The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (28 page)

I can't believe it. I just sit there, silent, as three of my tormentors gang up on a fourth. It's like I'm a diver who's been saved from a shark by other sharks.

"—smells so bad," Lorenz is saying, "that his zipper has a hazard alarm hooked up to it!"

More howls. Wow. The pecking order doesn't just peck
me.
Cool.

P
ETE
V
ESENTINE'S HOUSE IS LIKE
something out of an old sitcom, if you imagine the sitcom colliding with a vice raid. Picture-perfect furniture, walls that aren't painted the white that came with the house, wallpaper borders, molding. All the stuff Mom keeps threatening to do but never does.

If I didn't know better, I'd say every student at South Brook is here, crammed into the living room, mostly. The lights are down so low that you almost have to feel your way around. Maybe that's the point. There's an array of gyrating bodies, moving as if in spasm. This is supposed to be fun?

I waste a moment scanning the crowd for Kyra. The idea that she would be at a party like this is such a ridiculous notion that I feel like an imbecile for even considering it. Then again,
I
shouldn't be here, either, so there's precedent.

But she's not here. Not in the living room, at least.

I wish I'd brought along a notepad or a sketchbook or a camera. This is great research for
Schemata.
I can see a whole scene like this, a party, maybe Courteney comes to find one of her students ... I don't know. But this is what kids my age do, apparently, so if nothing else it's good to be exposed to it. It'll add some good details to the story.

The stereo is cranked up so loud that you don't hear the music so much as feel it through the soles of your feet, an endless repeating bass line. Vesentine himself cruises the house, jerking his head like a turkey, allegedly in time with the music, but as near as I can tell he's not keeping any kind of rhythm.

"White man's dance," Cal says, smirking, and I feel like an honorary black kid for a minute.

The place reeks of beer—it's like ten thousand Tonys decided to crack open brewskis all at once. Someone shoves a bottle into my hand and I stare at it in revulsion. I had beer once, a few years ago, on New Year's. My dad let me try some. I puked.

But I figure if I hold the beer bottle, I'll look like I fit in and no one will pressure me about drinking.

Cal's got a bottle, too, and I feel a flare of disappointment until I see that the liquid level in his hasn't budged either. He leans over to me. "If you really want to fool people, spill a little into the ficus over there every now and then."

A horrifying thought occurs to me. "Is Frampton here?"

Cal gives me the look he usually saves for when I try to do my bad 50 Cent impersonation. "Who?"

"Mitchell Frampton?"

"Oh, that burnout? Big blond doofus?"

"Yeah."

"No way, are you kidding? Ves can't stand him. No one can stand him. He's a total loser."

No argument there.

Someone shouts out, and then the music dips low, almost to silence, becoming a backbeat. Vesentine jumps up onto a table, pinwheels for balance, and then raises his beer bottle to hoots and hollers from the crowd. He launches into a long, slurred, invective-filled rant against the school system, the county, the head of the lacrosse program, and pretty much the rest of the planet. One word figures into his monologue repeatedly, used as noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, often in the same sentence.

The crowd receives him like he's Caesar. Let me clarify: like he's Caesar at the
beginning
of the play.

I look around for Cal to see his reaction to all this, but he's nowhere to be found. I'm alone in a sea of faces, some familiar, some unknown. Even the familiar ones are strange to me, remembered from hallway glimpses and not much else. There's almost no one from the sophomore class who isn't on the lacrosse team, but there's entire packs of juniors and seniors, roaming like confident soldiers, safe in numbers and age.

No Kyra. I don't even realize that I'm looking for her again until the depression that she's not around hits me. I don't understand what happened at the convention. I don't understand why she even showed or why she did what she did. Was that supposed to help? Jeez, every time she shows off her breasts, bad things happen to me.

"Yo!" A hand claps my shoulder and I almost collapse. "Need a beer?"

I turn to the face of a stranger. He's grinning widely, his eyes slightly unfocused, his breath a tidal wave of alcohol.

"Dude!" he says. "Dude, do you need a beer?"

I have no idea who this guy is. I raise my beer bottle and he goggles at it as if discovering Troy. "
Ex
cellent!" He hugs me and staggers off. I am officially weirded out.

Definitely using this in
Schemata.

I push through the crowd a little bit, finding the going tough in the dim light. Vesentine's monologue is over, having ended in a flourish of profanities linked by the occasional preposition, then a defiant roar from the crowd. The music comes back up and the walls start to vibrate. I try to figure out how to get through the crowd without rubbing against anyone the wrong way. In the end, I think it's probably impossible.

I don't want to drink. I don't want to be here. I don't do stuff like this, stuff that's wrong. It's illegal to drink at my age. I shouldn't even be holding this beer. It's like I told Kyra: There's right and there's wrong. That's it.

I manage to make my way through to a hallway, which is just as crowded as the living room. Girls are clustered with guys in couples up and down the corridor, kissing, grinding against each other. Like a porno with clothes on. I creep through. I just want some fresh air.

I make it to Vesentine's kitchen, which is a riot of ice cubes, beer bottles, smashed bags of chips, and something greenish gray smeared down a cabinet. I don't want to know.

I open the back door and go out onto a deck, into the cool night and blessed fresh air. At last! I breathe in deep, sigh in satisfaction, then lean against the railing and—after checking below—let my beer start to trickle out down to the ground.

"What a waste."

Kyra! I turn around, my beer all but gone now. There's a table with an umbrella sticking up from the center and it catches the light from near the door, throwing shadows into the corners, especially right up against the house. That's where she's sitting, in a deck chair, right where my blind spot would have been when I came outside.

My throat locks up.

"But it's pretty lousy beer, isn't it?" Dina asks. "No sin tossing it out."

Like I said: My throat locks up. I just stand there like an idiot.

Not Kyra; Dina. I could have sworn ... Just like in those dreams; getting them confused. I don't understand.

She's wearing a sleeveless blouse that's unbuttoned about halfway, enough that there's what appears to be endless acres of visible cleavage. I remember Kyra's lecture about the wizardry and illusion possible as regards the female breast, but that just leads me to Kyra's
next
move, which is a bad thing to think about right now. I don't need any more stimulation.

Dina's also wearing shorts, the kind with cuffs at about mid-thigh. They fit snugly, sleek against her hips. She has one foot on an ottoman, the other crossed over it, a sandal dangling from that foot as she jiggles it in unconscious accompaniment to the music in the house. Even unaware, she has better timing than Vesentine. She's not drinking beer. It's something else. Something with berries on the label. Wine cooler?

It clicks that I'm staring at her, which I shouldn't do, but it's so weird. Just a minute ago I was thinking of a scene in
Schemata
where Courteney has to come to a party like this, and now here's Dina.

"I didn't know someone was out here," I tell her. "I'm sorry." I head for the door.

"Just don't tell anyone you saw me."

"I won't." Yes, the sophomore slug will obey the commands of the Senior Goddess. For a split second I fantasize that I might actually talk to her, but then I remember the one time on the bus. When I accidentally touched her and she looked at me like I was a bug. A big, disgusting bug with too many tentacles.

As I open the door, I hear a familiar sound. Dina has knocked a cigarette out of the pack and is getting ready to light up.

"Please don't do that," someone tells her.

"What did you say?" she asks. And yes, she's talking to me.

"Please don't..." I should shut up. But I think of Kyra's mother and I just..."Please don't do that," I say again. "Don't smoke that."

She arches an eyebrow at me. It's a Kyra-ism, something that until recently I never would have thought was at all sexy. Such a fool.

"I have a friend whose mother died of lung cancer. It's a really bad way to go. And..."

The eyebrow is still arched. I'm fixated on it.

She sighs, which does simply amazing things to the body under the blouse. She breaks the cigarette in half and makes a show of tossing each half over the deck railing. "There. Happy?"

"Ecstatic." Does my mental control go beyond making her stop smoking? Dare I command her to dance for my pleasure? Sh-yeah.

"Do I
know
you?"

"Uh-uh." I shake my head vigorously, which is a mistake. I feel nauseated from the sudden motion and the reek of beer, which seems to have taken up permanent residence in my nostrils. I pull up a chair and sit down before I embarrass myself by falling down at her feet.

"You OK?"

"Yeah."

"You
are
a little young to be drinking." She favors me with a mock-severe look that I'm sure she intends to be maternal but I find nothing short of full-on erotic. That's it; I'm staying seated for the time being.

"So are you," I tell her. Which is true.
No
one here is twenty-one.

"What are you, an undercover cop or something?" She regards me with amusement in her eyes. So much better than contempt.

"I'm..." I had a pretty decent comeback on the tip of my tongue, but she tilts her bottle to her mouth and drinks. Her lips on the bottle. Her
lips.
On the
bottle.
God, I will never be able to stand again.

She finishes her swig. "Well? Are you?"

Only undercover with you, baby.

You seem to be thinking about getting under the covers with me, Miss Jurgens.

I do
all
my work undercover.

God. Where is
that
crap coming from?

"No, I'm the guest of honor. I'm the guy who hacked the school's grade computer." It comes out quick and easy and effortless, like all good lies.

She bolts upright in her chair. "Really? Are you serious?"

"No! No. It was just a joke."

"God, if you
were
the guy ... Half of them"—she jerks her head toward the house—"would want to kill you, and the other half would want to blow y—" She breaks off. "How old are you?"

Old enough, toots.

Mature in mind, young in stamina.

Ugh! Stop it!

"I'm a sophomore." Sounds better than "fifteen," for some reason.

"Oh. Oh, wait a sec. I
do
know you. You ride the bus with me, right?"

Ah, busted. "You don't ride the bus."

She nods, takes another sip. Oh, Lord above. Her lips on the bottle. The working of her throat...

"Someone told me you were some kind of genius. Is that true?"

Huh? For once, I'm well and truly flabbergasted. Who's talking about me? Especially to Dina Jurgens? How does my name get brought up to her? Have I crossed over into an alternate universe or something?

"A genius? Not really. I mean, a genius is someone with an IQ over one-forty." I'm still holding the beer bottle, and my grip is precarious as my palms begin to sweat. I lean over to put it on the table, and I get an eyeful of long, smooth, tanned leg.

"Someone told me," she goes on, oblivious to my drooling, "that you messed with Sawyer's head. I had a friend in her class last year, and she told me that this freshman just shut down the whole class one day."

"Oh. The Tortoise Blight thing. Yeah. That was me."

Something amazing happens. Something so magical and mystical that it makes me reconsider the existence of not just God but also any of the usual subdivine helping spirits, such as Cupid and Uriel and the Silver Surfer: Dina Jurgens laughs. She laughs full and loud and honestly, her head thrown back, gracing me with the sweep of her throat. I flash briefly into fantasy-land, my lips tracing a route down the smooth skin of her neck, into the hollow of her throat, then further, and I think I'll have to sit here until sunup.

"Oh, that was priceless!" She wipes tears from her eyes. "I couldn't believe it when she told me about it. She said it was like you had the whole class in the palm of your hand. Like you were running the show."

"Really?" I was
there
and I don't remember it being like that.