They created a bunch of comics, but Team Tomorrow was their legacy.

  A classic team favorite is Gargantua. She started off as a flagship member of Team Tomorrow, and it’s said that she was modeled after Jeanne. But when Jeanne and Hal’s marriage hit bottom after ten years, they divorced, and Gargantua left the core good guys team and became the head of an evil organization. Her minions, all disposable C-list villains, took to calling her my liege.

  This was probably a rib to Jeanne by Hal, as he was widely quoted as saying that Jeanne was like a tyrant that he had to worship. Of course, due to the fact that Hal still worked at WC and because he was a man, he owned the characters. Jeanne moved back to Canada and sued him over and over again for the rights to the characters. She never won.

  Hal went around calling Jeanne “that French witch” and a bunch of other horrible things. But in the turmoil of their disintegrating marriage and subsequent rights battle, one of the most formidable and iconic female superheroes/villains was born.

  Someone knocks on my door.

  After a few days of silence filling the house and me giving my father the stink eye while he paced the floors and talked heatedly in his office, or the bathroom, or the backyard, trying desperately to make it all go away, it seems a weird thing to have to go down to Sunday breakfast and say good-bye.

  “Edan.” I hear my grandma Jackie on the other side of my bedroom door. Usually, I like to see her. She’s the fun grandparent. The one who lives not too near but not too far. But right now she’s just the reminder that things are not going well in this family. She arrived late last night after her shift at the hospital. Grandma Jackie is a pediatric cardiac surgeon, so she’s no stranger to somber affairs.

  She knocks on the door again, this time a bit louder.

  “Edan,” Grandma Jackie says again, but this time she opens the door. I’m going to yell at her, but then I stop myself. She is just doing what she’s supposed to be doing. Keeping the family together in this crisis. And so I can’t be mad at her for opening the door without permission. Isn’t that what superheroes do sometimes? Bust down doors to do some saving and ass kicking?

  Instead of opening the door and insisting that I come downstairs, I wish she could take her scalpel and fix the heart of this family. But that’s not the way it works. You can’t operate on a feeling.

  “I’m up. I’m up,” I say, and throw the blankets off of me.

  “Are you still sleeping on your Team Tomorrow sheets?” she asks.

  “Always,” I say. “I’m never going to be too old for that.”

  The sheets I’m sleeping on are from the cartoon show, which is the thing that made me fall in love with the team in the first place. I’ve had them since I was small and they are my go-to sheets. I always feel better when I fall asleep on them. Like the team is going to take care of me while I dream.

  “I still have your mother’s original Star Wars sheets in storage,” she says. “And some other things.”

  I think it’s kind of cool that Grandma Jackie has kept my mom’s Star Wars sheets. I wonder if she’d give them to me. I wonder what else she has tucked away that I might think is cool.

  “I know this is hard,” she says. “But you really need to be downstairs.”

  I swing myself out of the bed. I have to admit, it’s an effort. I feel about as heavy as Gargantua must feel when she goes full mass.

  My dad always looks put together, but somehow this morning he looks sharper than usual. He is wearing a very fine suit and his hair is perfectly coiffed. It’s hard to look at him straight on, like he’s blinding me with how crisp he looks.

  My stomach drops, so I stop looking at him and turn to my mom. She is in a frilly bathrobe, which is weird, because she is the kind of person who dresses for breakfast and puts her face on, but right now her eyes are wet and red. A crumpled-up tissue is pushed against her nose. She keeps holding on to the edges of things, like she’s going to fall down if she’s not steadying herself. It makes me feel like this is all a lot worse than I already think it is.

  I don’t really know how to say good-bye. I kind of stand there at the kitchen island, buttering a bagel while I shuffle and look at my feet.

  My dad is the one who breaks the ice.

  “I hardly saw you this week, Edan,” he says. Dad
actually sounds a bit hurt.

  He hardly saw me because I wanted to disappear from his view. I didn’t want to look at him in his face and think bad thoughts.

  “Do you have some plans for the summer?” he asks. He’s trying desperately to connect with me before this separation happens. Trying to make small talk as though nothing is happening. That’s what he does, that’s what he’s good at. Charm. Deflection. Misdirection. How did I never see it before?

  He is acting guilty even though he insists the charges against him are false. Everyone is looking at me and I wish I could turn invisible. Or time-phase into the floor.

  “There’s a comic book convention,” I reluctantly say. “They are making a movie of Team Tomorrow and the cast is going to be there.”

  “Your favorite,” he says.

  I nod. Surprised that he knows anything about me at all.

  “Maybe you could send me a copy of it so I can see what you like about it,” he says. “I think I’ll be doing a lot of reading.”

  That kind of punches me in the guts. Here he is looking dapper and trying to be cheery, and Mom is pretty much crying, and I’m being surly, and really his whole life is about to change.

  I feel like a little girl again. And for one brief second I don’t care if he’s the bad guy in my story. Even if he might be a thief and if the things I’ve overheard are true, that he did mess around with production payrolls. He is my dad, and despite how pissed off I am, I am going to miss him.

  I go to him like I’m five years old and don’t know anything about the world, and I throw my arms around him and bury my head in his chest, and he ruffles my hair like when I was little.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he says.

  The kitchen door opens and Bobby, one of his business partners, steps in. He looks just as dapper and they say some stuff to each other. I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t been able to eat the bagel I made or because my heart is beating really hard, but everything is kind of in a fog now. It’s muffled and it’s hard to hear.

  Dad turns and waves at us like he’s going to get some milk or something and not up north to be put under a magnifying glass.

  “Good-bye, then,” he says, and then he leaves. He is gone.