make her look like she had some sort of lip disease. It was completely the wrong color. So was the dusty, dry, and unused-looking pack of cheap eyeliner. Contacts. Contact solution.
All the way at the bottom of the bag was the one thing that wasn’t totally generic. It was a brooch or a barrette, it could probably be used for either. Made of steel, it had a figure carved out in relief of a woman in armor driving a chariot drawn by cats. It was remarkably intricate work. Doris suspected if she had a magnifying glass, she could pick out the details of the woman’s face. But it really didn’t tell her much about who she was or why she was sitting in the stall, so she carefully put it away.
She checked the pockets of the jeans. A crumpled twenty and a couple of ones in her front pocket. In the back pocket, though, was a driver’s license! Hallelujah!
Doris Grisham. Female. Check.
Birthday: 9/3/1984. Okay. So it really was just about her birthday.
5'9' tall. ’Bout right.
110 lbs. Huh. Liar.
Eyes: Green. Have to check a mirror.
Hair: Red. Yep.
Address: 200 River Road, Chattanooga, TN 37405.
Okay. That was something. She now knew she lived in Chattanooga, TN, although it really didn’t ring a bell at all.
“Okay,” she said, definitely. “I’m Doris Grisham. I’m from Chattanooga. I’m at Dragon*Con. I’m here to find people like me or something. How the hell, though, do I get home?”
“Honey, if you’re practicing a secret identity, you might want to keep it down,” said a voice in the stall next to her. “And if you’re talking to your voices, take it from me, it’s a bad idea. That way they’ll never shut up.”
“Sorry,” Doris said meekly, as there was a flushing sound from the next stall.
“So which one was it?” asked the voice as the door to the next stall opened. “And if you’re not gonna use the john you might as well come out. I don’t bite. Mostly.”
Doris cracked the stall door and looked out.
A short, darkly tanned woman was leaning up against the sinks. She was wearing a bolero jacket, a black button-down shirt, jeans, black cowboy boots and a fedora. She probably would have been pretty, if not beautiful, if a teenage case of acne hadn’t left scars to shame a smallpox survivor. But button-black eyes glittering with humor somehow drew the eye away from the skin.
“I’m Mandy,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “You’re Doris. Or at least that’s your secret identity.”
“No, I really am,” Doris said, desperately holding out her license. “I’ve got ID. I’m from…I live in Chattanooga.”
“So you were just grounding,” Mandy said, handing the license back unlooked at and taking Doris’s unresisting hand to shake it. “I get it. Been there, done that, burnt the shirt. Sometimes you just got to make sure it’s you talking and not the chorus. Let me tell you, Aripiprazole helps. You wouldn’t want to know me if I hadn’t gotten on the prescription drug wagon.”
“Okay,” Doris said, eyes wide.
“Not that I’m on aripiprazole,” Mandy continued, turning around to wash her hands. “I finally convinced the county shrink that I was ADHD with PTSD, and not bipolar, which is what it looks like. Been a wonderful world lately being almost normal. I can enjoy a con and not drive everybody around me nuts. Con virgin?”
“Huh?” Doris asked, confused by the rapid changes in subject.
“Is this your first convention?” Mandy said slowly. It was clear that she wasn’t doing it to make Doris sound stupid, just slowing her own patter down for the benefit of the listener.
“Uh…yes,” Doris said, almost certainly.
“So who’s your con-buddy?”
“Uh…?”
Doris sighed.
“Con virgin and no con-buddy? And twenty-something hot female? Honey, you could get away with that at some place like Liberty or ConStellation, but Dragon’s a bit much. Let me guess. You heard about it from somebody and just drove down.”
“Something like that,” Doris said. Did she have a car?
“I’ve got a fair share of human charity, but,” Mandy said. “The but being that I’m here to enjoy myself, I’m already riding herd on Traxa, and there are places you’re not going to want to go that I’m headed. Not from the look of you. But if you got some decent clothes and makeup, I’d say you’d not only fit in, nobody would look at me, so you’re definitely not going.”
“Okay,” Doris said, ducking her head.
“But that’s later, and Traxa is trying to find the dealers, so I’ll take you under my wing for a bit. Come on.”
Doris obediently followed the woman out of the bathroom and back into the large room.
“Registration, which you just went through,” Mandy said, waving to the left. “They moved all the band stalls down here since it was getting crowded upstairs. That’s the Cruxshadows booth.”
“Crue-shadows?” Doris said. “The Shadow of the Cross?”
“Got it in one, not bad,” Mandy said. “Not a Christian myself, but doesn’t mean I don’t like the music.”
“I like what’s playing,” Doris said, timidly.
“Their single, “Birthday.” Kind of repetitive, but it’s got some interesting lyrics.”
“ Then tell me what really matters. Is it the money and the fame? Or how many people might eventually know your name? But maybe you touch one life, and the world becomes a better place to be. Maybe you give their dreams another day, another chance to be free,” Doris whispered along with the song.
“Rogue kind of strikes at the heart of things,” Mandy said as they passed the booth with the Goths still setting up. “Like, you are what you do. Now, me? I’ve got enough on my plate just trying to keep my shit together. Most I can do is maybe help a con virgin get her feet on the ground.”
“Thank you,” Doris said quietly as she sidled to the side to avoid being bumped again. There were a bunch of people around the escalator, and she parked in a corner by the booth, waiting for a hole to open.
“Hey, Doris,” Mandy said, waving. “I’ve been there, like I said. But you’re not going to get beat up for getting on the escalator. And if you think you can wait until it’s clear, well, it will be for about twenty minutes at five AM. And you’re gonna be pretty hungry and thirsty by then.”
Doris still waited until there was a little gap, then darted onto the escalator. She was nearly touching a very heavyset guy wearing an Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt. His look automatically made her think of bikers, and that triggered something unhappy. But she managed to avoid being noticed and got off the escalator at the next floor.
It was much the same as the lower level but there was natural light coming in from somewhere behind the escalator, and a restaurant, currently closed, on the left wall. She realized she was in traffic and looked for a corner to get into.
“Come on, one more level,” Mandy said, taking her arm. “That’s the back patio where most of the smokers, and the smokers’ friends, and about half the con, it seems, on Saturday night, hangs out. But since there’s still not many people, we’re going up to the cigar terrace.”
“Not many people?” Doris squeaked. It was too crowded for her already.
“Honey, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night it’s going to be more crowded than a club,” Mandy said, maneuvering her onto the next escalator by the simple expedient of hip-checking a skinny guy with a T-shirt that said All I Ever Needed To Learn I Learned From D amp;D out of the way. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” the kid said. “Hey, can I take your picture?”
“Maybe when we get to the top, if security doesn’t stop us,” Mandy said. “And no taking pictures of my butt on the escalator.”
The escalator debouched into an enormous lobby. The building from there up was entirely open-plan with a bank of glass elevators on the south side and multi-story windows on the east. In the middle was a modern-art sculpture that stretched all the way to the roof, and thinking about it, Doris realized it went down into the basement area where she’d met Mandy. People in a variety of dress, from normal streetwear to costumes, were