GUS

AFTER WEEKS OF practice, I still can’t get the words right.

I try again. “I need to talk to you. Seriously.”

“Oh.” Kalyn’s posture slackens. “Whatever.”

“Your dress.” In the past minute, she’s managed to coat herself in blue ink.

“What, wanna borrow it? It’ll be big on you.”

“Not my style.” Typically, now my brain lets loose two-dozen needless words. “I like art, but I’ve never been a P-Pollock fan. Paint spatter kinda seems, um . . . ​hazardous? No. Um. Slapdash? Is that a real word?”

Kalyn eyeballs me. “You think I know more words than you do?”

“Is there any reason you wouldn’t?”

“Huh. All right, Gus. Let’s have our heart-to-heart. And I promise not to cry.”

I don’t know what she means by that, but Kalyn reaches for my good hand and leads me away down the sunlit hallway.

Most people don’t touch me. I pretend they see me as an Armani suit, something that shouldn’t be stained. Really, I know I’m seen as something much less fashionable. You can’t catch CP any more than you can catch spina bifida. You’d be amazed by how many normies don’t seem willing to chance it.

Kalyn’s grip is firm as she steers me across the building. She doesn’t ask whether she’s going too fast. She’s not, but it’s strange, not being asked.

We veer down the shortest wing of the school. I haven’t been here since I took a Tech Ed class my freshman year. The smell of pine takes me back to frustrating hours I spent trying to juggle hammers despite my poor hand-eye coordination.

Between the collage-coated art room windows and the open shop doorway stands a brown door I assume leads to a utility closet. Kalyn pushes the door inward, and we clamber into musty darkness.

She pulls on a chain. A bulb flickers on above us. There are no water boilers or mops here. Instead, we’re caught between two walls lined with shelves occupied by a few pieces of abandoned pottery. The wall opposite us is marred by a large oven, built into the cinderblocks, its door hanging open to reveal more darkness.

“A crematorium?” I blurt, because I was raised in a tomb.

Dad was cremated. There are things you shouldn’t embalm, ways you don’t want to remember people. Dad was decomposing by the time his body was found. Mom and her yearbooks never told me this, but hours spent online in the Wheelers’ basement taught me plenty. I couldn’t avoid seeing autopsy photos. Dad wasn’t smiling on that silver table. Dad was—­

“It’s a kiln. For the art classes?” Kalyn sinks to the floor, stretching her legs out like she’s melting. “You hopeless Emo.”

I frown. “I’m not Emo.”

“All that black is misleading, then. Surprised I don’t see you hanging out with those boys in skirts. You know? The kids who play black guitars outside?”

“The Gaggle.”

She whistles. “They’ve named themselves? Shit.”

“No.” I clear my throat. “I named them that.”

“How freakin’ weird of you.” Kalyn rubs one finger over a shelf and holds the dust to her nose.

“I didn’t know we had a kiln.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve never needed a place to smoke.” Kalyn shoves a hand down her dress and retrieves a cigarette and lighter from her bra.

“I’ve got asthma.” I scrape my feet against the floor.

“Oh.” Rather than light the cigarette, Kalyn shoves it between her front teeth and chews on it.

This room is mostly soundproofed, but both of us look at the door as the bell echoes. My speech therapist, Alicia, is probably sitting in her tiny office next to the teachers’ lounge, looking at her watch.

I’m here, watching this girl pick tobacco from her teeth.

“Looks like we’re playing hooky.” Kalyn traces a finger through the dust on the floor. “It’s a gen-u-ine first for Rose. You’re bringing out the worst in me, Gus. What’s ‘Gus’ short for, anyway? Augustus?”

“No.”

“August? Gustav?”

“None of the above.” The last time I missed speech therapy, I was lying at the foot of the stairs outside the gym, wondering who tripped me. “Can we talk?”

“Well, aren’t we?”

“No. Yeah. But this . . . ​not what I planned, what to saying have do.” The words wriggle away. I press my fist against my right temple and close my eyes. When I open them, Kalyn’s rubbing at the blue ink on her dress with a fervor that might set fire to it.

She pats the filthy concrete beside her. It’ll doom my dark pants. “Sit down before those chicken legs of yours give out. What’s your deal? Did you have a stroke?”

“Um.” I can’t decide if I’m offended. Her bluntness borders on refreshing. What’s less refreshing is the prospect of relaying the details of me to yet another stranger. I take a breath. “I was born with a type of cerebral palsy called hemiplegia, which means—”

“Hold up. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“. . . sorry?”

“You’re cringing like I just threw another egg at you. I’m not gonna make you talk about shit you don’t wanna talk about. I only asked because my grandma had a stroke last March. It’s why me and Mom moved here. You talk like Grandma talks, a little out of order, using the wrong words and whatnot. It got me curious, is all.”

“Um . . . ​for me, it’s aphasia. But no one always uses the right words.”

“That’s the freakin’ truth. Gustin.”

“Also not my name.”

“See? I’ve only got wrong words! Yesterday in the cafeteria, they gave us soggy chicken fingers. I cracked a joke, like, ‘Hope they got manicures first.’ You know, before cutting the chickens’ fingers off? But the words were wrong. No one laughed.”

“Maybe the words weren’t wrong. Just different.” Why people ever think there’s only one way to think is something I can’t understand. Maybe because I already think differently. Words fall like branches in my brain. “Timber.”

“Did you just say ‘timber’? You see any trees in here, Gus-driver?” Kalyn laughs.

“Definitely not my name.” I use the shelves to lower myself to the floor. Kalyn budges aside to accommodate me. One battered flat bumps against my boot.

“So. How’d you find me out?” Her voice maintains that light twang, but her shoulders stiffen. “Did you look me up? Follow me home?”

I can’t make any sense of this. “Are you making another joke?”

“You found out who I am, right?”

I shake my head. “What do you mean?”

“Oh.” The shutters behind her eyes open a little. “So what are we here for, then?”

“You know my friend? He’s tall? Wears glasses?”

“Quillpower? Unforgettable tumbleweed of a guy. Gets boners for Shakespeare?”

I cough. “Phil is . . . ​odd. Reality is hard for him. He’s decided you must be a, um, character that’ll make his life interesting. He thinks you’ve got, um. Heroine potential.”

“I’m trying to decide if that’s condescendin’.”

“Definitely.”

Kalyn wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Dehumanizin’, at least.”

“I told him that. But he wants to know if . . .” It’s hard to say.

“The anticipation is killing me,” she says dully.

“Phil wants to ask you to homecoming.” It’s the cleanest sentence I’ve managed all day, but I’m wincing, muscles tingling. But Kalyn, or Rose, whoever she is? She doesn’t laugh. She rests her chin on one knee and says “hmm.”

Everyone in school knows “Rose” left Eli Martin hanging a few days ago, in front of an audience. Here in the dark, there’s no reason she should be nice.

But she says “hmm” again.

Without warning, I imagine the world Phil’s probably imagined.

A world where this girl says yes, and Phil finds the guts to rent a suit and borrows Mr. Wheeler’s car instead of taking the Death Van. Phil appears at Kalyn’s house. And she, wearing a tacky silver prom dress rather than her usual charming country fare, hops in beside him, and Phil drives her to school, more carefully than he’s ever driven me. And when they get to the gymnasium, they dance, obviously, and she makes him smile a lot more than I ever have, and both of them are shiny with sweat but neither is worried because they’re having a surprisingly good time, so good they can’t believe it.

I’m not with them. Not because I’m a horrendous dancer (honestly, so is Phil). I’m sitting alone on the bleachers, happy for my best friend. I’m not with them because I have become an option I didn’t consider on my list of unbearable fates:

g.the crippled side note who humiliates himself to secure a glorious romance for the underdog, thereby proving the underdog a protagonist

I’m suddenly queasy in the crematorikiln. I’m searching for my feet, and I don’t care whether the shelves give way when I lean on them, because something else is giving way, ridiculously, in my chest.

Kalyn grabs my hand. Not to help me up; just to hold it.

“That’s nice of him. Almost. Quillpower’s seen me at my worst.”

Her hand is so warm.

“Damn, your hand is colder than a witch’s titty in a brass bra!”

I slide down beside her, giggling like mad, my pants beyond saving. Kalyn laughs along with me. We’re shaking spiders from their cobwebs.

“Hey,” Kalyn hazards, “if he’s the one who wants to be rescued, why did Quillpower make you follow me?” Her face is level with mine, her eyes four fingers away. “Why can’t Phil do his own dirty work?”

“Phil thinks I can talk to girls more, better, better than he can.”

I expect her to mock that. She doesn’t. “So why’d it take you weeks?”

“I was . . . scared.”

There are specks of blue ink on her face, and makeup’s worn away to reveal freckles. “I’m nothin’ to be scared of.”

I stare at her.

“One day those thorny eyes are going to poke right out of your head.”

“Th-Thorny eyes?”

“Yeah. You’ve got thorny eyes. Is that condescendin’?”

I chuckle. “Dehumanizin’, at least.”

“Nothing for it. You and me are both twisted. The imposter and the stalker. But hey, the straight and narrow’s for bad drivers.”

“Or people on scooters.”

Her laugh is so big. It causes a full-on cobweb massacre. She slaps her hand against my dead knee—­

“Oh, shit, my bad!”

“It’s fine. Didn’t hurt.”

She grins and lets her hand rest there for an extra second. Dad winks in my mind. How weird is that? I’ve seen so many faces in my life, but Kalyn’s is the first to remind me of his. I wonder if she’s ever posed with a goofy smile, a trout in her arms.

“I’ll put some thought into Phil’s request. But I need a favor.” Kalyn pulls her dress away from her body. Her head tilts forward, gives her unflattering chins as she peers inside her garment. “Any idea how to get ink out of fabric?”

“Um. Have you got hairspray in your locker?”

“That,” she says, patting puffy bangs, “is a fair assumption. Know why?”

I suspect an unfunny joke is on the horizon.

“Because otherwise?” She flattens those bangs against her forehead, steamrolling them with her palm. “Timberrrrr!”

It makes no sense, but I’m laughing too hard to remember option g.