The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (8 page)

I wake up just before she touches me. Typical.

I lie in bed for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. The lights are on. Did I fall asleep? Or was it some sort of waking dream? And why do I always wake up just before the good parts? Is it because I have no experience for my brain to access to mimic that?

The bullet fell out of my hand during the dream; it glints from the floor next to my backpack. I reach out to pick it up and notice my English paper sticking out of my bag. Mrs. Hanscomb's large "99%" gets a smile from me ... until I remember Kyra saying that she'd like to see 99 percent of the school dead.

She can't possibly be serious, can she? She must have just been engaging in hyperbole. That's all.

My IM program chirps for my attention. Since it's a weekend night, I don't have to bother with the plastic over the door and turning down the volume; Mom doesn't mind me staying up on the weekends. I slip into my chair and drop the bullet next to the keyboard.

Promethea387:
How's it going?

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.

L
ATER 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
every
thing?" 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."

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.

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.