"As long as we have a chaperone, right?"
He clears his throat, and his meaty lips clash together in a way that makes me realize that—somewhere under that fat face—he's gnashing his teeth.
"You created this situation, Miss Sellers. We're merely living it."
"Yeah, I control things. don't you forget it."
"Miss Sellers! We are trying to help you. One more comment like that and you'll have the dubious distinction of ending up with detention before you've even gotten to homeroom!"
I think about it for a second. That would be kinda cool, actually. It would really rub the Spermling's nose in it and it would piss off Roger, too.
But no. I have to stay focused. I need to find Fanboy.
Of course, I'm not about to tell the Spermling any of that, so I just sit there with a smirk on my face and glare at him from behind my Bangs of Doom and tap my foot because I'm dying for a cigarette.
He lets me go. I resist the urge to look over my shoulder and say, "Stop looking at my ass!" as I leave.
Eleven
I HAVE A FEW MINUTES BEFORE the bell rings, so I go looking for Fanboy. I feel all light and puffy inside, like someone filled me up with a cloud or something. The Spermling doesn't bother me. Roger doesn't bother me. I'm going to find Fanboy and then everything is going to be fine.
No, wait. That's wrong. Everything is going to be perfect. Because I'm going to make it that way this time.
I'm halfway down the hall when something catches my eye. It's a poster on the wall, sort of a combination of computer type and artwork...
The artwork...
Jesus! It's his. It's Fanboy's artwork. I would know that style anywhere.
The poster says LITERARY PAWS VOL. XX #3 and then COMING BEFORE THANKSGIVING.
And then ...
Holy shit.
Under that: FEATURING THE NEXT CHAPTER OF SCHEMATA!
No. Effing. Way.
Twelve
IT'S NOT JUST SIMONE. THE WHOLE world...
The posters are everywhere. Literary Paws is the school's literary magazine. No one gives a shit about it. It's like a total joke. It's run by Mr. Tollin, this eight-hundred-foot-tall English teacher who spends all day talking about how he played college basketball and almost made it into the Final Four one year. (Whatever that means.) He's a total loser and he only runs the magazine because he's the newest English teacher and they must pass this thing along like it's a pissed-off skunk.
I don't get it. Schemata is running in Literary Paws? Did the whole world go crazy while I was away?
The bell for homeroom will ring soon, but I can't help myself—I have to see him. I have to find out what's happened.
So I rush to his homeroom, hoping for maybe just a minute before the bell.
And...
Yes, the world has definitely gone crazy.
Because there he is, there's Fanboy in all his Fanboy glory, sitting at his desk.
Surrounded.
Surrounded by like half a dozen people. They're all laughing, and here's the thing—they're not laughing at him. They're laughing with him.
And then his friend—the jock, Cal—starts waving them all away and busts out this fake ghetto shit: "Yo, yo, all y'all gotta back off my dawg here, OK? My man needs space to be the ace!"
I want to puke. What the hell?
And Fanboy kinda chuckles and starts drawing something. He holds it up and it looks like some caricature of one of the kids standing around him and everybody laughs and...
Caricatures?
He's wasting his effing time drawing caricatures?
And since when is he popular? God, I was the only person he showed Schemata to. Now he's ... he's serializing it? In the effing literary journal?
None of this makes any sense.
I back out of the room before anyone can see me. Dimly, like it's off in the distance somewhere, I hear a sound—the homeroom bell.
And I don't care.
Thirteen
I'M LATE TO HOMEROOM, BUT Mrs. Reed doesn't say anything other than "Welcome back, Kyra," which makes everyone look up at me, which I don't like, but whatever. I plop down in my seat and I stare out the window. I can see the roof of South Brook Elementary, which is across the street and down a hill from here. It makes me think of the playground there, the first place I met Fanboy.
The last place I saw him before I became DCHH.
That's what they called me in the hospital when Roger sent me there six months ago. DCHH. I didn't know what it meant at first, but I found out. Oh, yeah, I found out.
And why were you in the hospital, Kyra? Well, Kyra, because Fanboy ratted me out. Told Roger about the bullet, so Roger decided to hustle me off to have my brain scrubbed clean.
Thanks a lot, Fanboy.
What an asshole. I was right to be pissed at him. I was right to hate him. Why did I ever think I was wrong? Why did I ever think I owed him an apology?
He talked so big about being an artist, and what does he do? He publishes his "great masterpiece" in Literary Paws. God, how lame can you get?
And it wasn't even done yet. He still had all this work to do. How could he start publishing it when it still had so far to go? He's compromising his art. I was helping him with it and he just ... he just goes off and does this, this stupid thing, without thinking about ... thinking about...
God, I'm so pissed I can't even think straight!
He doesn't deserve to succeed. Not if he's willing to settle for Literary Paws. Pathetic.
"Kyra?"
I blink and turn away from the window. The room is empty, but some kids are starting to file in from the hall. What the hell?
"Didn't you hear the bell?" Mrs. Reed asks.
I didn't. I was totally off in fantasyland, but I'm not about to tell her that. I stare at her instead.
"Kyra? Are you OK?"
Why do people always ask me that?
"I'm fine."
"You look a little ... spaced out. Maybe you should—"
"I was just thinking, OK? God! Get off my back."
"The bell—"
"I don't need a bell to tell me how to live my life," I say to her.
She looks over her shoulder at the kids clustered in the doorway, all watching. Great.
Then she looks back at me and holds out a hall pass. "I think you should head down to the office, OK? Maybe talk to a guidance counselor."
I roll my eyes behind the Bangs of Doom.
"Your first day back can be tough," she goes on, and just to shut her up, I take the hall pass. Before she can keep lecturing me, I push my way through the kids coming through the door and head to the office, where I get to hang with the Spermling and Miss Channing again, lucky me.
"This has got to be a record, Miss Sellers," the Spermling wheezes. "Even for you."
For once, I can't think of anything to say. Because it really is a record, and I'm kind of distracted by that. So I just sit and stare at him.
"Your father and your therapist assured us that you were doing better. That things would be different this time. What happened?"
I shrug. "She wouldn't leave me alone, is all. I wasn't hurting anyone."
He watches me with his beady little eyes. They look like tiny chocolate chips in a huge bowl of lumpy cookie dough.
"Maybe we should have you speak to the county psychiatrist," the Spermling says.
"Jesus Christ!" I can't help it. "All I did was space out for a minute and you all are acting like I brought a gun to school or something!"
"Given your history—"
"The hell with my history! Just leave me alone and let me do the shit I have to do here and..."
I trail off because there's no point in talking anymore. The Spermling's not listening. He's made up his mind already. Hell, he probably made up his mind the minute I walked in here with Mrs. Reed's hall pass. Blowing up in his face just confirmed the decision for him.
I sit in silence as he sighs and picks up the phone. Pretty soon he
has Roger on the line and he's saying things like "Maybe it was too soon" and "I'm sure you did" and "Right now, I don't see any other choice."
The Spermling hangs up. "Your father is coming to pick you up. You may wait in the outer office with Miss Channing."
I go into the outer office with Miss Channing, who types away on her keyboard and answers the phone and shit. You'd think after all the times I've come here and sat outside with her that she would, like, talk to me or something, but no. It's like I'm not even here.
Time goes by. Bells ring. Some kids and some teachers come in and out. I ignore their stares. I just glare at them from behind my Bangs of Doom.
Eff all of them.
And eff him, too.
Who said he could be happy? Who said he could just forget about me?
Roger arrives. Great.
Well, at least I don't have to deal with Miss Powell today.
Fourteen
THE DRIVE HOME IS FILLED with shit like "...made me leave work again" and "...couldn't behave for one day, could you?" and "Here we go again, Kyra. Here we go again." He sounds like he's tired of saying it all.
I know I'm tired of hearing it all.
"Whatever, Roger." I say it because I know it drives him crazy.
"Goddammit, Kyra!" He slams his hand on the steering wheel and for a second there I imagine what would happen if the air bag suddenly exploded open right in his face.
"I thought this was the end of it, Kyra. You told Dr. Kennedy you wanted to go back to school."
"No. I told him I was ready to go back. I never said I wanted to."
I guess the worst part about it is this: I was ready to try. I really was. But then I was betrayed. How am I supposed to be nice to people who stab me in the back? Fanboy shared the thing that had only been between the two of us. And Cal, acting like he had always been there, like he was the best friend, when I know for a fact that it wasn't Cal that Fanboy first showed Schemata to—it was me. It was me, and I should have been the one standing there, brushing off the admirers and telling them to give myace some space...
"—listening to me?" Dad rants. "I can't even tell if you're awake with your hair down over your eyes like that."
Then shut up, I want to say to him, and let me sleep.
At home, he tells me that I'm grounded for the day, the night, forever. I can go back to school in the morning and I'd better "shape up." For now, I'm banished to my room and he's going to have to stay home and "keep an eye" on me.
Great. My room. Like the hospital. Roger sends me places—that's what he does. That's all he does.
So I sit in my room and stare at the computer. I think of how I first saw Fanboy, standing in gym class, all noble and unyielding while this big blond asshole punched him over and over in the shoulder. Took a picture with my cell because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Here's the thing about Fanboy: He's really smart and talented and all that, but he's also like really stupid. Naive, I guess. He thinks that not having anyone looking for you is the same thing as hiding.
Wrong!
That's how I found him the first time—an old MySpace page of his that he didn't use anymore, but the account name was XianWalker76 and I figured that he would probably use that for everything ... and he did. It was his IM name, so it wasn't hard to track to him down. And you know what?
He couldn't be bothered to do the same. To track me down when I went away. To even try. The whole time I was gone, the whole time I was DCHH—nothing. I came back home and I checked my computer and there was no e-mail from him at all.
I was disappointed, and then I figured...
I don't know what I figured. There weren't many e-mails from Simone or Jecca, either, but they knew where I was and they knew I couldn't get e-mail there, so they called me and sent me letters and stuff.
But him...
He's moved on. obviously.
He's gone.
And I'm ...
What?
Dear Neil,
I wish it were easy. I wish life were easy, like one of your comics.
I don't mean that your characters have it easy. That's not what I mean. Because you do some really terrible, really awful things to your characters sometimes. (And I kind of like that, so it's cool.)
What I mean is that I wish life could be simple like the actual page of a comic book. You look at a comic book page and there are rules, rules that make sense. The page is always the same size. There are panel borders and you know that the artwork goes inside the panel borders. Word balloons. Caption boxes. One panel leads to the next, one balloon to the next, and it makes sense, OK? It all fits together and if you tried to look at just part of it, it really wouldn't work. You look at the whole thing, though, and you have a little piece of the story.
It's simple. You can do anything on a comic book page, but at the end of the day, it's all based on these simple ideas, right? It's all lines and blocks and that's good.
Everything makes sense.
So I wish life were like that. That's all.
Fifteen
SO, ROGER HAS BANISHED ME to my room. Like this is supposed to change anything. Please. I can outlast Roger. I've been sent to my room by professionals, man.
After writing a letter to Neil, I log on to chat, but no one's available. Which makes sense, because everyone's in school, but I thought maybe Simone might be in the library.
Literary Paws is on the school's website, but I don't think I can bring myself to even look at it. But then I do anyway.
And I see it, but I don't believe it. My brain just won't accept what my eyes are showing it. This can't be. This is impossible. What was he thinking? What the hell is he trying to do?
Schemata. There it is.
It's too painful to look at the whole thing. I do notice, though, that Fanboy has made some changes: The main character's—Courteney's—hair is no longer blond like Dina's, but jet black. Her nose is shorter and her eyes are wider. It's still Dina, but only if you know what you're looking for and sort of squint really hard.
I can't bear looking at all of it, though. Every time I try, I get all caught up in a bunch of different emotions and they're all bubbling and gurgling inside me like I swallowed a bunch of seltzer and salsa.
It's not even noon yet. I can hear Roger moving around out there in the rest of the house. I roll up my sleeves to look at the scars on my wrists. They haven't changed much in the years since I put them there.
You and your scars, Fanboy said. That day in his bedroom. That's what he said to me: You and your scars. Like they didn't mean anything. Like they didn't matter.
I touch my right wrist. The slight raise-bump there. I remember every second, every instant when I did it. When I pulled the box cutter across, it's like all of a sudden my eyes and my mind became completely clear. It's like I could see the sharp lines and edges of the world, where the blade met my flesh, where the blood bubbled over, where the cuff of my shirt lay crisp against the skin. And it was all burned forever into my brain so that I could never ever forget it, even if I wanted to, which I don't.
And he sneered at me. At me and at it. At this ... this moment in my life, when for the first and only time ever things made perfect, almost holy, sense.
(The blade, sliding...)
And he said, That's just a cry for help. That's just attention. Everybody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital.
Remembering it, it's like I'm there again, in his bedroom. How could he do that to me? How could he treat me that way? God, I tried to explain it to him. Tried to explain women to him. I ... I showed him myself. opened myself to him in every way possible. But all he could do was mock me. A cry for help.
Everyone knows that.
But everyone doesn't.
I didn't.
That day. That day I made the first cut and received that amazing clarity of vision, I really thought I was killing myself. And I really wanted to die.
But I effed it up.
; You didn't really try to kill yourself, Fanboy said to me. You just wanted attention, but you screwed up. And then ... And then the harshest...
Try harder next time.
That's what he said to me: Try harder next time.
And I left his house that day thinking, I will.
Magic Bullet
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED THAT DAY when I came home from his house...
I'm surprised I made it home at all—my eyes were all blurry and effed up with tears because Fanboy was such an asshole to me.
But that didn't last long. Because by the time I got home, I was angry, not sad. And the tears went away and I got madder and madder and then I started to think about what he'd said, about how I wasn't really trying to kill myself. He thought I was faking. Even if he thought I really wanted to die, he would think I was stupid for effing up. I didn't know which was worse.
But I had something. I had his bullet now. I had stolen it from his hiding place while his mom was yelling at him.
I slid my hand into my pocket and I touched the bullet there and God! I got it. I understood. I understood why he carried it with him.
It was power.
I mean, a gun is useless without a bullet. Bullets do all the damage. The gun just, just throws them.
I couldn't keep my hands off that bullet. I lay in bed that night, rolling it between my fingers. I loved the brassy smell it left on my skin.
And I thought how easy it would be. If I had a gun, it would be so easy. One bullet. One shot.
I could show him. I could show him that I could get it right.
I actually got out of bed. I went into the kitchen and got the big knife Mom used to cut up chicken and stuff—before she died.
I sat on the floor. The cold kitchen tile made my butt go numb.