16. Then The Convention Part 2

After Hat Guy asked to look at my hand, his two friends whispered Stop it and Don't be a dick for once. Their pleas brightened the wattage of his self-satisfied smile.

I said, "That's not on the pricing menu," and hid my hands behind my back. This was me being mysterious. Given the chatter online, I was surprised it had taken this long for someone with an utter lack of tact to show up and want to inspect my pinky.

"I'll pay. Secret off-menu item, yeah?" Hat Guy said, and crossed his arms over his chest. This guy. He was meant to be a slasher victim, the kind we root for to die and die horribly.

His friends stood behind him, but that wasn't a metaphorical gesture. They were trying to hide their embarrassed faces. One of them said, "Sorry. He's always the asshole."

I said, "You'll pay, huh?" I briefly considered saying something ominous about people being too quick to say I'll pay before the full price is known. Instead, I added, "Forty bucks."

"Worth it. Um, do you take Venmo?"

"No. Secret off-menu item is cash only."

Hat Guy sighed. It was so hard being him. He had to borrow a twenty from one of his friends, but, eventually, he dropped two twenties on the table.

Keeping my right hand behind my back, I flourished my left hand and waggled my fingers. I said, "Nothing up my sleeve," and snatched up the two twenties.

Any semblance of cool tough guy gone, Hat Guy lunged for the twenties but he was too slow. He yelled, "You know I was paying for the right pinky! I knew you're a fraud! A scam artist!" He swiped a tantrum hand across my photo stacks, messing them up, like a game of fifty-two pickup with a deck of cards.

His outburst brought over one of the convention's burly security guards. I told the guard that it was okay, that I could handle it, but he stuck around. Hat Guy's friends set to fixing my photo piles. The celebrity room quieted to a hush. Jason and the other celebs froze in mid-autograph or mid–photo pose to gawk at my table. Nightmare Scribe had a little notebook out, and I would have to talk to him later about this scene not making it into one of his shitty books. This scene would be going into my own shitty audiobook. And thanks again for listening. Tell your friends.

Hat Guy and I weren't done playing, though. Especially since he started it.

I said, "All right. What's got you so hot and bothered to see my pinky?"

Hat Guy deflated a bit, likely sensing that I had the, well, upper hand, as he summarized the online conspiracy about my pinky not being missing. He used broken, incomplete sentences, and more "likes" and "ums" than a preschooler, so allow me to clean it up for him. He said that I did not lose half my pinky on-set while filming a scene. None of the actors or crew ever publicly verified that the accident had happened, and that included court testimony. He asked why wouldn't the lawyers bring up my losing a pinky to aid the case of negligence, of the set not being safe? He said no one could find the medical records of my injury, which was, of course, ludicrous as medical records are confidential. The most damning evidence were photos of me leaving the courthouse after the wrongful-death suit was settled, and in those out-of-focus, somewhat-distant pictures (that's me editorializing, sorry) you can see a blurry but presumably full pinky on my right hand. Hat Guy at this point held up his phone to show me and everyone else the photo. He didn't hold it up very long. He flicked to another photo that was supposedly of me in the early 2000s.

I laughed and said, "That guy isn't me. I was way more handsome." If the room wasn't on my side before the joke, they were now. In the photo, the guy who wasn't me was standing behind a bar, holding a comically small beer glass with his pinky out, presumably a parody of proper teatime. The camera's flash was a blue orb in the mirror just over the bartender's right shoulder. He wore a white T-shirt and had that terrible early 2000s George Clooney hairstyle, short hair combed flat and forward. Okay, so the bartender did look a lot like me, or the old me. By the old me I mean the younger me. I even had that same haircut once upon a time. What were we all thinking back then?

Hat Guy was losing his steam, but he kept going. He claimed the story of my losing half a pinky on-set was just that: a story. A story I promoted in interviews and now I wore an obviously stupid wrap over my healthy finger. His big finish: "That wrap is nothing but a cover for the fabricated story of losing your pinky while filming. And you made up the story so you could make more money off your fake celebrity. So, let's see it. Prove me wrong."

By this point my right arm was so far behind my back, I was practically chicken-winging myself. Next door, Jason had backed up against the curtained wall and shamelessly stared at my hidden hand. That fucking guy.

I didn't shout. I projected. "Did everyone get all that?" There was good cheer in my voice, and the gathered audience responded with appreciative laughter. Now I raised both arms over my head, showing off my right hand and the strip of flesh-colored bandage over the top half of my pinky. I made quick work of unwrapping and exposing a green foam piece that made up half of the digit. It was and is the same green of my mask, by the way. When one was going to be caught within the tractor-beam stare of the public eye, one must accessorize.

"Let's give him a hand," I said, and politely golf-clapped. Then I made a show of looking at my right hand and flexing the fingers in and out of a fist. I said, "Have you ever just sat with your hand, flexed the fingers, wiggled them around, and marveled at how they work? All those tendons, muscles, joints, bones, neurons, working in concert. If you stare at your flexing hand long enough, you can believe it's moving on its own, that it's not your hand. Try it sometime and imagine you're watching a movie about your hand." I stopped moving my fingers and held my right hand up and open. I added, "Okay, so I only do that when I'm, like, super high."

The crowd was—fine, another pun—in the palm of my hand. Scores of phones were held up and recording, which was against the celebrity-room rules, but no one moved to stop them. I was fine with it. I would shortly be going viral on Twitter, which would lead to invites from the biggest conventions before the weekend was over.

Hat Guy was thoroughly defeated, and security was about to escort him from the premises. But I wasn't done yet.

I leaned across the table and I said, "Before this one, I used lifelike prosthetics that were, I don't know, so un-lifelike. I hated them. Then a friend of a friend of a friend 3-D printed this bit for me. I thought I would hate it, too, and that it would be uncomfortable. I was wrong. I love it and it fits so well it's like it's not there. But a weird thing happened after I started wearing it."

I made a fist but left the pinky out, and I tapped the center of his chest with it.

He said, "Are you going to take it off? Show us?"

First, I held my right hand flat, like I was going to cover my heart, and then I did that lame missing-thumb trick with my left hand obscuring the right's bent thumb knuckle and I moved my left thumb back and forth across my right hand. That earned well-deserved groans from the crowd.

I said, "Sorry, couldn't resist," and then I took off the green foam piece—there was a rush of exhales in the crowd—and revealed that, yeah, the upper half of my pinky was gone. I balanced the foam piece on the table, so that it pointed up. "Don't worry, friend, you can still have your conspiracy." I grabbed a Sharpie and personalized a headshot for him as I continued. "Maybe I was born this way. Maybe I lost the bit as a child. But right, your photos, sorry, okay. Well, maybe I lost the pinky half in an accident after the movie filmed. That would be a poetic-justice kind of thing. You can make up whatever accident you'd like. Car door. Lawnmower, though I've never owned one. Maybe I worked odd jobs as a landscaper and had to work with all manner of bitey equipment. Or, wait, wait a minute. I mean, we're just riffing and workshopping here, but how about this? What if I purposefully cut the pinky half off? Amazing, right? Imagine it: I'm home, in a dingy one-bedroom, no, a studio apartment, standing in my kitchen. The overhead light flickers because I'm so broken that I can't be bothered to change the bulbs. Doesn't that set the scene and character? On the counter by the sink full of dishes is a half-empty whiskey bottle. Or half-full if you're an optimist. I have a butcher's knife in my hand because that's all it would take, right? Don't they say our fingers are about as difficult to cut through as a carrot? And I'm standing there, swaying in my drunkenness, gearing up for a little chop-chop. I put my finger on a dirty cutting board—no, straight on the counter, my character probably wouldn't own a cutting board—then there's a lens flare in the blade, and it happens quick, the knife cuts through my finger just above the middle knuckle. There, I sacrificed a chunk of flesh to make more money off my fake celebrity, like you said. Wouldn't that be perfect? And what would that say about me, right? Who would do such a thing?"

I gave him the signed photo. "For your forty bucks. Don't want you leaving empty-handed." Along with my signature, I wrote, Dear Hat Guy, Be careful. Or I will slice off and eat more than your finger. All the best, the Thin Kid.

Hat Guy took the photo but only glanced at it. He didn't read my message, at least not while he stood at my table.

I said, "Oh yeah, I mentioned a weird thing that happened." I flexed my hand one more time into a fist. "I've since had doctors look at the new end of my pinky and they said it's fine, but they can't explain why it looks the way it looks." I held out the stub of my pinky toward him and everyone else who had gathered at my table. "Okay, I haven't had a real doctor look at it."

Hat Guy said, "Jesus, is that—what, a tattoo?" I let him fill his own pause. "Another cover, like, what, some kind of plate?"

The scarred, rounded end of my half pinky was bumpy, hard, sharkskin rough, and it was green. The same green as my mask.

I snarled. A snarl is a different kind of smile.

I said, "It grew in like that. Weird, right? Do you want to feel it? Go ahead. I won't bite."