The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

before, so I go on the hunt. upstairs in the family room, Mom—who managed to come home silently while I was absorbed with the Web—and the step-fascist are sitting up, watching something on TV. There's a sheaf of papers on the coffee table. My pages. I remember now: I looked them over while watching TV up here the other day.
    The step-fascist's superhearing picks up the thunderous roar of my stocking feet on shag, and he offers up a look of annoyance. I play my part and ignore it completely as I lean in to take the papers.
    "You're in the way," Mom complains.
    I grab the papers, which are, I see too late, under a plate, a plate that makes an almost musical clatter-clang when I pull the papers out like a magician with a tablecloth.
    "Shhh!"
    Yeah, yeah. I riffle through the sheaf quickly to make sure I have everything I need. There are food crumbs and a coffee stain on one page, and I can swear I smell beer. But that could just be the ever-present
eau d' Bud.
    "Do you have to stand there making that noise? We're trying to watch a movie."
    I want to give Mom and her stupid pregnant stomach a glare, but there's no point. I back out of the room and head downstairs.
    The pages are pretty gross. For all I know, the step-fascist had his feet on them. As I walk through the basement back to my room, I forget about the beer smell when a new one hits me: gun oil.
    I look around. No one. Nothing. I'm alone in the basement. The lights are out, the only illumination coming from my bedroom door, partly open, spilling out a wedge of light for me to follow. The furnace, the water heater, the big workbench—they're blocky, shadowy
things
in the dark. It's like the basement in the old house. Dad's coat.
    I stand here in the basement now, even though it's a different basement, even though I'm older. Not to prove to anyone in particular that I can, but just to prove it to myself. I stand here and I breathe in the smell of gun oil, and I realize that no one is moving upstairs, the whole world is still, just me and the dark.
    Bravery proven, I duck into my room before the monsters can get me.

Chapter Nine
     
    I USED TO SLEEP . Or I tried, at least. I used to lie in bed for hours, the lights out, watching the digits on my clock change ever so slowly. I would play games to make myself not stare at the clock. I would make myself promise not to look for five minutes, to close my eyes and try to sleep for five minutes. After five minutes I would look, only to find that two minutes had passed.
    Stories filled and swelled my mind as I tried to sleep. Characters introduced themselves, told me their histories, then went off in search of tales to inhabit, and I always found a good one. Then I would get caught up in perfecting the narrative, developing the story flow, dictating dialogue in my head, and I would be up, and up, and up forever, the minutes running fast when I was writing in my mind, crawling when I closed my eyes.
    There's just no point to sleeping. Not if you simply can't fall asleep, anyway. So I stay up instead. Mom will sometimes check to make sure I'm in bed—she performs this maternal duty by looking into the basement to see that there's no light shining underneath my door. I used to put a towel there to block the light, but apparently in a dark basement, you can still see light limning the entire door in the tiny space between the jamb and the door. So now I have a black sheet of plastic that I hang over the door and weight at the floor so that no light can escape.
    So I can stay up as late as I want. And I do. I write the stories for real, and sometime between three and four I take down the plastic, climb into bed, and read until my eyelids and my hands drop at the same time.
    This is my ritual. This is how I do it. And Mom would never understand, so what she doesn't know won't hurt her.
    Tonight, though, I'm not at the computer. I'm just curled up in bed, my fist a tight knot. I can feel the bullet but I can't see it, which is