Expelled(10)

“Yeah, I understand the chain of events,” Jude interrupts.

“Let me finish. Someone put a fake you on my secret Twitter—which was obviously not very secret. And then, simple as that, we both got expelled. No questions asked. So whoever posted that snapshot nailed two people for the price of one.”

“Three if you count Parker,” Jude reminds me.

I ignore this because I don’t count him. “The point is, how could that be an accident?” I ask Jude’s back.

“Maybe whoever put on the tiger head wasn’t trying to impersonate me for nefarious reasons. Maybe he just did it for kicks. I mean, wearing a tiger head is more fun than you might think. You should try it sometime.”

What I think is that Jude’s being naive. “Why would you assume the theft of your tiger head was harmless?” I ask. “It wasn’t a victimless crime!”

Jude spins around. “Because it’s crucial to my sanity, Theo. I don’t need to be more paranoid about things than I already am. Look at me—I’m a sixteen-year-old bisexual virgin in a Hello Kitty T-shirt. Do you think it’s a piece of cake to be me?”

I pick up two of his brushes and bang them against the wall of the garage like drumsticks. “No, and I didn’t say it was. It’s not easy to be the guy with the dead dad, either, you know. And I kind of think it’s harder now that I’ve been kicked out. Don’t you?”

Jude shakes his head. “I don’t miss being called fag in the hallways, which is something that still happened almost daily, despite Arlington’s Gay-Straight Alliance club and the rainbow flag over the counselor’s office. What’s that hanging there for anyway? Is it some kind of signal—like, hey, if you’re questioning your sexuality, you should probably get some therapy?”

Jude has a point. I know high school hasn’t been simple for him. But again—it’s not like my life’s been a walk in the park lately, either. After my dad died, there were three whole weeks I barely got out of bed. I didn’t eat, and I hardly slept. I just lay there, silent and unweeping, like I was nearly dead myself.

Come to think of it, it’s a miracle I didn’t get expelled for lack of attendance back then.

And when I did finally get up? For months I felt like a zombie—a numb, moaning, half alive thing with only a vague memory of having once been a real person.

I still have to fight that feeling sometimes.

“But you’ll fail junior year,” I remind him. “Then won’t you have to spend a whole extra year dealing with that homophobic BS?”

“I won’t,” he says firmly. “Remember the plan: I’m going to paint my way to success and happiness. I’ll get a GED if I have to. Have you read about the kid they call the mini Monet? He’s worth, like, four million, and he’s only twelve.”

“Well, I don’t have your talent,” I say. “Or your absurd level of faith. So I’m a little more concerned.”

He turns back to his work. “If you believe it, you can achieve it,” he insists. But then his voice shifts, and it sounds almost sad. “I can be realistic about some things. Here’s one: you can’t take on the school board and win, Theo. You want to go back there and tell them what a nice person you really are? Say you have no idea who posted the picture but you were totally framed? That you have some secret nemesis? Do you really think Palmieri would buy it? Hey, maybe you’d like to write a persuasive essay. You were always good at that.”

“How come that doesn’t sound like a compliment?”

“Sorry.” Jude sighs. “We aren’t Boy Scouts or amateur sleuths, Theo. We aren’t men of action. We never have been. We’re men of acceptance and contemplation.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say, turning and walking down the driveway. “I’m going to find out who did this to us.”





10


East of town, near the tiny municipal airport, is the shopping complex that’s sucking the lifeblood out of downtown Pinewood with chain stores dedicated to sheets, discount shoes, and the kind of clothing Jude tells me is called athleisure. It’s an awful place: treeless, bordered by a slow, silty river, and everywhere you look someone’s waving a sign that says DISCOUNT MATTRESSES or LITTLE CAESAR’S HOT-N-READY $5.

The one good thing about this corporate wasteland is that Sasha Ellis works here, at Matheson’s, which is like a low-rent version of Target.

I have one goal for today, which is to convince her that she has to join me in taking back our lives.

“Just don’t act like a creepy stalker,” says Jude. I managed to badger him into driving me over here despite his lack of enthusiasm.

“I won’t. I just want to talk to her,” I say.

“Again with the weird face-to-face thing,” he says.

“I don’t actually have her number,” I admit, and Jude shakes his head like I’m too dumb to be believed.

The store is cold and bright, and it’s like I’ve got some kind of homing beacon thing going on because I see Sasha instantly: checkout lane 10, between the Starbucks outpost and the customer service desk.

“We should probably buy something,” I say.

“I don’t have any money today,” Jude says, as if he ever does.