Love, Comment, Subscribe by Cathy Yardley

CHAPTER 17

Tobin got a little lost.

He was lucky he’d left early, but he still smacked into LA traffic. God, he hated LA. Still, he knew it was where most of the successful YouTubers lived—that was probably why Lily had moved here. She was nothing if not a planner, and she did what she needed to, to succeed. She’d been like that since he’d known her in high school. She had studied for the SATs like she’d been planning the Normandy invasion, and she’d attacked the APs like they personally insulted her. He’d never seen anyone as prepared as she had been.

He’d winged it, knowing that a three in an AP course was basically as good as a five, if you were just looking at getting out of electives. She had hated that “half-assed” approach, he remembered with a smile.

Maybe she was right. Maybe their collaborating was a bad idea.

He pulled into a warehouse parking lot. He’d never been in this part of LA. The area was super industrial, and the building itself looked like a gray concrete factory, although he wasn’t sure what the factory was for. It was probably a good artistic backdrop for fashion stuff, he mused. He thought he’d seen a previous video where Lily had wandered through someplace straight out of a Soviet bloc, all rusted metal and exposed brick and concrete blocks, while she was wearing something gauzy and floral and feminine. She worked the hell out of it, he seemed to remember.

Not that he’d been paying too much attention to that, he thought with a huff, double-checking the address and then getting out of his car. It was just that he was trying to see more of her content, figure out what the Venn diagram intersect between what she did and what he did was. The problem was, she was right: their partnership might be a little too much of a stretch. She was just so rigid, so controlled. He worked hard, but there was a lot of guesswork and a lot of flexibility in his videos. He was jazz. She was a military march . . . the kind where the band would get shot if they got a note wrong.

He walked up to the door, looking around. The place only had a few cars. It was weird, considering it was the middle of the week.

On the other hand,he thought, there’s a chance she’s taking me somewhere empty to kill me without witnesses. She had been pretty pissed about the jump scare, and he knew that she tended to hold a grudge about that sort of thing, especially if she felt like people were making fun of her afterward. She wasn’t like their friend Vinh, one of the Nerd Herd, who was ridiculously old-school vengeful. That guy made Clint Eastwood look like Barney the Dinosaur. Vinh would wait a couple of months to a couple of years, then utterly destroy anything you cared about. Tobin remembered hearing about Vinh’s adventures at NYU, when some classmate had stolen one of his class projects, turned it in as his own, and tried to frame Vinh as a plagiarist. After researching the guy and his family for six months, Vinh had not only gotten the kid kicked out of school; he’d gotten his father arrested for insider trading with an anonymous tip and a buttload of evidence. Ultimately Vinh was a good guy, but if you crossed someone he cared about, the guy was scary.

Tobin shook his head. No, Lily could be pissy, and occasionally spiteful, but she wasn’t going to punish him for being late and scattered. At least, he hoped she wouldn’t.

Tobin buzzed the intercom. “Who is it?” a scratchy female voice said.

“Hey, Lils. It’s me, Tobin.”

“You’re late.”

“Just a little,” he protested. “I got lost. Stupid GPS.”

“No problem. I’ll send someone down to get you, okay? Just wait there.”

Where was he going to go? And who was “someone”? He’d done shoots with whole crews before—Shawn, Hayden, Asad, and whatever other merry band he could rope into helping him—but from what he could tell, Lily tended to work alone. He didn’t even know who her friends were anymore. Did she have a lot of friends in LA? Had she replaced the Herd?

It occurred to him that despite his penchant for doing things off the cuff, he might have asked a few more questions before he got here.

He waited, rocking back and forth from the balls of his feet to his heels. She hadn’t prepared him for this, although she’d told him that she knew exactly what they’d be doing. He glanced around. This place was the type of place where he could see a bunch of street runners parkouring. Maybe he should try a video where he attempted parkour. Mental note: see if Skeptic’s up for it. Although he doubted it. If Tobin was indoorsy, Shawn was downright subterranean.

The door opened, and he found himself confronted with a woman, taller than he was, with an undercut dyed bright purple, a baby doll dress, and a pair of platform combat boots that he was frankly amazed she could walk in. “You must be the goofy one,” she said, sizing him up.

“Yup. That’d be me,” he admitted. What the heck was going on here? “And you are . . . ?”

“The designer.” She turned, walking down the hallway. He glanced around, then followed. He’d assumed that was what he was supposed to do.

“Designer, huh? You’re going to be working on the shoot with us?”

The woman grunted. He wondered if Lily had told her what had happened with the previous video. If Lily wanted him dead . . . well, odds were good she could handle it herself, honestly. But he imagined this woman might be handy at disposing of a body.

She took him into a large workroom. There were bolts of fabric, and large tables, and workstations with sewing machines. He looked around with curiosity. It was cool.

“Tobin.” Lily sounded smug, and she walked over to him, cocking a hip and crossing her arms. “Perfect. You ready to get started?”

“Ready to get started with what?”

“You said my video, my rules,” she warned him. “And you said you’d go along with anything I came up with. Are we still good with that?”

He abruptly regretted that particular agreement. What did she have in mind? It was a workshop . . . obviously of a clothing designer. It couldn’t be that bad, really. He had already admitted that he’d been dressed in drag, and that was actually kind of fun. He wondered if he could steer her toward cosplay too. That might be a good combination of what they both liked, he realized.

“Tobin?”

He realized that his brain had gone off on a tangent. “Um, yeah. Of course. No problem.”

She nodded. “Then I have some people I want you to meet.” She gestured to a kind of buff Latino guy, who emerged from a small side room. “This is Santangelo, and you’ve already met Ion.”

He turned to the tall woman. The name kind of fit her, actually. He greeted them both. “Great! What are we going to be doing?”

She ignored his query, turning instead to Santangelo. “So, what do you think?”

Santangelo walked around him. “Dude, when was the last time you got a haircut?” he said, shaking his head. “It’s healthy, though. Use any product?”

“Not really.” Tobin realized he was feeling uncomfortably like a horse or car being auctioned, and ignored the impulse to cover his chest with his crossed arms. “Unless I’m cosplaying. I mean, I once put an entire bottle of hair gel in my hair to make it stick up like Goku from Dragonball Z.”

“Well, it’s shiny and has a lot of body, but you gotta do something with . . . all that,” Santangelo said, brushing past his anime reference and gesturing vaguely around his head. “And colors . . . how do you feel about changing it?”

“I dyed my hair purple once,” Tobin replied, then nodded his head at Ion. “Kind of like her color, but a little brighter.”

“No, I mean . . . ,” Santangelo said, then stopped, looking at Lily. “Well, we don’t want to be here all day, I guess.”

“It’ll be fine,” Lily assured Santangelo. Tobin wondered when she might assure him, seeing as he was the one who was possibly dying his hair or shaving his head or something. “Ion, what do you think?”

Now it was Ion’s turn to circle him. “I’m going to need to adjust a few things,” she said. “Nothing off the rack’s going to be quite right—he’s shorter than I was expecting, and he’s got a broader chest—but some quick tailoring ought to be enough. I’ll think about what I have that would work.”

Tobin didn’t want to show his impatience, but he was feeling it. “Um, what are we doing?”

Lily smirked. “Why, Tobin? Feeling nervous?”

He chuckled, or at least he tried to. It sounded a little wooden to him. “I am hardly nervous. Did you see the video I did with Skeptic where I waxed my entire body except for my head? And that other time, when I went tandem skydiving?” He scoffed. “Trust me. This is going to be a snap.”

“It really will be,” she said, and he swore she sounded like she was trying to soothe him. The idea seemed ludicrous. It also made him feel even guiltier—he hadn’t tried to reassure her when it had been his turn to do a video. If anything, it made him more of a dick.

“So, you’re going to make me dress in drag, then? Like we discussed?” he said. “That should be fun.”

“It probably would be,” she agreed. “But as you’ve said, you’ve done that already. Also, I think too many channels go for drag in a mean-spirited way. I don’t want that to happen.”

“Neither would I,” he agreed immediately. But he was completely at a loss. “So . . . what are we doing?”

She grinned. “We’re going to give you a makeover, of course,” she said with a placid smile.

“A . . . makeover?” He glanced down at his clothes. “Um. Okay.”

He wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t sure why he wasn’t expecting that. It actually made perfect sense, considering her usual content. Still . . .

“Isn’t that a little . . .” He cleared his throat, unsure of how to say it, then just plunged forward. “I don’t know, boring?”

He expected her to be offended and felt bad the moment the words were out of his mouth. Instead, her brown eyes glinted with humor.

“Trust me,” she said, in a way that absolutely meant he probably shouldn’t. “When I’m done, this is not going to be your typical makeover video. You are gonna be hawt.”

He couldn’t stop himself from barking out a laugh. “I sincerely doubt that.”

“So do I,” Ion muttered, causing Santangelo to laugh. Tobin winced at the conviction in Ion’s voice.

“My video, my rules, right?” Lily said, and there was no missing the smugness of her voice.

He grumbled his agreement.

“Perfect,” she said, smiling. Then she pointed to the little room. He started walking over.

“Oh . . . and, Tobin?”

“Yeah?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Strip.”