The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl Read online

  I look around. My fantasy of the school invasion has to be put on hold. (It's a good fantasy, and I add more details each time I relive it.) What the hell just happened to—

  Again. Pain. Erupting in my right shoulder. I rock to one side with the force of the blow and bite my lip to keep from crying out.

  I'm in gym class, or, as the idiots who teach it insist on calling it, "Physical Education." "Education," as if they're teaching us something other than the utterly useless skills of volleyball, flag football, and pushups.

  And my personal favorite (I'm being sarcastic), dodge ball. What genius invented this game? What unrelentingly stupid jackass decided that it was a good idea to take a cluster of people with widely varying body types, strength levels, and skill sets (to say nothing of ever-shifting moralities and ethics), and then encourage them to hit each other with a ball?

  I always try to get out early and easily—a glancing shot off my leg or shoulder. So I was standing in the Dead Zone of the game, whiling away "Physical Education" in my fantasy world, when the pain hit me.

  And again.

  I look over. The only other person in the dodge ball Dead Zone with me is Mitchell Frampton, a big stupid junior with shaggy blond hair that hangs over his eyes. He's grinning a dumb grin, his lower lip dried and cracked as he chews on it, and then he hits me again, in the exact same spot. My shoulder feels like it could just detonate, dropping my arm to the floor.

  "Pussy," he says. "Pussy. Whatcha gonna do? Pussy." And wham! Again. Same spot. Uncannily in the same damn spot. My vision goes red for a moment with pain.

  Why is he doing this? I don't even know him. I've never even talked to him before. I look around quickly. No one's watching. On the gym floor, everyone's busy being physically educated by firing rubber balls around, what fun. The two gym teachers (sorry, physical educators ) are standing off in a corner, talking and gesturing to each other, totally useless, not even watching the

  Ow! Again!

  Not even watching what's going on. I want to yell, but no one would hear me unless I screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs and then I'd just be another wimp, another wuss, another

  Again!

  tattletale. I'd be the crybaby, the momma's boy, the pussy, the weakling, the Again!

  Victim. Let's see, what else have I been called over the glorious years? How about—Again!

  "Please stop," I say to him.

  "Make me." Again. Again. Same spot, over and over. It's as if a Mitchell Frampton's fist-size part of my arm has become a mass of raw meat and screaming nerve endings. "Make me."

  I can't. He knows I can't. I'm a computer geek, a comic book geek, a study geek. Even in the Fast-Track classes, I'm apart. To complete the stereotype-made-flesh that is me, I'm also half a head shorter than most guys my age, and while I'm not a ninety-eight-pound skeletal weakling, my body is, in some ways, like one of those armature dolls, all straight, uninterrupted lines, uncut by any sort of evident muscle tone. I've got my South Brook High gym T-shirt on, and that's it as far as armor goes.

  "Just ignore them," my mother used to tell me, when I was a kid, when I was younger, when the other kids would tease and make fun. "Why do you care what they think? Just ignore them and they'll go away."

  They didn't go away, though. She was wrong about that.

  And the more I told her about them, the less she wanted to hear, and even when I was a kid, I could tell that she didn't want to hear about it. She had other things to worry about. She had to leave my dad and run off with her boyfriend, and for some reason she decided to add to the complications by dragging me along, too. Dragging me along, then ignoring me when I told her the other kids were making fun of me, were tormenting me, and what great advice: "Ignore them." So I did, even though they didn't go away, and pretty soon there was nothing to say, nothing to do, because how are you supposed to suddenly stand up to them after years of silence and nothing? Besides, I can't get in trouble. I just can't. I have one thing going for me: my brains. My ticket out. And college means transcripts, so unlike the rest of these idiots, my permanent record actually means something.

  When I was a kid (when my parents were still married), I was terrified of our basement. My dad had an old winter coat that he left hanging on a hook down there to use if he suddenly needed to go out the basement door for some reason. one time I went downstairs to get something, looked into the darkened basement ... and saw a shaggy form with arms—arms, no doubt about it—lumbering there, leaning against the wall, and I ran like hell, ran up the stairs so fast that when I tripped I fell up the stairs into the foyer, slamming my knee into the metal strip that sealed the bottom of the front door, my knee exploding with a pain so sudden and sharp that I thought my leg had been sheared off.

  Ten stitches in my knee. Blood everywhere. My first experience with unreasoning, unrelenting pain. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a preview of the rest of my life. Pain for no reason. Pain in different varieties. It was just Dad's coat, of course. Morphed by bad light and a particular angle and a kid with a wild imagination into something out of an old Steve Niles comic. Morphed into pain I didn't even deserve.

  So I guess I'm used to it. I just wish my bullet weren't in my gym bag along with my clothes; I need it. But I stand there and stare straight ahead while Mitchell Frampton giggles and keeps hitting that same damn spot. And I realize that someone else does see. Someone sitting up on the bleachers at the far side of the gym. Someone dressed in black, with black hair, the face just a white blur. Watching.

  Good. At least someone sees.

  Chapter Four

  BUT OVERALL IT'S STILL A GOOD DAY. Dina is on the bus for the ride home, and I scored A's on an English essay and a chem test, so all's not too bad. I contrive to get on the bus after Dina, so I do get a moment or two of Watching the Goddess Walk Away, not a bad sight at all.

  I finish my trig homework on the bus and read most of the chapter of Catch-22 that I needed to do, too. Figure an hour at home, tops. Then I can spend the rest of the night on the computer, working on my secret project. Yeah, it's tough to get things accomplished in between crashes and system freezes, but it's worth it—this is going to be my ticket out of Brookdale and away from everyone in it. It's the—

  The bus stops to drop Dina off—I watch her smooth, tan legs swish by in the aisle and memorize them.

  At home, Mom's half reclining on the sofa in the "family" room. (We're not a family—why pretend?) The step-fascist is home early—oh, joy—standing at the refrigerator. I flip a mental coin. Heads, he's getting a beer. Tails, a beer.

  A second later, I hear the click-hiss of a Bud can opening.

  He looks at me with that weird combination of contempt and puzzlement. He can't understand a kid who doesn't want to play football or shoot a bow and arrow or drop out of high school like he did. It's been about five years since I stopped even with a polite "Hi" when I see him. He's one case where Mom's advice to "just ignore" seems to work. He sees me, grunts, and goes into the "family" room with Mom, where the TV is offering up a show about remodeling speedboats or something. Yawn. The step-fascist is, I swear, sitting on the edge of his seat.

  Mom pretends to be engrossed; she sighs and just lies there, rubbing her hands on her big, stupid, pregnant stomach. When she first told me that she was pregnant, I thought I'd puke. She and the step-fascist called me into the "family" room and tried to make it all a big deal, and Mom's face glowed with something like hope, as if she thought that this would be the special elixir that would make me "come around" to her way of thinking, the element that would make the step-fascist and me get along, and make us a family for real.

  "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. Tha
t 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.

  Chapter Five

  IN 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 Panty Algorithm

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

  In English, though, I get my s
emi-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.