Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
“Excuse me?” I call after the server. “Put this on my room, please?”
I have work to do.
Hot Lips and Husky Voices has ended and everyone has filed out of the room, off to more panels. More convention frivolity.
Well, almost everyone.
Leslie Munch sits in her chair, staring blankly at the slowly disappearing blanket of white that has been clouding her vision, watching the world finally come back into view, and wondering over what witchery this is that is being used against her. It can’t be a coincidence that Essie Smith-Scott chose to say the very thing that Leslie had intended to, which would have exposed the Smith siblings as the lying frauds they are. That, into her perfectly clear and un-buzzy microphone, Essie was the one who outed Steve Smith as Tank Watson.
But. What’s really stumping her... Is that no one seemed to give a fat baby’s ass.
So, now she has to come up with a new plan. Which is what she’s working on at present, ruminating over the ways that she might be able to rain down hellfire upon the Godforsaken assholes known as the Smith twins for what has been perpetrated upon her. For, in the world of Leslie Munch, there is no greater feeling than schadenfreude.
“Ms. Star?” Leslie shakes the cobwebs away to see a nice, bookish, bespectacled girl in her twenties, approaching. The girl says, politely, “I’m sorry, but we need to set up for the next panel now. Do you mind if I ask you to—?”
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Leslie interrupts, appreciably less politely, before scooping up her shoulder bag and sweeping from the room.
And, as she slams her way through the door, she bumps—quite literally—into two kindred spirits. Kindred and familiar. Because what she has known all along that she would need for this weekend... Are allies. Confederates. Compatriots. Equally oriented malcontents whose very purpose on this Earth is to ‘gin up consternation,’ as the elder of the two might say.
Babydoll Tee—aka Angela—and Ride-or-Die Grandma—aka Elaine—are waiting for Leslie right outside the door, in the exact prearranged spot where they agreed to meet after the first set of panels were over.
“Well?” Leslie’s mood has gotten considerably worse in the mere seconds since she left Hot Lips and Husky Voices, so she is snapping. Possibly even threatening to bite. “Did you cause a riot? I don’t hear sirens, Elaine. You promised me sirens.”
“It was going really well,” Angela says.
“Was going?” Leslie is baring her teeth and growling.
“There were chairs flying everywhere,” Elaine says.
“All the authors fled like pussies,” Angela adds. “And Steve too.”
Leslie smiles. This is glorious. “How many injuries? Was the ambulance called?”
Both of the women, who are on opposite ends of the age spectrum, glance at each other nervously. They love Raylen Star. Love her. Leslie Munch… not so much. Leslie terrifies them. But they have been in her reader group on socials for nearly a decade. They are in too deep. Have seen too much. Know too much for Leslie to just let them walk away unscathed now.
Elaine decides to be the grown-up, since Angela is four decades her junior. “Listen, Leslie. There were no injuries.”
Leslie clenches her jaw. “You just told me chairs were thrown. How in the hell did everyone in that over-packed, fire-hazard room escape injury?”
“It was like…” Angela rolls her eyes up, like she’s thinking. Then she looks back at Leslie. “Divine intervention.”
“Divine what?” Leslie’s in the mood to punch a wall.
“Every time a chair was thrown, there was someone there, grabbing it right out of the air and gently placing it back down on the floor.”
“Someone?” Leslie raises an eyebrow. “Someone like who?”
“Mostly they were… maids?” Angela says, shrugging with her hands.
“What?” Maybe Leslie would forgo the wall and punch Angela instead.
“Maids,” Elaine agrees. “Yeah. Hotel maids. There were like two dozen of them in the room.”
“Why were there two dozen hotel maids in the Reader Rants panel?”
Angela shrugs again. “The water and coffee table? I dunno. But they were incredible. The chairs were being hurled, just one chair after another, and then… maids. Everywhere. It was weird.”
Elaine agrees. “Yeah. Like angels from heaven. They just scooped up those chairs and set them back down.”
“Well, and then Steve came back,” Angela says.
This is too much for Leslie. She’s about to have a meltdown. “He came back? Why?”
“To check on everyone,” Elaine says.
“Then he did a panel all by himself,” Angela says.
“He what?” Leslie is so hot with anger, sweat is dripping down between her boobs in a little stream.
“But you know what else he did?” Angela leans in towards Leslie, because this was the lede she and Elaine had agreed to bury. They’d planned to set Leslie off, then cool her back down with the amazing revelation about Steve’s fuck-up. Maybe they were kinda dumb for getting involved with her in the first place, but they are not stupid. They know how to push her buttons.