Boy Proof (3 page)

“I place people in certain seats to maintain a certain order in the classroom so that I won’t have to yell as much.”

“I had an incident with him this morning in Global History.”

“Well, you won’t have one here in my class or I’ll fail you, even if you are one of my most gifted students.”

Mrs. Perez is one tough cookie. That’s what I like and hate about her.

“Well, he stinks,” I say.

“Get over it.”

The bell rings and she turns her back to me and picks up her stack of graded papers. I skulk back to my seat and sit down next to Max. I sniff loudly and make a face. He doesn’t even smell today, but he continues to ignore me, which is highly annoying. He is busy with his pen and that little black book.

Now
I’m
interested in what he’s doing.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Drawing,” Max says. “I study people. I draw them and take notes like an ethnographer.”

I lean over and look at the black ink sketch he’s made of my profile. There is a bubble under it that says,
Quick to anger, thinks she knows everything.

It’s a good rendition of me and he’s made me look prettier than I really am, but I don’t want to be in his book. I don’t want to be collected.

I shoot my hand out to rip the page from its place. In anticipation of my move, he pulls the book away from me.

“Give it,” I say.

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “It’s a social record.”

“Look, I’m superstitious. You’ve drawn me. It’s like you’re stealing my soul or keeping my toenail clippings.”

I throw him the evil eye.

“What are you trying to do?” Max says. “Get me with your superpowers?”

“You’re an asshole,” I say.

He laughs and continues sketching.

“Ars longa, vita brevis,”
Max says.

“What?”

“It’s Latin,” Max says. “It means ‘Art is long, life is short.’ This is art. This is forever.”

He taps the drawings in his book adoringly.

“This,” he says, drawing an imaginary circle around my face, “is not art. This does not have to be forever.”

Mrs. Perez walks down the aisle toward us, passing back our environmental poems. She hands mine and Max’s back. I hold it up for him to see: A+.

“Why don’t you draw this?” I say.

“Why don’t I draw
this
instead?” Max says, and holds up his poem: A++.

I grab for his paper and this time he lets me take it. I scan the poem for flaws, and my eyes fall upon these lines:

Silent is the ruined land.
Man is brutal
and the rain does not wash away
the pain
or rid the distant memory.
It makes it glisten.

I thought he was stupid. Now I know he’s gifted, just like me.

An eyeless head is ogling me. I look over at the cemetery set from
Blue Hill Wyoming.
Skeletons are pushing up from the graves. On the walls are apes, monkeys, aliens, mummies . . . you name any creepy thing and it’s there.

On a shelf to my left is the wall of blood. Jars and jars of fake blood and the ingredients for each kind.

My father, Sam Jurgen, master mask-maker, animatronic freak, monster and alien specialist, special-effects makeup wizard, is hunched over his worktable constructing the perfect eye.

I plop my bag down on a stool and remain quiet until he is finished. From years of experience, I know not to interrupt him while he’s concentrating this hard.

Once, when I was about nine, I was bored and I wanted him to pay attention to me. He turned purple and shoved everything off the table onto the floor, then he yelled at me for getting in the way of the flow and ruining the lizard alien he was making. It’s better to remain invisible until he turns his eyes on you. Once he does, he gives you all the careful attention you deserve. You just have to wait your turn.

“There,” my dad says to me, holding up the eyeball.

Now it is okay to talk.

“Looks good,” I say.

“No, really look at it,” he says, and holds it under the work light. I lean forward and notice that the pupil dilates.

“Cool,” I say.

He’s like a little kid.

I can see pretty clearly why he and my mom didn’t work out.

I try to imagine them falling in love while he applied foam latex appliances and makeup to her on the episode of
The Nemesis
when she gets some weird skin radiation sickness and her whole face is peeling off.

Mom got kicked off the show when she got pregnant, and then Dad was doing his first big feature, a low-budget sci-fi film called
Star King,
which won him his first Academy Award. Soon after that, they split up.

She was mad about him applying lizard scales to all the naked models on the film, and he was mad that she wouldn’t let him mix up the latex in the kitchen. I was probably screaming all the time, making them even more tired and annoyed.

“I can’t believe that man-child won an Oscar before I did,” Mom always says.

And I always remind her that she has never even once been considered for an Oscar, much less won one.

Freaks shouldn’t breed,
I think, looking at my dad while he works.
They end up having freaky kids like me.

But as far as I can tell, as dads go, he’s a good one. Every Tuesday I make my way over to his creature shop and we make stuff in silence. He even has the Victoria Tuesday clause put into his contracts, so when he’s working in town we don’t have to miss a date. It helps that he has a whole team of assistants.

“How’s school?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say.

“How’s your mom?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say.

“Do you have any boyfriends this week?” he asks.

“Nope,” I say.

“Well, you’re a catch,” he says. “I wish I had known a girl who could design an alien exoskeleton.”

I don’t remind my dad that boys like that are total dorks.

I’m reclining like a woman in a Matisse painting. I flick through the channels, jumping between the evening news on three different stations.

“What’s the news?” Mom says, shoving me over on the couch and pulling her salad out of the takeout bag. She pulls out my sandwich and hands it over.

“It’s all doom and gloom.”

“Oh, well. Did they announce the Screen Actors Guild nominees?”

“No.”

I unwrap my sandwich and take a big bite.

“How was school today?” Mom asks, shifting full gear into mom mode.

“It sucked shit,” I say.

“That is not the language a young lady uses,” Mom informs me.

“I’m not a young lady,” I say. “According to some new kid, I’m some kind of autocrat.”

I grab my sandwich and get up so I can go eat alone in the privacy of my room, but she follows me down the hallway and she’s talking, saying something that she probably thinks is important. I’m sure it’s not, so I slam the door in her face as a response. Then I throw myself down on the bed and put my pillow over my head. Three, two, one . . .

The door opens and Mom barges into my room.

“Victoria —”

“It’s
EGG
!!!” I scream. Maybe this time she will hear me.

“I’m not going to call you Egg,” she says. “That’s not the name I gave you.”

“Well, Ursula’s not your real name. Some agent gave you that name,” I say.

“That’s different. It’s a professional name, not an item of food,” Mom says.

I scream into my mattress.

“I’m meeting a director for drinks later,” Mom says cheerfully.

“I don’t care,” I say.

Her weight makes the floor creak. She’s put on some pounds since her glory days as the hot chick on the eighties TV show
The Nemesis.
She hasn’t had a real role in years. She still looks like a model, though. My mom is gorgeous by anyone’s standards. She is the total polar opposite of me.

She’s standing there, waiting, hoping that I’ll be impressed. She’s hoping that I’ll say what she always wants me to say to her before an audition or meeting. Even though I don’t want to say it, I turn my head from under the pillow.

“Break a leg,” I mumble.

I can see Mom smiling upside down. She’s so happy I said it. She thinks it’s going to bring her luck.

“I have a good feeling about this one. I’ll be back later. Please be home when I get here.”

I wave for her to go, go! GO! Move away! If I had a Helgerian laser like Egg does, I’d blow her out of my room.

I stay on my bed until I hear the jingle of her keys, then the click of her high heels down the hallway. Then the door closes, and the lock snaps shut.

When I am sure she is gone, I log on to my computer. I set my play list on shuffle. Strains of Ella Fitzgerald fill the room. I surf over to the Zach Cross–
Terminal Earth
message board. No news today. He must still be in New Zealand filming the sequels. I check out some other sites of some other sci-fi films I’m tracking. I do a search on the guillotine. I read all about the Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794. It freaks me out. It seems to me that the world has always sucked.

Amelissa13 instant messages me.

Amelissa13: hey eggtoria have you heard that Zach Cross broke his ankle?

Eggtoria: No shit.

Amelissa13: Just yesterday. It was in the papers here down under.

Eggtoria: that sucks.

Amelissa13: yeah. I thought I saw him at the movie theater in Christchurch, but it was just some old guy. But from far away, when I squinted, it totally looked like Zach Cross.

Eggtoria: I gotta go. Homework.

I shut my instant messenger off. I don’t know why I even have it. Nobody in my real life chats online with me. It’s only those silly girls who like Zach Cross that do. I am different from them.

I’m not boy crazy. I have tried to explain it to them one million times.

I’m a cinephile.

Here’s something really weird. I love taking pictures for the school paper.

“I’ve got contact sheets here, Nelly,” I say, just to hear myself say something out loud. My voice cracks a bit from being unused all day long. Earlier today I took a vow of silence.

“Drop them in the box, Egg. You know the routine,” Nelly says. She smiles at me. She pushes her glasses up on her pretty button nose.