Xian Walker76: Fine. How are you?
Promethea387: How's your shoulder?
I pump my arm a couple of times. Not sure why, but that's what tough guys in movies do when people ask them how their arms are. The spot where Frampton used me as a piñata for two days straight is less purple now, more yellow. Tender to the touch, but not painful.
Xian Walker76: It feels OK. Just bruised.
Promethea387: What are you doing tomorrow?
I shrug, which is stupid because she can't see me. What's the right answer to that? Say "nothing" and I'm a loser. Make something up and I miss out on whatever she's getting at. Whoever thought I'd have this problem?
My IM bings again, which is annoying. Give me a second, I start to type, but then I see why it chirped: It's from another user.
IamaChildMolester: hey man guess what
Oh, crap. The window with my conversation with Kyra glares at me like a collection of angry relatives, her last question particularly annoyed. Cal's window is a pesky kid cousin, tugging at my leg and whining, "See what I did? See what I did?"
Xian Walker76: Give me your phone number?
Promethea387: Why? I know where you live. I'll stop by at noon. Later.
I shut down the last window and breathe a sigh of relief. That was stupid. Why didn't I just tell Cal I was talking to someone else? Why didn't I just ask Kyra to hold on for a second?
As usual, I skim through the chat logs quickly to make sure I didn't say anything too stupid. It also helps to refresh my memory in case I made up some sort of little helper lie. I wince at the glitches where I cut-and-pasted to save time. "ves's." That would be Vesentine's house.
Noon. She'll pick me up at noon. What is this? Is she my girlfriend or something? She did call me noble.
I pick up the bullet and toss it up and down a few times. I don't understand the world at all.
Chapter Fifteen
LATER THAT MORNING, after an uncharacteristic five hours of sleep, I tell Mom that I'm going out for a little while.
"Where are you going? I can't drive you today. I have to go—"
"Don't worry about it." I can finesse this—she's busy, so she's not paying 100 percent attention to me. She's sitting at the kitchen table, some sort of catalog of baby stuff open before her. The pages are dog-eared and plastered with Post-its. Outside, the step-fascist is making loud, unnatural sounds with a chainsaw and the pile of wood behind the shed. Every few seconds, the saw makes a noise that sounds almost like a human yelp: "Weee-ow!"
"Don't worry about it?" She turns away from the catalog. "Where are you going?"
I actually don't know. "Around. Just hanging around."
"With who? cal?"
"No."
"Then with who? "
"Jeez, Mom, a friend, OK? What's the big deal?" Finesse is not an option, apparently.
Mom gnaws on her bottom lip. "A friend?"
"Yeah."
"Who?"
"Her name's—"
"Her?"
"Can I finish? Her name's Kyra."
"Kyra. How did you meet her?"
That's one story that wouldn't go over well. Anything that starts with "I met her on the Internet" is just a bad idea. "She goes to school with me."
"How come you've never mentioned her before?"
"Mom! Do I have to tell you everything?" Oh, crap. That was the wrong thing to say. Mom's eyes narrow.
"What else aren't you telling me?"
"Nothing, Mom. I just met her a few days ago, that's all."
"Is she coming over here? " Mom has some sort of bizarre, paranoid reaction to people coming to our house. She doesn't even like it when my grandparents come over. She likes it to be her, the step-fascist, and, I guess, me. I think it's because back in our old neighborhood people used to stop by uninvited all the time, knocking at the front door, showing up on the porch, faces pressed to the kitchen door. I liked it—it was fun, having people show up all the time. But Mom hated it. She said she felt like she was living in a fishbowl, like she had no privacy. "I couldn't even come home from the supermarket," I heard her tell the step-fascist once, "without the phone ringing with ten people asking what I bought and what I was fixing for dinner."
So, part of my job as son is to quell her terror. "No, Mom. She's just picking me up."
"She drives? She's older than you?"
Oh, for God's sake, why do I keep screwing this up with the truth? "Yeah, she's a year older and she has her license. We're going to the comic book store over in Canterstown. I never get to go there and it's a lot better than Space Bazaar." There.
"She's a year older than you..."
"Yes."
"And she's a new friend?"
"Yes, Mom."
Mom smiles. "That's great, honey. That's really great. See, I told you you'd make new friends here."
It must be nice to be able to ignore reality the way my mother does; we've lived in Brookdale for six years, ever since the divorce, when she moved me away from my school and my friends. Ever since then, every time I've asked to have a friend from my old neighborhood come over or spend a weekend, she's gone into her paranoia mode and told me, "You'll make new friends here." Six years, and I've made exactly two friends and she thinks that's a good track record. Unreal.
I've got an hour before Kyra gets here. I don't know if this is a date or what. I don't know anything. But best foot forward and all that. I shower, mess around with some of Mom's mousse until I get my hair looking sort of like something that might one time have been on TV, spritz a bunch of cologne all over. I check myself in the mirror: Shave or not? Clean-cut look or rough stubble guy? And does the stubble really look rough and cool, or is it just sloppy? Can I do a goatee or not?
Better safe than sorry: I shave. Very carefully, so as not to nick myself.
Clothes. I look at the clock. Twenty minutes to go. Casual or what? Goth Girl won't care about neatness, right? It's warm out, so I go with olive green shorts, a yellow T-shirt, and a red golf shirt over top. Layers make me look less skinny.
By five of noon, I'm heading out the door. Mom shouts,
"When are you coming back?"
Beats the hell out of me. "Eight!" I shout back, and go outside before she can say anything.
I wait at the end of the driveway, checking my watch every few seconds. By noon, I'm still waiting.
By five after, I'm still waiting.
And by ten after.
This is all a joke, isn't it? Just another stupid joke. String along the geek who has no friends ... Man, I blew off talking to Cal to talk to her last night! Cal ... I was supposed to call him. I should go back inside and call him.
I look up the street, searching for her car. This would be a pretty elaborate joke, wouldn't it? The instant messages, the pictures, the meeting at the elementary school? Am I worth such preparation and planning?
Quarter after noon. I should call Cal. But maybe she got lost. Maybe she forgot how to get here.
I hear a car up the street and look, but it's not hers. Almost twenty after. Man, I'm a chump.
The car stops almost directly in front of me and the passenger door thunk!s as it unlocks. Kyra looks at me from the driver's seat, an eyebrow arched. She's done something to her hair so that it's spiked and standing straight up, but at least now I can see her eyes. For a second, I'm frozen; she looks different and the car isn't a compact—it's like a little four-by-four.
The passenger window whirrs down. "You coming or not?" And she gives me the magic grin.
I climb in. "Sorry. I didn't recognize the car." My heart beats a little quicker as I close the door and we take off. "Whose car is this?"
"My sister's."
"You said that car yesterday was your sister's."
"This is her other car."
"Your sister has two cars?"
"The idiot who knocked her up left it behind when he ran like hell. It was sitting in our driveway for, like, six months, so finally my sister said the hell with it and started using it."
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She's wearing black again, but this time short sleeves that reveal slim, pale arms down to wrists that are bound in wide leather bands studded with metal pyramids. Her blouse is loose, buttoned up to the throat, where she still wears her weird reverse smiley face. As she brakes at a stop sign, I check her feet, which are in glossy black boots that come up to her calf. She has on baggy black shorts, and between the end of the shorts and the top of the boots there's a good six inches of dead-white leg.
She's wearing black lipstick, and I wonder what it would be like to kiss black lipstick, to have a coal smudge on your face.
"Where are we going?"
She shrugs. "Where do you want to go?"
I almost say "Comi-Corps," which is the store in Canterstown.
"Doesn't matter."
"That's what I like to hear." And she hits the gas. Hard.
Chapter Sixteen
A PART OF ME WANTS TO KNOW how I ended up on a beautiful spring Saturday, lying on a grassy hill under the sun with a girl who seems to like talking to me, with nothing to worry about and no one else around for miles.
Part of me wants to know. The rest of me really doesn't care.
We drove around Brookdale for a while, which is an exercise in extraordinary patience because there's nothing to see. It was also an exercise in boredom because Kyra, good to her word, was focusing very intently on driving. She had a cigarette tucked between her lips but had forgotten to light it—that's how hard she was concentrating. Every time I started to speak, she'd shush me with a "hsst!" that seemed somehow, oddly, maternal.
"This sucks," she said at a stoplight. "We have to go somewhere. Where do you want to go? "
I couldn't think of any place that didn't sound unbefitting for a noble Indian warrior. Comi-Corps would have been cool—it's the best comic book store for miles around and I almost never get to go there. Better yet would have been Space Bazaar. To walk in there with a girl ... I'd be a hero for months.
But I didn't want those losers drooling all over Kyra. Even though she wasn't really all that sexy, she was kind of pretty in the face and she was my friend and the guys at Space Bazaar would have been real jerks to her.
She drove around for a while longer, then set her jaw as if making a decision. Soon we were on the outskirts of Brookdale, where Route 54 stretches for miles and miles, south to Finn's Crossing and north to Canterstown. There's nothing but empty farmland on Route 54, except for a housing development that went in a couple of years ago, a lonely cluster of cloned houses squatting on the side of the road.
Kyra pulled into the development and guided the car past quiet houses that may as well have been from a ghost town. At the end of the development the road terminated in a circle of five houses, beyond which loomed trees and tall grass.
"C'mon," she said, finally lighting the cigarette after she killed the engine.
Technically, it was trespassing. We walked right through someone's yard, sneaked behind their house, then headed into the woods. Just when I was starting to worry about getting lost, the woods opened up into a broad clearing. I could see fallow farmland in the distance. The ground sloped down to a chain-link fence, which ran in a rough oblong around a weedy, muddy flat, then sloped back up on all sides of the oblong. It was like the ground made a bowl here.
Kyra sat down on the slope, then lay flat on her back, a black line on the green grass. I sat down next to her and listened to the wind in the leaves, the rustle of grass, a croaking that could have been a frog or just wind in a hollow log. Kyra blew plumes of smoke into the sky.
We said nothing for the longest time.
I guess that part of me that wants to know is persistent. I know how I got here. But sitting here now, in the quiet, needing to say nothing, feeling no need to speak, just watching her black lips surrender white-gray clouds, it really doesn't matter.
Chapter Seventeen
"YOU LIKE THIS PLACE?" she asks after a while.
She's been lying there with her eyes closed, so I've been watching her fearlessly. At the sound of her voice, I avert my eyes as if caught doing something, even though she's still not looking.
"It's nice."
"Nice?" She opens one eye and blows smoke through her nostrils, snorting aurally and visually. "Nice? That's it?"
"I'm not big on nature stuff. It's pretty."
She laughs. "It's a testament to stupidity is what it is." She flicks the cigarette butt down the slope in the general direction of the fenced-in swamp. "It used to be beautiful here. There was a pond down there." She points to the fence. "Then they built the houses back there, and the idiots who bought the houses decided that they didn't want the pond because they were all afraid of mosquitoes breeding in it. So they drained it and figured they'd build a playground instead."
"And?"
"And look." With a hand, she sweeps the entire vista. "No one could be bothered. They drained it, the imaginary mosquito problem went away, and they couldn't be bothered to do anything else. So what could have been a little bit of unspoiled nature in the middle of more stupid cookie-cutter houses, they made a dumb-ass swamp and fenced it in so the dumb-ass kids they all bred won't accidentally fall in." She looks at me seriously. "people are stupid. people suck. period."
"Yeah. I know."
"That's what I like about you."
I shiver even though it's warm. What's going on here? That's what I like about you. What am I supposed to do? Does she want to be my girlfriend? That's impossible. The silence hangs in the air, heavy and impossible to ignore, so I say the first thing that comes to my mind:
"There's a comic book convention next weekend. You want to go?"
"Are you asking me on a date, fanboy?"
Back to fanboy, then. In which case, no, I'm not asking her on a date.
"Just wondering if you wanted to go, that's all."
"Anyone there I care about?"
I should have checked that. I will check that. I tell her so, then add, "Bendis will be there. I knowyou don't care, but that's a pretty big deal, whether you like his stuff or not."
"Whatever." Dismissive hand wave.
"Oh, come on! Come on! You have to admit it—it's a big deal. He's, he's an Eisner winner and stuff. Come on."
"OK, OK, it's a big deal, fanboy."
Hey, the Goth Girl likes to condescend! For some reason it doesn't really bother me. It's actually sort of cool. I like arguing.
"It's a bigger deal than if Neil Gaiman came," I say, stressing his name like a lovesick girl. I throw in some batting of the eyelashes for effect.
"Oh, please, it so is not."
"Yes, it is."
"No way. Bendis is this little superhero writer, and Gaiman, Gaiman's a best-selling novelist. A novelist, OK? People other than emotionally stunted adolescents read his stuff."
"Then why do you read it?" I ask.
She giggles. She actually giggles. I thought that would piss her off.
"He just reads a bunch of history books and comes up with bogus crap to tie it all together."
"Like your guy is any better."
"We're not talkingabout my guy." I'm going to check. I really am. I'm going to check the website and look to see if someone from Top Shelf or Fantagraphics or whatever is going to be there, and then I'll see if she wants to go, not because it would be a date but just because it would be cool to have someone go with Cal and me. Someone else.
But in the meantime, I start to gear up: She wants to talk about Neil Gaiman? Fine. I can do that. Where are the Greek gods in American Gods, I'll ask her. Wouldn't it make sense that Hercules would be around? What about Santa Claus? What about a god of democracy? Racism? He didn't think about it at all.
"What would you normally be doing?"
I open my mouth to let the Gaiman stuff come out, but instead I nearly choke. "Huh?"
She sits up, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them tight. "What would you normally be doing on a Saturday?" Her eyes are luminous and somehow huge set against
the pale nothing of her face. "If you weren't hanging out with me?"
"I..." What would I be doing? Talking to Cal, if he didn't have a game. Reading, maybe. That's ... That's it. God, my life sucks! "Probably nothing," I admit. Man, it kills me how I keep forgetting to lie to her! What the hell is wrong with me? "Probably hang out with Cal. But he would have a game or practice today, so I'd probably, you know, watch TV. Read something." Work on Schemata. But I don't tell her that. It's not a lie; it's an omission.
"You don't have any other friends?"
I don't know if she means "other friends" than Cal or "other friends" than her. But it doesn't matter. There's a tone in her voice—it takes a second to recognize it, but I pick it out. Concern. Sincerity.
"I've got ... There are some guys from my old neighborhood. From Lake Eliot, near Finn's Crossing?" She nods. "It's a stupid name. There's no lake there. But that's where my dad lives and that's where I grew up until my mom moved us here. There are some guys there and I see them in the summer when I live with my dad, but it's..." God, this is tough to talk about. I think I've always compartmentalized my dad and my mom: When I'm with one, I try not to think of the other. Two different worlds. Can't breathe both kinds of atmosphere at once; you have to go through an airlock first. "It's like 'out of sight, out of mind,' you know? They don't call me and I don't call them, but when I visit my dad, I see them. Sometimes. Less and less. I mean, it's tough, only seeing them once a month and then over the summer."
She's staring at me. She's been staring at me the whole time, perfectly still. With horror, I realize that my left eye is starting to water. I'm going to cry. I'm going to cry while the only girl who's ever said a word to me outside of school watches.
I cough, clear my throat, then rub both eyes. I don't know what I'm trying to pull, but all of these shenanigans have got both eyes watering now, but at least it's like I've got allergies or something.
"You OK?" she asks.
"Yeah. Something in my throat." I clear it a couple more times for effect. I need to change the topic. No way am I going to start bawling in front of her. That's just not going to happen.