Permanent Adhesives (8 page)

“Yeah, for ya know, your comic.”

“But I thought you said you were at work?”

“I was. I did this last night, or well, more like early this morning.”

“Didn’t you sleep?”

He shook his head.

“Aren’t you exhausted and/or hung over?”

“Being punched in the face a couple of times seems to sober me up quite quickly. Well, that and vomiting in your friend’s lawn.”

“And when you went home you didn’t sleep?”

“My head was swirling with too many things.”

“Pain being one of them?”

“That was part of the problem, but I kept thinking about what I could do to make it up to you, and then I got the idea I told you about and when I jump on board with an idea I have a tendency to go all out.”

“Did you sleep in the morning at all?” I was pretty hung up on the fact that he did not sleep.

“No, my brain wouldn’t let me. I don’t sleep a lot to begin with, and then I drank like a crap ton of those nine-hour energy drinks, and I’m telling ya, you should not drink more than one of those at once. I drank some more a bit ago and look.” He held up his hand which was shaking like crazy, kind of in rhythm with his knee he was bouncing under the table.

“That shaking can’t be good.” I peeled open a creamer and poured it into my cup.

“Eh, it’ll go away after a while.”

“Is that why you’re so twitchy?”

He shook his head no. “Twitchy is my natural state.”

I clicked my tongue at him like he did to me five hundred times already.

He smiled. “Wanna see what I got?”

“You stayed up all night working on this for me?”

Elias scratched the back of his neck and looked down at his notebook. “Yeah,” he admitted bashfully.

I was so wanting to be super mad at him still, but he was making it pretty hard. “Okay, whatcha got?”

He flipped open his notebook and there was scribbling—that I was assuming was supposed to be writing—all over the page. He held up a shaky finger. “First, I think you need to switch blogging platforms.”

“Why?”

“Well you use BloggyBlogBlog, which is all right but not really suitable for webcomics. Letterpress, another blogging platform, has this one template, that’s the layout kinda thing, just in case you didn’t know, where people will be able to like flip through the pages of your comic and start at the beginning and such. Whereas yours’, one has to scroll up and down and search for the beginning.”

“Don’t you have to pay for that, and won’t I lose readers if I switch?”

“You do have to pay for a web hosting service, but Letterpress is free, and I know of some cheap reliable hosting companies that will only cost a few bucks a month and if need be, I can spot you the cash. And if they’re true fans they will follow wherever you go, and if you switch to a real webcomic format with the template I was talking about, I can switch up the html and style sheets which are like web code stuff, to make it look really cool. Then it’ll just seem more professional, and if you seem more professional, people will be more willing to buy your products cuz we can sell e-books as I was saying, get it in print, tee-shirts, posters. The possibilities are endless really and then there are conventions…” He looked at his notebook and continued. “And appearances and readings and the more you get out there, the more fans you’ll get and with the added exposure, people, especially dudes, will see how cute you are and for some, that’s all they need. A lonely nerdy guy can totally pine over an adorable girl who writes comics. I’m sure that’s a many teenage boys’ fantasy and then…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up a sec here.” I wasn’t sure if he took a breath the whole time he was talking. It was like one long sentence, and his squinty dark eyes actually appeared to be lit up. He definitely did go all in when he had an idea. And then I’m certain my face was kind of red because he quickly slipped in about me being all adorable. He titled his head to the side with his eyebrows raised as if in asking
what
?

“Okay, slow down, it’s kinda a lot, and let’s go back over my cuteness.”

Elias took a deep breath and then let it out. It looked like he was trying to calm himself down. “Uh, sorry, I get kinda wound up once I’m on a roll, and it’s kinda like a fact that you are cute.”

“Really?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well, okay then.”

“And we could also make videos and put them on YoobToob, kinda like how some people make book trailers, but yours will be for a comic instead, or like a music video with a theme song cuz theme songs are cool. Well, they are in my book at least.”

“A theme song?”

Elias nodded and reached into his bag, dug around, and pulled out a myPhone. “Here, listen,” he said, laying his phone on the table. He tapped the screen a couple of times and I listened and this is what I heard:

Hey there ah Sasha

Oh yeah, it’s Santiago.

I hear that your brother

Is kinda an asshole.

And then there’s your parents

You don’t know where they go

So you want to go and jump off a bridge yo.

But then you hear something that tells you not to do it and unleash your superbness, oh.

Bop, bop a dob bop, bop, bop a dob bop. Bop, bop a dob bop, bop, bop a dob bop.

Now that you kick ass

You can take down your bother

But not before you go and recruit the others

Then you have The Society of Prodigious Superbness, oh yeah yeah, fight the evil.

Bop, bop a dob bop, bop, bop a dob bop. Bop, bop a dob bop, bop, bop a dob bop.

It was this most cute, little happy song played on a keyboard. I was quite surprised. I wouldn’t have thought Elias was capable of making something so cheerful sounding or even making a song at all, seeing that he kept his speaking to a minimum generally.

“That is awesome, oh my God. Did you make that? Like write it? Is that you singing?”

He nodded.

“All this you did just since last night?”

He nodded again.

“How? I mean your song is great. You just whipped that up with all these other ideas?” I was quite impressed.

“Are you weirded out? Sometimes my brain goes crazy.” He pushed his notebook across the table at me.

I turned it around so I wouldn’t be reading it upside down. I flipped past the chaotic looking page and found what appeared to be a full blown organized action plan: outlined, bulleted, numbered, etc., etc..

“You’re amazing.”

“No, just really sorry.”

I sighed and smiled at him. He shrugged and returned my smile.

We both drank more coffee and after my fill of greasy goodness, we walked out into the crisp, chilly city air.

I took in a deep breath. “I love this weather.”

“As do I,” Elias said. “You know what’s the best thing to do during this kind of cold fall weather?”

“What?” I asked.

“Going to the park.”

“Really?”

“Yep, it’s on the way back.”

“All right then.”

We walked side-by-side down the sidewalk with all the buses and cars whooshing by. The streetlights were aglow—making it seem like it wasn’t really dark out. A brisk wind gently slapped me in the face. We passed a couple of assorted storefronts and went under a viaduct where it seemed all light was lost, and all sound echoed. We arrived at the park, and Elias ran across the grass and the spot where the Austrian beef cart usually was with its red and yellow umbrella, selling hot dogs. I picked up a light jog and followed Elias down a blacktopped walking path and past a small hill with fall blooms and a brick park house. We were almost to the swings and such when Elias veered off the path, across a little patch of grass to a cemented sidewalk area just off the side of the park house.

“Colorado,” he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air.

I was a bit confused for a second, and then I noticed that on the cement was a large map of the United States, no colors or words, just the outlines of the states. I ran over landing on a southern state. My brain paused for a moment, and then I figured it out. “Louisiana!”

We jumped from state to state blurting out where we stood; an elderly couple with walking shoes and ankle weights, walked by, eyeballing us suspiciously.

“Kansas,” I said.

“Errrt, wrong, try again.”

I jumped back to my previous state and made another attempt. “Nebraska?”

“A question or an answer?”

“Answer?”

“You’re right, and you’re also it.”

Elias turned on his heels and ran across the park.

“Hey,” I shouted after him.

After my ill-fated attempt to catch him, we landed in the playground. I sat in the swing next to Elias; his hair was everywhere and hanging in his face. We swung back and forth, each time pumping our legs to go a little further. I loved swinging in the park, especially when there was no one around. Besides the old couple that eyeballed us, we were the only ones there. Swinging was like being a little kid and for a slight moment in time you had no worries, just the open air. I leaned back and looked at the darkened night sky with the cold breeze rushing upon my face. There was a tree in my sight-line, and I tried to touch it with my toes, knowing full well that the branches were out of reach, but maybe that one time they weren’t. I pumped my legs harder propelling myself and the swing further into the air. I blew at my hair that kept climbing all over my face; it flew off into the sky, dancing around in the wind. I looked over at Elias, and he stared off into the distance at some focal point I could not see.

My swing started jumping, so I had to slow down a bit. I slowed down enough and dragged the tips of my shoes in the wood chips below my swing, leaving long deep grooves underneath me. I stopped myself completely and leaned my head against the chain of the swing, enjoying such a peaceful moment. Elias slowed down too, stopped his swing, looked at me, and gave a little smile. We got up and started walking across the field whose grass was slowly changing to a faded green, losing any luster that it had during the summer. We reached the sidewalk and hung a right in the direction of where we lived. To our right were some limestone two flats, each one painted in a different color. There was a peach one, a federal blue one, and a cream colored one. We walked past the currency exchange and crossed the street at Mount Holy Burger and strolled down our block and over to my building.

“Hey, you wanna come in for a bit?”

Elias bit his lip, shrugged, and said, “Okay.”

I let us in and much to my surprise, nobody was home yet. We went into my room because my mom slept on the couch, so I knew when she got home we’d get kicked out of the front room. And the kitchen was out because I felt like lounging, and you can’t kick back and lounge in a kitchen. I sat at the head of my bed and leaned back against the wall. Elias sat at the other end, crossed legged and facing me.

“You seem so different outside of school,” I said, while thinking how I couldn’t believe I actually let him in my room because it was such a disaster zone.

Elias chewed on his nail. “Well, normally I don’t talk while in school.”

“Don’t talk?”

“Nope,” he said with a shrug.

“Hmmm, you’re…” I said, trailing off. I was going to say an interesting person, but I didn’t want to be, I don’t know, too complimentary maybe? He said I screwed up his head; I think he might have done the same thing to mine because somehow I was being won back over, but there was no way I could have still liked him, at least that’s what I was telling myself right at that moment. He was such an ass to me; I just couldn’t let myself. I was still supposed to be mad.

“We should start with the blog transfer first and then tee-shirts,” Elias suggested.

“Okay, but how do we get tee-shirts?’

“We could order printed ones, but that can get expensive, or you could use a print on demand website, or we could make them.”

“How would we make them exactly?”

“We can buy blank tee-shirts, and I can just screen-print some for ya.”

“You screen-print tee-shirts? How many talents do you have? How do you know all this stuff anyways?”

“Well,” Elias said slowly. “Some of the comic stuff—” He stopped and pretended the hole that was starting in the knee of his jeans had some of the most interesting threads. He sighed. “I started researching it before last night.”

I wanted to say aww, that’s so sweet, but instead I said, “Really?”

“Yeah and then a lot of the web and kinda promotion stuff I kinda learned from helping this kid at school. Remember Benson Carter, he graduated last year?”

“Yeah.” I definitely remembered Benson. I pined after him for a while last year, and he was in this band called
Insert Name Here
, and they were pretty spectacular.