Ship It Read online

  Why don’t I have friends in Pine Bluff? Maybe they don’t like me because I’m a “city kid.” (Pine Bluff with all of its four thousand people is actually considered a city to people who live twenty miles into the country.) Or maybe it’s because I only moved here five years ago and wasn’t born and bred in Pine Bluff. But probably they don’t like me because they expect me to be obsessed with country music and elk hunting and prom instead of a dumb TV show about demons in which the two lead male characters are not yet—but totally should be—dating.

  I realized a long time ago that making friends wasn’t really going to be a realistic goal, and a better mission was to keep my head down, get into a good college a long way from here, and never talk to anyone from Pine Bluff again.

  Kyle readjusts his John Deere hat so that it’s sitting on the very back of his head like it might fall off if not for the sheer charisma of his farmer-boy hair. He looks at me like he’s just now realized I was here. I’m used to the popular farm kids treating me like I’m invisible, but it’s particularly irritating when Kyle does it, considering the fact that I used to be very visible to him.

  “What’s your shirt?” he asks me, kind of out of the blue.

  I move the sides of my hoodie out of the way and look down at my shirt. It’s my second favorite Demon Heart T-shirt. “It’s for this show, Demon Heart.”

  I know he doesn’t know the show because it hadn’t started airing yet when we were hanging out last year. At the time, I was pretty obsessed with this series of books called Citybreakers and only wanted to read/talk about/write fic about them. Kyle thinks reading for pleasure is for “chumps.” Also, the only thing he likes to watch on TV is ultimate fighting. “Because I’m a man, Claire,” he would say.

  In case it’s unclear, Kyle is literally the worst.

  Andrea takes her hair out of her ponytail, brushes it with her fingers, and then starts putting it back up again exactly the same, but slightly tighter. I never do this with my ponytail, I just tighten it throughout the day until it’s time to take it out. Is that what Kyle likes about her? That she has really clean, tight ponytails? But what could Andrea possibly see in him?

  “Demon Heart?” Kyle squints at my T-shirt again. It’s the one with promo photos of Smokey and Heart gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, ostensibly locked in eternal conflict, but the shirt, like the show, is open for interpretation. And I choose to see love.

  So does Kyle, apparently. “Why do they look like they’re about to kiss?”

  Andrea snorts and punches him. “Be nice,” she says.

  “I’m serious, that’s the gayest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says.

  For a second there, I almost pity him. This shirt is the gayest thing he’s ever seen? Okay, sure, it’s a pretty gay shirt. But a gayer shirt would have them actually kissing. Or shirtless. Or it would show Heart taking Smokey from behind and… Well, there’s plenty of fic out there going into the details. The fic is pretty damn gay. This shirt? This shirt is just subtext.

  Kyle snickers.

  “Kyyyle,” Andrea whines. Their relationship is a mystery to me.

  “What?” Kyle feigns innocence.

  I straighten my glasses. “You think being gay is funny?”

  “I think that shirt is hilarious,” he says. I want to reach over and knock the stupid precarious tractor hat off his head.

  “Kyle, shut up, she’s probably gay herself.” Andrea turns to me. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” How generous of her. How progressive.

  I look at Kyle to see if he wants to respond. Apparently he does not, so I turn back to Andrea. “I’m not gay,” I tell her.

  “Yeah,” Kyle says, “obviously. She’s in love with the gay dudes on her shirt.”

  It’s too much. I suppress a snort, then I catch Kyle’s eye and the dumb expression on his face makes me really belly laugh. Andrea leans away from me, confused and a little afraid, but Kyle just gets mad. “What?” he demands. “What’s so funny?”

  “You know, there are people out there who think we’re crazy? That we see stuff that’s not there, that the show’s never gonna make it canon. But I just wanna state for the record that Kyle Cunningham, Kyle freaking Cunningham sees it. We’re not crazy.” Kyle is looking at me like I just kicked his prize heifer and I don’t care. “If Kyle Cunningham ships it, we should all be shipping it.”

  “I don’t ship it,” Kyle says sharply, his mood turning dark. But I don’t care, he brought this on himself.

  “Why, does that freak you out? That you ship two dudes?” I ask.

  “Give it a rest, Claire.”

  “Yeah, figures. You know what I never understood? Why they always cast straight men as heroes in everything… because you’re honestly the most terrified people on the planet.”

  Andrea looks back and forth between us with wide eyes. Poor chick has no idea what kind of idiot she’s going to prom with. Kyle starts to say something, but I wave him off. “Forget it,” I say and grab my stuff. They’ll never understand.

  I can hear their whispers before I even reach the exit. I close my eyes and shove through the doors.

  Screw this place.

  On the bus, everyone else has someone to talk to. Row after row of chattering kids, excited for their afternoons to start, for summer to start. I slip into the seat next to Joanie Engstrom, who is eating an apple from the top down, core and all. Joanie and I aren’t friends, exactly, but we’re allies—someone to pair up with in class on group projects, someone to sit next to on the bus when all the other seats are full. She smiles at me, then looks back down at her Bible open in her lap—well-worn and Post-it–noted from a lifetime of use. I’m not sure what more there is to glean from those pages after she’s read them so many times, but I’m not one to judge since I’ve seen all the available episodes of Demon Heart upwards of a dozen times.

  As Joanie reads, taking another bite of her apple, I look past her and watch Pine Bluff pass by out the windows, all six glorious stoplights.

  Annoyingly, I can’t stop thinking about what Kyle said. Am I in love with the guys in Demon Heart? Maybe. Rico Quiroz and Forest Reed, who play Heart and Smokey, are undeniably attractive people. I’ve spent more than a few afternoons gazing at pictures of them, the slope of their jawlines, the rough texture of their stubble, the swell of their lips.

  Rico, the older one, has amazing dark curly hair, an open face, perfect soft brown skin, and an easy smile. He comes off as approachable, kind, warm. I can see why fans are always tweeting Dad at him—I want him to rub my back and tell me I’m doing a good job, I want him to teach me how to fix my car, my problems. In my favorite fantasy, I imagine myself sitting across from him as he reads my college admissions essay, then looks up over it to tell me he thinks I’m going to do great things. I trust him, even though I’ve never met him.

  Forest is the younger of the two. Under his wavy blond hair, he has these incredibly expressive watery blue eyes that betray how broken he is inside no matter how tough he’s trying to be. He’s lean where Rico is broad, young where Rico is experienced, serious where Rico is quick to laugh. Forest has these long, strong arms—I imagine, if I were falling off a cliff and holding on with only my fingers, he could reach down and effortlessly pull me to safety with one hand. After which, I would melt into his chest in gratitude, but he would refuse to kiss me because he wouldn’t want to take advantage. He would insist on taking me out on a date first.

  But here’s where the fantasy falls apart. Do I want to date Forest Reed? It’s hard to imagine kissing Smokey’s lips when I’ve pictured them kissing Heart so many times.

  Am I in love with Smokey and Heart? Or am I in love with their love?

  After my run-in with the popular farm kid brigade, I feel tight, like an overfilled balloon. If anyone touched me right now, I would pop right in their face. The bus turns left onto a farm access road. Even though I live in a small town, I still have twenty minutes until I get home, thanks to circuitous rural bus routes.
I don’t have the energy to start a conversation with Joanie today and inevitably hear about her horses or whatever she’s learning in Bible study that week, so I rub my eyes under my glasses and do what I always do when I need to calm down—I cycle through my mental rolodex of fics and pick one.

  In episode nine of Demon Heart, there’s this scene where Smokey is tailing a gnarly demon, and he watches him enter a roadside bar. Then the show time cuts to several hours later, after dark, as Smokey watches the bad guy leave the bar… with Heart. At first you’re supposed to think Heart is cavorting with the enemy, but then there’s a twist where they reveal that Smokey and Heart are collaborating to bring down the bad guy. It’s the first time Smokey and Heart work together, so it’s a big moment for their relationship. And there’s this four-hour gap of time that’s unaccounted for. In my circles, we call that a fanfiction gap. I’ve read a hundred fics that take place in those few hours—imagining the conversation that must have occurred between them to get them to team up, and I’ve written a few myself. Today, I mentally pull up my favorite. It’s one of mine, because the only way to make sure someone writes exactly the fic you want to read is to do it yourself.

  I skip to the best part because it’s my head and I get to do what I want. Blah, blah, blah, Smokey confronts Heart in the bathroom of the roadside bar. Heart wants to work together, Smokey is dubious. They talk, then argue, then fight, then Heart pins Smokey against the wall of the bathroom, and I stop fast-forwarding and enter slo-mo.

  Their eyes find each other. The energy changes. All that struggle, all that energy, falls away. This thing they’re both fighting, they look it in the face for the first time.

  Smokey licks his lips.

  Heart glances at his mouth.

  They’re so close already, breathing each other’s air, the next move either a punch or a—

  Smokey leans in and they’re kissing and my stomach does backflips.

  It never ceases to work. That zhoom feeling that I assume people get when someone you like actually kisses you. But who needs all the drama and the herpes and the hurt feelings of the real thing when you can get that same feeling reading a great fic?

  I feel myself relax. Like a crumpled paper getting smoothed out. SmokeHeart always makes me feel better, like the world is manageable and love is real. There are only a few episodes of Demon Heart left in season one, and it feels like they’re building to something. The SmokeHeart vibes get stronger with every episode, and I’m not the only one who thinks so—the entire fandom is practically buzzing with anticipation about what’s going to happen in the season finale. A lot of people came to Demon Heart from other fandoms where they had gotten their hopes up about a gay ship and been disappointed. But Demon Heart feels different. Everything they’ve built so far, all the dominoes they’ve laid—it all feels like they’ll start tumbling into place soon. This time, this time, SmokeHeart might be real. The ship might go canon. And then everything will be okay.

  “Claire.” Joanie nudges me. The bus has pulled over and the driver is looking at me.

  Back to reality. It’s my stop.

  “THAT’S LUNCH, FOLKS,” the 1st AD hollers.

  “Wait, really?” I ask as Rico reaches a hand down to help me up. We’ve been shooting this fight sequence all morning and my muscles are aching for a break, but I didn’t think that last take worked. “I wasn’t sure we got it, do you think we got it?”

  Rico laughs. “Gotta move on, man. We have four more scenes to shoot before we lose the light.”

  “I thought there was another beat we could’ve played after the fall,” I say.

  The gaffer walks by carrying her burrito lunch.

  “Here’s a beat I’d like to play.” Rico clears his throat and adopts the unnaturally gravelly voice he uses for Heart. “Smokey. I hate to tell you this, but it’s burrito Tuesday, and everyone’s hungry.”

  Very funny. “Message received.”

  He softens. “C’mon,” he says, apparently taking pity. “I’ll read lines with you over lunch.”

  It’s still wild to me that I’m here, on a set, with a lead role in a TV series. A year ago, I was close to calling it quits on the whole Hollywood thing. It had been years of auditions and acting classes, indie shoots and student films. Of changing clothes in my car because the production didn’t have dressing rooms and getting chased off the location by security because we didn’t have permits. Of telling my dad I was fine, I was happy, LA was great, even though I hadn’t eaten anything in a week that I hadn’t stolen from the kitchen of the cafe where I waited tables. The good acting gigs, the ones that gave me hope, were rare. I was a Helpful Honda Guy for four blissful rent-paying months two years ago. That made my dad stop pestering me for a little while about my chosen profession. At least he could point me out to his friends on football Sundays when my spot played. But eventually, the commercial stopped running, the residual checks got smaller and smaller, the new auditions kept turning up bupkis, and I started to wonder if I should just move back to Broken Arrow, a failure at twenty-three, and think about applying to colleges.

  When my agent called about Demon Heart, it was just another audition in a million for a role I’d never land. I didn’t get my hopes up. You can’t, in this job, if you want to survive. But then they called me back to read with Rico and for the first time, I started to think I had a chance. I was nervous as hell, but auditions are always like that, so it was nothing new. What was new was Rico. I recognized him, vaguely, from his previous work. Not that I had seen Star Command or anything, but he’d been on the cover of grocery store magazines enough for me to know who he was. In person, though, he had that sparkle that successful actors sometimes have—that alluring mix of charisma, attractiveness, and well-fitting clothes. He shook my hand, flashed me that smile of his, and we got down to business. In front of a few casting people, some people from the show, and a PA running a video camera, we started the scene. And that was the moment I knew I had a shot at the role. I’d never had an audition that crackled like that one did. Rico kept up with me, matching my energy line for line, as the rest of the room fell away. We became Smokey and Heart that day, for three blissful minutes until the casting director called cut. And then it was over, and I was sitting in my car in the parking lot, holding my validated parking ticket, smiling and hoping.

  Four days later, I was standing in a Smart & Final when my agent called to tell me I got the job. I dropped my basket, walked straight over to the liquor aisle, and bought a bottle of champagne. My friends were all out at an improv show I’d already begged out of well before I got the call, so I drank my bubbly out of a coffee mug that night, toasting to myself on my futon in my studio in Koreatown, hoping this was the start of everything. Even though it wasn’t the kind of show I normally watched or cared about, this was a dream job. A series regular on a primetime drama? That is, as my agent would say, “a career-launcher.” I could go anywhere from here.

  But then I actually had to do it. The daily grind of shooting ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, memorizing lines, working in the cold, the hot, the rain. Exercising, being careful what I eat, hitting my marks, finding the emotional beats in a scene while thirty crew people watch, waiting for me to cry or yell or break down on cue. The work. My Helpful Honda Guy commercial had been a one-day shoot, my indie films shot over a few weeks. Demon Heart shot eight days per episode, for twenty-two straight episodes. The day after we wrapped one episode, we started shooting the next. It was endless work, and I had never had to do it on this scale before. There were days, weeks even, that I was sure the dailies were coming back terrible, convinced the studio would call, the network would call, the showrunner would realize: We’ve made a mistake. He can’t do this.

  But through it all, Rico, who has done this before, never made me feel dumb even when he probably should have. Every day on set I make mistakes, forcing everyone to wait on me. The grips, I’m sure, are onto me. Karen, the makeup girl, definitely knows. I’m faking all of this.
r />   But Rico, Rico the goddamn saint, has never once pointed it out. And for that I love him every day.

  Our burritos sit forgotten on the coffee table in my trailer as we play Red Zone 3 on my Xbox.

  “The demon portal could only be opened by a pure heart. There’s nothing you could’ve done, Smokey,” Rico says, as Heart.

  I shoot at a rebel fighter in the desert, then dodge return fire.

  “I can’t… think about my lines while I do this,” I say.

  “That’s your problem, you’re thinking too much,” Rico says, which doesn’t make any sense. “Just react.”

  He gives me my cue again: “There’s nothing you could’ve done, Smokey.”

  TAT-A-TAT. He fires a few rounds at my head in the game, forcing me to duck behind a sand dune to avoid him.

  “Jesus, okay! Um… um…” I take a deep breath and sneak a peek at my script, making sure Rico doesn’t catch me cheating. “This isn’t a game, Heart, it’s people’s lives,” I say, as Smokey.

  “It’s our lives. You wanna spend it fighting me or fighting with me?”

  This next line’s easy. “With you. ’Til the dirt hits my chest.”

  I see my shot at Rico and I take it. Bang. His character drops to the sand, dead. Maybe I can’t remember my lines, but at least I’ll always be better at Red Zone than him.

  “Damn you, Reed!” Rico says, tossing his controller away. Then he looks at me and grins that ridiculous, contagious grin of his. “Told you,” he says, taking a bite of his burrito. “You got this.” And he makes me feel better, like always.

  I’m almost able to forget the fact that Demon Heart is a show on the bubble without a guaranteed second season, which means everything we’ve built here could come crashing down with the stroke of some executive’s pen, and then I’m out looking for another job.