The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (5 page)

There's just no point to sleeping. Not if you simply can't fall asleep, anyway. So I stay up instead. Mom will sometimes check to make sure I'm in bed—she performs this maternal duty by looking into the basement to see that there's no light shining underneath my door. I used to put a towel there to block the light, but apparently in a dark basement, you can still see light limning the entire door in the tiny space between the jamb and the door. So now I have a black sheet of plastic that I hang over the door and weight at the floor so that no light can escape.

So I can stay up as late as I want. And I do. I write the stories for real, and sometime between three and four I take down the plastic, climb into bed, and read until my eyelids and my hands drop at the same time.

This is my ritual. This is how I do it. And Mom would never understand, so what she doesn't know won't hurt her.

Tonight, though, I'm not at the computer. I'm just curled up in bed, my fist a tight knot. I can feel the bullet but I can't see it, which is safe. I have to be careful with it. My fingers are pressed close together, completely concealing the bullet. I can take it anywhere. No one can tell. No one knows what I have in my hand.

It's just a bullet. Not a gun. I think of an old saying: "Guns don't kill people.
Bullets
kill people."

Usually, when I'm not carrying it around in my pocket, I keep the bullet hidden in an old hard drive case on my desk. Mom would never look in there for anything, so it's a good hiding place. Stick it in there every night, retrieve it every morning. But right now I keep it clutched in one hand while I flip through the pages of
Schemata,
organizing them with my free hand. The bullet is comforting. Like the baby blanket I threw out a few years ago. Like an old teddy bear.

I page through
Schemata,
revising in my mind as I go along. Soon I'll get up and go to the computer to make corrections, but I'll need both hands for that, and for now I just—

My computer beeps at me. It's the instant message sound.

I dive out of bed, launching myself at the computer. Once everyone's in bed I'm allowed to leave the dial-up connection on, and I forgot to turn down the volume! I hit the "Accept" button before the computer can chime again, then quickly turn the volume all the way down to "Mute" as the message window unfolds onto my screen. I sit in my chair, my own breath suddenly loud, wondering if somehow Mom heard the chime, if she was lurking near the stairs, or if the sound carried through the vents somehow ...

Nothing.

In my rush, I dropped the bullet. It's lying on the floor. I pick it up and put it next to my keyboard, then check the time. Almost midnight. Must have been a long lacrosse practice—Cal's up pretty late to be IM-ing me.

Then I see the instant message window. Surrounded by a crowd of overlapping windows for other documents, it's a tight fit. It says:

Why do you let him hit you?

F
OR A SECOND—JUST A SECOND
—I wonder how he knows. I haven't told Cal about Frampton punching me, though the thought is tempting. In one of my favorite fantasies (slightly below the hostage story line), I tell Cal about the people who've been bugging me and he gets pissed and dishes out some righteous justice, which inspires me as well, and I get my licks in on a variety of jocks, losers, and scumbags.

I close some of the windows on my screen so that I can see the
entire
IM window. The sender's name is wrong. I assumed it was Cal, but the screen name isn't IamaChildMolester (Cal's sick sense of humor at work). It's Promethea387.

Which I should have known without ever even looking at the screen name. Cal would have typed:
y do u let him hit u?

Instant Message spam. That's all it is. I sink back in my chair, relieved and disappointed at the same time. That carefully constructed, edited, and reedited fantasy in which Cal and I wreak havoc and ass-kicking on the unending hordes of jock Jerks that roam South Brook High like the buffalo killers of the Plains crumbles into dust. (Though I'll resurrect it someday, I know.)

Promethea387.

Why do you let him hit you?

I can't figure out what kind of spam that would be, though. It's not for Viagra or Nigerian bank accounts or herbal remedies or the kind of sex that doesn't make it onto cable. Spamming for people who are abused? What kind of sense does
that
make? Is it some kind of public service spam, designed to get the attention of women who are being beaten by their husbands? I don't get it.

I check the window thoroughly. It's definitely an IM window, not an ad or a pop-up.

Promethea387.

And why would a spammer use the name of an Alan Moore character from a comic book that isn't being published anymore?

I stare at the window, but it doesn't change. It can't be a coincidence. I flash to Cal's morbid screen name. What if it's one of those sick guys who troll the 'net looking for kids they can seduce and snatch?
Why do you let him hit you?
would be a good opening line, especially for some kid who's being smacked around at home. Get the kid's confidence, offer to help out, reel him in...

But it just doesn't
sound
right. It's that Alan Moore reference. Why would someone aiming for little kids use a character from a comic book written for adults? Why not Superman or Batman or something from
Yu-Gi-Oh!
or...

It just doesn't make sense.

I look at the bullet, gleaming next to the keyboard. Almost like it's a talisman, I stroke it briefly with the tip of a finger.

There's only one way to find out what's going on. I hit "Reply" and I start to type:
What—

Xian Walker76:
What do you mean?

Promethea387:
Why do you let him hit you?

Xian Walker76:
I don't know what you're talking about.

Promethea387:
Bull. Mitchell Frampton. In gym class. He hits you over and over and you just stand there. Why?

Xian Walker:
Who wants to know?

Promethea387:
Why do you care?

Xian Walker76:
Because I'm not in the habit of discussing things with faceless, anonymous sock puppets who appear from nowhere. Or am I supposed to believe you're actually Promethea?

Promethea387: "
faceless, anonymous sock puppets." Isn't that saying the same thing three different ways?

Xian Walker76:
Stop dodging the question.

Promethea387:
Stop dodging mine. I asked first.

Xian Walker76:
That's a mature, reasonable perspective. Are you five?

Promethea387:
Sorry. I'm "not in the habit of discussing things" like my age with "faceless, anonymous sock puppets" on the internet who could turn out to be chicken hawks. I'm somewhere between ten and a hundred, though.

Xian Walker76:
Ha ha. You started this, and you know who I am already. Pretty pathetic dodge.

Promethea387:
No more pathetic than your dodging in gym class. Or do you try to get hit?

Xian Walker76:
Well, now I know who you are. Or what you are, at least. Hope you had your fun and you and your jock buddies got your fair share of laughs. I'm signing off.

Promethea387:
You think I'm a jock? I thought you were smart. And I wouldn't blame you for trying to get hit—gets you out of the game that much sooner. If only you didn't have that other little problem. You know, the big blond idiot with the punching fetish.

Xian Walker76:
Whatever. I'm done. Lose my screen name.

Promethea387:
Check your e-mail.

I
BLINK AS
I
CLOSE OUT
the IM window.
Check your e-mail.
My hand has gone slick on the mouse, the onscreen pointer wavering over the "Log Out" button.

I'm pretty sure it's some jock moron from school. Probably got my screen name from something Cal said or did, something he did that inadvertently let slip how to find me online. I was an idiot to think that
no one
saw Frampton punching me. So Vesentine or Warshaw or one of those jackasses decided to mess with my head. Bunch of muscle-head freaks, sitting up at night, laughing their remaining brains out, trying to get me to say something sad or pathetic or incriminating online, something they can e-mail to everyone they know, something they can post on the web.

The more I think about it ... The pointer vibrates. I let go of the mouse and snatch up the bullet, rubbing its cool, smooth surface between my palms until it warms. They probably even set up the whole thing to begin with. Why else would Frampton just appear and decide to start hitting me? Why do it twice?

Check your e-mail.

Yeah, right. It's probably more gay porn.

Check your e-mail.

In the comics, Promethea was a sort of physical and metaphysical avatar for the nature of ideas themselves. She was the incarnation of imagination, and her purpose, if I remember right, was to bring about the end of the comic book universe she inhabited. Sort of a metatextual commentary on the self-destructive cycle of superhero comics or something like that. I don't remember exactly. Cal would know.

"She." That's the thing. Promethea's a female character. Why would a bunch of jocks decide to use her to trip me up? Lull me into a false sense of complacency? Maybe they just saw the name on one of Cal's comics or something...?

The bullet's warm now, a tight knot of brass in the center of my hands, which have now gone white with tension. I'm going to log out. I'm going to disconnect and go back to
Schemata.

I hold the bullet in one hand, grab the mouse with the other, and click "Check My E-mail" before I lose my nerve.

In there among the usual spam is a message from Promethea387, with a little paper clip next to it. An attachment.

I open the e-mail, thinking, "Virus, trojan horse, worm, spyware," but it's just a message that says, "See?" and a JPEG.

The JPEG is a crappy lo-res image, slightly blurry and small, but unmistakable. It's me in gym class, my face frozen in an expression of surprise and pain as Mitchell Frampton's fist slams into my shoulder. The extreme foreground is a blur of bodies playing dodge ball.

I stare at it for long seconds. The angle ... No one playing dodge ball could take a picture. And the angle ... It's so
wrong.
It's just off somehow. I don't—

And I think of a black blur with a white blur stuck into it, a face like a thumb dipped in white paint.

I bring up the instant message program and pound out a message to Promethea387:
Who are you .. . and why do you sit up in the bleachers during gym?

The pointer vibrates again, then I hit "Send" before I can change my mind. The bullet grows hot, mashed between my hands as I rock back and forth like a toddler who needs to go to the bathroom, waiting. My message is thrown out into cyberspace. Is Promethea even online anymore?

I'm chewing my bottom lip and thinking that I'm too late when the IM comes back:
Nice to meet you. Check your e-mail again.

My e-mail has another message from Promethea387, this one with multiple JPEGs attached, all of them in that same crummy format, all of them still eminently readable: Frampton punching me again. Frampton's arm pulled back. Mr. Burger and Mr. Kaltenbach in a corner, ignoring the gym as they laugh at something on Mr. Burger's clipboard.

I'm absorbing all of this when the IM program pops up a window again.

Sometimes don't you just wish someone would break into school and kill all of them?

D
ON'T YOU JUST WISH SOMEONE
would break into school and kill all of them
? It echoes in my head all night and all day. Because when you come right down to it, I guess that's what I
have
been wishing. Never in such stark terms, though, and never out loud like that ... if an instant message counts as "out loud." I figure it does, in some way.

If Promethea387 hadn't brought that question up, I probably would have signed off last night and never given another thought to my mystery IMer. Instead, I'm going to
meet
this person after school today. I'm not even really sure why. Maybe it's sleep deprivation—I slept a couple of hours last night, finally logging off the computer at four-thirty a.m., waking up when I heard Mom and the step-fascist tromping around upstairs at six or so. Even for me, that's not much sleep.

This morning, though, I got through first-period biology and second-period social studies with no problem. My secret weapon in these situations? Mom's stash of Excedrin Migraine, gone unused during her pregnancy. The stuff's loaded with caffeine, strictly verboten for the gravid among us. Headaches are caused by the expansion of blood vessels, which causes pain because they get too big for their allotted space and get squeezed. Caffeine, being a diuretic, causes the blood vessels to constrict. That's the magic of Excedrin Migraine.