GUS

“KEEP LOOKING AROUND like that and your neck might snap,” I warn.

Rectangular pizza slices bedecked in cubed pepperonis are laid out before us, but neither of us is eating. I’m dabbing grease away with a paper towel. It’s a losing battle, and two towels have already succumbed to soaking. I have a hard time swallowing, so I’ll have to mince this cardboard into smaller rectangles anyhow.

Phil can’t unglue his eyes from the cafeteria entrance. Every time something vaguely feminine walks through the door he looks ready to lunge. The last time I saw Phil this invested in anything happening outside a book or screen was at his twelfth birthday party, when his brother John gave him a set of hand-carved d20 dice.

Dad’s imagined voice burbles in my head, audible over a chocolate milk slurp: “Your mom and I met at school, you know!”

I’ve seen the notes they wrote in each other’s yearbooks, just months before Dad’s body was found stuffed in the trunk of a 1985 Ford Taurus. They didn’t write “Never change,” or “Have a great summer!!”

Dad wrote: “See you tomorrow, and every other tomorrow, too.”

Mom wrote: “You’re a dumbass,” and encircled the words in a massive heart.

What if they met at this very table? These battered hunks of wood and plastic seem just about old enough. What if Mom fell in love with Dad’s eternal stare before it was eternal, sucked into its orbit in the lunch line? Dad’s all over our house, but mostly the stories I know are the kind you can read in newspapers.

“I never got to know what kind of man your father was, Gus,” Mom says sometimes. “He died a boy.”

Legally, Dad was an adult. But now that I’m almost eighteen, I think she’s right.

Phil stands when a girl in suspenders ducks through the door. There’s something striking about the elaborate red hair crowning her head and the glittery purple pencil tucked inside it. I love her worn denim jacket. Right behind her comes Generic Cool Guy; he nudges her. Her cheeks grow pink with laughter.

Phil crumples. “Alas, it can’t be she. Far too coifed . . .”

“Seriously, wanna switch chairs with me?” Phil’s posture is painful to look at.

“Don’t coddle me.”

“Phil. I think you might have, um, what.” The word leaves me. “A thing for this girl.”

“Look, it’s nothing so juvenile. It was as though, as though . . . she stepped right out of The Matrix.”

“So . . . ​she’s bald?” I’m not being funny. I can’t always follow conversations.

“Her hair was a long rope of crimson, plunging toward hell.” Phil more or less talks in Mad Libs. “Her eyes were sable-encircled sapphires.” Phil spins on me. He’s actually feeling something, showing all his teeth. “Suppose our lives were a movie.”

“It would flop.” We’ve discussed this, usually during tabletop nights in Phil’s basement. Phil’s oldest brother, John, went to college for screenwriting before moving back into the basement. John instigates these conversations during snack breaks while Matt, the middle brother, proofreads our Pathfinder character sheets. In the Wheeler house, the honor of Dungeon Master is not lightly bestowed.

“Suppose our lives were a movie, or book, or game, any media portrayal. Our roles are obvious. We’d be the archetypal underdogs in virtually any canonical text.”

“Are underdogs an, ark, ar-archetype?”

“Underdogs are often main characters, because underdogs have the most room for unmitigated character growth. Agreed?”

“That’s, um.” There’s a word for thinking about yourself from outside yourself. My brain’s on the right path, but there’s a fallen log in the way and I’m tripping over it. “Mega? Megathought?”

“Metacognitive,” Phil parses. “We’re criminally underestimated. In stories, we’re the ilk that step up to save the planet, proving the dissenters fools. Granted, the caveats of reality will probably make our adventures here in Samsboro moderately less dramatic.”

“I don’t think life is a John Hughes movie.” As I say this, three guys in varsity jackets stomp through the cafeteria doors on their easy legs, jostling each other, hollering things like “dude” just so other people can hear them. “Okay. Maybe it is. Sometimes.”

“But this girl. Kalyn.”

“Kalyn?” That sounds more Kentuckian than The Matrix-y.

“Withhold your disdain. This was no ordinary Kalyn. We are talking a plus-thirty Charisma modifier. She’s protagonist material. Do you know what’s most compelling?”

“No idea.”

“She couldn’t remember her last name.” Phil smacks his palms together. “Amnesia. Classic Girl-in-a-Box trope. But may-haps she’ll kick-start our story arc.”

“I forget words all the time.” I poke my milk carton. Phil is my best friend, but sometimes he’s too buried in invented characters to remember reality.

If Phil’s categorized this girl as something fictional, I don’t know how to respond. How can I tell him talk like this makes me queasy? Phil’s got two brothers and I’ve got two moms; I think he forgets girls are people. It doesn’t help that he never talks to them. Does it occur to him that this girl has her own life to live?

“Of course I don’t truly expect anything,” Phil continues. “But were our lives a movie, she’d be our catalyst. Doesn’t the postulation inspire you, Gus?”

“I dunno.” I don’t like the idea that we’ve got roles to play in a high school drama. Phil wants to be Bill Gates. He wants to be a nerd who rises, to pull a sword from a stone and slay dragons known as “jocks with good skin.”

But if this were a movie and our roles were already prescribed, that’d be no good for me. I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, lying on the sectional in Phil’s basement.

I’d be cast as one of the following:

a.the crippled side note with a tragic backstory who adds texture to a country setting

b.the crippled side note the protagonist rescues from unjust bullies, thereby proving the protagonist heroic

c.the crippled side note whose health or circumstances improves after meeting the protagonist, thereby proving the protagonist heroic

d.the crippled side note who longs for “normalcy” and achieves it to some extent under the magical influence of the protagonist, thereby proving the protagonist heroic

e.the crippled side note who ends up tragically hospitalized, thereby allowing the protagonist to set up a touching vigil sequence with candles visible from a hospital window, thereby proving the protagonist heroic

f.the crippled side note who dies, thereby inspiring the protagonist to live more/better/beautifully

None of these options make for a story I want to belong to.

My stomach is a tangle. The words spill out despite me, to spite me. “Phil, if our lives don’t start until this girl walks in, what have we been doing all this time?”

Phil dismisses that, pulling out his PSP. “You’ll understand. When you see her.”

I only want to leave. “Um, later.”

When we first got to high school, Phil chose our table deliberately. He never said so. But it is the shortest walk from here to the lockers. From here we can disappear together, but we aren’t together now.

What if I walk directly into dreaded Kalyn, her flaming hair and war paint? If I do, will she catch me, or let me catch myself? Maybe our movie could be different. Maybe I don’t actually have to be any of the options between a and f. Not normal, no, but also not just “the disabled kid.” A person called Gus.