Guy in Real Life

by Steve Brezenoff

  So I click in the name field, and the cursor flashes at me, and I freeze, because I still don’t know her name, and if she doesn’t have a name, she can’t play. Besides, the elves are on the opposite faction from the orcs, and that won’t fly with Greg, so I hit Alt-F4, the game closes, and I flop onto my bed again. School starts tomorrow, anyway.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  LEVEL FOUR

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  CHAPTER 10

  LESH TUNGSTEN

 

  Greg is sitting at my feet, leaning against my neighbor’s locker, our respective class schedules side by side on his knees. With the stubby dirty index finger of each hand, he runs down the papers, comparing our days.

  “This is very bad,” he says.

  “It’s what I told you,” I say, unspooling a bit of clear tape and affixing a slightly wrinkled photo of Salt the Wound I tore from an issue of Kerrang! magazine. It looks good under the chained-up skull from the original cover of Killing Is My Business—the cardboard jacket of the vinyl copy I stole from my dad’s collection. I pretty much usurped his entire vinyl and CD collection—and record player—on the same day he joined the digital era and got an iPod. Anyway, this is called establishing cred. “If you’re going to take honors math, we’re going to have different schedules.”

  “Yeah, but this is nuts,” he says. “We’re not even on the same lunch.”

  “Nope,” I say, and I’m a little relieved. Maybe tenth grade is a good one to start fresh. Double digits and everything. “I’m skej A, you’re skej C.” Schedule, that is. “Look on the bright side: at least you don’t have to have lunch before eleven every stupid morning.”

  He shrugs. “Yeah.”

  I stand back and look at the inside of my open locker door. “What do you think?”

  Greg glances up. “Looks good.”

  I slam it closed. Satisfying.

  Greg stands with a little groan. “First class, three minutes.”

  I nod and slap his hand. “Peace.”

  “Tonight we get you to level twenty, bro.”

  Can’t wait.

  He heads off toward the science wing, and I slip into the nearest room, math for the slow-witted.

  I can practically count his shuffling and squeaking steps; I’m that familiar with his gait. And after five minutes, for the first time in years, Greg and I are more than seventy-five yards apart.

  As a member of skej A, I am expected to eat lunch at ten forty-five a.m. This is pure madness, and I will remind my mother of this when she insists I eat breakfast tomorrow morning. As it is, I can probably force something down, and I line up for the privilege.

  “Ohmygosh.”

  It’s from behind me. It’s on my neck. The voice is secret and soft, and it smells of cucumbers and strawberries. I turn around, and the cafeteria—which is huge and wide and high-ceilinged and was certainly there a moment ago—is gone, because now it’s just her eyes, and her sneer, and the smell of her shampoo.

  “Hi,” I say, and I think my mouth stays open. Flies are getting in. “You go here too, huh?”

  She narrows her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I try, “about the other night. I was—”

  “Drunk,” she finishes. “I guessed that.”

  “Right,” I say, turning back around. She’s too tall and shiny. “Sorry. I don’t usually do that. Drink, I mean. At all, really.”

  She’s quiet now, and I suppose that’s the end of it.

  I stare at the glass-covered offerings of the lunch line today. Baked beans. Dry, cracking chicken swimming in butterlike fluid. Green, yellow, and orange vegetables. As I get closer, the air grows thick with their mixed steams. It’s revolting. But down at the far end, in the very last steam table tray, next to a smallish vat of red sauce, are golden little dumplings, the skins of which bubble with the evidence of having been deep in the fryer.

  Pizza rolls it is.

  She sighs behind me, and for an instant the air is all cool and clean before the foody steam reclaims the back of my neck and the underside of my nose.

  “I got grounded,” I say, not turning around, not sure I even want her to hear me.

  “Good,” she says, and if I can just keep her talking, the whole building will fill up with that scent. It would be a great service to all mankind.

  For the good of everyone, I push on. “It wasn’t just my fault.”

  “Ha!”

  A sharp exhale and toss of her hair. It’s a delicious shotgun of body wash across the back of my head. I’m slain.

  “You’re not supposed to bike on the sidewalk,” I say, and I’m smiling a little, I realize, but still not looking at her, still just shuffling along the line. Soon I’ll reach the pizza rolls and have to order.

  “Says who? It’s not against the law.”

  It actually might be. I know it is in some places, anyway, but I don’t say so.

  She’s not feeling nearly as charitable, I guess, and my sense that she is somehow special—a magical girl I want to be next to—begins to fade when she grabs my shoulder and spins me around. “But do you know what is?” she says. “Drinking when you’re underage.”

  Yup. Definitely not magical.

  I nod. “Too true.”

  And that’s the end of that. I turn back and step up to the pizza rolls, and nod at the woman behind the glass. She serves ’em up and I grab the plate, drop it onto my heretofore empty tray with a thud and a rattle, ceramic on plastic on hollow metal tubes.

  I type in my PIN at the register and step off the line, face the quickly filling cafeteria. Sure, I’m relieved to be apart from Greg for a few hours, but the fact is, facing a crowded cafeteria on your own is less than ideal, spiritually and emotionally. I home in on a sparsely populated spot in the corner, apart from the gathering reunions and preternaturally comfortable seniors at the big window, who seem to me like extras on a miserable teen TV show. I sit and fish in my pocket for my phone and headphones. Lunch alone is all right, I tell myself, as long you’ve got your music.

  I take the chair in the deepest corner, facing the line, and by the time I’m sitting, unfolding pizza rolls so their molten interiors can cool and congeal, she’s leaving the line too, standing there at the exit, scanning the thickening crowd. When she gets bumped by some guy leaving the line behind her and almost tosses her tray, I jump in my chair a little.

  Now that’s empathy. Maybe she is a little magical.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  CHAPTER 11

  SVETLANA ALLEGHENY

 

  “Whoops!” says Fry. “Sorry, blondie.” He cackles a little, because though we’ve determined—with a little help from my preadolescent sister, sure—that he’s in love with me, he still flirts like a seven-year-old, shoving lizards in my shirt and hoping for some sort of reaction.

  He comes up next to me, immune to my glares, and says, “So, where are we sitting?”

  “I have both my hands on this tray, Fry,” I say through my teeth, “so I cannot hit you this time. Be thankful.”

  He laughs again and gives me a little shove—it’s meant to be playful, I suppose. It’s not, and somehow my eyes fall on the boy in black, deep in the corner of the cafeteria, hiding in his hood and headphones, but watching us, me and Fry. I shake my head slowly at him, and the corners of my mouth go up—why? He looks away.

  “I’m not eating with you, Fry,” I say.

  “You’d rather eat by yourself?” he says, and of course I would, but I think this is one of those things where even answering—no matter how thick with s
nark and distaste—will inevitably be interpreted as flirting, and just lead to further aggravation, so I simply walk away, toward the corner, because in spite of everything, the boy in black is the only person in this cacophony I even recognize. That is, apart from Fry and other admittedly recognizable faces I’d still prefer to avoid. I have known many of these children a long time, after all, and have developed a mental list of those to whom I’d prefer solitude.

  If I’m honest, it’s most of them.

  Besides, there are very few empty seats, and several of them are adjacent to the boy in black—these metal boys are intimidating, especially tall ones with facial hair, and the freshmen at his table have given him a wide berth. I’ve never spoken to one of these metal boys, aside from a few moments ago on the lunch line. It could be a fascinating anthropological study. Plus, maybe I’m not done berating him.

  I take the seat opposite him, next to a freshman-looking boy who shifts away from me about three inches in a squeaky shuffle of his plastic blue chair, as if I might bite him or—maybe worse yet—talk to him.

  The boy in black is staring at his pizza rolls, peeling each one and then marveling at the steam it produces. See? Fascinating. When I pick up a single pea between my thumb and index finger, he looks at me, his face still pointed down at the steaming inside-out tiny pizzas, so I can see all the whites in his eyes’ southern hemispheres, laced with red. It gives me an idea for my next embroidery project.

  “What,” he says. No question mark. Such inflection would shatter his black exterior.

  “There’s nowhere else to sit,” I say, and he checks the room to confirm my excuse. It’s mostly true. I eat the pea and stop watching him so he’ll stop watching me. I’m about to tell him about the green notebook, the one fanned open on the windowsill in my bathroom, so he’ll feel positively miserable—just because he’s fascinating doesn’t mean I don’t want him to squirm a little—when he looks over my shoulder and spots Fry. He nods toward him.

  “That dude is coming over here,” he says, and I don’t bother looking over my shoulder.

  “He won’t have a seat,” I say, and then quickly add, “How do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Talk in a normal voice with headphones on,” I say. “I always talk super loud, like a dummy.”

  “Practice,” he says, and he starts rerolling his pizza rolls. His bangs, which are of course black—probably unnaturally black, I decide—fall over his eyes, and he shakes them back. It’s an effeminate little move, and kind of childlike—reminds me of Henny when she reads. When one roll is closed, he takes a bite. Flakes of crust stick to his bottom lip, and his tongue pokes out to grab them and pull them in, with the congealed cheese and sauce.

  “Good?” I say, and he shrugs. “How can you hear me?”

  “It’s not on,” he says. “It’s just a prop right now.”

  Translation: Leave me alone, and this is when Fry sits down, two seats over, between the freshman boy and a girl with a still-closed paper bag in front of her, and her phone in both little hands, thumbing away. I bet she won’t eat.

  Fry leans close to the freshman—I can see his sniveling little grin in my peripheral vision—and in a moment the freshman is getting up with his tray and swapping seats. Fry is next to me, and once again it’s on.

  He’s got the special—the hot meal: an aged chicken breast in butteresque sauce. Also, mashed potatoes. He did not accept the little bowl of peas and corn and carrots. I glance at my own tray, and there it is: a lonely little bowl of peas and corn and carrots, because it is all I was willing to accept from behind the foggy sneeze guard. I feel myself shudder, imagining that Fry probably takes our respective lunches as an indication of how well we complement each other.

  Fry’s food stinks. The boy in black’s food isn’t tempting either, but at least it smells vaguely nice. I mean, I was five once. I ate pizza rolls too. So the smell has a certain nostalgic quality, perhaps of life pre-Henny, even, in our small house up in Como, on the same block as Roan, when I was the growing-like-a-weed White Queen of the block.

  “Hi, blondie,” Fry says. Does he ever stop smiling? “Wasn’t it nice of Gordy to give up his seat so we could sit together?”

  I don’t answer, but my heart is racing, not with heated passion—so obviously—but because in my head I’m working out what I can say. I’m thinking about Henny’s advice—heaven help me—and trying to find the words. I’m trying to find the words I can spit at him if I swivel suddenly in my seat and open with a fierce and sharp “Listen, Fry,” but nothing comes to me … nothing but “Listen, Fry,” which on its own would be less than effective.

  The boy in black looks at me and shakes his head, then adjusts his headphones as if they’re really on. Lucky jerk. I wish I had some headphones.

  I should probably get some. I’m not dying to be one of the kids who walk around in headphones all day, always looking all put-upon, but hey, I like music. I like being left alone. Fry is still talking, or talking again, and now he’s got meat in his mouth, shoved over to one side, shoved into his cheek like he’s a chipmunk—a very loud and annoying chipmunk—and he’s got potatoes in there too. There’s mashed potato shoved into his cheek with all this dry chicken and he’s talking, so little droplets of butter are escaping every time he tries for a P or F sound, or generally anything with a dental or labial stop. It’s making me ill, and even if I had just the thing to say, I couldn’t get it out now. I can feel my face going green, if faces actually do that, and my head going light. An episode is approaching. My days are rife with episodes.

  I’m staring at the boy in black now, envious of his headphones, because he certainly can’t hear the chewing and spitting. I wonder if he’d care. Probably not.

  He’s staring back, and I’m feeling woozy. He pulls off his headphones and lets them hang around his neck. “You okay?” he says, I think, but it’s like he’s lip-synching, because I don’t hear any of it. I just hear a moist chomping at my left ear. Almost unconsciously, I shrug on that side, and then shake my head at the boy in black, because I’m not okay. I’m not at all okay. I’m not okay in the biggest way.

  He looks at Fry, his face going hard, and his front teeth are on his lower lip for an instant, like he probably said the F word, among others, and I squint at him, trying to make out the words. I can’t. He seems like he might get up. He glances at me, and I get the vaguest sense of motion to my left: Fry’s tray is leaving. I hope for an instant that Fry will follow it. He does.

  “Hey, are you okay or what?” the boy in black says again, and this time I nod a little. “What the hell was that all about?” I can hear him now, like through an old radio picking up signals from another era, but I just shake my head: a little I don’t know, and a little Don’t ask.

  The blood in my veins is rushing back where it belongs, from wherever it gets to during an episode. The skin on the palms of my hands and on the top of my head is tingling—pins and needles, jabbing at light speed against me, micrometers apart. Tiny incessant pricks.

  Just like Fry.

  I giggle, and the boy looks at me again, and I look back, and now it’s my turn to say it. “I’m sorry.”

  He just stares. I go on. “Sorry about that. He … I don’t like him. But his family is friends with mine, or something, and he’s always around. He usually has a tiny trumpet. And I think he’s in love with me or something. It’s all very …”

  He’s still staring.

  “It’s all very uncomfortable.”

  He nods. “Well, he went away. I don’t think he’ll come back soon. That was pretty freaky.”

  Freaky. Of course. What else? Because I’m freaky.

  “Anyway, sorry,” I say, and poke my fork into three peas, so there’s one on each tine, and then pull them off and into my mouth. I like the feel of the plastic fork—the rough, biodegradable kind—as it scrapes through my teeth.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says, and I guess it’s over, because there’s a lon
g silence. He keeps eating his reassembled pizza rolls, and I continue to work on my little bowl of yellow and green and orange. They’re cold now; have you noticed how quickly bright steamed little veggies get cold? It’s astonishing. With enough salt, they’re tolerable little pebbles that go to mush in my mouth.

  “Does that happen a lot?” he asks, timing the question as well as the servers at Green Mill, who always come up to the table to ask how everything is at the exact moment that everyone in my family has just shoveled a forkful of something into their mouths and therefore can only nod awkwardly and mumble something unintelligible.

  Which is my first instinct: an urgent and rushed, head-shaking, pea-filled: “No!” At his smirk, I regain composure and grab a napkin, quickly wipe my mouth, and then cover the speck of green that’s landed on my tray. I’m Fry all over again, aren’t I?

  “No.” I push my tray an inch or so away—finished—and add, “Well, sometimes. I zone out sometimes, like, when the situation calls for it.”

  “Like narcolepsy?” he says. “Do you pass out?” He doesn’t speak with the excited interest of a ten-year-old boy meeting a circus freak, but with the disinterested frigidity of a scientist—kind of like Henny, actually.

  I shrug. “I have,” I say. “I have passed out. But I don’t usually. One time I fell off a ladder.” His eyes go wide, or as wide as they seem to be able to. He’s like Jughead: his eyes seem mostly closed, most of the time. But it’s true: one time I was on a ladder, at the old house, helping Dad clean the gutters. I had on his extra pair of work gloves—heavy and thick and crusty, and sort of baggy, despite my long fingers. When I reached a little too far for a sodden bunch of leaves, the ladder shook. It was fine. Mom was down there with both hands on it, holding it pretty steady. But I swooned, and then went deaf, and the world went fuzzy and white. Then I fell off, right backward, right on Mom. No one was hurt.

  “I’m Svetlana,” I say, on the off chance we’re polite, mature individuals.

  “Hi,” he says, and he briefly wrestles with decorum, I guess. “Um, I’m Lesh.”