The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (15 page)

I hand the pages over. I feel like I should say something, make some kind of presentation speech.

She clears her throat and settles in, turning in her seat so that she's got her back against the door, her feet up on the seat between us. She's wearing black shorts that are baggy and loose, and I realize that I could probably look up them if I wanted to, which—let's be honest—I
do
want to, even though she's just Kyra, not Dina, not even Lisa Carter. She's got black sandals on, which she kicks off now, revealing black-tipped toes that are almost too close to my leg for comfort. I humor myself—for just a second—that she's trying some kind of coy seduction, but she's not even looking at me. Her face is covered by the papers.

I wait. This is excruciating in its own way, waiting to see what she thinks. Is she going to hate it? Laugh at it? Should I have brought different pages? What do I do while I'm waiting? I can only occupy myself with
not
looking up her shorts for so long.

"Um, on these pages, the—"

"Shh!" she tells me.

Right.

A rustle of paper and she turns a page out so that I can see it. "Spent a lot of time on
this
one."

It's an almost blank page, with Courteney in the upper-left-hand corner, her eyes open in shock as she stares at nothingness.

"There's going to be a computer effect there. I haven't Photoshopped it yet."

"I figured." She lowers the papers to grin at me, magic grin. "De-stress, OK? I'm just messing with you." To drive home the point, she nudges my thigh with her toes, then leaves her foot resting against my leg. It's like five tiny, soft, hot pokers are lying up against me.

I roll down the window a little bit, just to let out some of the menthol smell. Why are her toes so hot?

"This is..."

I don't want to whip around like I'm too eager, but I do turn to face her, which somehow puts her feet up
on
my leg, practically in my lap.

"This is kinda cool..."

Yes!

"...I guess..."

"What do you mean, you guess?"

She shuffles the pages and starts organizing them in her lap. "It's tough to tell with just these pages. But the art is really good. It's not what I thought it would be. It's a little more cartoony than I figured for a superhero guy."

"It's not a superhero comic."

"I know. I know." She stares down at the pages in her lap. "And your dialogue is pretty good. I mean, I had to remind myself it was a
guy
writing a woman."

"Thanks."

"It's pretty good." She tosses the pages at me and kicks her feet out of my lap, almost catching my chin as I grab for the paper. By the time I've got
Schemata
back in my backpack, she's tucked her feet into her sandals. She lights up a cigarette, then starts the car.

"Where are we going now?" I've begun to accept that I'll never know with her, but I'm willing to just stick along for the ride.

"Taking you home."

"I thought we were gonna hang out again."

"Not anymore." She flicks her eyes left and right, then pulls out into traffic. "Taking you home so you can work on more of that"—she tilts her head generally toward my backpack—"and show me some more tomorrow."

I wonder if it would be going too far to flip down the visor and check my smile in the mirror?

"If you've got something you want, you have to go for it, you know?" she says, talking around the cigarette. "You can't let shit like Frampton or your buddy the jock interfere, see? Screw 'em."

I hadn't even been thinking about Cal until she brought him up.

"Other people are just ... there." She drags heavily on the cigarette, blows a stream of smoke out the window, then flicks the butt out after it. "If they aren't helping, they're just in the way. Weave around them, knock them over, do whatever you have to, but get past them."

"Which are you?"

"It's like dealing with the teachers and the other idiots who run that place." She's ignoring me. I realize that I should keep an eye on the road for her, just in case. "Beginning of the year, the Spermling called me into his office."

Mr. Sperling is the assistant principal. Some kids call him the Spermling. I don't really think it's funny, but it is a little amusing to hear Kyra say it.

"He's all passive-aggressive and shit, making me wait outside his office, then calling me in, then making me sit there while he's on the phone pretending to be important. Like he'd be a friggin' assistant principal in the middle of nowhere if he mattered
at all.

"So he finally decides to admit I'm sitting there and he says to me, 'Your teachers are getting a little bit tired of your acting out. We
all
are.' And I said, 'Tough titty.'"

"You
said
that?"

"Yeah."

"Wow." I roll through the implications of saying "tough titty" to my mom, to the step-fascist, to anyone. "You're hard-core," I tell her.

She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, I'm Batman. So he gets all red-faced and starts playing with this pen on his desk, bending it, tapping it, you know? But I just wasn't going to put up with his shit."

"Did you tell him about your sister?"

"I told him I didn't care if people were pissed about my 'acting out,'" she goes on, ignoring my question. "I mean, he's this creepy little pissant. Who the hell is he to tell me what to do and how to act?"

He's the assistant principal,
I want to say ... but why should that matter?

"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.

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.