Guy in Real Life Page 7

  The parental units banged around in the kitchen, probably planning to serve something Hen and I hate and preparing it with the volume of the ill-mooded, so I took Henny’s hand and my quilt of knitted squares in every color of yarn I had lying around, and we walked down to the deck off the second-floor TV room, and now we’re huddled on the cold wood bench, looking at the backyard, and beyond that the river and Pickerel Lake and Dakota County, and somewhere out there is Iowa. The stars are giving it their all, though the lights from two downtowns don’t make it a fair fight.

  “I had to,” I say. “You told me I had to.”

  Hen doesn’t answer. She sniffles. She sniffles against the air, which is getting colder by the minute. She sniffles because it’s ragweed season, and she belongs inside, where the air filters work double time to keep her sinuses healthy and to keep at bay the red in her eyes. She sniffles mostly, though, because that’s her thing, and she knows it. I’m the fainter, and she’s the sniffles and coughs. When there’s a bump in the road, it’s her place to sniffle.

  “At least it’s over,” I say. I shiver once, and Henny drops her arm around my shoulders—or she tries to. It’s an awkward position, since I’m practically twice her height. I huddle in closer, and she’s nodding.

  “He probably won’t be nice to you anymore,” she says.

  “He was never nice to me,” I insist. “That’s not being nice.”

  “Sort of it is,” Hen says. “He talks to you and smiles at you. That’s something.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s lecherousness.”

  “What’s that mean?” Hen asks, so I take a deep breath and let it out, then lean back till my head is against the back of the house. “Like a leech? A bloodsucking leech?” She derives some pleasure from saying such things: using the word “sucking” in an allowable context. I can feel her cheek against my arm as she grins and says it again: “A bloodsucking leech.”

  “Not at all,” I say, “or quite a lot, actually.”

  “Never mind,” she says. “I think I know. Context says so much.”

  I nod, because it does, and Hen goes on, “Anyway, you had to do it. And Mom and Dad will get over it.”

  I shrug. “Season’s over anyway, right?” It’s a joke, but not. If they can’t count on seeing the Dannons at Thunder games, avoiding them till this blows over is a safe plan.

  But Hen shakes her towhead. “Play-offs, we’re in them.”

  “We?”

  She ignores it, which is fine. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and it’s a silly if valid point: Hen and the parentals are not members of the team, and using the multiple first-person pronoun to imply they are is downright insane. But fine. I rolled my d10 for charisma, hoping for a digression distraction, and needed an eight. I got a two.

  “So they’ll see the Dannons again,” I say. “Soon?”

  “Soonish,” Hen says. “And you will too. Because you have a ticket.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’ll go.”

  “We’ll see,” says my intolerable little sister.

  “Why is this door open?” It’s Dad, poking his angry giant face through the open sliding door to call us to dinner. Hen and I stare back but don’t reply. “Dinner. Right now.”

  He pulls his head back and—astonishingly—closes the door. I get that he wants the door closed at all times except the precise millisecond at which a human form requires passage through what would otherwise be a wall or window, but to call us inside and then close the door before we come in is pure hostile madness.

  “Dad’s still angry,” Hen says. She’s very helpful in addition to being intolerable. We stand up, and now her arm has to slip down to my waist. Her hand falls on my far hip, and I pull the door open for her, and we step inside.

  “Go ahead,” I say. She waits a moment, and then stomps off. One of her socks—the green one, as they don’t match, and the other is red; very Christmas, or traffic-lighty—is slipping off as she goes. I watch her a minute, then close the sliding door and lock it and lean on it. The air inside smells of onions and boiled carrots and yeast, which means we’re having carrot bisque, which looks and tastes like vomited baby food, and those rolls that pop out of a tube.

  My parents have funny ways of exacting revenge.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  CHAPTER 16

  LESH TUNGSTEN

 

  “Where were you last night?” Greg says as our palms make contact on the sidewalk in front of Central High. It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m tired and sore. The crick in my neck is a thumping ache now.

  “What are you—,” I start, because he knows I’m grounded, and we didn’t plan to meet anywhere, but then I stop, because we did, at least vaguely. “I forgot. Sorry.” I forgot the tiniest, briefest hint of an inkling of the suggestion that we’d meet in the game and level my ugly-ass warrior.

  He shrugs as we head inside. “No biggie.”

  “You should’ve IM’d,” I say, and then regret it, because maybe he did.

  “You weren’t on. I texted.”

  My hand instinctively goes to my hip pocket, like I could read his text and respond through time. Had I been so lost in his ridiculous world that I hadn’t even opened a browser? Checked my phone?

  “I fell asleep early,” I say, and the lies have begun, because I am not about to admit that I spent the night—right through till nearly one in the morning—pretending to be an elven girl, bombarded with untoward comments from a ingratiating hunter and foul-mouthed dwarf just to help me level. “Anyway, tonight for sure.” It’s a promise I intend to keep. In the clear, cold light of Wednesday morning, my behavior last night seems even to me a perverted step off the rails. I vow silently to keep my interest in Svetlana Allegheny (her last name was easy to find; how many Svetlanas do you think there are at Central High School?) on a purely appropriate level. No more of this online impersonation junk.

  Anyway, Greg thinks about it. Checks his mental calendar for other online commitments, I assume, and finds none. “All right. Enjoy skej A.” We slap five again and he’s off. I’m getting used to this. I pull my headphones back up and find my locker.

  She sits with me again at lunch.

  Maybe she had been planning to—who knows. But just in case, I had exited the cafeteria line and grabbed the same seat as the day before. With a little maneuvering of freshmen, I arranged things so that the seat opposite me—Svetlana’s seat—was empty, and when she came out of the line, carefully carrying her tray of food, looking out over the sea of eaters, her chin high and her shoulders back, I caught her eye. It worked.

  I’m not getting used to this, but I pull the headphones clear off this time. Not even the mime of solitude today. I’ll try talking. I’ll try talking like a guy who can smile and be around people made of silvery light without pulling his cape across his face and hissing like the undead cat from Pet Sematary.

  “Do you mind?” she asks when her tray is across from me. Its edge touches the edge of mine. I shake my head. So much for being able to talk.

  “More pizza?” she continues.

  I look at the food in front of me. It is pizza—the rectangular kind, with pale yellow cheese, no demonstrable sauce, and a thick, undercooked, and freezer-burned crust. But it’s not more pizza. “More?” I manage to croak.

  “You had pizza yesterday,” and now she’s sitting. She’s got the pasta side—penne with veggies—but no meat. She’s probably vegetarian. She picks up a noodle with her fingers and eats it.

  “I had pizza rolls,” I point out, “but fine. Yeah. More pizza.”

  She eats another noodle, still regarding my pizza. When noodle number two is gone, she finally picks up a fork to grab a plank of carrot. It doesn’t look delicious.

  “So,” I say.

  She shrugs, like I’d actually said something, and then it’s silent
for a while, as I take bite after bite of rectangular pizza, being extra careful about chewing with my lips closed, and she moves her fork in slow circles around her plate and pasta.

  Finally she says, “I told that boy off last night. Fry. The one you sent running. He said you cursed him out.” She leans forward when she talks, like we’re conspirators. She sits back and shifts in her chair then, and her head falls to one side, and she shifts again, and she switches the fork to her other hand and puts the first hand on her bottle of water but doesn’t take a sip. It’s making me thirsty, how much she’s not taking a sip.

  “I didn’t curse him out exactly,” I say. “I cursed, and when I cursed I was talking to him. But I didn’t curse him out.”

  She shrugs one shoulder again, lifts her body, and folds her leg underneath her butt. I wish for a second that I could get a better look at that, because her skirt is heavy and thick, like it must weigh thirty pounds. I can’t imagine how she bothers to walk, never mind constantly change position in her chair. When she pulls off her green button-up sweater, I look back at my pizza. It’s gone. I’ve eaten two crappy slices of pizza just to keep something in my mouth and hands. My fingers are greasy, and as smoothly as I can, I rub them across the thighs of my jeans. Say hello to yesterday’s pizza-roll grease.

  The boy—Fry, I mean—is watching us. He’s sitting at the table closest to the lunch line, but he’s not eating. He’s just sitting, and there’s an open textbook in front of him on the table. He’s not even being subtle. Svetlana has her back to him. She probably doesn’t know he’s there, spying on us.

  “He’s right over there,” I say, and quickly add, “Don’t look, probably.”

  “Fry is?” she says, and she looks. Quickly, sure, but it’s not like he would miss it. “Incroyable.”

  “Did you go out or hook up or something?” I say, because I don’t know this girl at all and that’s the kind of thing that can only be taken well. I’m being sarcastic.

  She’s sickened at the thought, I hope. Her face twists and her tongue pokes out between her teeth and down-turned mouth. I even laugh.

  “He’s just a family friend. He’s a member of my social circle against my will and entirely contrary to my wishes.”

  I nod. “Noted.”

  She eats something and lets herself sag in her chair a little. My overheated little brain is cataloging her moves at a furious rate now. It’s unhealthy. A moment passes and she’s bolt upright again. She pushes her tray to the side—Gordy the freshman has finished his lunch and adjourned—and leans over to her tote bag, pushing her longer-by-the-second white-blond hair behind her ears as she does. I see the arch of her back and her hair as it falls from her ears again—she could do with some elf leporine (I looked it up) ears to hold it in place—and the spot on her lower back where her orange T-shirt should reach the top of her skirt, but doesn’t quite.

  Look away. Look away.

  I’m desperate for anything to say, anything to do with my hands. If I had more pizza, I’d eat it. I consider eating her pasta, but then she pops back up. She’s holding a spiral notebook in both hands, and she lays it on the table with a slap.

  “Homework?” I say, but then I glimpse the cover. “Whoa, what is that?”

  Our eyes meet, and hers are beaming. Her smile is beaming. Her hair falls from her ears and settles on her lean, broad shoulders like a silver shawl. A magical silver shawl. She’s a priestess, there’s no doubt. She’s pure magic.

  The cover of this notebook—once probably on the shelf at my mom’s Target, on sale for ninety-nine cents—is now more amazing and wondrous than any spiral notebook from Target should ever expect to be. She’s filled it with ink—blue and red and green and black—in a not-quite-abstract explosion of swirls that shine like heavily laid ink does. They form a dragon, soaring across the center of the page, over a frosty mountain range, at its feet a small medieval-looking village. I’m standing now— I didn’t mean to get up—and leaning across the table, twisting my body to get a better look. “Holy crap. You made that?”

  She nods and tucks her hair again. It falls right out. I nearly try to retuck it for her.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I totally knew you’d like dragons.”

  I squint at her and sit back. My heart thumps once against my ribs, because no, I’m not into dragons. Who’s into dragons at sixteen? But the game—the game is full of dragons, and she can’t know about me and the game. She can’t ever know.

  “So … just so we’re straight,” I say, “you don’t hate me anymore. That right?”

  She shrugs and isn’t smiling or looking at me. “I’m not big on hating,” she says, and after a beat, “generally.”

  “There’s Fry.”

  “I don’t even hate him, really,” she says, and she’s rooting around in that bag again. I wish I hadn’t sat back down. I could still be leaning over the table. I could still be in the perfect position to see her leaning over.

  “But I want to show you something,” she says, sitting upright again. And she drops this thing onto the table—this severely damaged spiral notebook, with its cover in tatters, its pages matted and warped at the edges, its spiral backbone bent and misshapen, no longer connected to the pages at the top and bottom of the spine.

  I’m no dummy. I can see why you might think I am, but I’m really not. So I know right away what this mess is. I shrink in my seat and groan.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not going to make a big thing of it. I meant to. I put it in my bag this morning with the intention of shoving it in your face.”

  “So what’s stopping you?” I ask all casual, but inside I’m anything but casual because that means Svetlana, first thing this morning, was thinking about sitting at lunch with me.

  She shakes her head and holds my gaze, narrows her eyes even. “I wanted to,” she says. “I wanted to pull out this notebook—this symbol of all my summer’s hard work—and I wanted to reignite the fire in my belly. The fire in my belly I felt when I was biking home the other night, after the incident.”

  The incident.

  “The fire in my belly when I spent the entire next day in a supremely foul mood.”

  She drags the word “foul” so it takes a full second to say. To intone. She’s Shakespearean or something all of a sudden. I bet she drives the English teachers positively wild with academic lust.

  “The fire in my belly when I punched Fry in the gut at the Thunder game.”

  Too many questions to process now. My jaw drops. I intend to speak. Nothing comes out, and her fuguelike state is over. Another shrug, another tuck of the hair, and our staring contest ends. “Anyway, it didn’t work. I think you’re okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You shouldn’t drink, though,” she adds, as if I didn’t know. “Because when you do, bad things happen to me and my stuff.”

  I let a short little laugh out and then catch something in the corner of my eye. It’s Fry. He’s walking toward us. Svetlana catches me watching and turns in her seat.

  “This doesn’t look good,” I say. “I should bail.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she snaps, flipping back to face me. Fry is at our table in an instant.

  “Hi, Lana,” he says, and I already feel like a moron, because here I am thinking her name—the one people call her—is Svetlana, when obviously anyone who has known her for any length of time calls her Lana.

  I should also explain that first of all, the name “Lana” is undoubtedly taken on every server in the game. Even “Svetlana” was taken. Hence the two v’s. Plus, changing your toon’s name is not free. It’s, like, twenty bucks.

  “Hello,” she says, and now she’s back to poking pasta.

  “About yesterday … ,” Fry says, but he can’t really get this confrontation off the ground. He sees me watching him and maybe remembers he’s a senior and I’m not. “What are you looking at?”

  I look away, back at the green messed-up notebook, but I try to smirk. I’m not
the omega in this situation. He is. I’m not sure he’s accepted that yet.

  “Fry, don’t start,” Svetlana says. I’m still calling her Svetlana in my head. I think I’ll stick with it. It’s more magical than Lana, and it won’t require a twenty-dollar payment. And I like the feel of the V on my bottom lip. I glance at her and there’s her bottom lip. She pulls it between her teeth—a nervous little tic, maybe—but I want to bite it. I suddenly can’t wait to get home and in the game, where I can be with her in private.

  That sounds more lecherous than it is.

  “What am I starting?” Fry says, because this spat isn’t going to wait around while I daydream about silver-haired Svvetlana. He’s smiling at her, but I can see he’s angry, and getting desperate. His haunches are starting to fluff. His tail is dropping. If we corner him, he’ll probably snap. Might take a finger. “I’m just saying hi.”

  Svetlana wiggles her plastic fork till a single piece of penne slides onto one of the fork fingers. Then she goes after a second.

  “Fine,” Fry says. “Fine, be completely insane. We won’t talk anymore at all. Sound good?”

  She’s got the second finger loaded up. There’s a third one—obviously—but I don’t think she can fit another noodle in the gap. It’s not big enough.

  Fry’s still waiting for her to respond, but she’s still wiggling her fork at a slippery little penne. It’s not going to work.

  I glance up at the boy. He looks back, so I shrug. That doesn’t go over well, probably because I’m still smirking—I look all alpha, like I’ve won some noncompetition we’re having over Svetlana’s love (if only)—and the cornered stray dog with his tail down finally lifts his lips in a snarl and snaps.

  Fry grabs the fork from Svetlana’s slender hand—it’s ink-stained; I hadn’t noticed, but of course it is—and throws it at the wall of windows behind me. The noodles stick to the glass. That can’t have been very satisfying, because next he pushes my tray—laden only with my empty pizza plate and unopened milk—onto my lap. It lands hard, and I stand and jump back, sending my chair slamming into the metal-covered heating system under the windows.