Wood Sprites(50)
“That’s the shout-out?” Louise managed to say after she stopped laughing.
“No, wait, it comes before. Let me see if I can find it.” Zahara went to a website that was labeled: Lemon-Lime Love. “Ugh. No. No.” She changed sites to one called: Jello Shots.
Louise’s stomach flipped weirdly at the site names. “Oh, tell me that those aren’t what I think they are.”
“Fan sites dedicated to your videos? Okay, I won’t tell you then. Here.”
The clip was labeled: “Nigel Reid is a Jello Shot!”
The clips started with Nigel leading the baby kuesi out onto the stage. Despite being only a few months old, it was already as tall as the Scotsman. Its long hair was silky and unruly, making it look like a shambling mound of hair with a trunk.
“Thank you for having me. This little fellow is a six-month-old Elfhome kuesi…”
“Kuesi? I thought he was a wembley.” The host double-checked her teleprompter. “I thought…it looks like a wembley.”
Nigel laughed. “Yes, everyone thinks so because of the video, The Queen’s Parting Gift. The people at the zoo have gotten so tired of having people insist that the sign is wrong that they’ve named this little guy Wembley. But he really is a kuesi, which is a cousin to Earth’s Woolly Mammoth.”
“Oh, he’s so cute,” the host said and then went wide-eyed as the beast bee-lined over to her and loomed above her. “And big!”
“I asked the Bronx Zoo to borrow him because I hope to be working with Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo in the near future.”
“Wow!” For a moment the host was more interested in the news than the animal standing beside her. “I love Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”
“Yes, they’re a wonderfully creative and knowledgeable production company.” Nigel dodged around gender, age, and number of people involved, probably because he didn’t know any of it.
“How in the world did you make contact with—” Whatever she was going to ask was cut short by the kuesi fondling her under her dress. She jumped, squeaking loudly, and the clip ended.
The comments under it exploded with speculations on what work he’d be doing with Lemon-Lime. The thread quickly grew ugly as the Jello Shot fans decided that Nigel was merely trying to capitalize on Lemon-Lime’s fame and that he was lying about the entire thing.
“Holy shit,” Louise whispered as she realized that despite being posted just an hour before, there were twenty pages of comments already.
“What are you doing with Nigel?” Zahara asked.
Louise stared at her, full of horror. It had never occurred to her that anyone who knew the truth about them would connect them up to Nigel. “You can’t tell anyone about this! We’d get into so much trouble if our parents knew!”
“They don’t know?”
“No! They think the Internet is full of pedophiles and we’re not allowed on any adult site until we’re at least fourteen.”
“Wow. That’s like really fossil-age thinking.”
“My mom knew one person that got into trouble like that; so she’s super protective. If they found out that we’ve posted our videos online and have been commenting on filmmaking sites and set up the YourStore…”
Louise stopped being able to talk because she was completely breathless at the idea of how much trouble they’d be in. They’d be grounded for months without Internet and they might never get their video equipment back.
“I won’t tell,” Zahara promised. “And I’ll let everyone else know not to say anything—but—this was on television. Does anyone else know that you’re Lemon-Lime?”
Their Aunt Kitty helped them pick the name, but she didn’t know about their videos. Also she didn’t watch morning shows. She wasn’t a morning person. Any time they did see her in the mornings, it was usually because she’d been up all night and hadn’t gone to bed yet. It was part of the reason she often babysat in emergencies.
“So what are you doing with Nigel Reid—that your parents know nothing about?”
It sounded horrible when Zahara said it that way.
“He wants to ask us questions about the gossamer call.”
Zahara’s eyes went wide. “But didn’t you just make that up as a joke?”
“Yes. I mean, no. We know there is a whistle for the gossamers, but we haven’t found any references to what it looks like or how it works.” Louise pulled at her hair at the sudden realization that they didn’t have anything concrete to tell Nigel. Her research had been detoured by everything else.
“So what are you going to do?”