The Road to Amazing (14 page)

Sometimes you just have to
make a leap of faith and hope that things turn out for the
best
, I thought.

We stood there watching the world a
few minutes longer, breathing in the wind, neither of us saying a
word.

Finally, Min said, "Well?" She meant,
"Ready to go?"

I took a deep breath. Then I said,
"Yeah, I'm ready."

At that exact moment, the clouds
broke, and it started to rain. I knew it had been clouding over,
but it hadn't looked especially like rain.

In less than a minute, the whole world
collapsed into a downpour.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Min and I were drenched by the time we
made it back to the house, even though it had only been a
five-minute walk (and we'd been under the cover of trees the whole
time).

After we dried off, we joined the
others in the main room.

"It's really coming down," I
said.

"It
is
," Vernie said, sitting in a chair
by the window with her Kindle.

"D-four," Ruby said. She and Nate were
playing Battleship at the dining room table.

"Miss," Nate said.

I looked around the room. I didn't
know if it was the rain outside or what, but everyone exuded
calmness. Min joined them, taking a seat and starting to read her
phone.

Kevin stood watch by the glass door
out to the deck, staring at the rain. I crossed over to him.
Outside, the raindrops made little explosions against the
wood.

"H-eight," Nate said, over at the
table.

"Oh," Ruby said. "Hit."

"Really?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Ripper, you little!"

Ripper, you little?
Nate's Australian slang made no sense
whatsoever.

To Kevin, I said, "I still say weather
forecasts are mostly quackery, but I guess they were right this one
time."

He nodded, but didn't smile. He kept
watching the rain.

"It'll be okay," I said. "We'll just
move everything inside tomorrow. That was the whole point of
getting this big house, remember? Having a back-up
plan."

He nodded again, but still didn't look
at me.

I put my hand on Kevin's arm.
"Seriously. It'll all be okay."

He put on a bright face at last, but
only for a second. Then he turned away, hypnotized by the
rain.

"E-three," Ruby said.

"Miss," Nate said.

I joined the others. I didn't want to
harsh the mellow of the room, so I sat down to do a little reading
of my own. I remembered what Min had talked about back in Amazing —
that photo album somewhere in the house with article clippings
about the whole mystery. I was about to ask her where it was when I
noticed Otto off in a corner reading his phone.

There was a strange expression on his
face: totally engrossed, but also sad, like he was watching YouTube
videos of kittens being kicked.

I almost said something, but then I
remembered what he'd muttered at the farmers' market about his
being on social media — implying it was a bad thing. Out of
curiosity, I fired up my own phone and did a quick search on his
name.

There were lots of great
articles on him and his whole story: how he created a web series
about his life as an actor with facial scars, and how it eventually
got him cast on
Hammered
. There were also lots of
photographs and videos of him attending premieres and charity
events, always in designer clothes (he really did clean up well).
That all made me smile.

But as I kept scanning, I saw things
I'd never seen before, things he'd never posted on Facebook or
Tumblr.

For one thing, there was
sort of a backlash against the show. This surprised me at first.
From my point of view, it seemed like the world couldn't ever get
enough movies and TV shows about college kids getting drunk and
having sex. But a lot of people didn't like
Hammered
, including a lot of
critics, and of course they felt the need to trash it online. This
exasperated me. My attitude about TV shows had always been that if
you don't like something, don't watch it. (That said, a few shows,
like
Girls
, were
so ridiculously overrated that they might possibly
deserve
to be
trashed.)

Anyway, I kept reading, and I
discovered that a lot of people were upset over Otto's character
too. This surprised me even more. A positive character with facial
scars in a major TV show? Who wouldn't think this was a good
thing?

Now I was annoyed. Were people just
stupid or what?

Weirdly, even some other burn
survivors were upset. I found one post in a disability forum, "Otto
Digmore Should Be Ashamed of Himself!"

It read:

There's a new show on the
CW,
Hammered
,
which includes a burn survivor character by the name of Dustin,
played by an actual burn survivor actor, Otto Digmore.

I guess I'm not surprised
that Dustin is barely in the show at all. He's lucky if he has four
lines per episode. I'm also not surprised the character is
completely defined by his scars. At the same time, we don't really
learn anything about him, about his treatment regimen, the pain
he's in. He's always happy and cheerful. No scary emotions from the
scarred guy! Naturally, he's completely asexual too, the one
character in this whole stupid teen sexy comedy show who never gets
laid.

But be careful what you
wish for. In the "No One Wears Tighty-Whities" episode, Dustin
finally gets his own storyline. In this Very Special Episode, it
turns out people are making fun of him for being scarred! Of course
he's completely powerless to solve his own problem. That's a job
for our hero, Mike Hammer, whose heart finally grows three sizes
that day, and he steps in and tells the bullies to go to hell.
Basically, Dustin only exists so Mike can learn an Important Lesson
About Tolerance, and the show can show us what a great, decent guy
Mike is, in between all his debauchery and casual sex.

I'm not sure what pisses
me off more about this show: the idea that it gives such a
completely stereotypical view of burn survivors, or that the
producers are making money off our pain.

FUCK YOU, CW!

And Otto Digmore, you
should be ashamed of yourself!

Now I was completely confused. This
didn't make any sense at all. Was it like how some LGBT people
wrote about gay and trans issues online? No matter what anyone did,
it wasn't enough. They assumed the worst possible motives about
everyone except themselves, thinking the entire rest of the world
was one hundred percent evil, completely consumed by racism,
sexism, and transphobia (even when, I'm sorry to say, things were
sometimes a lot more complicated than that).

I kept reading about Otto, and I saw
things that downright shocked me, which is really saying something
given that it was the Internet.

Someone had even posted pictures that
were supposedly of Otto naked, from some hook-up website. I was
pretty sure the photos weren't of him, but so what if they were?
Who hasn't taken pictures of themselves naked? And let's face it:
Otto's scars gave him a unique dating challenge. I'd been out with
him to bars and clubs, and people always stared, but no one — not
one single person in all the time I'd been out with him — had ever
asked him to dance, or asked him out, or even come up to talk to
him.

Not everything I read was bad. Some
people wrote supportive stuff, and Otto had plenty of admiring
fans: he was a good-looking guy, full stop, no qualifiers
necessary, and his body seemed even better now than when we dated.
At some point, Otto had posed for a series of sexy shirtless
beefcake photos, which I thought was so incredibly cool, and
probably the most subversive thing imaginable a guy like him could
do. I was so proud that I lived in a time when a guy with a scar
covering half his face and part of his body could be a sex
symbol.

But I couldn't get over what other
people were saying online — about how he was a freak, how it looked
like his face was melting, and on and on. There were even a whole
bunch of evil hashtags: #OttoDigmoreSkinCare, #OttoDigmoreIsOnFire,
#ScarierThanOttosFace.

Seriously?
I thought. Making fun of a guy who had scars on
his face? Talk about punching down.

At this point, I was outright livid. I
honestly couldn't remember the last time I'd been so angry about
anything.

As I sat there stewing, Otto got up to
use the bathroom. I followed him, waiting in the hallway outside
until he was done.

When he came out again, I
said, "
Fuck
them!"

He flinched. He hadn't expected me to
be waiting for him.

"What?" he said.

"I did a search on you," I said. "I
saw the kinds of things that people are writing."

"Russel—"

"No, seriously. Fuck them.
Just
fuck
them
."

He sighed and slouched back against
the wall. "It's not that easy," he said.

"Sure it is! Fuck them! Fuck them,
fuck them, fuck them!"

Otto smiled, but it wasn't like he was
really hearing me.

"I mean it!" I said. "Just fuck them
all to hell."

He turned to look at me. "Did you see
the Reddit stuff? Or the 'Otto Digmore' Halloween
costumes?"

I shook my head no. Apparently, I
hadn't even seen the worst of it!

"A year ago, I would have thought the
same thing," he said, "that I could blow it all off, or even laugh
about it. But it's different than you think. The hatred of the
Internet is so strange. You can't imagine what it feels like until
it's directed at you. It's like it has an actual substance, like
it's a hurricane, dark and ugly and evil." He stopped and stood
upright again. "Oh, God, listen to me. I'm sorry, Russel. I get a
role on a sitcom, all my dreams come true, and here I am bitching
about it to you."

"Otto, knock it off.
I
asked
you. Of
course you can talk about this stuff. Just because things are going
well, that doesn't mean your life is perfect. I totally get how in
some ways, it might even be worse."

He thought about it for a
second, then he said, "Fame isn't what I thought it was going to
be. I mean, some things are great — a
lot
of things are great. But
still."

The truth is, it was weird
talking to Otto about this. I would've given anything to be able to
say things like, "Fame isn't what I thought it was going to be."
Still, this was
Otto
, who was the most deserving person of fame in the whole
world. I was jealous, but only a very little bit.

"So stop reading it," I said. "The
stuff online. I know it's probably hard, but force
yourself."

"That's what everyone says, but it's
so much easier said than done. Seriously, I saw Jennifer Lawrence
at this thing a couple of weeks ago?"

"You know Jennifer
Lawrence?"

At least he had the decency to blush.
"Ah, Russel, I really am sorry. Really? I'm name-dropping? How
pathetic is that?"

"No! Are you kidding? You know
Jennifer Lawrence! That's definitely okay to talk
about!"

"I don't
know
her. I've
met
her. Like, twice.
Anyway, one of those times we had a conversation for a whole ten
minutes, and we talked about this."

"About how they stole her nude
photos," I said, nodding. But I immediately felt like an idiot. Why
in the world had I brought up nude photos?

"Not only that," Otto
said. "All of it. How she was so beloved, and then the whole
backlash, and the Sony email thing, and yeah, the nude photos. And
also about the Internet in general, the idea that everyone has an
opinion about you, and a lot of people have a really, really
strong
negative
opinion. Anyway, it doesn't really matter if you read it or
not, somehow you know it's there. Publicists and executives and
show-runners, they talk about it. And then reporters ask you about
it — they Google the hell out of you, and they just assume you've
heard it all."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I
didn't know any of that. And somehow you have to let it not bother
you anyway. Wow, that really does sound hard." I thought about what
to say.
"
Oh, hey,
what was that great tweet by
Gabourey
Sidibe last year when people criticized her for looking fat in that
dress?
'I cried about it all night on
my private jet on my way to my dream job.'"

Otto nodded once, but didn't say
anything.

"What?" I said.