Fan Art (3 page)

“I hope I survive,” Mason says. “Five APs and Purdy’s
exam. It all just might kill me.”

“You’ll ace ’em,” I say.

Mason chuckles. “Thanks, man.”

I stand up. I reach for Mason’s hand and pull him to his feet. “So, about prom. You want to share a limo with me, Holland, DeMarco, Lia, and Michael?”

“Don’t you need a date first?”

“Ouch,” I say, and clutch my chest.

This makes him smile. “See?” he says. “McCall.”

“No McCall,” I tell him. “Bahti will kill you if you back out, and I told Michael we’d share a limo.”

Grinning as if he’s pulling my leg, he shakes his head and walks toward the building.

I follow him through the door. I’m so confused. He says he’s going to prom because I’m going to prom, but then he goes and mentions McCall again—like he doesn’t want to go to prom. I don’t get it. I don’t know about him, but I want to get dressed up, ride in a limo, dance, and party until sunrise. It’ll be one of those things you never forget. Besides, I’ve never gone to a school dance because of the lack-of-date problem. But I like to dance. Well, I think I’d like to dance. I want to go to prom, and I know it’ll be one hundred times better with Mason there. “It’ll be fun,” I say, trying to convince him. “Promise.”

“
McCall
would be fun,” he says, and walks down the hall toward the locker room, leaving me standing there, looking at the back of his green T-shirt and at how the
worn fabric is pulled taut across his shoulder blades. He runs one hand through his hair, his bicep rising in a smooth hill of honey-colored skin. I watch, mesmerized, as his hair tangles between his fingers and springs free again, one curl, then another.

What is up with him?

What’s up with me?

I didn’t just check out my best friend.
Did I?

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

FOUR

No. No, no. No.

I did not just do that.
I can’t believe I just did that!
Mason and I have been friends since third grade, and I have never looked at him like that. Other guys, yeah, but not him. It should be in the Bible.
Thou shalt not check out thy best friend.

I wait a minute to catch my breath and the last shred of my sanity before I follow Mason into the locker room. I head for the sinks and splash water onto my face in an attempt to straighten out my thoughts. I’m okay with bent thoughts—I have them all the time—but checking out Mason? That’s going too far. He’s my best friend. And everyone knows friend crushes are the worst—even guy-girl friend crushes—drama, angst, broken hearts, you name it. It’s bad—real bad. And straight-guy-gay-guy friend crushes? I don’t even want to think about that apocalypse.

I take a deep breath and watch as the water collects along my upper lip. I mouth the words,
Mason. Is. Not. Cute.

But I’m
so
lying to myself. Under his glasses, mop of curls, and total lack of fashion sense is a square jaw, a straight nose, and an amazing smile. And, well, totally kissable lips.
Mason. Is. Not. Cute. Not cute. Not cute.
I chant in my mind as I splash more cold water on my face and then rub it dry with the hem of my shirt.

I check out my hair in the mirror. It’s in need of a major overhaul. Sweat is so not a hair product. I pick a piece of dandelion fuzz from over my left ear and stick my head under the tap. I pull off my T-shirt and dry my hair with it. I grab my emergency hair gel from my locker and run a dollop through my shortish sandy-blond hair, arranging it so and into a perfect rolled-out-of-bed sexy mess. Satisfied, I get dressed and apply half a stick of deodorant.

By the time I’m done, Mason is gone.

In art class, I sit in my usual seat next to Eden.

“Challis was looking for you,” she says.

“In a good way?” I ask with a flicker of hope. Maybe Challis would ask me to prom. That would save me a whole lot of trouble in the date-finding department—she’s the president of the Gay-Straight Alliance and clearly batting for the home team. We’d go as friends.

“Not exactly,” Eden admits.

I see Challis, tall and thin, stomping into the room like a moody runway model.

She whips out a sheet of paper then slaps her hand down on it, cementing it to the table in front of me. “You rejected my drawing!”

I peer around her fingers and recognize the image on the paper: the manga-style drawing from yesterday’s
Gumshoe
meeting. “We vote by committee?” I say, but it sounds more like a question.

She barks half a laugh. “No, you don’t. You do art. Lia, poetry. Holland, flash fiction. Michael, shorts.”

I ease the drawing out from under her hand. It’s a guy dressed like Magellan, only wearing a beret and holding a paintbrush. He looks familiar, like he’s from a game or a book.

Eden leans over to get a better look. “Nice,” she says, admiring the picture.

“You have something against Leo?” Challis accuses.

Now I recognize him—a young Leonardo da Vinci from
Assassin’s Creed
. “No, but I am looking for original characters, not fan art.”
Phew.
A legitimate reason actually popped into my brain and came out of my mouth!

Challis’s arched eyebrows form a straight line.

“And”—I fish for another brilliant answer—“I’m really looking for art that I can pair with writing, like a
story set in the Renaissance and a painting inspired by da Vinci—that’d be cool.”

This explanation does nothing to lift the eyebrow frown from her face.

I try again because I like Challis. “And I’d kill for a graphic short—give me one of those, and I’ll get it in.”

“A graphic short story?” she echoes.

I nod. Truth is, I admire Challis, maybe even wish I was more like her—out, proud, and in the GSA. Plus, she’s an amazing artist.

“Any topic?”

“Um—” Eden chimes in, as if warning me against agreeing to this.

“Anything I can get past Taylor. So, like, no f-bombs, okay?” I clarify, already imagining how a comic would look awesome in
Gumshoe.

Challis bites her lip while the corners of her mouth curl up into a smile. “You’ll accept it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“’Cause it’ll be a ton of work,” she explains.

“Yeah,” Eden says. “Original characters are more time consuming.”

“Promise,” I tell Challis. “Original characters, and it’s in.”

After school Mason sags into the locker next to mine. “Gabe got my shift,” he says about his brother. “Wanna
save the world from the zombie apocalypse?”

“Sounds great,” I say, and glance over at him. He looks like he always does at the end of the day, tired but content, and as if he just put an
X
through the calendar square in his day planner. His curls have straightened a little, and they hang in a curtain around the frames of his glasses.
See
, I tell myself.
He’s not that cute. No way I have a crush on him.

I throw my books in my backpack, and we walk out to the student parking lot, grumbling about the pop quiz in government. Mason tells me the correct answers, and I calculate that I scraped by with a C. I drive the three blocks while Mason cranks the radio.

After a few hours of Mason killing zombies and my character getting killed by them, Mason’s cell chirps with a text. He pauses the game to read it. He frowns.

“What?” I ask.

“My mom’s working late,” he says.

Mason’s mom works at the twenty-four-hour supermarket, and late can mean really late. But this isn’t why he’s frowning. “And I’m hungry.”

Personally, I’m famished. One of Mrs. V’s home-cooked meals would have really hit the spot.

“She said there’s hamburger in the fridge,” he adds, standing up.

Soon we have a couple of burgers sizzling in a skillet on the stove, and rolls are toasting in the oven. Mason
has his head buried in the pantry, looking for a can of chiles, when his dad and Gabe come in.

“Smells good,” Gabe says. “What’s for dinner?”

“Ham—” Mason starts to answer, appearing again with a can in hand.

But Mr. V cuts him off, asking questions in his rapid-fire Spanish. Not angry but not kind, either.

“At work,” Mason manages to answer one before another round of questions begins.

I pull two or three words from the volley:
little girls
and
cooking
or maybe
kitchen
.

Mason presses his lips together, his skin darkening with embarrassment or anger before he tries to hide it. He opens a drawer and rummages around for a can opener.

Mr. V continues, gesturing to the backyard and saying something about
huevos
.

I flip the two burgers over, getting the gist. We are, in his opinion, playing house like little girls by cooking in the kitchen instead of grilling like real men.

Gabe finds two beers in the fridge and gives his father one, ushering him out of the kitchen. “Put on another two, would you, Mace?” he asks on his way out.

“Effin’ A,” Mason mutters. “Make your own goddamn dinner.”

We eat our chile and-cheese-topped hamburgers on the steps that lead to the backyard, sharing a bag of chips and drinking orange soda from cans. We’re quiet for a
while, and I remember when Mason went from idolizing his father to antagonizing him.

The summer after seventh grade—the summer Mason spent in Mexico—was the worst summer of our lives. Mine because Mason was gone. His because he dug up a family secret. See, Mason’s father has two families: one here and one in Mexico. Mason is the youngest of five children total, Londa and Gabe being his full brother and sister.

His half sister, Clara, had come to visit the summer before. The trip was a birthday present. She had just turned twenty. She made the best tortillas, and we ate our fill while teaching her dirty words in English. We said she’d need to know them now that she was living in the States. She laughed, ruffled Mason’s hair, and said he was just like their brother Pedro. He’d shrugged off her comment, thinking he was nothing like Pedro. Pedro, he imagined, was more like Gabe, a tall, muscular teenager interested in cars and girls. Or maybe girls, then cars.

But when he met Pedro the awful summer that followed, he learned Clara was right. Pedro wasn’t much older than Gabe like he had thought he would be. He was fourteen—just a year older than Mason and me. And the math was off. Seriously off.

Gabe confirmed Mason’s suspicions—that Pedro was their half brother and, yes, his father had cheated on their
mom with Clara’s mother. Pedro was the result. Mason asked Gabe why no one in the family ever told him about the affair. And Gabe said, “You’ve always known about Pedro. I just didn’t know you thought he was eighteen.”

In Mason’s mind, Pedro’s age changed everything.

He had heard the family story that his father wasn’t there when he was born—a month premature. He knew that his mom had named him Mason and that his father didn’t like it—he had planned on naming him Diego so all five of them would have Spanish names. Now Mason knew about Pedro, and—according to Londa—that their father had been in Mexico with Pedro instead of at the hospital with their mom.

Mason is his mother’s maiden name, and it fits—because he is pretty brick-headed sometimes. That summer, Mason built a wall between himself and his father. He stopped speaking Spanish. Not a word. He signed up for French the following year, even though he could have tested out of all the foreign language credits, like Gabe and Londa did. And now? Exchanges between Mason and his father sound pretty much like what just happened in the kitchen.

“Do you think Sal would hire me?” Mason asks, breaking the silence.

“You want to mow lawns?”

“More like I don’t want to work for my dad.”

“Probably,” I say. “I’ll tell Frank you’re interested.”

“Thanks,” he says, and takes a bite of his burger. When he’s finished chewing, he changes the topic. “You should ask that art-geek girl to prom. I think she likes you.”

“Challis? She’s a lesbian. And pissed that she didn’t get into
Gumshoe
,” I say, even though Challis would be a perfect prom date. If she wasn’t mad at me.

“No. The other one. The one you sit with?”

“Eden O’Shea?”

“Yeah.”

“Eden likes me?” I never got that vibe from her. I mean, we’re strictly platonic.

“In a googly-eyed-fan-girl way, yeah.”

“It’s not like that.”

Mason presses his lips together, but the corner of his mouth curls up in a grin.

I elbow him.

“Sooo . . . ,” he drawls. “You’re just friends, huh?”

“Yeah. Just friends.”

“Girls don’t want to go as friends, though,” Mason says. “They want romance, slow dancing, hotel rooms.”

“Hotel rooms?” I hadn’t thought of that.

“Yeah, duh. Why do you think prom is at the Riverside Hotel?”

The color has probably drained from my face. There is no way I’d be caught dead in a hotel room with a girl.
Okay, well, maybe if I
were
dead.

“Kidding,” Mason says quietly, bumping my shoulder.

I bump his shoulder back and let the silence fall around us once again. We don’t talk, just eat. Our elbows brush each other’s on occasion, but neither of us moves away.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

FIVE

Michael has a date. Mason has
a date. The popular guys like Brodie and Kellen have had dates since elementary school. I still do not have a prom date.

But this doesn’t stop me from marching up to the prom ticket table after school. “Two please,” I say to Bahti.

“We’re sharing a limo,” she says in her British-tinged accent.

“Yeah.” I hand her the money.

“Who’s your date?” she asks, friendly because we know each other from band.