Guy in Real Life Read online

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  Advance Reader’s e-proof

  courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  DEDICATION

  Dedication to come

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  Level One

  Chapter 1: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 2: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 3: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 4: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 5: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 6: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 7: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 8: Kugnar

  Level Four

  Chapter 9: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 10: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 11: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 12: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 13: Svvetlana

  Chapter 14: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 15: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 16: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 17: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 18: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 19: Svvetlana

  Chapter 20: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 21: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 22: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 23: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 24: Svvetlana

  Level Thirty

  Chapter 25: Svvetlana

  Chapter 26: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 27: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 28: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 29: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 30: Svvetlana

  Chapter 31: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 32: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 33: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 34: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 35: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 36: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 37: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 38: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 39: Lesh Tungsten

  Level 50

  Chapter 40: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 41: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 42: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 43: Kugnar

  Chapter 44: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 45: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 46: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 47: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 48: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 49: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 50: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 51: Svvetlana

  Chapter 52: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 53: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 54: Lesh Tungsten

  Account Deleted

  Chapter 55: Lesh Tungsten

  Chapter 56: Svetlana Allegheny

  Chapter 57: Lesh Tungsten

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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  LEVEL ONE

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  CHAPTER 1

  LESH TUNGSTEN

 

  “This is not my life.”

  Everything is spinning on the curb in front of Vic B’s bar. I shouldn’t have been drinking. I knew that beforehand. I knew that as I drank. I know that now, sitting on said curb, with my head on my knees and a puddle of chunky vom next to my feet. It smells like bile and the banh mi I had before the concert. But on the last Saturday before school starts up again, with What Dwells Within, the best quasi-local metal band there is, playing within walking distance of my house, should I be expected to stay home? Of course not. And with school about to start, me entering my sophomore year, should I be expected to pass up vodka drinks when I’m given the opportunity to demonstrate my badassedness? Probably, but when seniors are pushing me up to the bar, that’s pretty much not going to happen.

  The music has stopped now. It was thumping hardcore until a moment ago, I think. It might have been the echo bouncing around in my empty head for the last few minutes, though. I missed the encore, I guess. Sucks.

  But the spinning is the worst part, because the rest of that little Vietnamese sandwich is about to come up. A hand slaps the top of my head a few times and I groan.

  “You missed the encore, Lesh.” It’s Greg—Greg Deel, my best friend, too-constant companion, and all around PITA. We’re identical in a lot of ways: black trench coats, supernaturally black hair, black jeans, black tennis shoes. Greg’s mom says we also constantly wear black faces—this is right before she tries to tickle us like we’re both five, hoping our surly exterior will crack. It doesn’t.

  But he’s also about a foot shorter than me, and he still has big fat baby cheeks, where mine are kind of bony and require semiregular shaving. At the bar, he got ignored and would have even with the best fake ID around. But I got served half the time I tried, and that’s enough that I ended up feeling like this at the end of the night, and he ended up feeling like the newborn babe he so resembles, which means he can torment me while he makes sure I get home alive. It’s lucky we both live about a ten-minute walk from the bar, in the part of Saint Paul that has nasty hole-in-the-wall bars that book metal bands when they’re not serving hardcore alkies and women with eye patches.

  “What’d they play?” I try to say, but it comes up like “whuu,” before turning Technicolor.

  Greg jumps back about five feet. “Dude, you almost got my shoes.” He sticks a bottle of water in my face. I manage a thank-you, unscrew the top, and pour about half of it on my head. For some reason I’m burning up—I mean, sweating like mad. The idea of putting the water into my body is unpleasant, but on my head,
it’s actually quite nice.

  Greg grabs the bottle back. “Hey, don’t waste it,” he says, and I manage to ask what the encore was. Anyone other than Greg probably would have still found me unintelligible. “‘Where Are You Now, Isaiah?’ It pretty much melted everyone’s goddamn face.”

  That’s their best song. It never fails to get the crowd going insane—except the members of the crowd who have had to give up waiting for the bathroom to sprint outside and puke in the gutter between parked cars, in plain sight on goddamn University Avenue, across from the twenty-four-hour grocery store where half the neighborhood shops every Sunday after freaking church. “Come on, get up,” Greg says. He grabs my wrists and pulls me to my feet. Then we stagger along University to the first corner and north into the neighborhood. We could have walked a little more on the main drag, but staggering on University after two a.m. is a bad idea, generally. If you don’t get beat up and mugged or spotted by the police, you still have to walk past the first gay bar in the Twin Cities, and then they whistle at you from the little gated smoking area. That’s always a little uncomfortable, to put it mildly, but with Greg’s arm around my waist—to keep me from walking into the street or falling right over—it’d be unbearable.

  “That girl was looking for you,” Greg says. My head spins a little as it looks for a picture, a still or animated image, of the girl in question. I remember ogling a girl with pink streaks and three rings in her bottom lip. I remember talking to one with lots of black eye makeup and leather bands on her wrists. Metal spikes.

  “What girl?” I mumble.

  “Man, how much did you drink?” Greg says. He shakes his head, and we stumble a little as he turns me onto Thomas Avenue.

  “Why are we taking Thomas?” I say.

  Greg ignores me and goes on about the mystery girl. “She had black lipstick. Her name was Kiki.”

  An image—a pink image with a black cat—flashes across my hazed-over eyeballs. “Skirt?”

  “That’s her,” Greg says. He gives me an extra stabilizing shove and stops. It turns out I can stand on my own, and we walk on, no longer embracing. “Anyway, she was worried about you.”

  “Huh,” I say. “Does she go to Central?”

  Greg shrugs. “Didn’t ask. Didn’t recognize her, though.”

  We get to the corner with a stoplight—Hamline Avenue. Greg cuts diagonal through the intersection, and I hobble after him. No cars around this late, but the Super USA is open. It’s the sketchiest convenience store for two miles in any direction. My mother won’t go in there at noon on a Sunday. That’s Midway, and that’s our neighborhood.

  “Thirsty,” I say. Greg’s already got a big bottle of water by the time I walk into the store, and he’s at the counter dropping two bills. I barely enjoy the cool convenience-store air before it’s time to go back outside. I take a swig—a long one—from Greg’s bottle as we get back to the sidewalk. I guess I’ve forgotten I’m still a little drunk—okay, bombed—because the bottle is upside down and still to my lips, so I’m looking up at the overcast night sky when we reach the corner again. That’s why I’m not watching where I’m going, and though Greg is saying things like, “Watch where you’re going,” I still don’t watch where I’m going.

  Which is when the bike hits me. The bottle of water is the first casualty: I don’t just drop it; I fling it, screaming, toward a row of hedges on the retaining wall next to me, and its contents fly in every direction like a sprinkler’s spew. It lands in someone’s backyard.

  Second casualty: me. I collapse as I finish my scream, and my back slams against the aforementioned retaining wall. I feel the rocky face scrape up my back as I slide. Somehow my head hits gently. I don’t think I’m bleeding.

  Third casualty: the biker. She careens off my stupid form, off the sidewalk—and why the hell is she riding on the sidewalk?—and drops from the high curb with a thud and a rattle. Her handlebar basket dumps its contents, and then her seat dumps her, right into the gutter.

  She says, “Ow,” and Greg runs over. She pulls off her helmet and lets her long, blond hair fall out. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not giving you the old “helmet comes off, blond hair shakes and falls in waves on the gorgeous girl” routine. This is more like white blond, first of all, rather than golden, and it falls not in waves, but in a matted bunch of twists and clumps and messy flyaways—like actual corn silk, when you can’t get those last few strands off the ear.

  “You okay?” Greg says, but she pulls away when he grabs her elbow and gets up on her own. She’s shaky, and it’s an awkward move with her helmet still in one hand. When she sees the contents of her basket—a now-empty tote bag and a bunch of spiral notebooks—spread across the pavement, she freaks.

  “Graham cracker crust!” she shouts, or something equally censored and ridiculous. I can’t be sure. I can’t even be sure she’s really standing there. Under the flickering white light of the lamp in the Super USA parking lot, she looks like an angel, as imagined in the movies of the 1920s. I reach back and put my hand on the back of my head, and it’s a little damp. Maybe it is bleeding. The world is spinning as bad as it was twenty minutes before—before I lost my supper in the gutter. I’m about to lose it again, no doubt about it, so the stupidest thing I can do is try to stand up to help this biker girl pick up her books and papers. When I reach the pile, though, I’m still on all fours.

  “Just leave it,” she says, and she isn’t angry—which, good, because honestly, it was her fault. Sidewalk. But she’s on all fours now too, and Greg is picking up her bike, in the middle of the street, and my head—which you’ll remember is still spinning and is also bleeding, and it’s probably the loss of blood that has me in this sort of state—clunks right into hers, and despite all that white-blond hair, there’s very little cushioning, so our bowling-ball bonkers straight-up echo with the collision. Anyway, mine does.

  “Ow!” we both say. “Shit!” we both almost say, and I do, but she manages to take a sharp left and spit out “Shark attack,” and I don’t know what that even means. We’re both on our knees, rubbing our heads, and Greg is standing in the middle of Hamline Avenue holding this girl’s bike. When she stands, her face crinkled in pain and confusion and anger, the light from the Super USA parking lot seems to ignite her white-blond hair, its frizz and flyaways like lightning. By the time she mounts her bike, her sleekly muscled arms bare and stiff and her helmet back on her head, strapped under her chin and everything, I’m not even sure she’s real.

  She’s about to pedal off when I spot a spiral notebook in a puddle near the curb—she must have missed it. I grab it and call to her, “Wait!” and I hold it up, me still on one knee in the gutter, her above me under the otherworldly light of the parking lot lamppost, and between us—in both our hands—is this notebook, its cover wet and full of ink, so ink runs in wild shades of purple and pink and blue, like a young bruise. But the art—it’s a drawing of a gnarly forest, and a swirling sky, and an icy mountain range, and over it all a huge beast with twisted horns and torn batlike wings. It’s something out of an epic fantasy, and it’s ruined.

  “Thank you,” she says, frowning at me, her eyes narrow and scornful. Then she shoves the wet notebook into her bag, pushes hard on the pedals, and creaks away.

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  CHAPTER 2

  SVETLANA ALLEGHENY

 

  Quel imbécile! Quel imbécile ivre!

  I can hardly ride now because my right knee is starting to bruise and I can feel it throb every time I pedal, and there’s a big dent in the front fork of my bike. I love this bike, and I love the notebooks in my tote bag, the notebooks swollen with black and blue ink, a summer’s worth of work, a summer’s worth of imagination and dirty fingernails and a wicked callus on my right middle finger.

  I should have flipped that idiot my m
iddle finger!

  Then again, he fished my precious green notebook out of an oily puddle of Heaven-knows-what in the gutter outside a Super USA.

  The poor green notebook—the very bible of the new semester, which starts in two days, thank you—is destroyed, soaked pages wrinkling and running ink into each other, in that pale and sort of cool-looking way that they do. And cool or not, I’d rather have my green notebook, unharmed. I have also made three copies of the green notebook, and thankfully they are safe at home in my desk drawer. I’d still rather have my original green notebook, unharmed.

  They’d adored the green one—the Central High School Gaming Club, I mean. It was the only one I passed around tonight, to the eager and variant hands of the other members. There are only five of us, and it’s been us five, and only us five, since Roan joined her freshman year, my sophomore year. As of Tuesday, I’ll be a senior. So will Abraham, Reggie, and Cole. Roan’s our baby, just a junior this year, and a year younger than the rest of her class. She skipped a grade—ages ago, back in elementary school—and she’s in the Central High honors program. I swear, if she wanted, she could ask the principal if it would be okay if she just spent six and a half hours every day in the media center, studying on her own, and he’d probably pat her head and say, “Sure, Roan. I can’t wait to hear about what you discover.”

  Abraham gaped at my artwork and detailed stats on each new creature—stunned into swearing, like always. He flipped through the pages of the green notebook with his right hand and pushed back his greasy dark-brown hair from his forehead with his left, revealing—and no doubt worsening—the acne problem his bangs usually hide (and probably cause). “Holy fork,” he said. “Holy fork, Lana. This is forking ridiculous.”

  I am not big into swearing. I have censored Abraham’s speech.

  “It really is, Svet,” said Roan. “You’ve gotten so, so good.” No one else—no one—calls me Svet, but Roan has been forever. We lived on the same block as little kids, she as a toddler, chasing me around the backyards, me as a preschooler, happily teaching her what being a big kid was all about. My parents moved us—clear across town, into a different elementary school’s territory, and to the huge and gorgeous and Frank Lloyd Wright-y and probably on the National Register of Historic Places house that had been my granddad’s—when I was ten, but Roan is a persistent and wonderful child and wouldn’t let me slip away, and our friendship with me. Is it any surprise that she joined the Gaming Club on the first day of her freshman year?