Fan Art (14 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-THREE

It’s after midnight on a school
night and I can’t sleep. Rain is pounding on the roof, and I’d like to think that is what is keeping me up, but it isn’t. My smooth move with
Gumshoe
is gnawing a hole in my stomach and turning me into an insomniac, not to mention lying to my parents about my upcoming whereabouts on Friday, the recent Mason-kissing-Bahti tragedy, or Mason forgetting to tell me that he
is
the runner-up to the valedictorian.

A ping sounds from my window, and I nearly tumble from my desk chair.

Tap, tap.

I peer out into the rain, where a shivering figure hugs himself, standing among the rosebushes—his dark hair plastered to his head and his glasses reflecting squares of light from my window.

I pull on a T-shirt before I race downstairs, jump the baby gate, and open the door.

Mason steps into the foyer without at word. He stands there, dripping rainwater like tears on the tile, until it occurs to me to fetch him a towel. He rubs his face, then his hair, then attempts to dry his glasses. But the moisture smears across the lenses, eliciting a swear word, said—to my surprise—in Spanish.

I lead the way through the dark house and up to my room. Mason sits cross-legged on the floor, the damp towel around his shoulders like a blanket.

“. . . comes into mine and Gabe’s room,” Mason begins midsentence. “Starts goin’ through our stuff, saying we lost the keys to his truck.”

I sit on the floor too, lean in, and try to catch up.

“. . . starts asking me about my prom picture. Who the girl is and if she’s Latina.”

I think he’s talking about his dad. And the pictures I gave him—the ones where Lia and Holland commented on how pretty Bahti looked. I figured he’d like those.

“I say no. And he acts all offended—asks me ‘What? You too good for Latina girls?’”

“What’d you say?”

“Nothin’. I just let him go on. Told me all about his conquistador days. About how when he was my age he had a baby already—like that’s something to be proud of!” He’s talking about Clara and his father’s other family—the one in Mexico that he went to visit that summer in junior high.

“I sorta lost it,” Mason admits, wiping his nose on the towel. “Told him I wasn’t like that. Never wanted to be like that. Never wanted to be him.”

I wince.

“Said it in Spanish. So he’d be sure to understand.”

Holy crap.

“He slapped me so hard I saw stars.” Mason hugs his knees, gives into the tears. “Damn it! He hit me! Hasn’t done that since I was a kid.”

“Sucks,” I say.

“I almost hit him back. I’m taller. Bigger.” Mason’s lip quivers, he leans forward, hides his face in his hands. “I almost hit my own father, Jamie.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just scoot closer and put my hand on his arm, even though I want to wrap my arms around him, hold him until everything feels okay again, protect him from his father and everything that is wrong in the world.

I think of Eden and how I
can
hold her through a million Parachute songs, how I can thread my fingers into hers for support, how she can kiss my cheek and leave a mark, and it’s all okay. And we’re just friends. But I’ve known Mason longer—since elementary school—and I can’t do any of those things just because we’re both male. So I just touch his arm, even though I want to do so much more.

He rests his head on my collarbone as if it’s too heavy to hold up alone.

We stay like that until he’s all cried out. Then I offer him a pair of pajama bottoms, a dry T-shirt, and a sleeping bag on the floor. I send Londa a text, so someone knows where Mason is and that he is all right.

I lay awake for a long time, listening to Mason breathe. Slow and even, peaceful. And so unlike his relationship with his father—filled with obligatory questions and one-word answers, the first asked in Spanish, the reply in English, “Fine.” When it goes any deeper than that, Mason pretends he doesn’t understand—even though he can translate the entire exchange to me at lunch the next day. They’re exactly alike. Mason and his dad, stubborn as goat heads—those weeds with thumbtack-sharp seeds that live for seven years without water—neither one giving ground.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

TWENTY-FOUR

After school on Thursday, I stop
in the band room to pick up my trumpet. The end-of-year concert is coming up, and I need to practice outside of class. I consider practicing at home, but since I have to be at the printer in an hour, I decide to stay here instead. I pull out the sheet music for “I Remember Clifford” and start to play.

I’m lost in the music, in the sweet sadness of the song, so I don’t see her right away. I look up, and Eden makes a loop with her finger to indicate that I should continue, but I stop playing. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says back. “I was, um, wondering if you could drive me to church.”

“Now?” I ask.

“In a few,” she says with a shrug. “Keep playing.”

“Cool, I have somewhere to be at four thirty. I’ll drop you off on the way.”

I go back to my music and wonder why Eden seems different. It isn’t her clothes or her glasses or even her red-gold hair. She looks the same. But there’s something about how she asked me the very same favor as she did two weeks ago. I figure it out. It’s
how
she asked. She asked nicely, as if I might say no. And the timing? It’s not last-minute. She’d have time to walk, maybe even catch the city bus. Again, maybe in case I said no. I finish the song, and start to pack up my music and my trumpet.

“That’s a great piece,” she says. “Not all oompah oompah like the band usually plays.”

This makes me think of German guys in lederhosen, and I laugh. “It’s jazz. That’s why.”

“I just might like jazz,” she says.

“Well, you’re in good company.” I gather my things.

Eden falls in step beside me as we walk down the hall. “I haven’t seen much of you this week.”

“Yeah. It’s been just art class, hasn’t it?”
Rhetorical. I know.
“I’ve been busy. We’ve got this concert, then my AP exam. And my stepdad is out of town—which means I’m promoted to lawn boy.”

“So it’s not me?” she asks.

“What? No.”

“I mean, since prom is over and everything.”

“No,” I say again. “We’re still friends.”

But she doesn’t answer.

Huh?
I
thought
we were friends. I turn my head and
bend down so I can see her face. “I wasn’t just using you for a prom date.”

She stops walking, and I see her smile for a second, but she frowns again.

“What?”

She swipes a finger under her glasses. “I’m so stupid. I dunno, Nick said—I thought—”

I wait, because I hate when I can’t get the words out and people interrupt me.

“I thought that maybe—since prom was over—you didn’t want to, um, hang out anymore.”

“I’d love to hang out,” I say.

“You would?”

“On one condition,” I tell her in mock sincerity.

“What’s that?”

“You teach me how to kill zombies. I want to kick Mason’s butt.”

“Dunno,” she says, suppressing a smile. “That might take a while.” Now the smile is out. “’Cause you suck eggs.”

“Duh,” I tell her. “That’s why I need you.”

“You need me?”

“
Need
you,” I say, and slip my empty hand into hers.

At the printer, they treat me like an important client. The secretary asks me if I want something to drink and gets
me a glass of ice-cold water from a watercooler. I wait in their conference room and look at all the cool things they have printed: pocket folders with silver ink, die-cut holiday cards, annual reports with glossy covers.

Then the pressman walks in holding an oversize sheet of paper with the
Gumshoe
covers on it. He has a five-o’clock shadow, green eyes, and ink stains under his fingernails and down the front of his T-shirt. I wonder if all pressmen are this buff—from lugging around pallets of paper or something.

“. . . it’s a work an’ turn,” he’s telling me as he puts the paper on this table under bright lights. “It’s running this way through the press.” He motions to the paper vertically.

My brain scrambles to process the information.

“So we can make adjustments to the cover and not affect the back.”

“Great,” I say, and step over to study the artwork. I’ve spelled
Gumshoe
and
Lincoln High School
correctly. I sound out
literary
and
magazine
to make sure those are right too.
Phew.
I tilt my head to one side and try to see the fish and the girl on the bridge through the glare of the lights. Finally I find an angle where I can see them, but the fish don’t seem as bright as they were on the proofs. But I’m not sure how to say this. There seems to be a secret language printers use: offset and litho and CMYK
and dot gain. I know a little about it but not what to say now. Besides, I don’t want to hurt cute press guy’s feelings. I pretend to study the page more.

“Sorry I’m late,” the rep says, stepping into the conference room. “Running proofs to people in this traffic is enough to drive me crazy.”

“No problem,” I say.

“Your proofs! They’re still in the back!” she says, and buzzes out of the room.

When she returns, she spreads out the rolled-up paper next to the press sheet. “Looks like we’ll want to bump up the colors, don’t you think?”

She read my mind.

“Yeah,” I say. “So it looks more like this.” I tap the fish on the proof.

“Sure thing,” the pressman says with a grin. “You want to come on back and I’ll show you how it all works?”

I restrain myself from bouncing on my toes. “Of course.”

He leads me down a hall that smells like solvent and through double doors into a massive room with a concrete floor. The sound of machinery is deafening, and the smell is even stronger.

“That’s the Heidelberg!” he shouts, pointing to a printing press as large as my living room—okay, bigger. It’s thrumming like an airplane engine, and paper is shooting out the end closest to us. Printed sheets are
stacked waist high on palettes all around us.

“Over here is the bindery,” the pressman says. “Cutter, stitcher.”

An older guy is feeding thick stacks of paper into a guillotine. It beeps before the blade comes down, slicing the paper neat and clean and square.

“Your magazine’s gonna be over here,” he says about the stitcher—the only quiet machine in the room. It’s off. There are pages of a book lying over metal bars that loop around the room like modern art. “The signatures will fall into the saddle, and
boop, boop
, they’ll be stapled together.”

I nod.
Maybe the secret language of printers isn’t so technical after all.

“An’ we’re in the back on the little press. Love this thing. Nice, tight registration. Four stations—haven’t got your aqueous going yet. Just runnin’ makeready.”

I nod again, even though I didn’t understand a word. I peek into the press and see my fish and my girl. There’s a two-inch stack of them.
Wow.

The pressman puts my sheet on his light table, arranging some weights so the little color boxes printed in the margins line up with a row of buttons on the table. “These control the colors,” he explains as he presses them. “And we’ll see if that helps!”

He hits another button, and the press lets out a warning buzzer before it hums to life.

Soon more
Gumshoe
covers are stacking up at our end. After a few, the pressman reaches in and pulls one out. He puts it on the light table.

It’s more vibrant than the last one, but he seems concerned. He gets out a machine and takes readings from the little squares of color. “Spectrophotometer,” he explains.

I don’t attempt to repeat that one and watch as he presses more buttons, prints more covers, and pulls out another sheet.

This time the koi are sunset orange, the river a shiny blue-black below the bridge. I gasp a little. It’s perfect.

“You like?” he asks me, a smile on his unshaven face.

“Yeah, it looks great!”

“Then all I need is your John Hancock.” He hands me a red Sharpie and gestures at the perfect press sheet.

I must look confused.

“Sign it anywhere. I’ll match all the others to this one.”

I sign it in the middle, careful not to smudge the wet ink.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

TWENTY-FIVE

It has been decided that the
sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in the quad will be, ahem, amended into the shape of a giant phallus.

I have no idea how.

This was Brodie’s idea. And because it was Brodie’s idea (or maybe because he offered to be the model), the senior class agreed that old Abe should be a dick for our senior prank.

“Whoa, man,” Mason says, surveying the contents in the bed of the Redneck’s two-tone pick-up by the light of a streetlamp. “This is crazy!”

“Go out,” Brodie tells him, making a throwing motion with a roll of toilet paper.

Mason and three others fan out over the dark school lawn, and with his magic arm, Brodie lands a roll of Costco-special single-ply in each of their arms.

Mason raises his in triumph, then bends his knees and
sends it sailing, a ribbon of white trailing through the night sky.

I’m still trying to absorb the fact that it’s midnight and I’m at school—and not with good intentions—when Brodie presses a roll into my chest and I take it.