The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (6 page)

Wash a handful of those suckers down with a Coke, and all's right with the world no matter how tired you are.

I'm glad I know things like that. Sometimes being the smart kid is fun. Other times, it's not.

For example, there was dirt in my locker this morning. Someone had obviously poured it in through the ventilation slots at the top, which must have taken them a while—the slots open
down,
which means that you'd have to force the dirt up into the slots a little bit at a time and let it drop inside. Someone had patience, though, and managed to get a good bit in there. I didn't even realize it until just now after third period; as I stooped to get my English books from the bottom of the locker, I saw the dirt and figured it out. Who was around my locker this morning, who had been out of place, waiting to see my reaction? At least I disappointed them.

I touch the bullet briefly.

Cal claps me on the shoulder as I head to English. "Hey, man, I finally did it!"

"Did what?" Cal's presence spikes a thought: Whoever put the dirt in my locker has to be involved in an afterschool activity so that they could have done it last night after I left. Which narrows my suspects to half the athletes in school and the band, but I just don't seem to inspire hatred in the band.

"Finally beat you on a paper," he says, and whips out a sheaf of stapled papers with the title "Who Watches the Watchman?: Emerson's Transparent Eyeball and the American Transcendentalists." Mrs. Hanscomb has written "98%" and some generic complimentary teacher-talk on the cover.

"You just couldn't resist an Alan Moore reference in your title, could you?"

He points to one of her comments. "She thinks I'm referencing Juvenal's
Satires.
"

"How did you get your paper back so early?"

"She's giving them back in class today. I ran into her this morning and she gave it to me." He grins and waves it in my face again. "It took me almost the whole year, but I
finally
beat you in this class. No
way
you get higher than a ninety-eight. Doesn't happen."

"Congratulations."

"That's all you have to say? That's it?"

I probably should have more to say, especially considering all the good-natured ribbing I give Cal on a regular basis about my grades and his, but I'm humming from the caffeine buzz and my brain is still processing last night's IM and e-mail chat-fest.

In English, Mrs. Hanscomb hands me my paper as soon as I walk into the room. The bell hasn't rung yet and everyone's still settling into their seats, including Lisa Carter, wearing, today, a pair of nicely tight blue jeans that are pleasing to the eye but do absolutely nothing to help the ongoing Panty Algorithm investigation. Cal is joking and laughing behind me, reading Mrs. Hanscomb's comments on his paper just loud enough for me to hear them, exulting in his triumph.

I look at my paper and I can't help it. I explode with laughter and collapse onto the floor.

"What?" Cal looks around. "What? Don't. Don't tell me."

So I don't. I just lie there laughing, and hold the paper up for him.

"Ninety-nine? Ninety-nine? No
way!
I can't believe this!"

The bell rings and Mrs. Hanscomb tells Cal to take his seat. Glancing my way, she says, "You, too," and I pick myself up and walk to my desk, aware of the eyes on me. I couldn't help it, though. I just had to laugh.

"The American body paradox," Mrs. Hanscomb says, hoisting herself to sit on her desk and crossing her legs. "Who can tell me about this?"

"Beats me," Cal says. "I only got a ninety-eight on my paper. Ask him." And he hooks a thumb in my direction.

The class laughs, and maybe it's just the caffeine, but I laugh along with them.

"I mean, his hobby is tearing the erasers off his pencils," Cal goes on.

Mrs. Hanscomb allows herself a grin. "OK, Calvin, that's enough."

"When he gets a perfect paper, his grade point average goes
down.
"

And now the laughter takes on a slightly dark tinge, a bad flavor, as if dipped in a solution containing the slightest percentage of vinegar. Mrs. Hanscomb tells Cal it's enough again, and he flashes me a grin before tucking his paper away in a folder, but now I'm conspicuous and the laughter's echoing in my head. I slip my hand into my pocket and stroke the tips of my fingers against the bullet. I feel calm almost immediately.

It's not good to remind them that I exist. Not good at all. I can't afford to let myself feel good, to let my guard down, to think for a single moment that I belong.

Because I don't.

A
T THE END OF THE DAY
, I skip the bus. I've managed to sweep most of the dirt out of my locker onto the floor, where it's scattered by the constant march of feet up and down the hall. Cal catches me on his way to the buses: "Hey, man, you coming to the game tonight?"

The game? I think about it for a second—I seem to remember something about a lacrosse game being mentioned on the morning announcements. Despite his intellect, Cal suffers from the misapprehension that I secretly harbor some measure of concern about the school's sports teams.

"No," I tell him.

"Come on! You
never
come."

Which really tells you all you need to know right there.

"You should see us. If we win, we go on to the county playoffs."

I can't imagine anything in this world I care about less. "Sorry," I tell him, shrugging my shoulders as if that action somehow absolves me of any responsibility for the decision.

He just rolls his eyes with an expression that says, "There you go again." Not that I've given him any cause to think so, but he seems to believe that my dislike of the Jock Jerks is passive, as if I just can't be bothered to go to sporting events. But I
actively
don't care about them. I mean, I
work
at not caring about those morons!

He tosses a salute my way as he heads down the hall. I wave weakly. Have fun, lacrosse boy.

I go outside, skirt the bus line, and go around the building before anyone can notice me. There's an elementary school, the imaginatively named South Brook Elementary School, nearby. You cross an access road and go down a hill, and there it is.

And there I go, my backpack bumping against my shoulder blades as I stutter-walk down the incline. I hope I'm right about this. If not, I'll be calling Mom for a ride and she'll be pissed that I missed the bus.

I spot someone on the playground behind the elementary school, a small figure dressed in black sitting on one of the swings. For a moment I kick into paranoid mode: This could all still be a trap. It would be an easy setup. Lure me out here with some e-mails and Instant Messages, then pound the crap out of me. I should turn around and huff my way back up the hill. I might still be able to catch the bus.

But there's no one else around, and the figure in black is just sitting there all alone, barely moving on the swing.

I walk up to her. She's wearing long sleeves even though it's hot out, some kind of black shirt with buttons up the side instead of the front, opened at the top to show her neck and part of that well between the neck and shoulder on her left side. The shirt's untucked, flapping over black jeans, which lead to black socks and black shoes. Her hair is black—either dyed or just naturally made out of semihardened ink. It's like something that swallows light, thick and endlessly dark and chopped short on top and in back, hanging long and low in front. She's looking down at her shoes, which trace lazy arcs in the sand as she drifts on the swing.

"So," I say. "Promethea, huh?" Brilliant introduction. I should have had something better planned.

She looks up at me, not bothering to push her hair away from her eyes or her forehead. Her face is so pale ... It's so pale that I can't even think of something to compare it to. Chalk? Kabuki makeup? Liquid Paper? Her eyes are brown stamps on it, her nose a bump that sparkles with a red stone through one side. Her mouth twists in a sneer; her lower lip is pierced at the corner, and the ring somehow makes the sneer broader. Now that she's raised her head, I can see that she's wearing a necklace with a reversed smiley face on it: a black circle with yellow lines making up the face, like a photo negative.

"Yeah. Promethea. Got a problem with it, fanboy?"

Her voice is exactly as I expected it from her online messages: low, sardonic, defensive. Sort of like what I would sound like if I were a girl, I guess.

"No. But now that I see you, I figured you for more of a
Sandman
type." Take that.

"Oh, please, fanboy. Spare me your crap."

"You mean you
don't
like Gaiman?"

She rolls her eyes and pulls a pack of cigarettes from somewhere under her shirt, probably tucked into her waistband. As she lights up, I take her in—she's almost painfully thin, like her whole body's an afterthought.

"I like him fine. All the cool screen names were taken, so I went with Promethea. Is that all right? Do I pass your test, or do I have to name the founding members of the Legion of Super-Jackoffs?"

"Hey, you asked
me
here. You IM'd
me.
"

She stands up, tilts her head back, and blows smoke straight up into the sky. She's almost my height, but some of that is the shoes, which, I notice, have thick, chunky heels.

"Yeah, yeah. I know."

"You got here pretty fast. I left right after the last bell. How'd you beat me here?"

"I blew off last period."

"Oh." I've never skipped a class in my life. I don't even know how you'd do it. Doesn't someone notice you're missing and report you? I want to ask her, but I feel like that would be unsophisticated somehow.

"So, why?" she asks, sucking on the cigarette again, gazing at me. She's pretending to be bored, but her eyes give her away. She's hungry for something—something new. Something different.

"Why what?"

"You know. You never answered me. Why do you let him hit you?"

We stand there, staring at each other. My blood is pounding in my temples and I can feel the beginnings of a massive headache. It's not just the smell of the cigarette—once caffeine washes out of your system, your constricted blood vessels bounce back. Caffeine withdrawal. Just like any drug, it bites you in the ass at some point.

"You're right," I tell her, not sure why. "Sometimes I
do
wish someone would break into the school and kill all of them."

She grins. "Yeah. I figured that."

Her name is Kyra. We walk the elementary school grounds together, alone.

"I'm just so tired of that gym class shit," she says. "That's just so over for me. Like I need that kind of noise, you know? So I swiped one of my sister's doctor's notes and took it into school. Her name's Katherine, and the note just says 'K. Sellers' on it, so the school nurse thinks it's about me."

"What did it say?"

She shrugs and flicks her cigarette butt out into the grass. I bite my lip. I want to pick it up so that some little elementary school kid won't eat it or something, but she's just walking along and I have to keep up.

"Something about depression and shit like that. My sister's a freakin' pharmacy on spiked heels ever since she lost the kid."

"Lost the kid?"

"Yeah. Dumb bitch couldn't even remember when to take the stupid pill, you know? She washed outta nursing school because of the morning sickness and then she had a, y'know, like a miscarriage, and now she just sits there all the time, watching TV and eating Cheetos and ballooning up like she's preggers all over again. But whatever. It got me out of gym."

"Don't ... don't your parents—"

"My dad? As long as no one burns the house down, he doesn't care what the hell goes on."

"Oh. Oh. My parents are divorced, too."

She stops for a moment and I almost walk into her. She sweeps that long, annoying hank of jet black hair out of her eyes. "I never said my parents were divorced, fanboy."

"Stop calling me 'fanboy,' OK?"

"Why? You read superheroes, right? You and your buddy, the superstar jock? Are you two queer on each other or something? Not that I care."

"No! And I don't just read superheroes," I tell her.

"Uh-huh. OK."

"You read comic books, too," I remind her.

"Not superhero shit."

"Oh, please!" For a second I forget that I'm on the verge of having an honest-to-God new friend. Her hypocrisy just bugs the hell out of me. She's been rambling and talking because let's face it, I don't know how to talk to people, but I
do
know about comic books. "
Sandman
started out as a superhero comic! The first volume had the friggin' Justice League in it and Batman shows up at the funeral at the end of the series! You Vertigo people are so damn pretentious. You can't—"

"I don't
just
read Vertigo, fanboy. You ever hear of Sara Varon? Adrian Tomine? Chynna Clugston-Major?"

"Yes."