by Barry Lyga
"He's a gross little perv. He stands in the main lobby every morning when we all come in and you can see him staring at the girls." She looks over at me, and I guess something shows on my face because she indulges me with the magic grin. "Hey, it's cool for you to stare at the girls. You're not, like, a hundred and ten years old and married. But I was just sick of him and his shit, so I told him that if he bothered me again,
I was going to tell the police that he molested me."
"You what? "
"You should have seen the look on his face!" She rears back, laughing, smoke purling from her nostrils like a dragon. I do a quick road check and it appears that I won't be dying today. "Oh, shit, man, it was hilarious. I mean, I think he has molested one of the girls before. Or at least thought about it, because he damn near broke the pen in two and his eyes got wide and he started to stutter about 'let's be reasonable' and 'why would you lie like that?' and all of that crap, but, man, he looked guilty. And I knew I had him. I just had him. So I got up and left, but before I left I untucked my shirt and I undid a couple of buttons and I sniffled a little bit when I walked past the secretary's desk. Just to make an impression, you know? Just in case.
"Adults are idiots. They think they're in charge and they think they have some kind of authority, but you know what? They're idiots. They're just grown-up kids with more money who listen to shitty music and hate everyone younger than them because they know they've screwed up their lives and they want another shot at it. But all of us, all of us kids think that adults are in charge, too. They've got us messed up, up here." She points to her head. "So they get away with all kinds of crap." She sniffs. "But if you have the balls to tell them to shove it, they crumble. Easy."
I see myself telling Mom to shove it, the step-fascist, Mr. Sperling. Cue amusing animation of them all literally crumbling to pieces like stale cake.
"Your chick gets that," she says, turning into my neighborhood.
I blink, not sure what she means. It isn't until she's dropped me off (with nary a wave goodbye) that I realize she means Courteney. Courteney, who can see the truth of the world. My chick.
My chick gets it.
Tuesday Forever
I sit in my room for a while, staring at the computer, which is almost daring me to turn it on. I'm afraid. I'm on the bed, holding the bullet, watching the dead monitor. If I turn it on, I'm afraid Cal will e-mail me...
No. That's not true. I'm afraid he won't.
After a while, my stomach starts to complain. I hide the bullet in the hard drive case and go upstairs for a sandwich and Coke. The step-fascist is unpacking grocery bags, unloading what looks suspiciously like ingredients for chili. My stomach lurches. The step-fascist makes truly evil chili. It stinks up the house for days and burns more than swallowing a blowtorch. Its heat is torture, but also its only saving grace—by the time you get to your second spoonful, your mouth is seared beyond the ability to taste any longer.
Mom is chattering about a baby shower. She sounds happy and excited, and I get a weird spike of empathic pleasure for her through my chest. I'm glad she's happy. Good. Someone should be.
But then again, I'm happy, too. A little bit, at least. Kyra likes Schemata. I got Little Miss Indy-Alternative-Goth-Gaiman Fan to like my graphic novel. They call that "crossover appeal."
Back downstairs, I eat one-handed, the bullet in the other. Mom calls down, "Good night," too achy and pregnant to bother coming down the stairs, I guess. I tape the plastic sheet up over my door to block out the betraying light, then switch on the computer. My e-mail program automatically launches and starts up the Internet connection, but I kill it. No Internet. Not tonight.
It's me and a hundred pages of Schemata. That's all that matters. Colleges will be impressed by an applicant who has published his own graphic novel in high school. I'll get scholarships, which means I'll be able to go out of state. Get away from here. Start new somewhere else. That's what it's all about, really. I don't need Cal. I just need Schemata. But I need it done right, so that Bendis is blown away by it. So that he flips out when he sees it and calls his publisher on his cell phone.
I lean in close to the monitor, tracing arcs and curves I laid down months ago, cleaning up sketchy, unfinished images, adjusting line weights. I don't have a graphics tablet; I draw everything with the mouse. Back when I started out, I drew everything freehand in pencil, then scanned it into the computer to ink it, but my scanner is so slow that it was excruciating. I taught myself to draw with the mouse, which is so counterintuitive that it's ridiculous, but I figure that drawing itself is a learned skill, right? No one is born with an innate ability to hold a pencil; there's no evolutionary advantage to it. We learn to do it that way. So that means we can learn to do it another way, which is what I taught myself.
I like that line of thinking. I make a note to myself to use it in the story somehow. Maybe Courteney can give a lecture on learned versus natural skills.
The page in front of me starts to blur. I pop some Excedrin for the caffeine. Movies and books extol the virtues of the all-nighter. The hero is always dead tired, but it's always worth it, have you ever noticed that?
I have thick binders filled with original drafts of pages, pencil sketches of characters, ideas, tag lines, bits of dialogue. Once I'm happy with the art, I go through the binders and pick out the dialogue that I intended for each scene, adjusting it as I go to adapt to whatever changes I made on the pages on the fly. This is actually the toughest part: not the writing or the drawing, but the lettering. Figuring out where to put the word balloons. Trying not to obscure too much art, or too much of anything important, at least. Making sure that the balloons are placed so that the dialogue flows naturally and leads the reader's eye correctly. Prose writers have it easy: Everything starts in the upper-left-hand corner of the page and goes downhill from there. In a comic book, you start in the upper-left-hand corner, but from there you can go right, down, diagonal, whatever. You can have panel borders, or none. You can have word balloons that are connected, disconnected, broken. You can have characters speak from off-panel, or in voice-over captions. You have to decide if the words are important enough to cover up the artwork that's telling half the story.
Bendis's dialogue is perfect. Every time. He puts more words on a page than most comic book writers, but somehow it all fits. It never seems cramped or overdone or flowery or padded. It's always an extension of the artwork. It's the first thing he'll notice in Schemata, I'm sure, so mine has to be just as perfect as his.
Sometime around four o'clock, I figure the Internet is safe. I log on to check the convention website. Bendis is still scheduled for the show. Nothing has changed.
There's an e-mail from Kyra waiting for me. She says that if I'm reading her e-mail, I'm wasting my time and I should get back to work. My muzzy head conjures, again, an image of me kissing those black-lipsticked lips, which I have no desire to do, so I don't know where it came from. I'm tired. I can barely type at this point. I tell her I'm fine, just busy, then shut down the computer.
The thought of taking down my plastic shield makes me even more exhausted. But I can't afford to have Mom decide to wake me up in the morning and find it, so I force myself to stand up. I tear down the plastic, fold it up and tuck it under the desk, then turn out the light and collapse onto my bed. I should be able to get a couple of hours of sleep.
Instead, I lie there, my mind racing even as my body begs for sleep. I see Cal walking away from me, Lisa Carter's legs parting, a glimmer of green winking at me, Kyra winking at me, her arms sheathed in black, Dina reaching out to touch me, Cal walking away, Courteney from Schemata moving as if animated by Pixar, Cal walking away, Bendis grinning at me, frozen like the author photo I've seen on his website, grinning, Cal, Lisa, Kyra, Dina, and my alarm goes off, it's time to get up, it's Tuesday, but it's already been Tuesday forever.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THIS IS WHAT A ZOMBIE FEELS LIKE, I'm sure. My brain is floating somewhere a foot or
two above my body and maybe ten inches back, trailing along. I get the ritual shoves and "accidental" kicks on the bus, but I barely feel them. I don't care.
Same thing at school. There's probably a locker somewhere along the hallway dented with an imprint of my body. It's just the odds, given how many times I've been pushed aside into them.
But in two more years I can go to college. Go to college far away, where no one knows me, where I can start over. And in college, everyone is smart, so it'll be OK to be myself and I won't be a freak anymore.
Tuesday ... I force my mind to function as I stand at my locker, staring with something that, I'm sure, looks like dumb amazement at the books within. I can't remember my Tuesday schedule. I know I don't have gym on Tuesday because my gym bag is at home, ipso facto, or should that be ergo? I can never remember. God, I'm rambling in my own head. But I'm missing something, I think. Something in my locker. Or my backpack. Something's not there.
Cal's locker is three down from mine. I hear his voice and it takes every muscle in my neck, a Herculean effort of will and strength, not to look over. He's talking to someone, talking about lacrosse, using that faux street patois he affects when he's busy out-cooling the white kids. I know that. I know it's a put on. He told me.
I know his secrets. He knows mine, but I know his.
What I don't know is what I have first period. I don't recognize any of my books. Am I really reading The House of the Seven Gables? For which class? Or was that last semester and I forgot to turn it in?
Someone sidles up to me, almost silent. "You OK?"
I look over at Kyra. For the first time, I'm looking down at her. She must be wearing what-do-you-call-em: not-heels. Not heels. Flat things. Flats.
Her hair is different somehow. It's not slick or spiked or sleepy. Just clean and shiny and pulled back in a ponytail that looks ridiculously jaunty on my black-garbed little muse. And something else.
Lips. Red lips. Red lipstick, not black. I lick my lips before I can stop myself.
"I don't know," I tell her. I think it's been a few hours since she asked the question. "I'm tired."
"No kidding." She pokes my chest, drags her finger up, flipping the collar of my shirt into position. "Get to homeroom, fanboy. You've got a perfect record."
I turn back to my locker. Biology, I think. Yes. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I grab the bio book. God, it's heavy. I look around for Kyra. She's gone. Was she even here?
I turn toward homeroom just in time to see Cal walking off with a pack of List-dwellers. He's doing some MTV/BET hand motions, and they're all eating it up.
I get to homeroom right before the bell. I just want to sleep. What is it I'm missing, anyway?
Chapter Thirty
MY DAD TOLD ME ABOUT THIS STUDY he saw once. This was when he was in high school, so we're talking, like, before the Internet, before cable TV, before cell phones. It was a study where they tried to figure out the effects of sleep deprivation, and they showed a film to my dad's class in black-and-white. That's the part of the story that sticks in my head and drives it home to me: The film was in black-and-white. Like a security camera at a convenience store. Now that's primitive.
But in this study they had this guy and they made him stay awake for hours and hours and days and days. With a camera on him the whole time. He sat in this chair and read, and he paced sometimes, and he did everything possible to stay awake while they filmed him.
Now, eventually, the guy started to lose it. He started to hallucinate, seeing things, hearing things. You'd expect that, right?
But here's the weird part: It happened much later than anyone expected. They figured the subject would go nuts after a day or two, but he lasted a lot longer than that.
When they went back and checked the tape, here's what they found: The guy wasn't awake the whole time. Yeah, there was a camera on him and he looked like he was awake, but he was actually taking micro-naps, little bouts of sleep that last maybe a second. It's like sleeping during a blink.
I don't know. Maybe that explains how I got through the day. Or maybe it's just an old-fashioned second wind. Whichever, by the time the final bell rings, I'm feeling slightly human again, and some stranger with my handwriting has filled my notebook with some information that is partly legible, and hopefully not on a test in my future.
I duck into the media center for a second and fire up the school website. Every teacher is supposed to post homework assignments each day. I have no idea what my homework is, but fortunately I have this county-mandated cheat sheet. Mrs. Grant, the media specialist, gets my attention and taps her watch, reminding me that I have to get to my bus. I scan the homework list quickly and run for my locker.
I make it to my locker and then out to the bus with time to spare, feeling hugely conspicuous as I gasp for breath. Fortunately, no one's looking.
"Hey!" Someone pokes me in the back and I almost jump over the school.
"Kyra!" I turn to her, ready to yell at her for scaring the hell out of me, but I lose the anger as fast as I gained it. Her hair's still clean and tied back, but her lips are bare. Did the lipstick come off during the day? Did she take it off? Or did I just hallucinate her this morning, pre-micro-naps?
"Wow, I thought you were gonna drop a load in your shorts." She rolls her eyes.
"That's gross."
"You're so easy to offend."
"That's because you're so offensive." Guess my wit caught a nap before.
"Nice one. Nice one." She glances around. She's wearing black, of course, a blouse that buttons down the center, all puffy and loose like a sack, with sleeves that button tightly at the wrists. High collar. Loose silver belt and then black shorts that hit the knee. Why I care, I couldn't tell you. Actually, I could: It's kind of interesting to see how many different permutations of black there are. This makes me giggle.
"You really are tired, aren't you? C'mon, show me the stuff?"
"Stuff?" Show her the stuff? Are we in a movie? Is this the drug sale scene?
"Yeah, the pages. You said you'd bring more today."
"Oh, crap."
She arches an eyebrow at me and cocks her hip. If the hip weren't lost in endless yards of black fabric, it might be sexy. Oh, who am I kidding?
"I left them at home."
"You what? "
"I'm an idiot. What do you want? I was tired this morning. I left it all at home. I knew I was missing something today. All I have is a bunch of script pages." I dig into my backpack and wave them at her—nothing more than words, and words do not a graphic novel make.
"Normally I'd be pissed, but your honesty and your willingness to admit you're an idiot has endeared you to me. Come on." She grabs the script pages and tucks them under her arm.
I stand there like a lump as she starts to walk away. What, does she have my pages somewhere?
"I said, 'Come on,' fanboy." She comes back and grabs my wrist, pulling me after her. Her fingers are delicate and soft. Weak. But I let her pull me, even though she's pulling me away from my bus, even though people are starting to look now.
"I'm gonna miss my bus."
"You don't need the bus."
"Can I have back my script?"
"No. I'm keeping it so that I can at least read the dialogue and stuff when you keep forgetting pages in the future."
She drags me to the parking lot and a little two-door black coupe. She climbs in on the driver's side and gestures for me to slide in next to her.
Now, I'm dead tired, but I'm not stupid.
"Wait a second. Whose car is this? "
"This was my mom's. Dad's been saving it for me in the garage. I figured why not use it. It's nicer than my sister's. Now get in so I can drive you home and see the friggin' comic book."
"Graphic novel," I tell her, shutting the door as I settle into the seat. She accelerates and blows out of the parking lot before I can snap my seat belt. Someone shouts and jumps out of the way, and someone else screams. I realize it's me, so I stop.
"I saw Mr. Tollin in the mirror," I tell her. "He was writing down your license plate."
She shrugs. It's almost like saying, "Eh," with her shoulders.
I look at the stereo. There's a CD in the deck. "Your mom listened to Outkast?"
"It's mine, dillweed."
Is dillweed a promotion from fanboy? I'm just frazzled enough to ask. She laughs, and it's a laugh like wind chimes, like ice in a glass, like fireworks.
"Wake up," she says. I wonder why she says it, and I wonder why it's darker, too, until I open my eyes and realize I must have fallen asleep while she drove me home. We're parked outside my house.
"You snore," she tells me, ring tilting like never before.
Oh, Lord. Sleep, a double-edged sword. My brain's back online, just in time for me to fully appreciate my mortal embarrassment. At least I didn't talk in my sleep.
No one' s home. I hesitate a second before I open the door to the house. Mom doesn't like guests ... But Kyra drove me home. Mom would want me to be polite. You invite people in, right? That's what you do. And it's not like I can stand here at the doorstep and say, "Oops, I forgot, you can't come in. Stay here while I go inside and get the pages, and you can look at them on the porch." Please.
So I let her in and we go downstairs to the basement, which brings an odd light into her eyes for the first time. I explain how I have my room down here, and it's better for privacy, which sounds really bad when it comes out of my mouth. I mean my privacy, but she thinks I mean something else, and she raises an eyebrow at me.
"I like it quiet," I say, running through a mental checklist before I open my bedroom door: Bed made? Probably. Underwear on the floor? Don't think so. Socks evident to eye or nose? Did laundry Sunday night, so I think I'm safe.
Last: Anything embarrassing on the walls or flat surfaces? Oh, yeah. Only about a million superhero comic books and posters. Too late now.