by Chad Morris
She didn’t think so?
She didn’t think anyone had called me cute before? Now instead of thudding, my heart didn’t know what to do. It almost wouldn’t beat. It was like the stampeding wildebeests had all collided with each other. Or Juggernaut tripped and crashed and burned.
Gavin, Travis, and the girls just looked at me for a moment, searching my face. It was way too quiet until Gavin erupted in laughter. Travis, Chloe, and Emma joined him. I couldn’t tell if the other girl did or not. I was having a double vision moment.
Middle-School Rule: Everyone is always trying to look better than everyone else.
I hated that rule.
“Just kidding,” Gavin said, and slapped me on the back, almost knocking my dumb glasses off my nose.
“We thought of it a second ago and we had to try it out,” Travis said.
A joke. It was all a setup. How did I not see that coming? Back in elementary, Gavin and I had been on a few football teams together. Gavin was our quarterback. He was really good but always needed attention for it. I was the short wide receiver who could always catch Gavin’s crazy throws. He joked then and I dished it back out. He was always teasing. Gavin once told me that his grandma could catch better than I could. I told him I’d be happy to prove that with a little game of catch with his grandma. She never took me up on it.
That was before my eyesight changed. We didn’t play anymore. We didn’t jab back and forth anymore. It just went one way.
Middle-School Rule: Even if you have been friends for most of elementary school, when you go to middle school, if one person’s eyes have started going bad and they can’t play football anymore, and you live in a town where football is all that anyone ever talks about, then that kid with the bad eyes isn’t as cool as he used to be and you don’t have to hang out with him. At all.
My chest felt hollow and I wanted them all to go away so I could scrape my dignity off of the floor and get myself ready for what was already looking like it was going to be a horribly long day of school.
Gavin went to slap me on the back again, but decided against it.
“You have to admit, that was pretty good,” Travis said.
I didn’t have to admit it, but I gave him a fake smile and nodded anyway.
Chloe and Emma were still laughing as they walked away. The girl with the dark hair I think I recognized from science class smiled as she left. Gavin was the last to turn and point at me with both his fingers. Like he was so charming or something.
As they left to tell their other friends how funny they were, I squinted and pulled my comic back out of my portfolio case. I had to finish it. I had to win the contest. And when I won, everything would change.
BAZAAM!
I had drawn the word, its letters growing bigger across the page, as Squint sliced through the last of the octopus robots.
Now I was sketching at my table in the lunchroom. Classes had been the usual: blurry boards and teachers talking. Thankfully I hadn’t seen Gavin or Travis. The girl who had been hanging out with them really was in my science class. And, of course, Chloe in English. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this morning when they had all come to my table.
I ate my peanut butter sandwich on the way to lunch so I could have the whole time to focus on my comic. My table was in the far back corner in an unnoticed alcove. I never had problems getting it to myself because I didn’t stop to get anything else to eat. No lines = first choice of tables.
Squint kicked away a robot octopus blade and looked up into the barrel of a bazooka. The huge blaster rested on Gunn’s blue-cape-covered beefy shoulder. The bazooka was as thick as a tree and shot basketball-sized spheres of fire. “Why are you here, Squint?”
Gunn took a few steps toward Squint, the bazooka still on his shoulder. Gunn was nearly a head taller than Squint and maybe twice as thick. “Has someone been telling you that you’re a hero?” Gunn asked.
No one had called Squint a hero, but he wouldn’t fall into this verbal trap.
Gunn had two things he was really good at. One: getting into his opponents’ heads and making them lose focus. Two: intimidating others with his really big weapons.
“They don’t have to,” Squint said, narrowing his eyes.
And then . . . VAROOSH! Squint light-blasted Gavin—I mean Gunn—into a different dimension. Seriously, he was hit so hard and flew so many miles back, he wouldn’t remember when he’d last brushed his yellow teeth. Not that he did that much.
Okay. I didn’t really draw that last part, but I kind of wanted to.
In comics, I could always think of the perfect thing to say. And if I didn’t, I could come back and change it as many times as I wanted to until I liked it. I wished I could do that in real life. I wished I could be clever when Gavin and his friends showed up.
Either that or blast him with light-daggers into a different dimension.
Why hadn’t I said something like comic-book Squint would have said? Or maybe when Chloe had asked if anyone told me I was cute before, I could have said, “Yep” or “Definitely.” Of course, that would have been a lie, but she wouldn’t have known that. Well, unless you count my grandma. Or I could have even said, “Maybe.” Any of those answers would have spoiled their joke. Then what would they have done? Looked at each other uncomfortably and left? That would have been so much better.
As I got back to my drawing, the talk in the lunchroom behind me was its usual loud chaos. It almost blended into static for me. Occasionally, I picked out complete sentences as I drew.
“Did you take the math quiz?”
“Can I sit here?”
“Did you hear what Kailey said?”
“That would be so weird.”
“Um, can I sit here?”
The noise was easy to ignore. It always had been. Especially now, as Squint had to square off against his former friend. I was shading in his muscles as he pulled out his light-dagger. Of course his muscles were impressive, and bigger than any normal person’s muscles. That’s a comic rule.
Comic Rule: All muscles in comics are exaggerated. No hero or heroine has anything but muscle. It’s like they only eat brussels sprouts and kale and drink protein shakes while bench-pressing semi trucks and running marathons.
And the closely related rule:
Comic Rule: Nearly all heroes must wear something skintight so we can see all of their exaggerated muscles.
It’s weird, but I go with it.
I started in on a fold in Squint’s red cape as I heard more lunchroom chatter.
Wait. Had someone been talking to me? Had someone asked me a question? To sit by me?
I looked up to see a girl with a round face, big eyes, and long dark hair looking at me. The girl from science class. The girl with Gavin and his gang. I still couldn’t think of her name.
“Well?” She shrugged her shoulders, her large eyes waiting for an answer. She held a tray with a sub sandwich and a bowl with something green poking out of it.
She must have asked if she could sit with me. “Um . . .” I didn’t know what to say. Why was she here? To make another joke?
“Unless you stop me,” she said, “I’m sitting.” She looked around quickly then set her tray down and sat on the bench in the corner, hardest to see from the rest of the lunchroom.
Great. I couldn’t have someone bothering me, especially not someone like this. Gavin definitely put her up to whatever she was going to do. And I had work to get done. A month wasn’t much time if I wanted to finish a full comic.
I slid my pages back into the portfolio, quicker on the draw this time.
She folded open her milk carton, took a sip, then pointed at me. “We’re in science class together, but we’ve never really met.” She put her hand out for a handshake.
A handshake? Did anyone do those anymore? I wasn’t sure what to do, so I shook it
. From the glimpse of color I saw, she had her nails done all nice, like a girl who cares what other people think. If I could trust my double-vision eyes, she had thick dark lashes and was pretty. But of course she was pretty; she was popular.
Middle-School Rule: Good looking people are five times more likely to be popular.
“I’m McKell Panganiban,” she said.
“Pangan . . . ?” I repeated what I could of her difficult last name.
“It’s Filipino,” she said.
I nodded. “I’m Flint,” I said, “But everyone calls me . . .”
“Squint,” she finished. “I know.” Everyone knew. For years now only adults had called me Flint. Squint and Flint just sounded too close to each other. And with my eye problems, it had stuck. “I kind of like it,” she said. “But can I ask you something about that?”
Here it came. Gavin and the others were probably hiding somewhere close, filming the whole thing on their phones.
I wasn’t going to fall into any other traps. I had to be on my guard. “Do you want to know if anyone called me cute before?” I asked.
Ha. Beat her to the punch.
“No,” she said. “And that wasn’t . . .” She paused, then looked away again. “I don’t think that was as funny as they thought.” She shook her head, her dark hair swaying. “I mean, it really wasn’t funny at all.”
I looked at her. Was she saying what I wanted to hear so she could drop a bigger joke on me? Or was she sincere?
No. I couldn’t stop to think too much. I had to be confident. Stand up for myself. “Then what did you want to ask?”
“Um.” McKell’s eyes fell for a second. “I wanted to know why they call you Squint. I mean, I asked Emma and she said your eyes weren’t that good. Is that it? Because you wear glasses.” She pointed at my thick black-framed glasses. “Shouldn’t wearing glasses fix it?”
I wasn’t expecting that. No one ever asked about my eyes. I don’t know if they thought it was too personal or they didn’t care. But they never asked.
Wait. Was this a trap? How could she turn this against me? I couldn’t think of anything. Hoping I wasn’t about to mess up, I admitted, “I have an eye thing . . . a disease.”
But then she didn’t say anything. She kind of smiled and listened, like she was waiting for me to say more. No jokes. No laughs.
“It’s called keratoconus,” I said. “It’s not like super rare or anything. There may even be someone else in the school with it, but mine is pretty bad. Well, really bad. My corneas are getting thinner and thinner, and that makes my eyes bulge. It’s like the windshield of my eye got too weak to hold its shape and now it’s shaped kind of like a football instead of a baseball.” I’d heard one of my doctors explain it that way. “It makes everything look a bit like a fun house mirror.” I pointed to the ceiling. “Like that lightbulb up there, I see five of them right now and the light is shooting off in weird ways.”
If she was going to say something mean, this could be her shot.
But she didn’t.
She looked around again, then said, “That sounds pretty awful, but you can see me okay, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, you’re blurry, and sometimes I see two or three of you, but I can see you.”
Why was a popular girl asking questions about me? That went against all sorts of middle-school rules. She didn’t even seem like she was trying to look better than me.
“Thanks for telling me,” she said. She pulled out her phone, and then pressed her screen. Was she recording? Or did she just stop recording? Maybe Gavin and the others sent her to get more information about me. Maybe they were planning something bigger.
McKell grabbed her tray and started to get up like she was going to leave, but then looked around and sat back down. I had no idea whether that was good or bad.
“This is going to sound really,” she paused, “strange. But can I show you something?”
Apparently, McKell wasn’t done. Maybe this was when she nailed me with some punch line. Maybe instead of recording, she’d been checking her phone so she knew exactly what to say. I wasn’t going to walk into it.
“You’re right,” I said. “That does sound strange.”
“Oh,” she said and started to grab her tray again.
That wasn’t the reaction I expected. Had I hurt her feelings?
No. I couldn’t have.
Middle-School Rule: What the quiet kid who draws in the corner says never really matters.
But she might really leave. And she was the first person to come sit with me who hadn’t made fun of me in the first thirty seconds.
“But strange is okay,” I said. “I should know. I’m strange, but okay.” What was that even supposed to mean? Sometimes my mouth . . . I shook my head to clear my mind and motioned for her to sit back down. “You can show me . . . whatever you were planning on . . . showing me.” I wasn’t cut out to talk to people.
McKell took her hands off her tray. “Sorry. I’m just nervous.” She brushed her dark hair over her ear, but most of it fell back to where it had been.
I didn’t understand why she would be nervous. Popular kids don’t have to worry about things like nervousness. “I like to make up rhymes and songs on my uke,” she said. “I got challenged to show them to someone. But since I’m not going to bring my uke to school, I’ll just show you my rhymes.”
“Wait,” I said. “What’s a uke? It sounds like a hairy animal or something.” I pictured her reciting poetry on top of a buffalo thing with bushy fur and thick hooves. “Or is it some cold arctic place?” Doesn’t uke sound like a freezing, snow-covered place in Antarctica or something? “But that doesn’t really fit what you said. So probably not.”
Oh, no. More rambling.
“No,” she said, laughing a little. “A ukulele. It’s like a small guitar.”
“Oh,” I said. “That makes so much more sense than performing a song with some huge hairy buffalo, though I would really like to see that. But I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to bring a hairy animal to school.”
She laughed again. What I said hadn’t turned out so bad. Rock and Squint would be proud.
“So you were challenged to show me some rhymes?” I asked, trying to picture what that was going to be like. I wanted to ask who had challenged her. It was probably Travis or Gavin or someone. This was when the prank was going to hit.
Or not. I still couldn’t tell.
“Yeah, rhymes,” she said. “Freestyle. Just making it up like . . .” She thought for a moment. “I like rhyming. The timing. The sound, around, the words, you heard.” She slipped into it. Like she was writing a poem on the spot.
I blinked a few times. “Whoa,” I said. “That was cool. You just made that up?”
“Yeah,” she said, her face trying to stop a grin. Her bright white teeth stood out in contrast to her light brown skin.
Usually kids in middle school only write cheesy Valentine’s Day–style poetry. That or super mopey depressing stuff. We had a whole poetry section in English class last year and every poem stunk, like skunks-in-a-landfill stunk, mine included. But the rhyming she’d just shared was . . . really good.
“That doesn’t seem like stuff you’d say or sing or whatever while strumming a little guitar,” I said.
“Oh, it works better than you’d think,” she said.
“Do it again,” I said.
Another big smile. “Let’s see.” She thought for a moment. “Mr. Flint, had to squint. For his eyes were not as energized . . .” I tensed. Here it was. She was going to make fun of me. “And McKell had to tell, some rhymes, this time.” That was no insult. She had changed the subject away from me to her. “For a challenge . . .” She paused, then bunched up her mouth. “I kind of got myself stuck there. Does anything rhyme with challenge?”
I choked on a laugh. Maybe
partly because she couldn’t think of a rhyme and partly because she hadn’t made fun of me. “I’m not sure.”
“Ballenge. Callenge, dallenge,” she said to herself. She was going through the alphabet just giving the word challenge a different first letter.
I couldn’t think of anything that rhymed. “It might be a dead end,” I said.
She scrunched up her lips to one side of her face. “You’re right,” she said. “But I think I’ve bugged you enough. Thanks for letting me do my challenge thing.”
That was it? Nothing else? “Okay,” I said. I wanted to ask what that was about. Who challenged her to do the rhyming? Why talk to me? Why did she want to know about my eyes? Why had she played with her phone earlier? Had she recorded something?
She looked around, then got up and went over to sit by Chloe, Emma, Gavin, and Travis. But she went a long way to get there. She was trying to make it look like she had been coming from another direction. Like she hadn’t been with me. Was talking to me a secret? Or was she telling them how weird I was? Getting some info for a future joke?
I had no idea.
But I had made her laugh and smile. There had to be some Middle-School Rule about that. I wasn’t sure what the rule was, but I kind of liked it.
“You know, Flint,” Grandpa said, digging his spoon into his bowl of oatmeal, “back in 2005, Deion Branch, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots, came back from an injury to help get his team to the Super Bowl. And the Super Bowl is the only game as great as,” he turned to the University of Nebraska football calendar on the wall, “any game played by our Huskers in Memorial Stadium.” He nodded proudly. “Go Big Red,” he chanted, almost like he was in the bleachers at a game. Grandpa was a sturdy man with a good-sized gut. And hairy—his hair was long and he had a six-inch brown and gray beard. As short and thin as I was, it was hard to believe I came from the same gene pool. Of course, I couldn’t see him that well.
“Do you know what Deion did the night before the big game?” Grandpa asked. Grandpa worked at Jayden’s Hardware, but he loved football—with a capital L. He had played in college, helped with the high school team for a few years, and had been a little-league football coach for decades. He had even coached me before my eyes went bad.