by Mike Jung
“So that wasn’t actually your mom, was it?”
“Nope.” Eric stuck out his chest. “I set the alarm clock on my phone in the store just in case something like that happened.”
“Dude, you’re awesome!” Everyone should have a best friend who doesn’t trust the people who can’t be trusted as accurately as Eric, am I right?
“So, wow, that was different,” Eric said, zipping his jacket back up as we walked. The sun was just starting to dip behind the trees, and it was getting seriously cold.
“WHAT THE WHAT WAS THAT …” I flailed my arms in the air, then let them drop.
“What do you mean, what the what was whatever it was you just said?”
“I mean, what does this mean?”
“What do you mean, what does it mean?”
“DUDE. STOP. I just don’t like not understanding reality anymore.”
“Yeah, well, reality didn’t make a lot of sense before, Matt.”
“I have the most bizarre thought, and you’re gonna laugh at me, but I’m telling you anyway.”
“Oh, come on, when have I ever laughed at you?”
I snorted. “Dude. That makes ME want to laugh. At you.”
“Seriously, I won’t laugh.” Eric stood up really straight and did a big cross-your-heart motion with one index finger.
“I had a thought about Sean, like we could be, you know, friends, if things were different. As if all Rocket Cats fans could potentially be friends, right?”
“Right.” Eric kept his promise. That’s the great thing about Eric—I can trust him to take stuff seriously when I need him to.
“And Sean’s not, like, pure evil all the time like Kenny.”
“I guess,” Eric said. “He’s a little evil, though.”
“Well, yeah, but just a little.”
“And they’re really good friends, so it’s not like pure evil bothers Sean.”
“I guess that’s true.”
Eric nodded. “When I saw him with the Rocket Cats book, I wondered if he was trying to set some kind of trap for us. Is that bad?”
“I don’t know if it’s bad. Might be a little paranoid, though, since he’s never actually done that.”
“Maybe he’s just been pretending to not be evil all along, dun dun duuuuhhhhh!” Eric raised his arm and made a few up-and-down stabbing motions.
“Okay, that actually is paranoid. Like, super paranoid.”
“I know.” Eric started drumming his fingertips on his knees. “I think if somebody had stepped on a butterfly five years ago, it would have altered the space-time continuum, and Sean and I might be friends today. We’re not, though.”
“True. Also, the butterfly effect might have ended up with you and me not being friends.”
Eric snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Exactly! Or you and Sean might be the ones who are friends today!”
“Which would be terrible,” I said.
“No it wouldn’t, you’d be friends! It’d be normal!”
“Now I can’t even remember why we started this conversation …”
“Everything’s normal, in other words?” Eric grinned.
“Oh, har dee har har,” I said. “I guess what I mean is … what if we could be friends with Sean now?”
Eric shrugged. “Could we? I mean, sure, he likes the Rocket Cats, but does that automatically mean we like him now?”
“I guess not.”
“Yeah. I don’t know about you, but people who call us ‘queers’ and ‘boyfriends’ as much as Sean does aren’t exactly the people I want to go to DefenderCon with.”
“Yeah, I guess not. Which means we have to figure out what to tell him.”
“Why do we have to tell him anything?” Eric said.
“Because he clearly wants to go to DefenderCon with us, don’t you think?”
Eric shrugged. “I mean, yeah, but so what? He doesn’t know anything for sure.”
“It’s gonna be pretty obvious when we’re not at World of Amazement on the last day.”
“Who says?” Eric said as we turned the corner onto his block. “Everyone will be doing different rides and stuff—that’s the only thing that’ll make it possible to go. We’ll just make sure Sean doesn’t see us leave, and then it won’t matter if he wanted to go with us or not.”
“Maybe.”
I couldn’t help thinking it was more complicated than that, though.
It was another few weeks before we found out how serious Sean was about going to DefenderCon with us, partly because Eric got the flu and missed a whole week of school, and partly because I tried really, really hard to avoid Sean. Lucky for us I had a lot of practice from dodging bullies, or maybe I should say unlucky for us. It also helped that I was in the flute section for orchestra, which meant Sean and I were basically at opposite ends of the room. He pounced on the very first day Eric was back at school, though. He didn’t actually come talk to us until practice was over and everyone was on their way home, when we thought maybe we’d escaped for another day.
The weather was nice too—it was sunny, the sky was bright blue, and only two or three fat, puffy white clouds were floating around up there. It was like the universe was getting ready to pull the rug out from under us. We’d just gotten over all the stress of listening to other kids brag about how many valentines they got on Valentine’s Day while we didn’t get any, but did Sean care? Noooooooo.
“Hey! You guys!”
At first I didn’t even recognize the voice coming from behind us as we walked up the big hill that started on the block right next to school, mostly because it sounded more friendly than snarky. It was only when we turned around and looked that I realized it was Sean.
“Oh hey, it’s Sean,” Eric said in the kind of voice you might use to say “I have detention for the next three weeks.”
“Methinks he wants to parley,” I said, wondering if it would be too suspicious to just take off running and try to lose Sean by cutting through people’s yards.
“Dude, you know you can’t pull off that epic fantasy warrior voice.”
“Who died and made you the elven king?”
“Hey,” Sean said again as he stopped maybe seven or eight feet away. It was a weirdly in-between distance—not really next to us, but not not next to us either. Most kids at school who lived in the same direction as us took the long way home because the hill is so steep, which was why Eric and I always walked up the hill. Fewer hassles, you know. So the three of us had the hill’s three blocks of sidewalk all to ourselves, with the houses on either side of the street looking ominously quiet and empty. There were cars in some of the driveways, but still. It was finally getting close to spring, but the vibe of the whole situation was almost Halloweenish, like there should be gray skies and dead leaves blowing in the wind. Now it felt wrong that it was sunny and too warm for winter jackets.
“I wanted to give this back to you guys,” Sean said, holding out a piece of paper. It was crisscrossed with tape on the back. “Sorry about that.”
Sorry about that? Was Sean apologizing for something? I reached out, took the taped-up piece of paper, and held it so Eric could look at it too. It was the map Kenny had ripped to pieces—Sean must have picked them up and taped them back together. The “DefenderCon” written on it was ridiculously clear. I had no idea why we thought it’d be a good idea to bring it to school.
Eric and I looked at each other, and I tried to tell him to be on guard by subtly wiggling my eyebrow. I wasn’t sure if it worked, though.
“Er … thanks?”
“Did you look at it?” Eric said, suspicion dripping from every word.
“Of course,” Sean said, like it was no big deal to read someone else’s private stuff.
“So … why are you giving it back?” I said, feeling cautious.
“Wow, guys, paranoid much?” Sean held up his hands, palms facing us.
“Yes,” Eric and I said in unison.
“So you remember what we talked ab
out a couple weeks ago? At Hero Worship?”
“Wait, was that you?” Eric said, rubbing his chin.
“You’re not fooling anyone, Costa,” Sean said. “Are you guys seriously gonna bail on the last day of the trip to go to DefenderCon?”
And there it was, our big secret plan just thrown right out there on the sidewalk.
“No,” Eric said.
“Yeah,” I said at the exact same moment. Eric slapped his forehead, then turned to give me a look of death. I gave him a slumped-shoulders, “I’m sorry” kind of shrug. Sean gave us a sideways grin.
“You guys need to work on getting your story straight,” he said.
“DUDE,” Eric said, ignoring Sean and staring at me with his hand still clamped to his forehead. Eric can pack a lot of communication into a single “dude,” like what are you doing, I thought we were on the same page here, and we are not going to DefenderCon with Sean!
“Hey, it’s not like we talked about this.”
“Well, yeah, that’s true. You could have just, you know, gone with it.”
“Dude, seriously, I just can’t.”
“What, can you not tell a lie or something?” Sean said with a smirk.
“No,” I said.
“He’s just really bad at it,” Eric said, talking to Sean, but looking at me.
“Are you like some real-life version of Mr. Fearless?”
Eric and I turned our faces toward Sean super fast—if someone was drawing a picture of us, we’d both have swoopy motion lines to show how fast our heads turned. Mr. Fearless was a Golden Age superhero, originally created more than a hundred years ago. He was super strong, impervious to metal weapons, in vulnerable to radiation, and was considered kind of a dork for his “I never tell a lie” policy. His comic ran for about a hundred issues, but he’d never been on TV, in a movie, or retconned to have a secret, traumatic origin story, so the only people who knew about him were hard-core comic readers and collectors.
“Lying’s too much work,” I said. “And you know who Mr. Fearless is??”
Sean pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket, slowly unwrapped a piece, stuck it in his mouth, and nodded once as he put the pack back in his pocket without offering us any.
“So … you read comics besides Rocket Cats,” Eric said. Sean gave another solitary nod, slowly chewing his piece of private gum the whole time.
It wasn’t just the comic books that was bizarre—lots of kids at school read comics; it’s not like Eric and I were THAT unusual—but the whole “talking to us about it while being an obnoxious jerk for only part of the time” thing? For the second time? INCREDIBLY bizarre.
“Huh. That’s … cool,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe. Or not.” Eric was unconvinced, which was probably good. It’s important to keep one person on mental guard duty. Still, I was wondering if this was a chance to get Sean to stop being obnoxious all the time. Mom and Dad like to talk about “the interconnected web of human existence” and “finding meaningful commonalities”—it’s a Unitarian thing—and what’s more webby and meaningful than comic books?
I wasn’t exactly anxiety-free, though. It’s not like we were talking to Summer Oh, who treats us like people worth talking to even though she’s older than us and thinks comic books are ridiculous and is almost as bossy as her younger sister. This was still Sean.
“You mentioned Jonah Burns when we were at Hero Worship, but do you know who he actually is?” Eric said suddenly, crossing his arms and using a keep-’em-off-balance kind of interrogation method.
Sean crossed his arms too, and he somehow managed to lean backward while he was still standing up.
“Yeah,” he said, drawing it out so long that it sounded more like “eeeeeeeyeeeaaaahhh.”
“What’s his best series?” Eric said, not messing around at all.
“Duh, Atomic Aardvark.”
Eric and I shared a fast, sideways “huh” look. Atomic Aardvark was good.
“What do you think of Sandpiper?” I said, because while I liked Atomic Aardvark too, Sandpiper is the greatest.
“Aw, Sandpiper sucks,” Sean said, waving his hand like he was blowing away the smell of a fart or something. “Burns is terrible at drawing chick heroes.”
I blinked. Chick heroes?
“Did he really just say ‘chick heroes’?” I said to Eric in a “wait, what?” kind of voice.
“Sandpiper doesn’t show any skin,” Sean said. “She doesn’t have a boob window; she wears pants instead of shorts or skirts. I mean, come on, why bother drawing her at all?”
Yeesh. Everything about that explanation was gross.
“You know that’s totally sexist, right?” I said, immediately feeling like a dork as I said it. Mom and Dad have told me a million times how awesome it is to just come right out and say stuff like that, but I still felt like a dork saying it. The first time I said it at this school was in the cafeteria on my first day, and being laughed at, punched on the shoulder, and harassed for the rest of the day by the biggest, meanest guys in the whole school isn’t the kind of thing I get over super fast.
“Oh, give me a break, Park,” Sean said.
“Yeah, Park,” Eric said, sticking his lower jaw way out like a bulldog. “Give the big strong man a break.”
Sean opened his mouth, looking ready to throw down in a bigger way, but he paused, stuck his hands out like Captain Stupendous stopping a runaway train, and gave his head a quick, sharp twist to the side. The crack from his neck was totally audible, ech.
“Wow,” Eric said, sounding honestly impressed by the loudness of the neck crack.
“You know what, I’m not talking to you guys just to harass you,” Sean said, putting his hands into his back pockets and doing his leaning-backward-while-standing thing again.
“Could have fooled me,” Eric said.
“Haha,” Sean said.
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “Why are you talking to us?”
We all knew why—Sean wanted to go to DefenderCon with us, it couldn’t have been more obvious—but I was starting to feel mad about it. This was supposed to be our final adventure, just me and Eric. Sean could speak for himself!
“Your plan to go to DefenderCon is awesome, and I want in.”
GAH. Why did Sean have to go and speak for himself ?
We stood there and stared at each other for a minute, and I mean a solid sixty seconds all in a row. SUPER awkward.
“For real, huh,” Eric said, making it sound not even a little bit like an actual question.
“For real,” Sean said. “It’d be cool, right?”
The thought that jumped into my head just then took me completely by surprise.
It could be.
Being suspicious of people all the time is an incredible bummer. You have to keep your guard up whenever you’re around those people, you can’t trust what they say even if they’re not always trying to mess with you, and you have to watch what you say because you never know if it’ll be used against you. And the thing with Sean is he doesn’t always try to mess with us—unlike Kenny Delacroix, Sean can actually seem like a not-terrible person. He does mess with us sometimes, though, so it’s not like he was suspicion-free. That was when the huge, crackling lightning bolt of guilt went through me.
Me and Eric. Me and Eric. NOT me, Eric, and Sean.
I’d actually been thinking about going to DefenderCon with Eric and Sean! And it wasn’t about Sean, it was about me and Eric!
“Why aren’t you going with Kenny?” I said.
Sean shrugged.
“Kenny’s my best bud, but he’s not into comics.”
“Too bad,” Eric said. “You guys could have started a fire in the hotel or something as a distraction. That’d be a hundred percent Kenny.”
“Nah, he’s not into it. Besides, it’d definitely be cool for you guys if I went with you. Like, awesomely cool.”
“Awesomely cool,” Eric said in his most deadpan, monotone voice.
�
��Did you actually just say that?” I said.
“Oh sure, Matt, it’s not every day we get to hang out with, you know, the guy we stand next to in band practice every day at school.”
“Hey, hey, I’m just kidding,” Sean said. “I mean, this would be different from band—you guys would get to hang out with me—but it’d all be undercover, so no one would know anyway.”
“Because it’d be so embarrassing for you, huh?” I said.
“Dude, no, because we don’t want to get caught.”
“Oh, you’re right, we didn’t even think about that,” Eric said, splaying his hands over his cheeks like the screaming person in that painting of a screaming person.
“Anyway, you don’t have to decide right now,” Sean said, sounding like he was doing us a giant favor. “Just think about it.”
And just like that he turned and walked down the hill, brushing at his hair with one hand before sticking it back into his pocket. A car passed him on its way up the hill, then passed us, doing that Doppler effect thing where the sound of its engine gets higher as it gets closer, then drops as it gets farther away. We stared after him until he reached the corner at the bottom of the hill, crossed the street, and disappeared behind the house on the other corner at the bottom of the hill.
“Welp, we can’t say that was a surprise,” Eric said.
“No, but it might have been the most confusing moment of my entire life,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s kind of … too bad, you know? That he can’t go with us,” Eric said, and whoosh, the relief! It wasn’t just me. There are reasons Eric and I are best friends, and one of them is the way we both torture ourselves with guilt.
“Yeah, it really is too bad.”
“This is our thing, though. He can’t go,” Eric said firmly, and I nodded.