Goth Girl Rising (17 page)

There's a blank moment of total silence. I'm still staring at Courteney. I have to admit—he did a good job. It's not like he traced a porn star or a Playmate or something. She looks like a
real
woman, just naked. I mean, a gorgeous and incredibly in shape woman, but still. She's not posed like a model or anything. Real. Not fake.

"So, uh," he stammers into the quiet, "I still have a week before I have to turn it in. Do you want to look at it?"

I grit my teeth. God, I just want to tear his head off. And throw him down on the bed. Both things. I don't get it.

I hear myself say, "Sure." Just like that.

And then: "So, hey, Fanboy..." Trying to sound casual. "Where's the stuff I saw before?"

He snaps his fingers. "Right! God, I'm an idiot..." He jumps up and rummages in a pile of papers in the corner between the desk and the bookcase. I find myself watching his every move. What the hell is wrong with me?

"Here," he says, coming back to me with a stack of
Literary Paws.
"These are all the chapters you, uh, missed. While you were, you know."

I snatch the mags from him. They're not what I want or need. "In the
hospital,
Fanboy. The loony bin. The Maryland Mental Health Unit."

He flinches, which is nice, but not as nice as getting those original pages.

Or kissing him.

OK, I'm officially insane.

I sit there and I flip through one of the magazines and try to come up with a way to ask him for the
original
art pages. It gets too quiet. He's hovering over me and I can tell he wants me to say something about
Schemata,
because he's needy like that. But it's all blurring together for me—I can barely focus on the pages or the panels.

So I say the first thing that comes to my mind: "It's stupid to put it out like this, Fanboy." (When in doubt, when uncomfortable, I've learned it's always best to fall back on the easy stuff—insults.) "A chapter at a time. It's stupid. Was that another one of
Cal's
ideas? It's supposed to be a graphic novel."

"But—"

"
Novel,
Fanboy.
Novel.
Like, a complete book. Something you sit down and read all at once, you know?"

"Dickens serialized
his
novels, and he was—"

"You think I effing care about Charles effing Dickens? He wasn't doing comics, Fanboy."

He snorts at me, another indicator that he's forgotten who's in charge here. "Oh, please. Gaiman did
Sandman
in issues, you know." When I don't say anything, he repeats it and says, "You
did
know that, right? That
Sandman
originally came out monthly, in single issues? It took them
years
to collect the whole thing into graphic novels."

Yeah. I knew. I forgot, but I knew.

I read your greatest work pretty much by accident.

I didn't even know the whole
Sandman
series existed at first. I wasn't into comic books at all. I was a kid and Mom had just died and Roger had taken me to the library. I can't remember why. He did a lot of shit back then that was just, like, flying by the seat of his pants, trying to fill up the days with stuff until it was time for both of us to go to bed. He was trying to numb his entire life, and mine, too.

The thing is, though, that I wanted to feel. Roger thought that the way to deal with his grief was to feel nothing. I knew the truth, though. I knew that the only way to deal with it was to feel
too much.

So there I was at the library, wandering around, waiting for Roger, because even back then I wasn't hugely into reading. I was in the teen section and I walked past this display.

And there it was.

This graphic novel I'd never seen before (not that I'd been looking), with a dark cover and the word DEATH on it. DEATH. It was huge.

I thought it would freak Roger out, so I picked it up. It was
Death: The High Cost of Living.
And I remember spending a lot of time just thinking about the title. It was so profound. It's like, it wasn't just a title—it was a
statement.
It was a
philosophy.

I didn't know who you were. I didn't know that you were this bigshot, award-winning writer. I didn't know that this was just a side story to the larger
Sandman
story. I just knew that it was dark and it said DEATH and the title alone made me think.

So I checked it out and brought it home and read it in, like, five seconds.

And oh my God.

It was like nothing else I'd ever seen. It was dark and moody, but also funny and clever. It could have been just relentless and sad, and, yeah, it had some of that, but there was more to it.

It's like, I
got
it. Didi was ... Didi was nothing like me, but that didn't matter. She had it
together.
She was mysterious. She understood things that no one else understood. She said cool shit that made sense after you thought about it.

And she wore all black and was all gothy, which I instantly loved.

I loved it
all.
I loved that Sexton called his mom Sylvia, just like I called my dad Roger. I loved the crazy British lady, Mad Hettie, who was looking for her heart. I loved the whole idea that death was a person, a comforting presence. Somehow, it made what happened to my mom make a little more sense. Somehow. I liked the idea that there was a person there to tell her, "OK, that's it" at the end.

So I totally devoured it and then I read it again and then I went and looked you up on the Internet and learned all kinds of stuff about you. I found a picture of you and you looked
totally
hot in your sunglasses and someone online said that you never, ever took them off, but then I found pictures of you without them on and that was cool, too. And even though I was only twelve, that night I
totally
had a sex dream about you and I can't believe I'm admitting that.

I made Roger take me back to the library the next day. I checked out the second
Death
book,
The Time of Your Life,
and read it like I was thirsty for it. It was even better than the first one. And I hadn't read any of
Sandman
yet, so I didn't get some of the references to the stuff from
Preludes and Nocturnes
or
A Game of You,
and I gotta be honest—it was my first time reading about lesbians, and that sort of surprised me. Oh, and I also thought, at the end, that maybe you should have reversed the titles of the two stories. Because if you think about it, the first one is
really
about "the time of your life"—Didi's life, Sexton's life—and the
second
one is really about "the high cost of living," when Bruno sacrifices himself so that Foxglove and Hazel and Alvin could live.

But anyway. I finished that and then I went back and I checked out as many of the
Sandman
books as they had. And I spent all of my time just absorbing this amazing, amazing world you'd created. I read your novels, too, but it was the
Sandman
stuff that I couldn't get out of my head. I loved the way Death talked to Dream, the way she didn't let him get away with shit, the way she always told him the truth. I wanted that. I wanted to go around to people and smack them in the head and make them see the truth.

I wanted to dress in all black and be cool and mysterious. Like Death.

"I
REREAD IT
," F
ANBOY SAYS
."
S
ANDMAN.
Over the summer. I was, well, I was thinking about you and I decided to read the whole thing."

What does he want me to say to that? He's looking at me with this weird combination of Eager and Shy. I don't know what the hell to say to that.

"It was ... I read it, like, a few years ago. In middle school."

Around the same time
I
read it. Weird.

"So I reread it over the summer, and it was ... I mean, I liked it the first time, but it was even better the second time. Probably because I
got
more of it, you know? That's what I'm hoping for with
Schemata.
That people will reread it and get more out of it each time."

There was nudity in
Sandman.
So why is the nudity in
Schemata
bothering me? Because it's Courteney, who used to be Dina? Because it's Fanboy? Both?

"They didn't have the whole series at the library, so I borrowed Cal's. He has the originals, when it first came out in monthly comics, you know? And that's when the two of us started talking about how some really great stuff has been serialized first, and he came up with the idea of doing that with
Schemata.
So that's how I reread
Sandman.
It was cool. Because, like, there were the letter columns, you know? They used to have letter columns in comics—"

"God, I know that, Fanboy! I'm not an idiot!"

"OK, OK! Jeez!" He holds up his hands like I was about to hit him or something.

"Look, I'm not like you, OK? I'm into comics, but I don't
live
for them."

"OK, whatever. But I read the comics and the letters in them. It was cool, to see how people were reacting when it came out. And I learned stuff, too. Like, for example, did you know that the series was supposed to be like half as long?"

"What?" God, would he just shut up for half a second and let me think?

"Oh, yeah," he goes on. "There's a letter early on where someone asks if the series is going to end or just go on forever and Gaiman actually answers the letter himself, instead of having his editor do it. And he says that the story will end around issue fifty. But it actually ended up going on to issue seventy-five."

What? My head's spinning. I've got too much going on all at once: the artwork, Dina, Fanboy, and he's babbling about issue numbers, when I never even thought about
Sandman
in issue numbers.

"So I wonder," he says, "if he added more stories or if he just ended up taking more
time
with the ones he'd already planned out. Like 'Ramadan,' for example. I mean, if he planned out the whole series in the eighties, he couldn't have planned 'Ramadan,' because the Gulf War hadn't happened yet. You know?"

He looks at me with these shining eyes. I want to punch him. Or kiss him. Either will do.

"You know?" he says again. "The ending depends on the Gulf War happening, but that issue came out five years after the start of the series. So how was it
supposed
to end? Was there a different ending? Or did he insert that story into his plan at some point? How much was planned out and how much of it was flying by the seat of his pants?"

He stops, and this time it's pretty obvious that he's going to wait until I say something.

"I have no idea," I manage.

He laughs like I said something witty. "God, I
love
thinking about stuff like this."

Yeah. Yeah, he does.

He loves it.

And me?

What do I love?

Who do I love?

L
OVE MAKES YOU WEAK
. T
HIS
I know for sure.

Mom loved Roger. Roger loved Mom. And look what happened there. She died. She thought her love made her strong. She kept telling me—after she was diagnosed—she kept telling me, "I'm going to beat this, Kyra. I'm going to come out of it. I love you and I love your father and that love is my strength. You're my strength."

And sometimes she would go on and on about it: "I want to see you graduate from high school. And college. I want to see you get married. I want to hold my grandchildren." She would get teary. I would get teary. There's a word for it—I learned it in Miss Powell's class, the only thing worth learning: lachrymose. That's the word. Mom was lachrymose. I was lachrymose.

"I'm strong thanks to you, Kyra. You're my strength."

And who the hell was she to put that burden on me? I was her strength? Then what did that mean as the cancer ate her from the inside out? What did that mean as she got weaker and weaker and weaker? When the cancer migrated to her brain and made her forget things and space out randomly?

You can't rely on other people to be your strength.

You have to be your own strength.