42 Armand Gets Love Bombed

August 14th - One day until the convention oh god oh god

I stood at the front of the classroom and surveilled my troops, trying not to allow myself to be overcome with emotion. I'd managed to save enough time for this, the last class, to be spent on critique. The students were presenting their work to each other, explaining their processes, making suggestions, and complimenting each other, using the terminology and storytelling locutions I'd taught them.

Ashley (Long-Face-Freckle-Mullet), who had rolled their eyes so decisively during our full week of layout discussion, had done a marvelous job pacing. Aiden (Button-Nose-Sleek-Goatee), who had struggled with drawing bodies in any other stance than standing, had used multiple dynamic poses. Aubrey (Square-Jaw-Cat-Eye-Specs), who could not draw at the start of the workshop, still could not draw, but had developed increasingly creative ways to hide this fact with stylization.

Every single one of them had made progress. Myself included.

And I definitely wasn't near tears.

Some backroom deal had been struck early on between the university and the Drawn Quartered Comic Convention organizers so that the three-page works my students produced would be galleried on the same day of my talk and QA panel. It was quite brilliant, when you thought about it—the students had all been awarded free entry to view their own work, but family and friends would have to buy tickets if they wished to dote.

Money would be made and everyone would be happy.

I really was a sellout. With any luck, I'd continue to be one for the foreseeable future.

Please, god, let me be a sellout.

"Well done, lads." I cleared my throat. "You've all done a lovely job ... er ..." Now, in the last twenty minutes or so of our final class, I was meant to make a speech. To wrap up the entire workshop to the best of my ability ... but it was as if I'd never learned to speak to them properly. I'd fully regressed—I couldn't stop swallowing, my palms were damp, the back of my neck was sweating, I could feel my pulse in my molars. What could I even say to these people? Sorry to have wasted a month of your life? But no, they had improved, if not thanks to anything I'd done—

"Ahem."

I pulled myself back from the brink of despair. Finch had stood up in his seat and the rest of the class was turning back to look at him.

He was grinning his impish, Peter Pan grin, eyes sparkling and cheeks flushed. When he spoke, his voice had a theatrical cruise-conductor quality which seemed to draft everyone in the room into his dastardly machination. "I think we should all go around and take a few minutes to tell Professor Demetrio how much we learned in this class. How much fun we had, and how grateful we are that he came here to teach this workshop. Does that sound good to you guys?"

There was a general, enthusiastic cheer of assent, while I tried my absolute best to evaporate.

That little bastard.

"I'll start." He beamed, rocking back on his heels. "When I first heard about this workshop I was so excited. Surrogate Goose is a phenomenon, right? Like, it's so weird, and it came out of nowhere. And now Mr. Nowhere Man is teaching a class? How cool is that?"

The students gave a collective chuckle. I'd leaned back against my desk, legs crossed, hugging myself with one arm and biting my knuckle like a bloody caricature of myself.

"Anyway, I really appreciate how comprehensive this class was," Finch continued. "Like, we covered so much in only a month."

"Yeah." Blue-Glasses-Afro-Puffs (Ashlyn? Adrian ... Ariadne) stood up. "Me too. I thought maybe we were just going to cover basics or comics history or whatever, but this was like comics bootcamp!"

"I don't feel like I only learned about comics." Blond-Apple-Cheeks (Bently) stood up—why were they all standing up? What was happening? "I feel like I learned about art."

Nose-Ring-Purple-Hair (Corrine? Corey. No, Cyrus) stood up as well. "I feel like I learned about life."

This kept going. Until each and every one of these sun-kissed Californian children had stood from their seat and expressed their appreciation for whatever they perceived me to have been doing during these ill-conceived sessions. All I'd done was ramble and rant and try to make sense out of this ... thing I was compelled to make. What had Finch called it? A phenomenon? More like a ridiculous, self-indulgent spectacle.

Finch watched over it all with an evil, beatific grin, and when the last of the Sparticuses had O Captain, My Captain-ed me into oblivion, the horrible little traitor led them in a round of applause.

All but curled into a ball on my desk, I thanked the students, trying to pretend my voice wasn't thick with emotion and my face wasn't burning. Several of them requested hugs, and I was helpless to refuse.

"See you at the con!" said Braids-Sloe-Eyed-Gap-Tooth (Damian) and hugged me around the middle. "I can't believe it's tomorrow!"

I swallowed hard and kept it together until the last of the students had left—except for Finch, of course, who skipped down the auditorium steps like the malicious fae child he was.

I said nothing and glared at him, which he took as an invitation to say, "I'll see you at the play tonight, right? We're seeing everyone at the play tonight, right?" He poked my biceps. "Right? Everyone who might be about six feet tall? Everyone who might have a dimpled chin?"

Finch had apparently run into Lucas at some point this past week. After smugly informing me of this encounter, he'd waited, as if I might beg him for information. When I'd stood firm, he'd begun peppering me with infuriating little factoids.

Lucas was blond. He had a nice smile. Big hands.

Unfortunately, Finch had also been witness to the last time Lucas and I had tried to move against the will of several gods and forces of the universe by attempting to meet each other. He'd watched as several members of a local Indie Comix Club—an organization I had not heretofore known existed—had embarked upon an uncomfortable ritual in which they praised Surrogate Goose and myself to the point of tears. Theirs, not mine.

Well, nearly mine.

Finch had known I was meant to be meeting Lucas that night, and to his credit he'd done his best to help me leave. He seemed concerned that Lucas and I barely had three days left in which to try to see each other, but he was obviously also a bit pleased that his play would have a role in this comedy of errors.

"Lucas is coming?" Finch asked, his voice gone slightly hesitant.

I let my shoulders shudder in a heavy sigh. "I certainly hope so, Titch." I tried to smile at him. "I assume you're excited for tonight?"

For a moment his wicked smirk almost faltered, something other than mischief and unadulterated joy contracting behind his eyes. Nerves? It almost looked like fear.

He shook it off and ushered a grin back into place. "I'm so excited I could pop." He poked my biceps yet again. "You gonna run around screaming for the next couple hours?"

I shrugged dejectedly. "I think I'll just wait in my office." I'd brought some work with me, as always, though the Indie Comix Club incident had left me gun-shy and reluctant to act predictably.

"Great, see you later!" And he scampered off, forever bursting with endless, cheeky, intolerable energy.

I stepped outside for a quick smoke, then holed up in my office like I'd planned. I had brought work along, but I'd also brought something else. It sat snug at the very bottom of my bag and posed incontrovertible proof that I was turning into my father.

I shut the door and took a few quick nips from the flask, just to steady my nerves. I was simply sad about the workshop ending, nervous about the con tomorrow, rueful about missing Lucas's dinner, and anxious about seeing him tonight.

After all, I was in control. I was the master of my own fate, making conscious adult decisions.

Which was why I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice message arrived from my agent.

"Did you find a meeting, pet?

This was one of my conscious adult decisions turning on me—I'd told Lakshmi that I'd contacted Karim. She knew what that meant.

"Yes. I sat in a church basement with a load of strangers and now I'm cured," I grumbled, trying not to sound guilty.

Lakshmi clearly tried not to sound skeptical. "Glad to hear it."

I had found a meeting, and it had helped. But it wasn't pretty.

And neither was drying out. All I had to do to stop drinking so much was stop bloody drinking so much.

I could almost feel the whack Karim would have aimed at the back of my head and hear his scolding: "You think it's that simple? You kill me, habibi." There would be a reckoning when I got home, back to my safe, controlled environment, but for now I had to focus on short-term goals—those things I could realistically change. Goddamn fucking buggering bloody mindfulness.

This was far from my first time drying out or even my first time attempting it on my own. I knew what I needed, and while the sobriety tracker app suggested to me at the meeting was a nice thought, old-school sharpie marks on the bottle served just as well.

I resolutely refused to acknowledge the fact that sharpie marks didn't have quite the same effect with a flask.

What I needed was to work.

I needed to work and utterly divorce myself from reality, from the many-flavored banquet of anxieties that threatened to fill every last part of me. First and foremost among these was the worry surrounding my and Lucas's potentially disastrous first meeting. Tonight. There were so many, many ways I could cock this up.

What if I forgot how to form words or became suddenly and catastrophically incontinent? What if, upon meeting me, he flat-out rejected me because I offended and repelled him so? What if I'd completely misunderstood the tone of his communiqués and what I had perceived as flirting was actually friendly heterosexual banter, and the moment he realized my intentions he tried to kill me in a fit of homophobic passion? Perhaps he thought I was a woman? Or simply far more desirable than I really was? He had mentioned my fame; what if he was under the impression that I was also rich? Perhaps he was expecting Mr. Bond: English, sexy, and debonair, but would instead be met with Mr. Bean: English, neurotic, and humorously tragic.

Even if the worst happened, would it matter? I was leaving the country in three days.

"You still there, pet?"

I looked down at my phone. I could tell Lakshmi, but that would result in some of the most tedious and relentless ribbing known to man, and I did not feel I possessed the necessary resilience to withstand it in my current condition. The damage done would outweigh whatever advice she gave me.

The only thing that could distract me from my anxiety about meeting Lucas was my anxiety about the convention.

"But Lakshmi," I spoke tremulously into my phone, "Leeds."

"You're twice the man you were then. Literally, you've put on at least two stone in the past year."

I laughed despite myself. "Why are you still up, anyway?"

"Who do you know who still sleeps?"

"Go to bed, you harpy." I said goodbye and took a few deep breaths.

She was right. I was a different man.

But while my ability to articulate myself in front of a crowd had demonstrably improved over the course of this bloody workshop, my talk at the convention would require a much greater skillset. Teaching was not so different from dancing—I could lose myself in the form, the ideas, the rhetoric. Teaching required me to discuss the work of others, which should not be confused with the bowel-freezing task of discussing my own work. I would need to account for myself at the convention, make a case for my and my work's existence, be charming and palatable, and seem passably sane in front of a crowd of hundreds.

Thousands, if you include the livestream.

I reached for the flask again, making a conscious, adult, mindful decision.