by Barry Lyga
Her voice is exactly as I expected it from her online messages: low, sardonic, defensive. Sort of like what I would sound like if I were a girl, I guess.
"No. But now that I see you, I figured you for more of a Sandman type." Take that.
"Oh, please, fanboy. Spare me your crap."
"You mean you don't like Gaiman?"
She rolls her eyes and pulls a pack of cigarettes from somewhere under her shirt, probably tucked into her waistband. As she lights up, I take her in—she's almost painfully thin, like her whole body's an afterthought.
"I like him fine. All the cool screen names were taken, so I went with Promethea. Is that all right? Do I pass your test, or do I have to name the founding members of the Legion of Super-Jackoffs?"
"Hey, you asked me here. You IM'd me. "
She stands up, tilts her head back, and blows smoke straight up into the sky. She's almost my height, but some of that is the shoes, which, I notice, have thick, chunky heels.
"Yeah, yeah. I know."
"You got here pretty fast. I left right after the last bell. How'd you beat me here?"
"I blew off last period."
"Oh." I've never skipped a class in my life. I don't even know how you'd do it. Doesn't someone notice you're missing and report you? I want to ask her, but I feel like that would be unsophisticated somehow.
"So, why?" she asks, sucking on the cigarette again, gazing at me. She's pretending to be bored, but her eyes give her away. She's hungry for something—something new. Something different.
"Why what?"
"You know. You never answered me. Why do you let him hit you?"
We stand there, staring at each other. My blood is pounding in my temples and I can feel the beginnings of a massive headache. It's not just the smell of the cigarette—once caffeine washes out of your system, your constricted blood vessels bounce back. Caffeine withdrawal. Just like any drug, it bites you in the ass at some point.
"You're right," I tell her, not sure why. "Sometimes I do wish someone would break into the school and kill all of them."
She grins. "Yeah. I figured that."
Goth Girl
Her name is Kyra. We walk the elementary school grounds together, alone.
"I'm just so tired of that gym class shit," she says. "That's just so over for me. Like I need that kind of noise, you know? So I swiped one of my sister's doctor's notes and took it into school. Her name's Katherine, and the note just says 'K. Sellers' on it, so the school nurse thinks it's about me."
"What did it say?"
She shrugs and flicks her cigarette butt out into the grass. I bite my lip. I want to pick it up so that some little elementary school kid won't eat it or something, but she's just walking along and I have to keep up.
"Something about depression and shit like that. My sister's a freakin' pharmacy on spiked heels ever since she lost the kid."
"Lost the kid?"
"Yeah. Dumb bitch couldn't even remember when to take the stupid pill, you know? She washed outta nursing school because of the morning sickness and then she had a, y'know, like a miscarriage, and now she just sits there all the time, watching TV and eating Cheetos and ballooning up like she's preggers all over again. But whatever. It got me out of gym."
"Don't ... don't your parents—"
"My dad? As long as no one burns the house down, he doesn't care what the hell goes on."
"Oh. Oh. My parents are divorced, too."
She stops for a moment and I almost walk into her. She sweeps that long, annoying hank of jet black hair out of her eyes. "I never said my parents were divorced, fanboy."
"Stop calling me 'fanboy,' OK?"
"Why? You read superheroes, right? You and your buddy, the superstar jock? Are you two queer on each other or something? Not that I care."
"No! And I don't just read superheroes," I tell her.
"Uh-huh. OK."
"You read comic books, too," I remind her.
"Not superhero shit."
"Oh, please!" For a second I forget that I'm on the verge of having an honest-to-God new friend. Her hypocrisy just bugs the hell out of me. She's been rambling and talking because let's face it, I don't know how to talk to people, but I do know about comic books. "Sandman started out as a superhero comic! The first volume had the friggin' Justice League in it and Batman shows up at the funeral at the end of the series! You Vertigo people are so damn pretentious. You can't—"
"I don't just read Vertigo, fanboy. You ever hear of Sara Varon? Adrian Tomine? Chynna Clugston-Major?"
"Yes."
"You ever read their stuff?"
I'm silent.
"That's what I figured."
I want to tell her about Schemata. I just want to tell her all about it, but I can't. I'm too afraid. I haven't told anyone about it. Not even Cal. No one.
"Your idea of 'mature comics' is Brian Michael Bendis," she goes on, snorting his name. "Just because he drops the F-bomb every other word in Powers— "
"It's a good comic," I interrupt. "And he also did the Jinx stuff, which wasn't superheroes at all, and it was good stuff."
She grins at me. She has a way of grinning—it's not every time she grins, but sometimes—where the little silver ring in the corner of her mouth somehow tilts up and makes her seem happy and almost, almost, beautiful. She magically produces the pack of cigarettes from under her shirt. "You're fun." She holds out the pack. "Smoke?"
"No, thanks."
"Good y two-shoes." She lights up and makes the pack disappear.
"Nothing goody two-shoes about it," I tell her, defensive. "I just have an allergic reaction to lung cancer. Gives me tumors."
She blinks, then laughs, loud and long and sustained. "Oh, damn! That's good. That's good. "
We've made a circuit of the elementary school by now, back to the swing set. She sits on a swing and gestures for me to sit next to her, which I do.
"I was sitting up there on the bleachers, like I always do," she says, kicking off and swinging out. I follow suit, a half-second out of sync with her. "And I saw it. He just started hitting you. I couldn't believe it. And no one saw. No one noticed. It was like watching a movie or something. Like there was a screen there and everyone was just ignoring what was showing. Over and over. Hitting you." She reaches out, across the space and the half-second between us, and taps my shoulder. The bruise still hurts, but I force myself not to flinch. Bad enough she's seen it already. Bad enough she knows what a wimp I am.
"And I just watched," she goes on. "You just stood there. Like a..." She gives me a second to run through my mental roster of the words I've heard used in this context.
"Like an Indian warrior," she says finally. My jaw drops and I lose the rhythm of the swing, jittering to a stop as my feet drag in the dirt. She keeps swinging, ignoring me.
"Maybe that's the wrong way to put it. But you were, like, almost noble, you know? You didn't shout or scream or cry or anything. You just stood there and took it. You never let him know it hurt you."
I watch her swing, my throat jammed painfully with a lump that won't go away. A part of me wants to burst into tears and throw my arms around her. But I guess that wouldn't be noble or Indian warrior-like.
She drifts to a stop next to me. "So when he did it the next day..." She fumbles around under her shirt again, this time on the buttoned side. I catch a glimpse of smooth hip, slightly darker than her face, which must be powdered, I guess. She produces a flip phone and slaps it open so that it points at me. "I pulled out my phone and took some pictures."
"Why?"
We watch each other over the phone for a second. Her cigarette hangs from the corner of her mouth. She snaps the phone shut and tucks it away, then taps her cigarette's ash off and sucks in more smoke. "I don't know. I really don't. Like I said: noble. Indian warrior. All that shit. I figured ... I figured I'd take a picture of it. Keep it to prove to myself that not everyone at that place"—she gestures vaguely in the direction of the high school—"is a
Neanderthal."
"Most of them, though..." I let it hang.
"Yeah. Someone could walk through the halls with a machine gun and kill ninety-nine percent of the people in that place and I wouldn't care."
For some reason, 99 percent makes me think of my English paper, tucked away in my backpack. "That many? Really?"
She shrugs. "Why not?"
I've never thought of that many. I don't even know most of the people at South Brook. I try to keep my head down and stay out of trouble. There's a small group of them I'd like to see disappear—the ones on The List—but that's it. There are about two thousand people at the school, if you include the teachers. Killing 99 percent of them would leave ... Jesus, only twenty. I can think of a dozen teachers alone I wouldn't want dead.
"Just sounds like a high percentage to me," I tell her. Even in the bloodiest, most brutal iteration of my hostage fantasy, most of the school survives. Most of the casualties fall into a specific range of athletes in the sophomore class. I barely know any juniors, seniors, or freshmen. Nothing against them.
"Who cares? Wipe 'em all out. Screw 'em. Assholes."
Without even realizing that I'm doing it, I pull the bullet out of my pocket, toss it in the air, and catch it. I guess I'm trying to be cool and blasé, but I almost fumble the bullet when it hits my palm.
"Damn!" She whistles and looks in my hand. "You always carry ammo with you?"
"Not usually. My stepfather has guns all over the house. I grabbed this one a while back."
"Why?"
"No reason."
She arches an eyebrow. "Oh?"
I shrug. I'm not going to tell her how I've clutched it for hours like a security blanket. How I slip my hand into my pocket to caress it during the day whenever I feel nervous or threatened. How it calms me every time, like a balm or a cup of hot tea.
Instead, I jump the bullet from hand to hand for a few passes, watching it glitter in the sunlight, watching her eyes brighten as they follow it. Then I drop it into my pocket and check my watch. "You said last night that you'd get me home."
"Bored with me already?" But she grins when she says it, and I find myself grinning back.
"I've met my quota for Neil Gaiman goth girls today. Sorry."
"That's all right. I just needed to befriend a superhero geek for my volunteer credits."
She leads me back up the hill to the high school. Everyone's gone now and the place is quiet, except for the lacrosse team, running back and forth on the field, shouting at each other. Kyra and I roll our eyes at each other in shared disgust and disdain.
There's a beat-up compact car in the parking lot. Kyra motions for me to get in as she unlocks it.
"You have a car? " I had assumed she was a sophomore like me, maybe even a freshman.
"Nah, it's my sister's."
"She lets you borrow it?"
"You weren't listening before, were you? Cheetos. TV. Ballooning. Et cetera."
"Right."
She guns the engine and takes off. "You have your license?"
"Learner's permit," I tell her, surprised by my lack of shame. I should feel like a loser, confessing my age like that to her, but I don't seem to care.
"Yeah, me, too." She takes a corner way too fast, skidding into the oncoming lane. Fortunately, no one is coming in that direction.
"Are you nuts?" I scream. "You can't drive alone, then! It's illegal!"
"So's bringing a bullet to school," she points out, tapping the brake perfunctorily as she glides through a stop sign.
"That's different." I watch the streets for pedestrians and cops. So far, so good.
"How is it different? We're both breaking the law. You think a judge cares? Hell, you're probably worse than me; they'd Zero Tolerance your ass outta school, but I'd probably get a slap on the wrist."
"It's a bullet, not a gun. I'm not gonna kill anyone with just a bullet. You could kill someone because you don't know how to drive!"
"Sure." She tugs the wheel, rounds a corner with a screech of tires. "Big whoop. You think that's gonna make a difference to them?" I'm not sure who they are: parents, cops, judges, teachers? She accelerates and my heart pounds. I'm terrified, but I don't want to admit it. "What makes you think this is any worse that toting ammo in your pocket?"
I'm struggling with this one—the speed, the car, and she's kinda, a little bit right, in some sense. "Because some things are just wrong, that's all. And you don't have to explain them all the time. Some things are right and some things are wrong."
"You've been reading too many comic books."
"No, you haven't been reading enough comic books."
She grins that magical ring-tilting grin and slows down. "Will you feel better if I obey posted speed limits and road signs?"
I manage a shrug and an aloof gaze out the passenger-side window. "Whatever makes you happy."
She giggles but drives under the speed limit until she drops me off at home. I go around to her side to thank her for the lift, then stand awkwardly by the car, not sure what I should do next.
She saves me: "Later, fanboy," she says, and peels away in a squeal of tires and a plume of exhaust.
Chapter Fourteen
I DO MY DAILY BENDIS-CHECK (all's still on track) and then mess around with Schemata for a while. The house was empty when I got home, so no need to explain why I was late or why someone was dropping me off. I was all ready to explain how I'd missed the bus and this girl offered to drive me home, but no need for the lie.
It's stupid, but I keep thinking about her. She's foul-mouthed, annoying, and opinionated, but except for the foul-mouthed bit, a lot of people probably think the same about me, so no big deal. She's no Senior Goddess. She isn't even Lisa carter. She's a typical goth girl Gaiman freak, but she talked to me at least, she hung out with me. She teased me, but not in a mean way or anything.
She called me noble.
I wonder what the deal is with her sister? And her mother. She said her parents weren't divorced, so does her mother live with her and just not get involved?
As if on cue, I hear the front door open and the step-fascist sighs as he comes in. I'm up in the family room by now, channel-surfing, and I figure it's time to get out of Dodge. I turn off the TV and brush past him in the kitchen on my way to the stairs and my dungeon.
"Hey," he says. "You know where your mother is?"
I freeze at the top of the stairs. I want nothing more than to let rip with that classic retort—"It wasn't my turn to watch her." But honestly, I'm a little afraid of the guy. He's bigger than I am, he drinks a lot, and he owns guns. He's like Mitchell Frampton in fast-forward.
So I jam my hand into my pocket and touch the bullet.
"No. I don't know where she is."
I hear him open the pantry, then the rustle of a potato chip bag. A nearly empty potato chip bag. Whoops. Busted. If eyesight were gravity, I'd be crushed right about now by the g-force of his glare at my back.
So, slink down the stairs or hang around up here and pretend I'm innocent?
He solves it for me: "Hey."
Time to take the medicine. Yeah, yeah, I ate your lousy chips. Deal with it. That's what I want to say. What I plan to say. But I know I'll wimp out. I'll just listen to him give me hell and then I'll go downstairs and—
"You forget something?"
I turn around. He's pointing into the family room. I can make out the coffee table and the pages of Schemata that I left there.
"Oh. Yeah." I fetch the pages. When I pass him, he tilts the chips bag up into his upturned mouth, pouring the crumbs in, then shrugs, mashes the bag into a ball, and tosses it into the trash. I clutch the pages in one hand and slip the other back into my pocket to touch the talisman, the bullet, as I head down to my room.
Later, I'm lying awake at night (or, actually, early Saturday morning), rolling the bullet between two fingers, thinking about how boring the weekend's going to be. It would be great to see Kyra again. Not for any particular reason. Just b
ecause it's good to talk to someone else about comic books. It's good to have someone else to talk to, period.
Someone who calls me "fanboy," yes, but also calls me an Indian warrior.
Next thing I know, she's here, she's right in my room. It's out of nowhere. I don't know how she got here. Her hair is blond, though, and she has it tied back, but otherwise she's the same. Her blouse is a little bigger, though, because it's hanging off her shoulder, which is tan, for some reason, and she gives me that grin, the one that makes the ring in her lip move, and it's not Kyra. How could I think it was Kyra? It's Dina Jurgens. In my house. In my bedroom. I'm looking right at her, staring, really, watching her straight on, not out of the corner of my eye, not a furtive, stolen glance. I'm studying her, memorizing her. For the first time, I don't have to look away, and, God, she's more beautiful than I thought, more perfect than I ever imagined. She's curves and arcs, flesh poetry written in sines and cosines and the special geometries reserved for the circumference of a thigh, the radius of a breast, the perimeter of a mouth, curving just right. She's coming closer, getting onto the bed, walking across it on her knees, toward me.
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?