Anna Priemaza - Fan the Fame

THEYRE CALLING THE GIRL MY BROTHER, CODY, UNCEREMONIOUSLY DUMPED a slut. Its all over social media. Im not even friends with her, and still it makes it onto my feed. I scroll through the posts on my phone as Cody and I hover in the Boston airport near our gate, travelers rushing past as he flirts with yet another girl whos asked for his autograph. Not that there are that many girls who ask; Cody has several million YouTube subscribers on his gaming channel, but the majority of those fans are male.

I skip past another post about Janessa, my seventeen-year-old classmate who allegedly slept with my situationally famous twenty-one-year-old brother. Apparently someone overheard her talking about it in the bathroom. Thats the way they phrase it: she slept with him, which makes her a slut. Never mind that Cody is the one who started it all, asking me about that hot girl with the boobs one day when he picked me up after school. And never mind that one of the posts says she was crying about losing her virginity, while when I asked Cody about her, he called her just another hookup.

At least its only my classmates who are talking about her. Judging by the way Cody flirted with every pretty, made-up girl he crossed paths with at the Boston gaming convention we were just at, his fans dont even know Janessa exists.

Lainey! Stickers! Cody barks at me now, and I hit the power button on my phone and shove it back in my pocket, returning to the job Im supposed to be doing.

The Asian teen girl Codys talking to is younger than I had registered out of the corner of my eye, maybe fourteen or so. She looked older at a glance because even in a winter coat, she actually has a figure. Lucky. My boobs didnt start growing until I was fifteen, and they grew for maybe six weeks, then decided that was enough and called it quits, the lazy jerks.

Cody must not have been flirting with her after all; shes only a kid.

As she grins at him, I want to tell her that she needs a new hero, but instead I sigh, pull a Codemeister sticker out of my pocket, and hand it to her, making her squeal before she goes running excitedly back to her parents. Thats what I do as Codys gaming convention roadie: hand out swag, carry his stuff, keep my mouth shut. In return Codys paying me two hundred dollars in cash, room, food, and flights, and the chance to get out of our tiny prison of a town for my entire March break. Weve just finished at PAX East in Boston and are headed to Toronto for LotSCON, the convention for the video game Legends of the Stone.

When Cody invited me along, I jumped at the chance to get away from home. In my defense, since Cody moved out a few years ago, Id forgotten that spending large amounts of time with my brother sometimes makes me want to strangle him.

Cody has wandered back to our seats at the gate to rejoin Noogmeister, another of the six guys in the famous YouTube gaming group Team Meister. If Lainey wasnt here, Cody tells him, Id totally have boned that.

I whirl around, cutting off Noogs laugh with my glare. Until this trip, I hadnt realized how often Cody makes jokes like that to his friendsor how often they egg him on just by laughing. Cody! I whisper-shout. That girls like fourteen!

So?

I march toward them. So youre twenty-one. Thats illegal! And gross. And so inappropriate. I thought it was bad enough that he apparently charmed a seventeen-year-old into sleeping with him.

Cody rolls his eyes. Lainey, dont be a buzzkill.

A buzzkill? Im not trying to kill your buzz, Im trying to stop you from being such a dickhead. I regret the words as soon as they escape my mouth. If theres a way to get through to Cody, its not by calling him a dickhead.

A dickhead? Really, Lainey? Am I going to have to tell Mom to have a bar of soap ready when you get home? Hes joking, but theres an edge of anger under his words.

Simply the mention of Moms soap bar makes my own anger stretch tight inside me, like an elastic band. When we were kids, Momd wash my mouth out for failing to talk like a lady, while Cody could say the exact same thing as me and Mom wouldnt bat an eye. But Ive learned from experience that getting angry at Cody only makes him shut down, so I ignore the anger and backtrack instead. No, sorry, Im just a bit wound up because people are calling Janessa a slut.

Who? Cody asks.

I throw my hands up. Are you serious? Janessa! From my school! Blond hair, big eyebrows, quiet as a mouse. You apparently slept with her. Ringing any bells? I barely know the girl, since she only moved to our school a year or two ago, but Im not about to identify her to Cody by her boob size.

Cody puts his own hands up in surrender. Im joking! Of course I remember who Janessa is.

I glare at him. Did you really sleep with her? Shes my age! People are calling her a slut because of it.

Cody shrugs. Its not my fault people are jerks.

Noog stands and steps up to us. She slept with this guy? he asks with a sneer, pointing his thumb toward my brother. Then she is a slut for stooping that low.

Hey! Cody smacks him in the arm, and then Noog smacks him back, and then theyre both laughing.

Dickheads.

Cody and I have fought for years about the obnoxious things he says, but I hadnt realized how bad things have gotten. Or maybe theyve always been this bad, and I never realized it.

After seven days of listening to Cody joking crassly about girls to his friends, a sick feeling has built up in my stomach along with the usual rage that bubbles there. Because Im fairly certain that if Cody doesnt change his ways, his jokes are going to turn into his reality, and hes going to end up the headline of some big new #metoo scandal.

Or, I realize, thinking of that fourteen-year-old he joked about banging, even end up in jail.

And though sometimes I want to knee my brother in the gut, I dont want him to end up in jail.

I should talk to him. Or get someone else to talk to him. Or something.

Right now, though, he and Noog are still grinning from their abhorrent jokes and all I can picture is how their heads are basically hamster dicks. Tiny, hairy hamster dickheads. Which, uh, is maybe not the best way to start off a heart-to-heart with my brother.

So instead, for now, I simply give them both the finger and then stalk away.

Im on the plane and about to buckle my seat belt with a satisfying click when LumberLegs appears beside me in the aisle. Hes not on Team Meisterthough hes just as famousbut he spent most of the time at PAX East with us. I knew he was headed to LotSCON, too, but I hadnt realized he was on our flight. Most of the guys left last night.

Would you mind switching? he asks the woman to my right. I was hoping to sit with my sister. He gestures toward me and holds his ticket out to her, his dark-brown hair flopping charmingly over the edges of his rectangular face.

She agrees, and then were all standing and doing an awkward dance around each other as LumberLegs stumbles into his new seat beside me.

Sister? I echo as Legs fumbles for his seat belt.

Friend, he corrects. His knee bumps mine as he pulls one of the seat belt buckles out from under his butt. Didnt want her to say no.

My cheeks flush hot, even though hed just as likely have switched to sit with one of the guys if they were in coach. Anything to keep from sitting alone. The sadness that he wont talk about oozes out of his pores like garlic, though none of the guys have seemed to notice so far. You just took the middle seat and gave her the aisle, I point out. His knee is still touching mine, and I feel an urgent need to establish that I am most definitely not his sister. She wasnt going to say no.