The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (16 page)

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.

T
HIS 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?

M
Y 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.

I open the door and let her in first, then follow, disappointed but resigned to the fact that the universe did not align itself to remove the posters and comics.

She's not bothering with the décor, though. She's staring at my computer. "You did
Schemata
on
that?
"

"Yeah."

"You're kidding me. Where's your tablet?"

"I don't have one."

"So, what, you scan it and ink it onscreen?" She points to my scanner.

"Nah. It's a piece of junk. I draw it with the mouse."

She whistles. "Holy crap. I'm impressed. I mean it." She spies a stack of pages and picks them up. "I can't believe you did this on that old thing." She squints at the computer. "Is that a
modem?
Are you on dial-up?"

I shrug.

"I didn't know. Jeez, no wonder you always took so long to answer my IMs. My dad works for the phone company, so we have free DSL."

"I want your life," I blurt out without thinking. Ah, hell.

She smirks at me; all is forgiven.

"It's just that, you know, this whole thing would go a
lot
faster with a better computer. I get a lot of crashes. I lost six pages one night. That really sucked."

"I bet."

"That's why a new computer is one of my three things. I want to get a Mac," I tell her while she looks through the stack of pages. "I mean, then I could really crank on the pages. I'm using Photoshop 4.0 still. And Illustrator 5. It's just—"

"Three things?" She looks up at me.

"Nothing. Look at those pages. Tell me what you think."

"What three things?" She doesn't care about the pages anymore. "Come on, tell me. I want to know."

"It's nothing! God!"

"Haven't you learned by now that the more you tell me something is nothing, the more I want to know what it is?"

She's grinning. She's amused by the whole thing. Fine, then.

"OK, OK. Look, it's just ... There are three things I want in this world more than anything else."