Fan Art (24 page)

I don’t want you—

even though I think I might—

to think I’m too young, too awkward,

too out, to be considered your friend.

Maybe you just haven’t noticed me yet,

even though I’m the only one

cheering for the marching band,

and waving a flag with a stripe of every color.

I don’t blame you,

even though I wish I were

in your circle of I-love-you-man friends,

under your radar, on your mind.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THIRTY-EIGHT

The disciplinary committee reached a decision
. My punishment? It’s not so bad.

It’s just the last thing I need right now: more schoolwork. I have to write a ten-page paper about censorship of books in schools and libraries—since I appeared so interested in the topic—while I am sitting in the library. With detention. And if my paper is satisfactory, I can walk at graduation and get my diploma.

After my calc exam and before detention, I swing by Dr. Taylor’s classroom to turn in the twenty-five dollars from the rest of the
Gumshoe
magazines I sold—even though they were technically samples—because I don’t want to get in any more trouble with Principal Chambers.

“Thank you, Jamie,” he says about the money. “So, they’re selling well?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I think we have a hit.”

“Good,” he says. “I hope I wasn’t too harsh with your punishment—I see where you were coming from regarding the comic and I don’t disagree with you, just how you went about it.”

Wow. Dr. Taylor agrees with me?
“It’s fine. And an interesting topic,” I add, since the idea for me to write a paper on censorship obviously came from an English teacher.

“I’ve decided. I think we should sell the magazines as is,” Dr. Taylor says.

Double wow.

“Which means we’ll enter it for the awards that way too,” he continues.

I resist the urge to do an end-zone dance. “Thank you. It means a lot—and not just to me.”

“I know,” Dr. Taylor says, returning to the papers on his desk. “I look forward to reading your paper on the seventeenth.”

“Yes, sir,” I promise, and head out.

“Jamie,” he says, calling me back. “I want to start selling them tomorrow, so can you man the table during your lunch hour? DeMarco has the lunch hour before you. Holland has zero-hour covered, and Michael volunteered for after school.”

His words sound like music, sweet and satisfying. “Yeah, of course!”

“Lia’s still upset,” Dr. Taylor continues. “So I didn’t ask her to participate. But she’s welcome to.”

I nod. I’d sit next to Lia every lunch for the rest of the year if I had to—as long as we were selling uncensored
Gumshoe
s.

I’m on my way to the library when I hear familiar shrieks—and from the location and from purple posters on the walls, I know it is the Japanese club party. And Eden. So I poke my head in the door.

Challis is writing something on the whiteboard, and Eden is trying to jump up and grab the marker, but Challis is writing high on the board.

“She’s making my drawing pornographic,” Eden complains to the group.

Several look up from reading manga and sketching on notebook paper. A girl dressed like a Pokémon giggles. She is drawing on the other whiteboard—and her artwork is pornographic. A spiky-haired redheaded boy is nestled between the legs of a blond, androgynous-looking character—their big eyes at half-mast.

It’s enough to make me blush.

“Jamie,” Eden pleads.

And I turn to inspect her drawing. Two boys caught in a hug but with thought bubbles. It isn’t nearly as dirty as Pokémon’s.

Challis adds to the second thought bubble, writing in what must be Japanese because I can’t decipher the dashes and curves.

“Tell her to stop,” Eden says.

“Challis?” I ask, sitting on a desk. “You owe me a favor.”

Challis stops writing to look at me, her eyebrows straight lines. “A favor?”

“A-week-of-detention, ten-page-paper favor. And if I don’t get to walk, you’re gonna owe me a whole lot more.”

She pouts. “I do, don’t I?”

I smile.

And she relinquishes the marker to Eden.

Eden pulls a chair over to the whiteboard, stands on it, and starts erasing.

Challis comes over and sits on the desk next to mine. “But you’re the only one selling
Gumshoe
s. It’s like the rest have been sent through the shredder.”

“Nope,” I say. “Taylor just told me we’re going to sell them as is—with your graphic short!”

“Woo-hoo!” Challis leaps off her desk and opens her arms as if she’s going to hug me. But then she stops, as if she thinks twice.

I wipe the unintentional girls-are-icky look from my face and open my arms.

“Thank you,” Challis says in my ear as we hug. “Lincoln needed a little shaking up.”

“Especially for our incoming sophomores—they’re your biggest fans.”

“Yeah,” Challis says. “Next year the GSA is gonna kick butt.”

“Wish I was going to be here to see it,” I say, wondering if I would’ve come out if I had been among a supportive group of friends like them.

“Careful,” Challis says, her blue eyes twinkling. “You might be.”

“Hey,” I say.

“Principal Chambers loves to hold the you-might-not-graduate thing over everyone’s heads.”

“I’ll ace the paper,” I say.

“Let me know if you need help,” Challis says. “I’ve got tons of LGBT sites bookmarked on my computer—some about straight-washing YA lit.”

I’m not sure what she means and what it has to do with my paper, so I say, “Yeah. Can you send them to me?”

Then, like a toddler wanting her parents’ attention, Eden jogs over and points to her whiteboard.

“Aw,” Challis coos.

I can’t read the kanji. “Nice.”

“It says, ‘I’ve been looking for you all my life,’” Eden translates. “‘Where have you been?’”

“And Raffi says”—Challis points to the other character and his thought bubble—“‘Right here.’”

“Cute,” I tell them, and motion that I want to speak to Challis alone. We step into the hallway.

“My mom said something when she saw
The Love Dare
,” I begin, because I need to know if she was right. “She said she thought the characters looked like me and Mason. Was that on purpose?”

Challis looks down at her shoes. They’re the ones she wore to prom.

I tilt my head and try to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look up.

Instead she nudges my sneaker with her toe and, barely above a whisper, says, “You were my inspiration.”

“Inspiration?”

Challis’s blue eyes meet my own. “You’re a good person, Jamie. You don’t care if someone’s hot and popular or doesn’t even have a best friend; you see them for who they are.” Her fingers find my hand and squeeze it. “That’s something. Inspiring.”

“I don’t feel it’s my place to judge.” I shrug. “Since I’m, well . . .”

She nods as if she understands the rest of my sentence. “I hope Justin and Tony didn’t look
too
much like you—I left off Mason’s Clark Kents and your freckles on purpose.”

“Uh, thanks,” I say, knowing those details won’t change how people choose to see it.

Challis squeezes my fingers one last time and walks back in the classroom.

I walk to the library and find a table, my mind still
on our exchange. I guess I asked for it, literally. I’d asked Challis for a graphic short story and she drew me one, using my best friend and me for inspiration. I had promised her I’d get it in, but that was before I knew what it was about. Only after Michael and Lia read it, they rejected it. The rest of it was all me. Her story inspired me. It was like I was the one taking the dare, not my likeness in a comic book frame—I took the pen from her hand and wrote my own fate.

Now it comes down to Mason. He’s got a copy of
Gumshoe
to decipher and decode. Add in a few clues from the art-geek girls, and well, he’ll figure me out. The ball will be in his court. He’ll choose to be my friend, or not.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THIRTY-NINE

Each morning that week, the Redneck
calls me
Fagmag
in the locker room. Eden’s friends gossip in art class. I sell dozens of
Gumshoes
at the door of the cafeteria while Mason studies for more APs in the library. My exams are the regular ones, so I’ll take them next week. After school, I report to the library to work on my paper and study for exams. The Redneck does the same. When I get home, my mom doesn’t feel guilty asking me to mow the lawn or to run to the store or to watch my sisters—because it’s McCall payback time. Eden calls and we talk on the phone. And Mason and I don’t talk about my declaration in government or the comic in
Gumshoe
. In fact, we don’t talk all that much, as if our last conversation—after Wesley and over
Gumshoe
—was our last. So even though I try to fool myself with the idea that I’m avoiding
him
, it could be that he’s avoiding
me
. Or maybe he’s just had enough of my crap.

Thursday afternoon, I’m shoving my computer into my backpack in preparation for my mad dash out of detention when the Redneck blocks my path. I dodge right and reach for the door handle in vain.

“Fagmag,” he growls.

I freeze like a deer in the road.

“I thought we had an agreement.” He points a sausage-like finger at my solar plexus.

“Yeah, Nick, we did,” I say with all the false confidence I can muster. “I didn’t narc on you and you didn’t narc on me.”

He thinks for a long minute.

I think I can see gears turning behind his big freckled forehead.

“Uh-uh,” he decides. “I still got effin’ detention.”

“Me too.”

“So you ratted on me.” He pokes at my chest again.

I shake my head, play it cool. “Nope. Sorry.”

This clouds his sky-blue eyes. “Yeah, you did.”

“Nick,” I say. “I didn’t tell on you. Your truck was at the school that night. Someone saw it.”

“Well, I’m gonna tell my parents you’re not Eden’s boyfriend.”

“Go ahead,” I say because it’s true. “But that’ll piss her off. Big time. And, well, I’m not gonna stick around to see that go down.”

He’s still thinking, so I edge around him and out the door.

I hear a guttural sound behind me and imagine the Redneck, changing colors like a stoplight—from red to yellow to green, swelling to the size of a silo and roaring like the Incredible Hulk with a Hummer crushed in each fist. I imagine what he’ll do to me and break into a run.

In art on the last day of classes, the room looks bare. Drawings and paintings have been taken down from the walls. The still life has been disassembled, the wax apple and peacock feathers returned to the back corner. I feel a little pang of this-is-really-it for my last day of high school.

Our self-portraits and accompanying artists’ statements are due. We also have to clean off our shelf and return the supplies we borrowed. I turned in my self-portrait with my artist statement about what it all meant taped to the back. It’s all psychotherapist mumbo jumbo that I’m sure Ms. Maude will think is deep. Even though, in reality, it’s just the thesaurus in Microsoft Word, because the truth isn’t something you type up and turn in.

My shelf is a mess of sketches, so I’m sorting keepers from trash, sliding the latter into the blue recycling bin, when the room falls silent.

DeMarco looks over at me as if to ask,
What’s going on?

We turn around to see that the art-geek girls have gone mute.

“Finally,” DeMarco mutters, and goes back to recycling old assignments.

The girls are in a tight huddle, all of them looking down at something.

“Oh my God!” Sharpie girl whisper-shouts. “They are so adorable!”

“It looks just like them!” another adds.

“I don’t know, Eden,” Challis says. I see her blond head shaking in slow-motion.

“You don’t like it?” Eden asks.

Challis’s head revs like a lawn mower, shaking faster.

Then there’s a ripping sound. A crunching, crumpling sound. And a collective gasp.

Challis’s long arm emerges from above the circle of girls, a piece of paper in her fist. Eden lunges for it as Challis steps out of the huddle. “Challis!” she shouts. “That’s mine!”

“Girls?” Ms. Maude asks.

But neither of them pay any attention to her. Challis marches toward me like an advancing army of one. Eden jogs beside her and jumps to try and reach the paper. When this doesn’t work, Eden grabs Challis by the waist and digs in her heels.

Stopped in her tracks, Challis tosses me the ball of drawing paper. As it spins through the air, colors flash
from within the folds.

I catch it.

Eden’s green eyes go wide behind her glasses. She lets go of Challis and bounds over to me. “I don’t think you want to see that, Jamie.”

I palm the balled-up paper and hold it behind my back so she won’t grab it. “Why?”