I grab the bike. It’s not that I want to go anywhere, but I need something to hold on to before my legs fail me.
“How … how did you … when did you realize it was me?” I ask.
“On my first day of school when I suddenly found myself in the middle of the story I’d been reading for a week. At first I thought maybe it was a huge coincidence, but then I started reading about myself, so …”
I stare at the ground, hoping for a hole to open up that I can crawl into and pull in after me. In a flash I recall every single ugly thing I’ve written about him, thinking I was talking about him behind his back when I was actually saying these things right to his disfigured face without even knowing it. I’m dying of embarrassment, but at the same time I feel exposed and violated in my privacy.
I know I’ve been writing down my story for people to read.
Just not people who actually know me.
“Besides,” Philip continues, “you’re using everyone’s real names. Not sure why you thought that would be a good idea.”
“Well, it worked great for me until you came into my life,” I say, and I immediately regret it.
He looks at the passing traffic again.
“Sorry, that came out wrong.”
He shakes his head. “Never mind.”
“No, seriously. It was a stupid idea to use real names. I can’t blame you for that.”
Without bothering to look at me, he says, “I have to go.”
Behind me I hear a car pull up. It’s Mr. Thongrivong in his old clunker. Without another word, Philip gets into the passenger seat and they take off.
As I watch them leave, closely followed by a shiny black Tesla, my mind is a whirlwind of all sorts of thoughts and emotions hitting me in the face like hail in a hailstorm that I’m exposed to with no shelter and no clothes.
I turn my bike around and I’m about to take off when another cyclist is blocking my way. It’s Alfonso, of all people. He glares at me and doesn’t say a word.
“Oh, hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he replies with little enthusiasm.
“So listen, can we talk? I’m really sorry I lied to you, and I want to explain how that came about. Actually, there are several things I need to explain to you.”
Alfonso sighs and looks at the handlebar of his bike for a few moments. Then he looks me in the eyes and says, “Not now, Matthew. I’m running an errand for my dad.”
Not now doesn’t mean no. It simply means not now. So he’s actually throwing me a bone—albeit a tiny one—and it’s almost embarrassing how I pounce on it like a stray dog that hasn’t had a proper meal in days. “Okay, can I come over later then? I really need to talk with you.”
Again he takes his time to reply. Finally, he looks at his watch and says, “In an hour maybe.”
“Perfect!” I say. “Thank you.”
He could have said an hour after midnight in the cemetery and don’t forget to bring a dead cat, and it would have been just as fine with me.
Without another word he gets back in the saddle and takes off.
“See you later!” I call after him. He’s shaking his head in response, knowing exactly how desperate I feel.
I make my way back home, and when I turn into our driveway, Greg is still in the garage. He looks surprisingly cheerful. That’s probably because he’s not alone.
“Matthew Elliot Dunstan!” Mom fires at me as I dismount the bike.
“Sorry, Mom. I just had to do something real quick. I can help you in the garden now.”
“I guess you could,” Mom says. “Except for the next seven days you’re not going to leave your room unless you have to go to the bathroom, to school, or to attend breakfast and dinner.”
“Mom!”
“Starting now, Matthew!”
“But Mom! I have to be over at Alfonso’s in an hour. It’s really important!”
“You can talk to Alfonso tomorrow at school. For now, you’re grounded.”
“Mom …”
“Matthew,” she says with a tone in her voice that leaves no room for interpretation.
I hand the bike over to Greg, who isn’t even trying to conceal the stupid smirk on his stupid face, and I make my way inside.
“I’m very disappointed, Matthew,” I hear Mom call after me.
Slamming the front door shut behind me is the only response I can come up with.
I run upstairs. Being grounded usually also means a restriction of my phone and Internet privileges. Mom didn’t explicitly mention it in the heat of the moment, but it’s just a matter of time until she’ll remember and confiscate my phone. Blocking my Internet won’t be quite as easy. Mom and Dad are too technologically illiterate to block the WiFi just for me without cutting it off for the rest of the family. Greg and Zoey know how to block individual users in the router, but we have a mutual silent agreement to refuse assisting our parents in enforcing cruel and unusual punishments.
As soon as I’m in my room, I pull out my phone and speed-dial Alfonso’s number. He answers after the third ring.
“¡Hola!”
“Alfonso? It’s me, Matt.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, and I can hear how he rolls his eyes. “Caller ID, you know?”
“Right. Well listen, I’m really, really sorry, but something came up, so I can’t make it. I got grounded.” I give Alfonso a few seconds to say something. When he doesn’t, I add, “For real this time.”
Finally a response. He snorts.
“I know this sounds totally stupid, but I literally got grounded a minute ago and I wanted to let you know before Mom confiscates my phone. I’ll explain it all tomorrow, okay?”
I listen, but there’s nothing to listen to. Alfonso’s already hung up on me.
It probably serves me right.
I throw myself on the bed, curling up and hugging my pillow. The tornado that’s been wreaking havoc inside my mind slowly dies down, the quiet after the storm revealing the damage it has caused. Being grounded sucks big time, but it’s actually the least of my problems. What really gets to me the most is the fact that Alfonso hates me right now, and I have no idea what—if anything—I can do to make him unhate me. I need to talk to him. I should have talked to him a long time ago, but now that I’m finally ready to do it I can’t. For now, the only way to talk to him is at school which sucks due to school’s inherent time constraints and lack of privacy. So that sucks. And then there’s 2-b-pretty, who is not Sandy, or any other girl for that matter, or anything like I imagined her to be.
Him.
Whatever.
The shock of that revelation is still eating away at me. How could this happen? How could I be so stupid? In my defense I have to say that Philip’s online and offline personalities are diametrically opposed, and nobody in their right mind could ever have connected one to the other. And what are the odds of him coming across my Wattpad just a few months before meeting me in real life? The only way I could have prevented this whole mess would have been by not putting my story online—or by not having been born. Both were not an option. There is nothing I could have done differently. Therefore, I have no reason to be mad at myself.
Yet, I’m feeling mad.
Hey, I’m only human. I have to direct my anger at someone, don’t I?
Philip.
How dare he?
How dare he weasel his way into my life pretending to be pretty despite his ugly face and giving me relationship advice when he doesn’t even have any friends? That is my gut reaction. Then my brain butts in to remind me that at first, Phil thought what he was giving me wasn’t relationship advice but a simple story critique. Because apparently knowing one stupid quote from Macbeth makes him a freaking literary critic or whatever.
Fine.
But then he realized that the story wasn’t just a story. It was real life. It was my life he was messing with, and he knew exactly what he was doing! That’s what infuriates me. From day one I felt a strange kind of connection with her/hi
m/whatever, a closeness that I didn’t even know where it was coming from, and everything he said to me seemed to make perfect sense. He was giving me sound, reasonable advice, well-intentioned and with Matt’s best interests at heart.
My best interests.
How dare he? What made him think I needed help from a pathetic lowlife with no friends who sounds like a freaking duck when he talks? How did he even come up with all the smart-assed things he said? A smart person can fake being stupid, but how can a stupid person fake being smart? That doesn’t even make any sense.
Or does it?
God, I hate him!
I hate him so much that I want to punch him in his stupid, disfigured face.
What I hate him most for is how he makes me think all those mean, ugly things about him when all he ever did was trying to be friendly. And then he had the audacity to not even flinch when I said the meanest, most vile things about him to his online alter ego. His behavior towards me didn’t change one bit even though he knew exactly what I was thinking about him.
Now who’s the pathetic lowlife?
I should be ashamed of myself, and I am. I’m so ashamed, I can never face him again, except I have to work with him on that stupid term paper about Romeo and freaking Juliet.
Screw you, William Shakespeare! Screw you and your stupid drivel about two teenagers in love who aren’t meant to be together. Your story sucks!
My life sucks, too.
My life sucks in Shakespearean proportions.
I clench my fist and punch my pillow tree, four, five times. Then I take the pillow, toss it against the headboard, and bury my face in it, trying not to burst into tears. I lie there for a long while, trying to free my mind of anything that might upset me, which is everything. Eventually all my thoughts slowly ebb away and I doze off.
When I wake up it’s nearly dark outside, and the tide of depressing thoughts is on its way back in. I don’t want to deal with them again, not now, not ever, so I grab my laptop for some distracting entertainment. Maybe watching a couple of videos of natural disasters will cheer me up. I click on the YouTube icon in my browser’s menu bar and … nothing happens.
My Internet is dead.
“Oh what the hell,” I mutter, and at the same time there’s a knock on my door.
It’s Zoey. “Matt? Dinner!”
I catch up with her on the landing.
“Is your Internet working?” I ask.
“Yeah, why?”
Without a reply I storm down the stairs. Zoey comes rushing after me because she senses there’s a show not to be missed. When we enter the dining room, Mom, Dad, and Greg are already sitting at the dinner table.
“Why is my Internet not working?” I ask no one in particular as I take my seat next to Greg.
“You know why, Matthew,” Mom says. “It’s part of being grounded.”
“I get that,” I say. “But since when do you know how to block individual users?”
With a smug smile, Mom shakes her head. “That’s not important.”
“Oh, but I think it is,” Zoey says, looking at Greg. I look at Greg too, and so does Dad. Greg is the worst actor in the world, though, and the perfectly innocent look on his face is a dead giveaway. If he really were innocent, he’d be outraged to be accused of treason.
“Well?” I say.
Greg shrugs. “Well what?”
“Wow,” Zoey says, seeing through his charade. “Who’d have thought you’d stoop so low? So much did they pay you?”
“Nobody paid nobody anything,” Mom intervenes and turns to me. “And it would show some strength of character on your part if you could just gracefully accept your punishment.”
“I do accept my punishment, but I think I have a right to know by what means it is enforced.”
“I don’t think you do, actually,” Mom says.
I shake my head in disbelief. “In a democracy this would be a case for the supreme court. But this family isn’t a democracy, I guess.”
Dad raises his eyebrows at Mom as if to say, ‘He’s got a point, you know?’ but he doesn’t say anything.
“Stop whining already,” Greg finally says. “If you hadn’t stolen my bike—”
“I didn’t steal your bike, I borrowed it. And I told you it was an emergency.”
Zoey snorts at Greg. “I can’t believe you unilaterally terminated a lifelong mutual agreement because of your stupid bike!”
“Whatever,” Greg says and shrugs.
Dad looks at me. “What was so urgent that you had to borrow his bike anyway?”
“I had to meet someone at the library.”
“Probably his boyfriend,” Greg says.
“Shut the hell up!”
“Language, Matthew!”
“So who was it?” Dad wants to know.
I drop my cutlery on my plate. “It was Sandy, okay?”
Technically that’s not even true, but at the time I thought it was.
Mom and Dad exchange proud, sympathetic glances.
“Well,” Mom says, “I’m sorry, but you can’t just grab somebody’s bike without asking and take off. There has to be some kind of punishment.”
I sigh. “I already told you, I accept the punishment! Does anyone in this house ever listen to anything I say?”
“Was it at least worth it?” Dad asks. “I mean, did you meet your sweetheart?”
“She’s not my sweetheart, she’s just a friend,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Anyway, no. She wasn’t there.”
“Bummer,” Zoey says.
“Yeah, welcome to my life.”
Greg snorts. “You don’t even have a life.”
“Greg, I think we’ve heard enough from you today,” Dad says, and I can’t help but add add, “Or any day.”
Under the table, Greg stomps on my foot and I yelp, perhaps a little louder than necessary.
“All right, Greg,” Mom says, “as you’re well aware, we don’t tolerate physical violence in this family. You know what that means.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did. And you’re grounded for a week. That includes your phone and Internet privileges. Good thing I know how to block individual users in the router.”
“Wow,” Zoey says shaking her head. “Karma is such a bitch.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When we leave for school in the morning, Zoey doesn’t waste any time to get on my case.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
I frown at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Matt. The limpet, seriously? You got yourself in this whole mess over Sandy when you just could have called or texted her? I don’t believe that for a second. Who were you really going to meet at the library? Chris?”
I sigh, knowing full well that denial is futile. Zoey can see through my lies like through an open window. Besides, overnight—a night that was sleepless for the most part—I’ve finally come to the obvious conclusion that all my tactical lies were a big strategic mistake. I need a new approach, and that new approach is: speak the truth or don’t speak at all. The latter not being an option with Zoey, I finally tell her about my fictionalized online version of events and about 2-b-pretty, my biggest fan and his real identity.
“Wow,” Zoey says when I’m finished. “That’s an interesting turn of events. You made a new friend. And without any help, too. Didn’t see that one coming.”
“Very funny.”
“So Phil is gay too, huh?”
Although the answer to that has to be pretty obvious to anyone who watches him for five seconds, I say, “You know what, I don’t even care. Why would I? I mean, just look at the freak. He annoys the crap out of me.”
“You didn’t find him that annoying before you knew what he looks like, though, did you?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind,” she says cryptically. “And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
> I scowl at her. “What?”
“Mrs. Spelczik was my English teacher too when I was a freshman, you know? My term paper that year was about A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
That Shakespeare dude is really starting to get on my nerves.
“That’s a lovely anecdote, Zoey, but it doesn’t have any practical application in my situation.”
“Oh, I think it does. You said it yourself, Matt. You said at one point you were so fond of 2-b-pretty’s comments that you were secretly wishing she were a guy. Why would you say that if not for the plain and simple reason that you were having a crush on her? Him. Whatever.”
“Look,” I say as we reach the corner of Vine and Harper. El Niño is nowhere to be seen. “I have more pressing issues on my mind at the moment, okay?”
“Right,” Zoey says, gracefully following my lead into a different topic. “So what are you going to do about Alfonso then?”
I shrug. “What am I supposed to do? He obviously doesn’t want to talk to me, and I can’t even blame him. I mean, he should be here by now, but he isn’t, so I guess he’s taking a different route to school today. At lunch he’s gonna sit at a different table … I want to talk to him and explain everything. I really do. But—”
“There is no but, Matthew! You made this mess, you clean it up. And stop whining already. Alfonso doesn’t owe you anything, so don’t expect him to make this easy on you. Just because he’s avoiding you right now doesn’t mean he doesn’t want you to keep trying or that he doesn’t care. He does care about you, you know that. But if you don’t keep trying, he’ll think that you’re the one who doesn’t care. You don’t want that.”
“But how—”
“Look, I get it,” she interrupts me. “He’s sulking right now. Get over it, and get over yourself. Grab him over lunch and talk to him. And if he doesn’t want to listen, make him listen and tell him the truth. The whole truth, everything.”
I mull over her words for a few moments, then I say, “I’m so freaking scared.”
“Man up,” is her stone-cold reply.
* * *
I get a hold of Alfonso outside of our classroom before the first period. He doesn’t say a word when I stop him. He just looks at me with an indifferent look on his face.
Cupid Painted Blind Page 14
