Boy Proof

by Cecil Castellucci

  I want someone as cool as Uno.

  “Question for you, Egg,” Martin says.

  “Shoot.”

  “We’re having a debate about the most influential classic sci-fi film. I say it’s Star Wars. Rue says it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Hasan says Blade Runner. I’m sure you have an opinion.”

  Martin is so formal in his speech. He is a nerd and he has the unfortunate luck to sound all nasally like one, too. It makes me cringe.

  “It’s The Day the Earth Stood Still,” I say.

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that one,” Martin says.

  “That’s the one I meant. I change my answer to that one,” Hasan says.

  “Classic,” I say. “Plenty of films borrow from it. Message of peace and all that.”

  “Egg, why don’t you sit down and join us? Lunch is half over and you still haven’t eaten,” Rue says, patting the empty seat next to her again.

  Mental note: Take different route over to tree at lunchtime.

  “I gotta do homework,” I say, making a hasty retreat.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask Max.

  “I’m just sitting in my assigned seat,” he says.

  He’s more interested in what he’s doing than in me. So I bang around my books and the chair and the desk to show him how pissed off I am that he’s sitting next to me again.

  “Careful. You don’t want a repeat of this morning,” he says.

  New tactic: Take matters into your own hands.

  I push my way up to the front of the room and confront Mrs. Perez.

  “I’d like for that new kid to be moved away from me,” I say.

  Mrs. Perez has her arms crossed and she’s looking me over. She is sucking on a lozenge, which is making the hairy mole on her lip jump around. She always has a lozenge in her mouth, because she’s always screaming and her throat always hurts.

  “I place people in certain seats to maintain a certain order in the classroom so that I won’t have to yell as much.”

  “I had an incident with him this morning in Global History.”

  “Well, you won’t have one here in my class or I’ll fail you, even if you are one of my most gifted students.”

  Mrs. Perez is one tough cookie. That’s what I like and hate about her.

  “Well, he stinks,” I say.

  “Get over it.”

  The bell rings and she turns her back to me and picks up her stack of graded papers. I skulk back to my seat and sit down next to Max. I sniff loudly and make a face. He doesn’t even smell today, but he continues to ignore me, which is highly annoying. He is busy with his pen and that little black book.

  Now I’m interested in what he’s doing.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  “Drawing,” Max says. “I study people. I draw them and take notes like an ethnographer.”

  I lean over and look at the black ink sketch he’s made of my profile. There is a bubble under it that says, Quick to anger, thinks she knows everything.

  It’s a good rendition of me and he’s made me look prettier than I really am, but I don’t want to be in his book. I don’t want to be collected.

  I shoot my hand out to rip the page from its place. In anticipation of my move, he pulls the book away from me.

  “Give it,” I say.

  “Nuh-uh,” he says. “It’s a social record.”

  “Look, I’m superstitious. You’ve drawn me. It’s like you’re stealing my soul or keeping my toenail clippings.”

  I throw him the evil eye.

  “What are you trying to do?” Max says. “Get me with your superpowers?”

  “You’re an asshole,” I say.

  He laughs and continues sketching.

  “Ars longa, vita brevis,” Max says.

  “What?”

  “It’s Latin,” Max says. “It means ‘Art is long, life is short.’ This is art. This is forever.”

  He taps the drawings in his book adoringly.

  “This,” he says, drawing an imaginary circle around my face, “is not art. This does not have to be forever.”

  Mrs. Perez walks down the aisle toward us, passing back our environmental poems. She hands mine and Max’s back. I hold it up for him to see: A+.

  “Why don’t you draw this?” I say.

  “Why don’t I draw this instead?” Max says, and holds up his poem: A++.

  I grab for his paper and this time he lets me take it. I scan the poem for flaws, and my eyes fall upon these lines:

  Silent is the ruined land.

  Man is brutal

  and the rain does not wash away

  the pain

  or rid the distant memory.

  It makes it glisten.

  I thought he was stupid. Now I know he’s gifted, just like me.

  An eyeless head is ogling me. I look over at the cemetery set from Blue Hill Wyoming. Skeletons are pushing up from the graves. On the walls are apes, monkeys, aliens, mummies . . . you name any creepy thing and it’s there.

  On a shelf to my left is the wall of blood. Jars and jars of fake blood and the ingredients for each kind.

  My father, Sam Jurgen, master mask-maker, animatronic freak, monster and alien specialist, special-effects makeup wizard, is hunched over his worktable constructing the perfect eye.

  I plop my bag down on a stool and remain quiet until he is finished. From years of experience, I know not to interrupt him while he’s concentrating this hard.

  Once, when I was about nine, I was bored and I wanted him to pay attention to me. He turned purple and shoved everything off the table onto the floor, then he yelled at me for getting in the way of the flow and ruining the lizard alien he was making. It’s better to remain invisible until he turns his eyes on you. Once he does, he gives you all the careful attention you deserve. You just have to wait your turn.

  “There,” my dad says to me, holding up the eyeball.

  Now it is okay to talk.

  “Looks good,” I say.

  “No, really look at it,” he says, and holds it under the work light. I lean forward and notice that the pupil dilates.

  “Cool,” I say.

  He’s like a little kid.

  I can see pretty clearly why he and my mom didn’t work out.

  I try to imagine them falling in love while he applied foam latex appliances and makeup to her on the episode of The Nemesis when she gets some weird skin radiation sickness and her whole face is peeling off.

  Mom got kicked off the show when she got pregnant, and then Dad was doing his first big feature, a low-budget sci-fi film called Star King, which won him his first Academy Award. Soon after that, they split up.

  She was mad about him applying lizard scales to all the naked models on the film, and he was mad that she wouldn’t let him mix up the latex in the kitchen. I was probably screaming all the time, making them even more tired and annoyed.

  “I can’t believe that man-child won an Oscar before I did,” Mom always says.

  And I always remind her that she has never even once been considered for an Oscar, much less won one.

  Freaks shouldn’t breed, I think, looking at my dad while he works. They end up having freaky kids like me.

  But as far as I can tell, as dads go, he’s a good one. Every Tuesday I make my way over to his creature shop and we make stuff in silence. He even has the Victoria Tuesday clause put into his contracts, so when he’s working in town we don’t have to miss a date. It helps that he has a whole team of assistants.

  “How’s school?” he asks.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “How’s your mom?” he asks.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Do you have any boyfriends this week?” he asks.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “Well, you’re a catch,” he says. “I wish I had known a girl who could design an alien exoskeleton.”

  I don’t remind my dad that boys like that are total dorks.

  I’m reclining like a woman in
a Matisse painting. I flick through the channels, jumping between the evening news on three different stations.

  “What’s the news?” Mom says, shoving me over on the couch and pulling her salad out of the takeout bag. She pulls out my sandwich and hands it over.

  “It’s all doom and gloom.”

  “Oh, well. Did they announce the Screen Actors Guild nominees?”

  “No.”

  I unwrap my sandwich and take a big bite.

  “How was school today?” Mom asks, shifting full gear into mom mode.

  “It sucked shit,” I say.

  “That is not the language a young lady uses,” Mom informs me.

  “I’m not a young lady,” I say. “According to some new kid, I’m some kind of autocrat.”

  I grab my sandwich and get up so I can go eat alone in the privacy of my room, but she follows me down the hallway and she’s talking, saying something that she probably thinks is important. I’m sure it’s not, so I slam the door in her face as a response. Then I throw myself down on the bed and put my pillow over my head. Three, two, one . . .

  The door opens and Mom barges into my room.

  “Victoria —”

  “It’s EGG!!!” I scream. Maybe this time she will hear me.

  “I’m not going to call you Egg,” she says. “That’s not the name I gave you.”

  “Well, Ursula’s not your real name. Some agent gave you that name,” I say.

  “That’s different. It’s a professional name, not an item of food,” Mom says.

  I scream into my mattress.

  “I’m meeting a director for drinks later,” Mom says cheerfully.

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  Her weight makes the floor creak. She’s put on some pounds since her glory days as the hot chick on the eighties TV show The Nemesis. She hasn’t had a real role in years. She still looks like a model, though. My mom is gorgeous by anyone’s standards. She is the total polar opposite of me.

  She’s standing there, waiting, hoping that I’ll be impressed. She’s hoping that I’ll say what she always wants me to say to her before an audition or meeting. Even though I don’t want to say it, I turn my head from under the pillow.

  “Break a leg,” I mumble.

  I can see Mom smiling upside down. She’s so happy I said it. She thinks it’s going to bring her luck.

  “I have a good feeling about this one. I’ll be back later. Please be home when I get here.”

  I wave for her to go, go! GO! Move away! If I had a Helgerian laser like Egg does, I’d blow her out of my room.

  I stay on my bed until I hear the jingle of her keys, then the click of her high heels down the hallway. Then the door closes, and the lock snaps shut.

  When I am sure she is gone, I log on to my computer. I set my play list on shuffle. Strains of Ella Fitzgerald fill the room. I surf over to the Zach Cross–Terminal Earth message board. No news today. He must still be in New Zealand filming the sequels. I check out some other sites of some other sci-fi films I’m tracking. I do a search on the guillotine. I read all about the Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794. It freaks me out. It seems to me that the world has always sucked.

  Amelissa13 instant messages me.

  Amelissa13: hey eggtoria have you heard that Zach Cross broke his ankle?

  Eggtoria: No shit.

  Amelissa13: Just yesterday. It was in the papers here down under.

  Eggtoria: that sucks.

  Amelissa13: yeah. I thought I saw him at the movie theater in Christchurch, but it was just some old guy. But from far away, when I squinted, it totally looked like Zach Cross.

  Eggtoria: I gotta go. Homework.

  I shut my instant messenger off. I don’t know why I even have it. Nobody in my real life chats online with me. It’s only those silly girls who like Zach Cross that do. I am different from them.

  I’m not boy crazy. I have tried to explain it to them one million times.

  I’m a cinephile.

  Here’s something really weird. I love taking pictures for the school paper.

  “I’ve got contact sheets here, Nelly,” I say, just to hear myself say something out loud. My voice cracks a bit from being unused all day long. Earlier today I took a vow of silence.

  “Drop them in the box, Egg. You know the routine,” Nelly says. She smiles at me. She pushes her glasses up on her pretty button nose.

  My GPA is higher than hers.

  Sometimes I almost think that I would like to be Nelly Melendez’s friend. She’s the student editor of the Melrose Lion. She’s in all my AP classes. She’s on the tennis team. She has a brain.

  She’s chewing the eraser off a pencil and twisting her really long brown hair with her skinny manicured finger. And I bet even though she’s looking up at me that she doesn’t know what I look like. I notice that she never really looks in my eyes, as though I scare her. She treats me like I am an alien or a monster. She’s afraid that she’ll awaken the demon inside of me.

  Nelly tries to be so nice — so welcoming, so understanding, so sweet, so everything a nice girl should be — that I try to convince myself that there is something deeply wrong with her. Like she’s got some deep-rooted psycho issues.

  But she’s smart, and not a social retard like most of the people who talk to me, so I try with her. And I don’t try anymore with anyone.

  “I like your shirt,” I say. “It’s shiny.”

  Now she really looks up at me. I’m wearing my Egg cloak over jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Yeah, um, I dig your cloak,” she says. Only she says it like a question. Like I’m a joke. Like she’s grabbing for straws to find something nice to say to me because she’s that kind of nice girl. I convince myself of this because with me she always seems awkward. Forced. Fake. It upsets me, because there is nothing about me that she really digs.

  She’s finishing up the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle that I already completed this morning while sipping on a latte and waiting for school to start. I can see that she can’t get the answer for twelve down, “A Tolkien Tree.”

  I realize that she would never think to ask me for help. She probably just hopes I’ll go away.

  “It’s ‘Ent,’” I say.

  “What?” Nelly says.

  “The answer to twelve down.”

  “I would have gotten it eventually.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “Just trying to be helpful.”

  I go and grab a seat for the meeting and wonder yet again why I try being friendly to people.

  Mental note: Don’t bother.

  Ms. Dicostanzo comes in. I notice that she’s put more blond in her hair and she has hip new chunky black glasses. She changes her look every four weeks. It corresponds to the exact same time all the new fashion magazines come out.

  Max Carter is following her and they are deep in conversation. She pulls out a chair and Max sits next to her.

  “Does he have to be everywhere?” I ask.

  Nobody answers me.

  “I’d like to introduce Max Carter, our new editorial cartoonist,” Ms. Dicostanzo says.

  “Do we need one?” I ask. “I mean, don’t we have enough people on the paper?”

  “There’s always room for one more on the team!” Nelly says.

  Ms. Dicostanzo nods in agreement.

  Nelly leans forward in her chair trying to get a closer look at Max. Nelly likes everything new, and that includes boys.

  “I think that there are already too many on the team,” I say.

  “Now, Egg, that’s no way to treat a newcomer. Please welcome Max Carter to the Melrose Lion,” Ms. Dicostanzo says.

  Across the table, I see that Nelly’s still checking Max out. I notice when she perks up, she pushes her chest out first and then rises in her seat. She fancies herself a kind of Lois Lane. I believe this might be an actual Nelly flaw. It makes me feel better. But Max Carter doesn’t look like Clark Kent. I hardly think he’s hiding a Superman outfit underneath his Preacher T-sh
irt.

  “Wait, your name is Egg? Like in Terminal Earth?” Max asks.

  I nod my head.

  “Oh, now the cloak makes sense,” Max says.

  When I look up to meet his eyes, I notice that Max Carter has washed his hair.

  “How do we know he can draw good?” Inez says.

  Ms. Dicostanzo peers over her glasses at Inez.

  “Please don’t use street language here at the paper,” she says.

  “I was just being colloquial,” Inez says.

  Max holds up his sketchbook. It’s a drawing of our mighty mascots, the Melrose Lions that guard the front of the building, dressed up to look like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. I have to admit that he’s got talent.

  “Oh,” Nelly says. “That’s cool.”

  “Do you even know who they are?” I say.

  “You’re not the only person who watches a lot of movies,” Nelly says.

  Nelly may be a cinephile, but it’s only because she’s starstruck. I bet she’s never set foot in the Silent Movie Theater for one of their special screenings, even though it’s practically across the street.

  Then Nelly begins to hand out assignments.

  “Okay, people. Egg, can you take pictures of the installation that went up two days ago at the empty lot down the street? The artists are being sued by the city, and I want coverage on the lawsuit. I’ll write the story. Plus, I think it would be nice to document the art before the city tears it down.”

  I nod and tune out everything else she says until she tells us that we can go.

  “Okay, that wraps it up. Good work, guys,” Ms. Dicostanzo says.

  I grab a new roll of film from the cabinet and head out of school and across the street.

  “Hey. Wait up.”

  It’s Max Carter. I don’t want to share another single moment of my day with him. It is beginning to feel like he’s living all over me. Enough already.

  “I wait for no one,” I say, and keep walking at my brisk pace. It’s one of Egg’s lines from the movie. It’s one of my favorites. I quote her all the time.

  The installation is beautiful. It is a model of the Statue of Liberty, made out of a broken gas pump.