At the printer, they treat me like an important client. The secretary asks me if I want something to drink and gets me a glass of ice-cold water from a watercooler. I wait in their conference room and look at all the cool things they have printed: pocket folders with silver ink, die-cut holiday cards, annual reports with glossy covers.
Then the pressman walks in holding an oversize sheet of paper with the Gumshoe covers on it. He has a five-o’clock shadow, green eyes, and ink stains under his fingernails and down the front of his T-shirt. I wonder if all pressmen are this buff—from lugging around pallets of paper or something.
“. . . it’s a work an’ turn,” he’s telling me as he puts the paper on this table under bright lights. “It’s running this way through the press.” He motions to the paper vertically.
My brain scrambles to process the information.
“So we can make adjustments to the cover and not affect the back.”
“Great,” I say, and step over to study the artwork. I’ve spelled Gumshoe and Lincoln High School correctly. I sound out literary and magazine to make sure those are right too. Phew. I tilt my head to one side and try to see the fish and the girl on the bridge through the glare of the lights. Finally I find an angle where I can see them, but the fish don’t seem as bright as they were on the proofs. But I’m not sure how to say this. There seems to be a secret language printers use: offset and litho and CMYK and dot gain. I know a little about it but not what to say now. Besides, I don’t want to hurt cute press guy’s feelings. I pretend to study the page more.
“Sorry I’m late,” the rep says, stepping into the conference room. “Running proofs to people in this traffic is enough to drive me crazy.”
“No problem,” I say.
“Your proofs! They’re still in the back!” she says, and buzzes out of the room.
When she returns, she spreads out the rolled-up paper next to the press sheet. “Looks like we’ll want to bump up the colors, don’t you think?”
She read my mind.
“Yeah,” I say. “So it looks more like this.” I tap the fish on the proof.
“Sure thing,” the pressman says with a grin. “You want to come on back and I’ll show you how it all works?”
I restrain myself from bouncing on my toes. “Of course.”
He leads me down a hall that smells like solvent and through double doors into a massive room with a concrete floor. The sound of machinery is deafening, and the smell is even stronger.
“That’s the Heidelberg!” he shouts, pointing to a printing press as large as my living room—okay, bigger. It’s thrumming like an airplane engine, and paper is shooting out the end closest to us. Printed sheets are stacked waist high on palettes all around us.
“Over here is the bindery,” the pressman says. “Cutter, stitcher.”
An older guy is feeding thick stacks of paper into a guillotine. It beeps before the blade comes down, slicing the paper neat and clean and square.
“Your magazine’s gonna be over here,” he says about the stitcher—the only quiet machine in the room. It’s off. There are pages of a book lying over metal bars that loop around the room like modern art. “The signatures will fall into the saddle, and boop, boop, they’ll be stapled together.”
I nod. Maybe the secret language of printers isn’t so technical after all.
“An’ we’re in the back on the little press. Love this thing. Nice, tight registration. Four stations—haven’t got your aqueous going yet. Just runnin’ makeready.”
I nod again, even though I didn’t understand a word. I peek into the press and see my fish and my girl. There’s a two-inch stack of them. Wow.
The pressman puts my sheet on his light table, arranging some weights so the little color boxes printed in the margins line up with a row of buttons on the table. “These control the colors,” he explains as he presses them. “And we’ll see if that helps!”
He hits another button, and the press lets out a warning buzzer before it hums to life.
Soon more Gumshoe covers are stacking up at our end. After a few, the pressman reaches in and pulls one out. He puts it on the light table.
It’s more vibrant than the last one, but he seems concerned. He gets out a machine and takes readings from the little squares of color. “Spectrophotometer,” he explains.
I don’t attempt to repeat that one and watch as he presses more buttons, prints more covers, and pulls out another sheet.
This time the koi are sunset orange, the river a shiny blue-black below the bridge. I gasp a little. It’s perfect.
“You like?” he asks me, a smile on his unshaven face.
“Yeah, it looks great!”
“Then all I need is your John Hancock.” He hands me a red Sharpie and gestures at the perfect press sheet.
I must look confused.
“Sign it anywhere. I’ll match all the others to this one.”
I sign it in the middle, careful not to smudge the wet ink.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
TWENTY-FIVE
It has been decided that the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in the quad will be, ahem, amended into the shape of a giant phallus.
I have no idea how.
This was Brodie’s idea. And because it was Brodie’s idea (or maybe because he offered to be the model), the senior class agreed that old Abe should be a dick for our senior prank.
“Whoa, man,” Mason says, surveying the contents in the bed of the Redneck’s two-tone pick-up by the light of a streetlamp. “This is crazy!”
“Go out,” Brodie tells him, making a throwing motion with a roll of toilet paper.
Mason and three others fan out over the dark school lawn, and with his magic arm, Brodie lands a roll of Costco-special single-ply in each of their arms.
Mason raises his in triumph, then bends his knees and sends it sailing, a ribbon of white trailing through the night sky.
I’m still trying to absorb the fact that it’s midnight and I’m at school—and not with good intentions—when Brodie presses a roll into my chest and I take it.
I find my target, a maple tree not far from Abe. And wonder if I should have Googled “how to TP a high school” before attempting this feat. First I loosen the end and reel out a few squares to get it started, and then, in a Brodie-inspired throw, I let it fly. Not bad. I run to retrieve the rest of my roll, rinse and repeat.
When the quad looks like a Halloween hit-and-run, Brodie summons us back into a huddle. I put my hands on my knees, breathing a bit harder than the others—maybe because of adrenaline or maybe because of Mason’s giddy smile and his shoulder brushing mine.
“Good work, team!” Brodie says in what must be his quarterback voice. “They’ve got the chalk around back,” he says. “And the drinks.” He winks when he says this, and I wonder what’s wink-worthy.
But when Kellen tosses me a bottle of red Gatorade, I catch it.
Mason catches a blue one, and I’m so glad mine is a tolerable flavor that I don’t miss the lack of a click when I unscrew the top. I raise it to my lips and chug half the bottle.
“Dude,” Kellen says. “Slow down.”
I peer at him around the end of my raised bottle.
He holds up a bottle of his own. It’s glass and reminds me of an ad campaign—I feel my eyes go wide and I struggle to put on a poker face as my brain processes the typography: Absolut.
Vodka.
In the Gatorade.
This wasn’t my first drink. Mason’s dad had given us beers at a barbecue on the Fourth of July after sophomore year—said not to tell our moms, that this was a guy thing. He passed them out ceremoniously, unscrewing the top and pressing a bit of lime to the lip. Gabe first, then Mason, then me.
Eager to repress my now-pretty-clear sexual orientation and eager to impress one of the manliest guys I knew—Mr. V—I took it,
poked the lime wedge into the bottle, and took a sip.
My poker face wasn’t working that day either. My facial features screwed up so tight it was like I bit into the lime directly—and that it was marinated in lighter fluid.
“Aw, Jamie.” Mr. V cuffed my shoulder. “This is the light stuff.”
“That’s why it tastes like piss,” Gabe whispered as we clinked our bottles together in a wind-chime-like song.
I choked down that bottle of beer while wondering how I’d ever manage to become an adult. I mean, I had a stepdad and I knew the rate at which beer was consumed (three to five bottles per football game, a pitcher per baseball game), but I wasn’t sure I was ready to enter the adult world, or at least, the beer-drinking one. Because I just didn’t like beer. It was bubbly like ginger ale but bitter and watery like some sort of cruel joke.
But Gatorade and vodka—that was passable; it tasted like Hawaiian Punch. And with all those electrolytes, it might even cure its own hangover. Genius.
“Chalk or Abe?” Brodie asks me.
“Huh?” I ask.
“Chalk the gym wall or turn Abe into a dick?” he clarifies.
I’m about to say chalk, because, um, the penis thing is—
When Mason interrupts. “Design the sculpture, Jamie.”
I shoot him a look.
“Jamie’s awesome at art,” he recommends.
“Chalk is art,” I protest. But no one hears me. “Typography . . . ,” I try.
So I unload bales of Pink Panther insulation from Nick’s truck. Kellen has a tape gun, Brodie has scissors and a box of garbage bags. I don’t get it. So I just watch. First the insulation goes on, pink side out, until Abe is obscured in a column of pink.
“Tape,” Brodie says to me.
I grab the gun and follow his instructions, starting at Abe’s feet, and I wrap the clear packing tape around and around the insulation like stripes on a barber’s pole. I try to concentrate, really I do. But every time I loop the north side, I have to reach around Brodie, who was holding the stuff in place. First, his worn-out Nikes, then his bulging calves covered in blond, curled hairs.
My next pass was at thigh level and I didn’t want to, well, bump anything. The next one I aim at waist level, and as I reach around Brodie, he says, “I think this is working!”
But Kellen, who has a little distance from the project and can probably see it better isn’t so sure. “Maybe. But maybe not.”
I spiral the tape up, tear it off.
Brodie steps back to get a better look. “Awesome!” he shouts. “That’s an effin’ huge dick!”
“It doesn’t look like a dick,” Kellen says.
“Yeah, it does,” Brodie counters. “You’ve just never seen one that big.”
I stifle a nervous laugh as I step back to stand beside them. I flutter my T-shirt off my chest in an attempt to cool down; I’m burning up even though the night air has a chill.
“It looks like Abe Lincoln wrapped in insulation,” Kellen says.
And this is when Brodie looks over at me. And even though it’s dark, and the moonlight a cool blue, I think he can tell that my face is Pink-Panther-insulation-pink. “It, um—” I start, feeling even hotter than before.
“Somebody’s drunk,” Kellen says to Brodie.
“It doesn’t look like a dick,” I finish.
And Brodie’s face falls.
“Yet,” I add, and pick up the tape gun.
Brodie stops directing the operation, stands out of the way while I work. I wrangle the column of insulation in with more rounds of tape and then have Kellen add another layer around Abe’s top hat and secure it in place.
An audience gathers: Challis, the Redneck, Michael, Holland, Ashley Quincy, and Hailey Beth Johnston.
“That’s my dick,” Brodie announces. “True to scale.”
This gets the girls giggling and Challis gagging.
“Man, if that’s your cock,” the Redneck says, “I feel sorry for your girlfriend.”
Brodie takes this as a compliment, and Ashley turns cherry red.
But it wasn’t meant as a compliment, and the Redneck tells him so. “The head’s all deformed.”
Kellen and I step back from our work—well, he steps and I totter.
“It still don’t look like a dick,” he tells me.
He’s right. There’s a tuft of pink fluff sprouting from a corner of Abe’s hat like a cancerous growth.
“I can’t reach that part,” I defend my work.
“And the chicks like big head,” the Redneck suggests.
“Not me,” Challis chirps.
But I doubt her vote counts.
So Kellen adds more stuffing to Abe’s head and hat area, and I tape it down in a generous manner.
“It’s still got a disease,” the Redneck advises.
I roll my eyes at Kellen.
“And it kinda needs a slit,” Kellen whispers.
My face bushes hot.
“Get on my shoulders,” Kellen says, crouching down like he’s on the line of scrimmage.
I just stare at him. This isn’t a football game and I don’t have a ball. Just a tape gun.
“Climb onto my shoulders, dude. So you can reach.”
“Oh,” I say, then silently wish I had a crush on Kellen and his shoulders—which I was about to sit on. Sit on!
I’m not a cheerleader and not used to climbing on people. So I put the tape gun down, for safety purposes—not wanting to knock Kellen unconscious with it. Then I swing one leg over Kellen’s back, and he shifts under me. I grab at his head for balance, get my other leg in place.
He stands without a grunt, as if my weight were simply the first rep, easy as pie on his massive quads.
I gulp down a wave of nausea as my perspective on the world changes and my stomach lurches. “Tape gun,” I say instead.
“Tape gun, Brodes,” Kellen echoes, pulling Brodie from a lively conversation about the details of his dick.
From my perch on Kellen’s shoulders, which are most certain to win awards for steadiness, I sculpt the top end of our sculpture to a dome of perfection.
“Sweet,” Brodie calls up.
“Now it looks like my cock,” the Redneck informs us. He has an audience—the others, Mason included, have returned from chalking the gym wall and have formed a half circle around the masterpiece.
“Naw, man. It’s mine,” Brodie counters.
“Looks like mine,” the Redneck says. “Right, babe?” He nudges the girl next to him who shoots him a look of daggers.
“I modeled for it,” Brodie says.
For a minute I think they both might just whip them out.
Kellen reaches up for the tape gun and then bends his knees so I can slide down.
My Chucks hit the ground and then, surprisingly, my ass does too. Which triggers a giggle fit that sloshes the contents of my stomach. I grab Kellen’s outstretched hand and let him pull me to my feet. Now standing, I look up. See Kellen’s beautiful, square-jawed face, messed-up hair, and a giant phallus almost growing from his head, and burst into another fit of laughter.
“You okay, Jamie?” Mason asks.
I stagger a few feet. Nod.
The motion doesn’t help the dizzying concoction of thoughts, vodka, and red Gatorade.
Mason touches my shoulder.
I clutch my stomach, trying to stop the spin.
“Jamie,” Brodie’s voice swims toward me. “You gotta put the condom on.”
This is so out of context—and so far in the gutter—that everyone joins in laughing.
But my stomach isn’t game. It spins like a carnival ride. And I lose an epic battle to keep the contents inside. Mason sees what is happening and jumps back just before my stomach heaves and a fountain of liquid gushes out, sickeningly sweet and bitter at the same time.
“You should probably sit down,” Mason says, steering me away from the damp spot I made in the grass. He sits next to me, close enough that I can feel the heat coming
off his skin contrast with the cool night air.
I watch Kellen and Brodie wrap my masterpiece in a condom of immense proportions made from clear plastic bags and packing tape.
“Dude, you need to lay off the booze,” Mason says.
“I didn’t know,” I protest.
“Just joshing you, Jamie,” he says, and drapes an arm over my shoulder. His hand rests on the back of my neck, his thumb on my bare skin.
“You don’t think I’m a total wuss?” I ask, keenly aware of his touch.
“Nah,” he says, and moves his thumb across my skin in the slightest caress.
I attempt to ask a second question, but his touch and my thoughts swirl together in a dizzy, drunken mess, and I imagine we’re dancing to “Kiss Me Slowly,” his arms around my neck, my arms around him. I real-life lean closer to him, catch his eyes with my own.
He doesn’t back away.
I have half a buzzed thought to kiss him before I snap back to reality. God, I so shouldn’t drink alcohol. It makes me crazy. Mason is not gay—he very clearly said so. Okay, not said, but kissed a girl. With tongue. He does not want to kiss me.
Mason looks away, or rather, up.
I follow his gaze and find Challis standing over us, one eyebrow arched.
Mason’s hand falls from my neck as if we were really up to something.
Challis sits and hands me a half-empty bottle of water. I take it but give her a questioning look.
“It’s water,” she says.
I unscrew the cap and drink.
“You didn’t drive here, did you?” she asks.
“Nah,” I say. I didn’t want my car at school if the cops showed up. “My car’s at Mason’s. We walked.”
“We’re gonna crash at my place,” Mason says.
Challis’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Let’s just say my mom has no clue I’m here.” I shoot her a look to explain that she’s reading way too much into this.
“No, I—” She starts to apologize, then stops. “You shouldn’t be driving tonight. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” I agree. Then together we say, “No more Jordan Polmaskis.”
Challis takes out a pack of cigarettes. She shakes one out and offers them us, but Mason and I shake our heads.
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