TRUE BELIEVERS: Chapter 27 — Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal!

True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.

The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!

Even though he’s just across the hotel room, Calvin feels like he’s a universe away from Billy. As he pulls on his Avenger outfit — making sure to hide any exposed flesh from Billy’s sensitive eyes — he starts to wonder when exactly the chasm started forming between them. Was it when he first told Billy about the boy he’d kissed? Did that make him uncomfortable? Is that what this is all about? It’s not like Calvin went into any detail beyond that. And surely Billy had already known that Calvin wasn’t into girls.

It’s not like they ever talked about girls anyway. Hell, as far as Calvin could ever tell, Billy was practically comicbooksexual, if that’s possible. They’d been friends since kindergarten, bonding over the superhero cartoons they watched…