The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (3 page)

"You're going to have a little brother or sister," she said. "Isn't that great?"

"
Half
brother or sister," I pointed out, which, for some reason, earned me a glare and a command to get out of her face for a while.

A week or so later, I e-mailed Planned Parenthood and had them send a bunch of brochures about abortion to our address.
That
didn't go over very well.

I grab some lunchmeat from the fridge and make a sandwich. Before I can leave, Mom says, "The baby kicked today. Want to feel?"

Oh, God. Could there be
anything
—I mean
anything—in
this world more vile and disgusting than feeling the spawn of the step-fascist kicking up a storm in there? The very idea conjures unstoppable images and thoughts that would have made Oedipus put out his eyes
and
put a bullet in his head.

"Not particularly." It comes out a little nastier than I intended and I feel bad for a second when Mom's face falls, but when I see the step-fascist shaking his Cro-Magnon-like head, I figure I'm better off.

With my five-star dinner of sandwich, pretzels, and Coke, I head downstairs to my bedroom; I fought like hell to have my room downstairs, away from theirs. The step-fascist pissed and moaned about having to put up walls down in the basement, about losing space from his precious workshop (where he does such important things as banging his thumb with a hammer and listening to right-wing radio), but I got my way in the end.

Homework and dinner done by five. New record. I hear them tramping around upstairs, in particular, one heavy set of feet going back and forth to the fridge. When I close my eyes, I can see the beer can and hear the click-hiss over and over. I had never even seen a beer can in person until Mom moved us in with the step-fascist.

I log on to the computer. It whirrs and clicks and clacks like an old man, and I think of a new computer again and sigh. It'll do for now.

An Instant Message pops up:
send addy?

It's Cal. It's
always
Cal on IM. No one else IMs me. I don't even bother looking at the window anymore—I just zero in on the text:
send addy?

Since he ditched me at the lockers this morning, I hadn't had a chance to talk to him the rest of the day.
What are you talking about?
I type. I hate that Internet shorthand crap, all that "u" and "gr8!" and junk like that. What's wrong with spelling and grammar?

Addy from a.m.
comes the reply.

Address from this morning? What does he—?

Right: the Grant Morrison stuff. The X-Men websites I told him about. I hunt my Favorites list for the URLs and shoot them over to him. I bite my lip and cross my fingers and pray that I don't lose my dial-up connection or outright crash.

In a few minutes, my ancient hard drive grinds out a few megahertz and I get another message:
^5! gm rocks & his run's cool r u ok?

I send his high-five back to him and then we're off, "talking" about the site and Grant Morrison's genius, and I'm so happy and distracted that I let myself forget about the punches and the baby and the step-fascist. For a little while, at least.

I
N THE MORNING,
I
HEAD FOR THE SHOWER
first thing. There's one down here that the step-fascist uses to clean up when he's done working on one of the junkers he claims he's going to make street-legal someday, but I pretty much commandeered it a few years back. It was a sort of silent war—I started using it in the morning so that I didn't have to go upstairs to use the main bathroom. At first no one noticed. (Why should they? The world is Mom and the step-fascist and that's it, right?) By the time they did, it had been a month or more and I had a washcloth and shampoo in there, and possession's nine-tenths of the law. one night I heard Mom say, "He's not hurting anything and you never really use it anyway," followed by some sort of monosyllabic grunt of accession. Victory was mine. I had taken over another corner of the basement. Let there be marching in the streets and dancing girls for my pleasure.

It's cool in the basement, but not
too
cool, so I usually head to the shower with my towel wrapped around my waist and that's it. Imagine my surprise when I find Mom standing there by the washing machine.

"Mom!"

"What!" She jumps as much as a pregnant lady can, and for a second there I'm worried that she might miscarry or go into labor or do something else disgusting. But she just spins around. "What?" she says again. "Don't use that tone with me. I can be down here. You don't own the basement."

"I was just surprised, that's all."

"Surprised that I'm doing laundry?"

Actually, yes. But that's beside the point. I don't really care one way or the other, so I shrug and make a beeline for my Conquered Territory, the First Shower.

"Wait.
Donnie
, stop." Oh. God.
Bonnie.
Like I'm ten years old. Like I'm a little kid. I run through the possibilities and figure that I'm probably due for the "It's Time for All of Us to Think About How to Get Along, for the Baby's Sake" speech. It's one of Mom's favorites, mainly because it requires absolutely no decisiveness on her part. She just runs down the list of everything I've done recently that annoys her and sums up by telling me that she's disappointed that I have this "attitude" and maybe there are ways I can think of to work on that, hmm? Sure, Mom. Just dump all the work on me. No problem.

She pokes my right shoulder and I want to scream, want to bellow in agony. "What's that? What is it, Donnie?"

I hiss in a breath through clenched teeth, my arm suddenly numb with fire where Mitchell Frampton pummeled it yesterday.

"What is this? What happened to you?"

I look at what she's looking at, a massive bruise that discolors my arm from the point of the shoulder muscle up to the clavicle. At the center it's a deep purple that's almost black, lightening to a sickly jaundiced yellow at the edges.

I don't know what to say. Or, actually, I know
exactly
what to say, and that's the problem.
What happened to me, Mom? I fol-
lowed your advice, that's what happened. I followed it for years and it's just that for once someone decided to go beyond name-calling and sniggering and flipping me off and sticking porn in my hands and the occasional shove or push, so someone finally left a mark that even you can't avoid seeing.

But there's no point in saying that. I'm fifteen now. What would she do? Call the school? Call Frampton's parents? My word against his, and even if they believed me, so what? He gets suspended for a few days and comes back worse than ever.

Well, there
was
that person I saw, that person in black up on the bleachers. But I don't even know who he was, and how would I find him anyway? It's too late to fix it now. I've made it this far. From age nine to here, six miserable years in this crappy little town with its crappy little people and their crappy little tortures. It's April. After this school year ends, I've got two more, then it's college and I'm gone, gone, gone, like the song says.

And I guess there's one other reason not to tell her. I guess there's always the chance that she wouldn't do anything about it. She'd get exasperated and tell me that she can't believe I just stood there and let him hit me, that I didn't say something to anyone, I didn't make it stop and take care of myself—how
could
you, Donnie...?

"I don't know what happened," I tell her, still looking at the bruise. Usually I'm a much better liar. Usually I can come up with stuff on the spot, like the Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight. But she caught me off-guard. I never thought about a bruise forming, even though my shoulder hurt and throbbed all night. And I never really expected to see something like concern in her eyes.

"I really don't know," I tell her. It's a bad lie, but it's the one I'm stuck with, so I have to work with it. "It wasn't there when I got home from school last night." A story pops into my head, complete and fully formed, as they often do: Blame the step-fascist. Tell her he hit me.

No. Too many details to come up with. Too many places to trip up.

"You don't know? Are you sure? Are you lying to me?"

"Why would I lie about something like this?" oh, the liar's best friend. Because, seriously, why
would
someone lie about something like this? I throw her a bone: "Maybe I bumped it against my nightstand when I was asleep."

As my dad would say, she's not buying it, but there's nothing else on the shelves. I get released from Interrogation and head for the prison showers.

The bus is, sadly, uneventful, Dina Jurgens's dad having evidently taken care of her car troubles.

In English, though, I get my semi-regular Glimpse of the Panties. Mrs. Hanscomb has our desks arranged in a U formation "so as to foster dialogue between students and discourage the class from becoming a simple lecture." Lisa Carter sits across the U from me, and on days when she wears a skirt she either A) forgets or B) doesn't care. She is no Dina Jurgens, no Senior Goddess, but she has nice legs and it's easy for me to look while pretending to be looking at my notes. To amuse myself, I keep track of the style and color of her panties, jotting down notes in a shorthand code I invented for the purpose. I might just try to work out some sort of database that tracks and predicts her underwear choices. I doubt there's an algorithm for this sort of thing, but it might be interesting to try it.

Lisa seems nice enough. She's a "school friend." We're nice to each other in school and she's never done anything particularly rotten to me, but we would never have any reason to talk outside of school. I feel sort of guilty and sleazy for looking up her skirt, but I do it anyway.

Once I almost told Cal about my visual explorations of Lisa Carter's inner thighs and the all-important Panty Algorithm experiment. He's in Hanscomb's English class, too (off to one side, bad angle for panty-viewing). But I never did because he would think it's pathetic and sad (which it is—at least I'm honest). Cal doesn't need to sneak peeks. When he's not talking to me or hanging out with the Jock Jerks, he's surrounded by freshman and sophomore girls—sometimes even juniors. He flashes that broad, easy grin, tosses out some faux street slang, and gets oohs and coos in response. "When I black it up, they love it," he told me once, and since it was just the two of us, it was OK to talk like intelligent human beings, and we pondered the social implications and origins of such behavior, finally deciding that it's just that South Brook girls are interested in anything that isn't the same old boring white bread.

If they knew that Cal was a secret comic book geek, would they ooh and coo so much?

No, there's no Carter Examinations for Cal. He's seen the real thing up close and personal, he let slip once, then looked embarrassed. While around the JJ, Cal has to play the Conquering Stud Muffin, but with me he's discreet and prefers not to discuss sex, which I find respectful, in a way.

And me? Shocking though it may be, I'm a virgin (no, it's true), but—God bless the Internet, cable TV, and convenience store clerks who don't ask for ID—I've seen enough to know that I want to see more.

A part of me wonders if Lisa knows. If she's some kind of exhibitionist. Is there a particular brand of kink that involves flashing the town geek?

A ball of cold lead forms in my throat and then drops down into my gut. Worse yet, is there a game that calls for getting the town geek hot and bothered with flashes of the Promised Land, then letting a bunch of Neanderthals in letter jackets pound the living crap out of him? That sounds more likely than anything else.

I shiver just once before regaining control of myself. My hand automatically goes into my pocket, where the bullet waits with its almost narcotic touch.

Mrs. Hanscomb is droning on and on about Poe, about opium, about alcohol, about
MEL-an-choly,
and Lisa Carter coughs, shifts in her seat, lets her legs open just a little bit more. More than ever before.

I look, but I'm not happy about it.

O
N THE WAY TO GYM CLASS
, Cal catches up to me. There are no jocks around, so he's safe to pull out a comic he found on eBay. It got to his house yesterday.

"How much?" I ask, looking at it. It's an old
Swamp Thing
comic, flimsy and stapled. I've got the collected editions, nice bound softcovers that contain multiple issues, and I think my dad has the originals, like this one, in his collection.

"A bunch," he says, sighing. "Too much. Fifty bucks. But I couldn't resist. I love that Alan Moore stuff."

"Dude, you can get the trade paperback for, like, fifteen bucks, and it's got all four parts, not just this one." I want to wave it in his face, but I'm mindful that he just laid down five Hamiltons for this sucker.

"Yeah, yeah, I know." He shrugs as if to say,
Whaddayawantfromme?
Cal's a serious collector, a total nut for first editions and Mint conditions. Me, I just like the stories. with one exception, I don't care if they're printed on toilet paper and bound with bubblegum.

"But this is how it first came out," he goes on. "This is how people like your dad first saw it and read it. Not all at once in some big collected edition with an introduction and stuff. They saw it one at a time, each month, waiting each month for the next installment. This is like..." He takes it back from me, opening it carefully, not wanting to crinkle the paper at the spine where the staples hold the whole thing together. "This is like an historical document."