by Leah Thomas
“Seriously, wanna switch chairs with me?” Phil’s posture is painful to look at.
“Don’t coddle me.”
“Phil. I think you might have, um, what.” The word leaves me. “A thing for this girl.”
“Look, it’s nothing so juvenile. It was as though, as though . . . she stepped right out of The Matrix.”
“So . . . she’s bald?” I’m not being funny. I can’t always follow conversations.
“Her hair was a long rope of crimson, plunging toward hell.” Phil more or less talks in Mad Libs. “Her eyes were sable-encircled sapphires.” Phil spins on me. He’s actually feeling something, showing all his teeth. “Suppose our lives were a movie.”
“It would flop.” We’ve discussed this, usually during tabletop nights in Phil’s basement. Phil’s oldest brother, John, went to college for screenwriting before moving back into the basement. John instigates these conversations during snack breaks while Matt, the middle brother, proofreads our Pathfinder character sheets. In the Wheeler house, the honor of Dungeon Master is not lightly bestowed.
“Suppose our lives were a movie, or book, or game, any media portrayal. Our roles are obvious. We’d be the archetypal underdogs in virtually any canonical text.”
“Are underdogs an, ark, ar-archetype?”
“Underdogs are often main characters, because underdogs have the most room for unmitigated character growth. Agreed?”
“That’s, um.” There’s a word for thinking about yourself from outside yourself. My brain’s on the right path, but there’s a fallen log in the way and I’m tripping over it. “Mega? Megathought?”
“Metacognitive,” Phil parses. “We’re criminally underestimated. In stories, we’re the ilk that step up to save the planet, proving the dissenters fools. Granted, the caveats of reality will probably make our adventures here in Samsboro moderately less dramatic.”
“I don’t think life is a John Hughes movie.” As I say this, three guys in varsity jackets stomp through the cafeteria doors on their easy legs, jostling each other, hollering things like “dude” just so other people can hear them. “Okay. Maybe it is. Sometimes.”
“But this girl. Kalyn.”
“Kalyn?” That sounds more Kentuckian than The Matrix-y.
“Withhold your disdain. This was no ordinary Kalyn. We are talking a plus-thirty Charisma modifier. She’s protagonist material. Do you know what’s most compelling?”
“No idea.”
“She couldn’t remember her last name.” Phil smacks his palms together. “Amnesia. Classic Girl-in-a-Box trope. But may-haps she’ll kick-start our story arc.”
“I forget words all the time.” I poke my milk carton. Phil is my best friend, but sometimes he’s too buried in invented characters to remember reality.
If Phil’s categorized this girl as something fictional, I don’t know how to respond. How can I tell him talk like this makes me queasy? Phil’s got two brothers and I’ve got two moms; I think he forgets girls are people. It doesn’t help that he never talks to them. Does it occur to him that this girl has her own life to live?
“Of course I don’t truly expect anything,” Phil continues. “But were our lives a movie, she’d be our catalyst. Doesn’t the postulation inspire you, Gus?”
“I dunno.” I don’t like the idea that we’ve got roles to play in a high school drama. Phil wants to be Bill Gates. He wants to be a nerd who rises, to pull a sword from a stone and slay dragons known as “jocks with good skin.”
But if this were a movie and our roles were already prescribed, that’d be no good for me. I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, lying on the sectional in Phil’s basement.
I’d be cast as one of the following:
a.the crippled side note with a tragic backstory who adds texture to a country setting
b.the crippled side note the protagonist rescues from unjust bullies, thereby proving the protagonist heroic
c.the crippled side note whose health or circumstances improves after meeting the protagonist, thereby proving the protagonist heroic
d.the crippled side note who longs for “normalcy” and achieves it to some extent under the magical influence of the protagonist, thereby proving the protagonist heroic
e.the crippled side note who ends up tragically hospitalized, thereby allowing the protagonist to set up a touching vigil sequence with candles visible from a hospital window, thereby proving the protagonist heroic
f.the crippled side note who dies, thereby inspiring the protagonist to live more/better/beautifully
None of these options make for a story I want to belong to.
My stomach is a tangle. The words spill out despite me, to spite me. “Phil, if our lives don’t start until this girl walks in, what have we been doing all this time?”
Phil dismisses that, pulling out his PSP. “You’ll understand. When you see her.”
I only want to leave. “Um, later.”
When we first got to high school, Phil chose our table deliberately. He never said so. But it is the shortest walk from here to the lockers. From here we can disappear together, but we aren’t together now.
What if I walk directly into dreaded Kalyn, her flaming hair and war paint? If I do, will she catch me, or let me catch myself? Maybe our movie could be different. Maybe I don’t actually have to be any of the options between a and f. Not normal, no, but also not just “the disabled kid.” A person called Gus.
KALYN
ROSE POPLAWSKI WOULD never smoke. Rose Poplawski’s got a smile worth sparing. But when I walk out of Jefferson Prison, a smoke’s all I can think about.
As the last stragglers depart, I plop myself down on the front steps. It’s like air can’t get through me. I’m a clogged-up old engine.
I spent the whole day as someone better than me.
I’m being practical. I’m even being, jinx-knock-on-wood, clever.
Dad says there’s a slim difference between being clever and being cowardly. When he was on trial, people asked him why a “clever, promising young man with a full ride and a baby on the horizon” deserved to be shot dead in a junkyard. Dad said, “He must have been real clever, sneaking around our property at night like that.”
Dad might not be clever, but he wears his face and no one else’s.
What would Dad think of Rose Poplawski?
My fingers are in my jacket, fumbling for the one cigarette I keep hidden in the lining. My fingertips brush the raw egg first, warm and almost living. I pop it between my lips so I can get to the small hole in my pocket. The damn cig’s drifted to the other side of the jacket. I cuss and pull the egg from my mouth, slamming it against the sidewalk—
Somebody yelps.
I look back and see four weird feet behind me, splattered with milky egg and shattered shell. A pair of Doc Martens and a pair of graffitied canvas shoes, now covered in my identity crisis.
“Aw, Christ!” I start wiping the gunk with my hand, but Quillpower, that scrawny tumbleweed, backs up like my hand’s a torch. “I mean, I’m ever so sorry!”
But I’ve already snapped the Rose character in two. I try and shrug the broken pieces of her back into place as I get to my feet. Graceful I’m not, but Quillpower, all pimpled beanpole, looks more awkward than ever, leaning away like that. His silent friend, a big-eyed, bespectacled pipsqueak with a mess of corn-silk curls springing from his head, is hardly any better. The uncomfortable glasses brigade, here.
“It is you.” Quillpower lowers his handheld. “We met this morning.”
“I don’t think so.” Quillpower is the only kid who didn’t meet Rose, and I want to undo that. I double down on the accent. “Y’all must be mistaken.”
“I’m not.” I can see the orb of his Adam’s apple, floating like a fishing bob. “But you’ve since donned a disguise.”
“Shucks, but I’ve met so many people today!” God, smiling is killing my face.
Quillpower cocks his head.
His friend, Boots, is scanning my bat
tered ballet flats, my oversized denim jacket, and the blouse underneath it. I’m no giantess, but Boots is easily four inches shorter than me. I scan him right back, getting a good gander at his wild mess of hair.
His curls look soft, almost floral. I kind of want to muss them.
I don’t think he’d like that, based on how he’s made his big eyes thin as wires beyond his bulky black bifocals. If his head’s a rose, those eyes are thorns.
I can’t figure how, but it feels like Boots can see my braid undone, and the black war-paint ghosts on my cheeks. Like he can tell my battered shoes used to be Mom’s, and my overalls are secondhand, that someone put me in the freshman class when I’m actually sixteen.
He rubs me all kinds of wrong.
“What?” I make it the most aggressive syllable.
“Are you the girl Phil met this morning?” There’s a weird drag in Boots’s raspy voice. His mouth opens a little funny, like his bottom jaw doesn’t line up with the top. There’s something off about his posture, too. One arm is curled in close, like a little snail, and one knee twists inward above its boot. “Did you change yourself?”
“Change myself?”
“I mean, your clothes?”
His stare prickles. “Hell, what do you care?”
I scoop my backpack off the ground and make to abandon the steps, maybe walk home through the cinnamon-stinking evening, but Boots says, “Wait.”
He takes one cockeyed step toward me. He sags for a second, then rallies. “Um. I like your jacketfit. Your outfit.”
Well, this guy’s a perfect mess.
“You talk just like my grandma,” I blurt.
His lips twitch. “That’s a new one.”
Quillpower—Phil—is watching us all wary, invisible fur on end. Maybe he’s expecting a duel. Maybe a duel is what we’re having, Boots and me. I can’t tell.
“Well, maybe not just like my grandma. You’re like her because you don’t make sense, but you’re not like her really, because you don’t make sense to me.”
Boots blushes, pink as an actual freakin’ peony. “I don’t always do it well. Thinking and talking at the same time. I mean.”
“Well, who does?” I can’t tell if I’m being sarcastic.
He blinks.
“Okay. So. Delightful meeting you!” I muster up the gall for a Rose-y beam, but the words are mine: “I just get prickly with new people.”
“I get it.” I suspect he does.
Boots gimps by, and Phil shadows him, gazing at me over hunched shoulders. They wander past the curb toward the student parking lot.
It hits me that these two probably waited for school to clear out. If there are any kids more likely to get picked on than the girl whose dad is an infamous murderer, it’s got to be Quill-power and the crab-walking puffball. I’m not sure what exactly Boots has going on, but Mom had patients with congenital disorders, things like MS and chromosomal issues. Life’s no picnic for some folks.
I holler after him. “Those are some kickass boots!”
Boots is as red as my bangs. Blushing is something you can’t fake.
I fall back on the steps and manage to land right in the egg-splat. Go get ’em, Pistol Poplawski. Those nerds can’t hear me cuss, but I kind of wish they could. They were unfazed by Rose’s voodoo. Guess some people don’t like chocolate ice cream.
Mom shows up forty minutes late, making excuses while Grandma sobs loudly in the back seat. Angela couldn’t cover her shift after all, so would I mind eating my cake in the back seat before Mom drops me and Grandma off at home?
So much for Funfetti.
Mom tosses me a Hostess cupcake, a votive candle, and a patriotic lighter. When I hold the flame over the candle, Grandma’s whimpers become a scream that carries on until the birthday song is over.
“Claire caught fire,” Grandma says, but we don’t know anyone called Claire.
“I won’t be home when Dad calls, but send him my love, all right?” Mom’s eyes are puddles, her voice sandpaper. “Your first day go okay?”
“You should be asking Rose.”
“What?”
“It was fine. Check out my new pencil. It’s glittery.”
We’re rolling again, and soon we’ll be caught between the towering, rusting stacks of cars that replace the corn once you hit Spence turf.
I wonder if Mom will ever meet Rose. I wonder if she’d want to. Maybe she’s wanted a daughter like Rose for ages. That iced tea on the table last week, it wasn’t even lukewarm before she agreed to send me to Jefferson Prison.
Did you change yourself? Boots asked me.
No, not actually. And I don’t really want to. I hope I don’t want to.
GUS
“SHE’S VIOLA AFTER the wreck, Portia defending Antonio!” Phil shouts over The Two Towers OST blaring through blown speakers. “Éowyn on the fields of Pelennor!”
“But wasn’t, um, Kalyn? Wasn’t she a girl both times you saw her?”
“Shakespeare’s gender benders are the easiest analogies at my disposal, Gus. And the last example was Tolkien. I’m merely admiring that, like many heroines, this girl has adopted a disguise to hide her secret identity. Obviously our heroine should be feminine.”
Obviously? Phil might default to being smitten by girls, but smiting is hazier for me. There was something arresting about Kalyn throwing an egg at us, about her tangled red hair and arching eyebrows and unfounded anger. But there was something just as arresting about Garth of the Gaggle when I saw him today. Garth, beside the drinking fountain, laughing in a way that echoed in my skull, wearing a kilt that fit him so loosely that I wished I could adjust it for him.
I think most people are arresting. Girls, boys, everyone. People.
“Do you think she is taken with me?”
“No idea.” I move my seat belt so it doesn’t crush my dead arm.
If this was a gender-bending story and not real life, and this wild-eyed girl on the steps was everything Phil wants her to be, maybe things could change for us. But Kalyn isn’t a heroine. She’s a short-tempered hillbilly passing for sweet.
If I’m bitter, it’s because she is passing. All Kalyn had to do was change her hair, and voilá, carefreedom! All the Doc Martens in the world couldn’t do that for me.
I don’t want to talk about Kalyn. It’s not what she said so much as the way she looked at us. She was sandpaper and we were bits of wood.
Phil’s driving the Death Van (named after the Death Star painted on its side) with one hand, waving the other like he’s directing a symphony. “It does support my theorizing, doesn’t it?” Phil reaches for a warm Powerade and swigs it. “We’re the only ones who know who she really is!”
“We don’t know who she ‘really is,’ ” I murmur.
“She’s Kalyn,” Phil says reverently. “Kalyn, the catalyst.”
“Oh, what’s in a name,” I snap. Phil ignores my tone to correct me. Phil can’t help himself when it comes to Shakespeare. As he’s told me “tenfold,” people constantly misquote that line, or at least, he says, swerving around a tractor, misinterpret it.
“. . . people use it to imply a name has nothing to do with who someone is, which is the opposite of what Shakespeare intended.” He should put both hands on the wheel. Imagine having two good arms and abusing them like that. “We are in an entirely novel position. We, the only half-faced pignuts in school to whom she disclosed her true identity!”
“Could you turn down the music?”
Phil doesn’t. He’s tapping his fingers on the wheel, so quickly that watching it borders on nauseating. “Should we have offered her transport, Gus?”
“No.” My limbs ache. “She didn’t even ask our names.”
The vehicle squeals like a dying pig when Phil hits the brakes at the main downtown intersection. A prop ax from the back flies forward, whacking my elbow.
Phil’s the third brother to drive this van, and not the first to drive it ragged. There are traces of all the Wheeler sibling
s here: Matt’s painted Death Star, John’s empty reels of film bouncing around the back, the gum stuck along the ceiling behind us in an incomplete rainbow spectrum. Where most people have a middle seat, a grubby pile of blankets and prop swords from weekends at Ren Faire coat the carpet.
“Gus, if only I’d had the gall to speak to her as you did.”
I avert my eyes. The local ice cream shop is already closed for autumn, but the barber pole is still spinning.
“I envy you. Girls always want to speak to you.”
I freeze. It has nothing to do with the stop sign Phil just ran. “No. They don’t.”
“How many girls spoke to you today? Tell me truly.”
“You mean how many people, um. How many—tried to carry things for me?”
“Yes, you despise that.” Now we’re barreling through my subdivision. “But can’t you see the benefits? People wish to speak to you. People find you interesting, Gus.”
“For the wrong reasons.” I shouldn’t have to explain this to Phil. Phil, who sat with me for hours and helped me read words in order. Phil, who shut off The Elephant Man when it made me bawl for reasons untold.
“Do people ever wish to speak to me? Do they ever think I’m interesting, apart from the allure of shoving my face into toilets?”
“I think you’re interesting,” I whisper.
But I know what he’s telling me. Things got bad for Phil somewhere around seventh grade. Phil’s acne started bubbling up full force, making moon craters and sinkholes of his face. This attracted more winces than my dead-rightness ever has.
Josh Erickson and a few other guys had a lot of fun pockmarking all Phil’s stuff.
“You want everything to match, right, fag?” Josh said, after he hole-punched and knifed holes through Phil’s messenger bag.
“You’re the one into fashion, Gus,” Phil said dully, picking circular bits of leather off the speckled floor. For years he’d been delivering magazines to me, Vogue and GQ, plopping them on my desk after his dad recycled them from clinic waiting rooms.
I tried to help, but I can hardly kneel on a good day, and the stress made that anything but. Phil asked me to abandon him to his quest.