1

I’ve got a system to keep people from seeing what I’m drawing.

A thousand cartoons and TV shows and teen movies would lead you to believe that when you’re drawing something at your desk in school, a pretty girl is going to say “What are you drawing?” and you’ll tell her and she’ll go “That’s neat” and your artistry will reveal to her the secret sensitivity in your soul and she’ll leave her football-player boyfriend for you. These cartoons and TV shows and teen movies are wrong.

In my experience, a pretty girl never sees you drawing and goes “You’re an amazing artist.” In my experience a pretty girl sees you drawing and, if she says anything at all, she goes, “Wow, you’re a really good drawer.” Not drawer like where you put socks, but draw-er. Guys who are good at basketball are not described as excellent throwers, and dudes who are good at guitar are not called really good strummers, but somehow I’m a really good draw-er.

And the experience does not change based on what it is she catches you drawing in the margins of your math notebook or whatever. No matter how well you’re drawing it, there’s nothing good you can be drawing. You can’t win. If you’re drawing superheroes, that looks nerdy. If you’re drawing landscapes or things girls might actually like, like animals, that looks girly. If you’re drawing the female figure, you’re a pervert. If you’re drawing the male figure, you’re gay. If you’re drawing superheroes and you haven’t gotten around to drawing the masks or capes or whatever yet, you’re gay. Do yourself a favor: Don’t start with the muscles. Start with the rocketpack and work your way out. You’ll still be nerdy, but everybody knew that about you already. I mean, come on: you’re DRAWING.

And those “how-to-draw-comics” books? Fuck those books. Everybody saw those in their Scholastic book orders in second grade and now they assume I just ordered enough of those books, and that anyone could draw this well if they’d done the same. Well, they’re a little right. I did order like two of those books. And the first thing they teach you is this system of lines and shapes, to sketch out the bodies first before you fill in the details. Basically what you have before you start having anything that looks like anything is a page full of what looks like basketballs and potato sacks. The basketball-looking things are eventually gonna be heads and the potato sacks are eventually gonna be torsos, but when I was drawing based on those books, the guidelines would never really erase right and it always looked like all my characters’ limbs were built around a sack of potatoes with a superhero insignia printed on it, or like they’d just been nailed in the face with a superheated basketball. Anyway, the point is, fuck those books.

There’s this kid, Tony DiAvalo, who always makes a big show of being the kid who draws in class. He’ll use whatever time is left over at the end of the period and pull out his special pencils and his special pencil sharpener and this big fucking drawing pad and just start.

He’s good, I guess. Probably even good enough to justify all the supplies. But it’s just so goddamn showoff-y, and the things he picks to draw are just so inane. It’s all pop-culture stuff, never anything original. It’s always, like, one of those cartoon M&Ms except the M&M is wearing a doo-rag and smoking a joint and he’s written something underneath the M&M like “HUSTLIN’.” Kids think it’s hilarious. And I guess, if pressed, he would point to that joint and doo-rag as his “originality.” He’d probably have you believe he’s as original as someone who fills their notebooks with things they made up. All I know is he draws to be seen drawing, and he draws what people want to see. I guess I take back the statement that there’s nothing good you can be drawing: everybody seems to think preexisting cartoon characters smoking weed and counting money is pretty hilarious, and a good thing to hang in your locker.

One time his showiness got him in trouble and he got busted. Mrs. Cartwright the Spanish teacher saw three or four kids huddling around his pad in the last ten minutes of class when people are supposed to be working on their Spanish free-writing. They were behaving the way people usually do around Tony DiAvalo’s drawing pad, which is high-fiving each other, and Tony, and saying “Sick!” That’s way more excited than anybody ever is about Spanish free-writing, so Mrs. Cartwright rushed over, and saw on Tony’s pad an almost-finished depiction of Tommy from Rugrats as Scarface, complete with giant mountain of cocaine. She sent everybody back to their desks except for Tony, who she sent to the office, where he was written up for “advertising drug paraphernalia.” So now his M&Ms and his Spongebobs go jointless, though they’re still “HUSTLIN’.”

While I don’t pull out the big fucking pad, it’s not like I go behind a curtain or anything, either. I don’t make a big show of hiding what I’m drawing. That’s just as bad. I don’t cup my hand around the part of the notebook page or worksheet-back I’m drawing on. Made that mistake before. It just makes you look guilty. Someone is inevitably going to ask and you can’t say no because then it looks like you’re hiding something and when you do show them whatever you’re drawing it’s going to be interpreted with suspicion because it looks like you were hiding something. If this happens and what you’re drawing happens to be a girl, the kid you show it to will think it’s a girl in your class that you have a crush on. If this happens and you’re drawing a gun, the kid will think you want to shoot up the school. So I don’t hide it. Or I don’t make it look like I’m trying to hide it. Being super-obvious about hiding something is almost showing off. It’s almost worse. It’s like this fragile-genius thing I think would be disgusting. Like girls in the back of English class being very obvious about the fact that they’re writing tortured poetry. No one cares.

And that’s the thing, is that no one cares. No one cares but they will ask anyway, in this detached way, “What are you drawing?” and you know just by how they ask that they don’t care, and you wonder what the point is of explaining, because they don’t care and when you explain they won’t understand or even bother to try, but you’ll look like a creep if you don’t answer but you’re so upset by the fact of their even asking in this half-baked way that by the time you do answer you’ll come off like a huffy know-it-all, guaranteed, every time. So better, for everyone, to be subtle. Saves you from coming off weird and saves them their I-barely-give-a-shit-anyway energy.

I don’t get absorbed. I don’t hunch over and curl my tongue up like I’m super-concentrated. The time between when you’re finished with your work and class gets out would seem like the best time, because you can concentrate the most, but it’s actually the worst. I draw while the teacher is talking, because then everybody’s looking up at the front of the classroom, or at least they’re supposed to be. I look up periodically, just like everybody else. I jot down notes occasionally, just like everybody else. Every so often my pencil drifts over and draws the jawline of a face. Then it returns to its place and writes “GILDED AGE 1870-1890.” Then it drifts over again and draws a nose. Then it goes back and writes “COINED BY MARK TWAIN IN BOOK OF SAME NAME.” Then it puts a pair of sunglasses on the nose. I’m into sunglasses recently. They’re not as risky as eyes.

When there’s not a good reason for me to have my pencil up, I put it away. When that empty five to ten minutes at the end of class comes around where weaker men do their drawing and end up being interrogated by popular girls and pushy dudes, I pull out a book. I try to make it a book we were assigned, too. Fewer questions that way.

“What were you drawing?” somebody asks me when I’m four pages into The Great Gatsby, which we just went up to the front of the room to get our copies of.

“Huh?” I look up. Eric Lederer is standing over my desk.

“When Mrs. Amory was talking about our independent essay assignment. You were drawing something.”

“Oh yeah. It’s nothing.”

Eric Lederer and I have never talked, I don’t think. All I know about him is he looks like a nerd, turns everything in super-on-time if not early, and knows every answer to every question always and is not shy about raising his hand to prove it. Which makes him a nerd I guess. Cecelia Martin must know more about him than I do, because she’s looking at him like he just blew up a school bus and whispering to two girls next to her across the room. Looks like something along the lines of “That guy just blew up a school bus.”

“Can I see?” he asks. Having never paid that much attention to him, I haven’t until just right now noticed that there’s something strange about him. It takes me a second but I realize what it is: he’s standing really still. Right in front of my desk, both feet planted. No one stands this awkwardly sure of themselves except characters in my drawings, staring straight ahead with their arms at their sides, because when they start to move around I start to realize that those drawing books might have a point about form and motion, even if what their tips usually get me is a bunch of basketball-burned sack-bodied heroes.

“Sure,” I say. I open my notebook. Folded up inside is the bright orange sheet with the criteria for our independent essay assignment. The bright orange color will be a big help when I’m digging through my backpack the night before the essay is due trying to find the criteria so I know what the hell to write, the whole time swearing to myself I’m going to get some sort of organization thing going, but knowing I won’t as long as teachers keep printing the important stuff on brightly colored paper that stands out even when it’s shoved into my backpack with a roughness that says “I’ll never need this again!”

I smooth out the paper and hand it to Eric. In the bottom right-hand corner of the page, underneath big bold letters that say “WORKS CITED IN PROPER MLA FORMAT!!!” two men in suits and dark sunglasses are restraining a cybernetic caveman with electrified lassos.

“Nice monkey,” I expect Eric to say. Even with the best intentions people always get what I’m drawing wrong, and admittedly the caveman looks kind of monkey-ish.

“Nice cyborg,” Eric says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Is this going to be a comic book?” he asks.

“No,” I say, “I was just doodling.”

“Oh,” Eric says.

I was trying to be dismissive because Eric being genuinely interested seems about as bad as Bret Embler or Carter Buehl being mock-interested. Here somebody across the room is staring at him like he blew up a bus, and I wonder if he has a reputation that I don’t know about that’s rubbing off on me just by being seen talking to him that will get me lots more attention from idiots. But I may have embarrassed myself just as much by using the word “doodling.” I look around, sort of like “does anyone know this kid? I don’t,” and see that Cecelia and her friends are still looking at Eric like, “That’s him, Officer, he’s the one who laughed when those kids who thought they were going to school went to Heaven instead.”

“You know that kid that always draws cartoon characters?” Eric says.

“Tony. Yeah.” He’s going to suggest Tony and I would make good friends since we both draw. Lindsay Skinner once told me Tony and I should be “drawing buddies.” Lindsay will never know what that remark cost her, and what it cost her was me asking her out, something I had been psyching myself up to do for weeks until the “drawing buddies” comment. So I didn’t get to stand in front of Lindsay’s locker and stutter out one of the eighty-five variations on “Do you wanna go do something sometime” I’d been weighing the pros and cons of, and Lindsay didn’t get to shoot me down.

“Do you think he’s good?”

“Tony’s alright, yeah.”

“Oh,” Eric says, the same way he said it when I told him I wasn’t drawing a comic book. “I think he’s awful.”

“Really?” I look around, this time to see if any of Tony’s friends are around. Then I realize Tony doesn’t really have friends, just what I like to think of as freak-show admirers.

“Yeah,” Eric says. “He never draws anything original. You originated these characters, right?”

“I mean, they’re just … y’know … doodles, but yeah.”

“I think that’s great,” Eric says. “I couldn’t draw anything, original or otherwise, if my life depended on it.”

“Yeah?” I say. “That sucks.”

“It does,” Eric says. He folds the sheet back up the way it was and gives it back to me.

The bell rings. Eric hustles back to his seat to get his stuff. I throw my notebook and The Great Gatsby in my bag and I’m out the door when one of Cecelia’s friends, Jen, catches up with me.

“Hey,” Jen says. “Do you … talk to that kid?”

I shrug. “I dunno,” I say. “Not really.”

“Oh,” she says, “never mind,” and starts off down the hallway.

Eric comes out of the classroom, his backpack way too high on his back.

“See you tomorrow,” he says. “I know it’s not a comic, but you should consider trying your hand at one. Seems like you have the chops, drawing-wise, along with the originality to not just sketch other people’s copyrighted material plus drugs.”

“It’s not a comic, but, uhm,” I say. “It’s actually a movie trilogy and a series of novels.”

“Awesome,” Eric says, breaking his weird stillness to hop just a little on his toes. It’s geeky but it’s pretty much the way I’d want somebody to react if they were the first person I told I was planning a movie trilogy and a series of novels. Eric is the first person. He says “awesome” again and we go off to fourth period in opposite directions.

“What’s it about?”

Eric is standing over me again the next day towards the end of third period. No “hi” or “what’s up” or anything, like our conversation from yesterday never ended.

“The movie trilogy and series of novels.”

“It’s sort of a lot to like, go into,” I say. “You know the loading dock by the auditorium?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I eat lunch over there,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says. “Fifth-period lunch?”

“Yep,” I say.

“Good,” he says all conspiratorial like we’re planning a high-stakes daylight robbery. “Good.”

When I round the corner of the auditorium, Eric is sitting cross-legged on the concrete loading dock in direct sunlight, his lunch spread out in front of him.

“Aren’t you hot?” I say.

“Hmm?”

“Aren’t you hot?” I say. “I usually sit in the shade.”

At lunchtime, the way the sun hits the school there’s a big wedge of shadow on one side of the dock. It’s cool up against the brick and easier to read over there.

“Oh, right,” he says. “Thanks.”

I don’t know why he’s thanking me, I didn’t really do it for him. The truth is he’s so pale that in the sunlight he sort of hurts to look at.

He starts packing up his lunch to move. There’s four or five little Tupperware containers and something wrapped in tinfoil. He puts them all in a small paper bag and moves toward the shade.

“So?” he says.

I start unwrapping my lunchroom burrito. I have two chili-cheese burritos and a fountain Dr. Pepper. I remember coming to high school when the fact that they had soda seemed like a huge deal. The thrill has worn off but I still get it every day.

“It starts with this scientist who works for the government. He invents these cybernetic modifications for soldiers. His technology ends up causing the deaths of millions of people. Then one day he stumbles upon the technology to make time travel possible, and he knows that if the government gets their hands on it, they’ll make things even worse. Then he realizes that he can actually use the technology to go back and prevent those millions of people being killed. But the government busts in just as he’s about to go and there’s a shootout and he ends up getting sent too far back in time, to the Stone Age, through a temporal distortion.”

I take a bite of my burrito. They’re pretty messy, but I’ve figured out how to eat them so not too much stuff leaks out one end.

“Then in the Stone Age …” I won’t repeat the rest here but there’s cybernetic cavemen and a race to an energy crystal at the heart of the universe and the dead and the living keep switching places. When I finish I realize I’ve never said the whole thing out loud before, or any of it, really. Then I realize I forgot a bunch of things.

“That’s dynamite,” Eric says. “Really.” In the time it’s taken me to tell the whole thing he’s worked his way through four of the five Tupperware containers (string beans, some kind of potatoes, spinach, fruit salad) and half of what was wrapped in the aluminum foil, which turns out to be a pork chop sandwich.

“Who packs your lunch?” I ask.

“I do,” he says, and I remember I have a lunch.

“Leftovers?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I cook.”

I expect he’ll talk now so I can eat without it being awkward but he doesn’t, he just sort of stares straight ahead. I eat anyway, and when I’m done I chew on the rim of my Styrofoam cup.

“What if the scientist—?” he says.

“What if the scientist what?” I say.

He shakes his head. The bell rings.

Wednesday in English Mrs. Amory splits us into groups for group projects. When she announces that Eric is in the same group as Cecelia, Cecelia sighs and looks at Jen and her other friend Teresa. She goes up to talk to Mrs. Amory when we’re all supposed to be getting together with our groups. After Cecelia and Mrs. Amory are done talking in very hushed tones, Mrs. Amory calls Eric and Ashlyn Taylor up and tells them they’ll be switching groups. My group is Chris White, Alicia Henry, and some girl whose name I always forget but I think might be in choir. Alicia has already divided the project up into four equal sections, assigned one to each of us, and written her e-mail address on three identical-sized strips of notebook paper so we can just e-mail her our sections when we’re done and she’ll assemble them all in a nice little binder before the due date. She actually says “nice little binder.” We all just give in to how badly she wants to get into a good college and go back to our desks with lots of class time to spare.

I’m almost done with The Great Gatsby and if we don’t get assigned something else soon, I’ll have to start reading my own books at the end of class, which I would enjoy except for the questions about what I’m reading and why I’m reading it. Getting asked what book you’re reading isn’t as bad as getting asked what you’re drawing. What you’re drawing is coming right from your head onto the page, it’s all you, but if a book you’re reading looks particularly nerdy, like it has a guy straddling a dragon on the cover, or when you start to describe it to the person asking you realize it sounds particularly nerdy, you can always defuse it by tacking “… it sucks” to the end of your description. But then the question becomes “So why are you reading it?” Like, people stop reading assigned books once they realize they suck, they stop reading on page two if page one was too dense or too gay or too historical, so the fact that you’re pressing on with a sucky book that no one is even forcing you to read is now a red flag.

Mostly people ask what your book is because they’re worried it’s something we were assigned when they were ditching out to go huff with some friends they have who go to Catholic school downtown, and they don’t think that just because they missed one day means they have any less of a right to know what books they’re supposed to half-try to read and give up on for being too dense, gay, and historical.

Eric never comes over to me. He just nods when he catches my eye.

“What if the scientist COULDN’T return to the present?”

Eric is sitting in the shade of the loading dock when I go there after the cafeteria.

“He sends the cavemen back to the present to do his bidding, but why can’t he just go back and lead them himself?”

“Because the time-proof signals he sends the cavemen in the present need to get intercepted by the Temporal Ranger—”

“I know. I know he needs to stay in the past for the story to work. But what I’m saying is, there ought to be a reason he has to stay.”

Eric looks at me with wide eyes, expecting something, like as long as I don’t hit him, this whole thing will be very exciting.

“Like—”

He jumps before the words are even out of my mouth.

“Like what if, unbeknownst to him the government has created a clone of him in the present and the clone him has invented an apparatus to prevent the real him from coming back? And what if … well, here, let me show you.”

He takes his math book out of his backpack, opens it, and a folded sheet of paper falls out. He unfolds it, and it just keeps unfolding until there’s a diagram spread out in front of us. It’s covered in words like “scientist” and “Temporal Ranger” and “government.” Question marks are everywhere. Things are circled and connected to each other with arrows. It looks like a football play drawn on the blackboard in the locker room in a sports movie, except the players are words I’ve had in my head for the six months since I came up with this idea. Plus some new ones I don’t recognize, like “Dream Spider” and “O.M.N.I.” and “Wolfpack Genetically Modified Not To Feel Fear.”

“Jesus,” I say.

“I got sort of excited about your idea. I thought about it a lot and I sort of assembled this last night. If there’s anything in here you don’t like, that’s fine, it’s your idea, but if there’s anything you do like, it’s all yours. Anyway, the thing I find hard to buy about the caveman troopers is their human behavior. It seems right now they’re your average everyday cyborg, only hairier. I mean, isn’t the fun of cavemen that they’re cavemen?”

By the time the bell rings the world of this has tripled in size. We barely touch our lunches.

“I think this is too big for three movies,” Eric says as he slips on his too-high backpack.

“Even with the novels filling in the gaps?”

“Even then.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”

“Also I don’t think the title TimeBlaze: An EVILution necessarily applies anymore.”

“Yeah. But I don’t know what else we’d call it…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eric says. “The title is the least important part.”

I spend all sixth and seventh period drawing. I’ve finished Gatsby so I just say fuck it and draw through the last five minutes of class both periods. I cover worksheets front and back, graded-and-handed-back tests, and most of the school-picture order form we got in homeroom.

Eric spends the next two periods making a list of possible titles, which are the least important part.

It’s not until I get home that I realize I’m starving.

The next morning when my dad is driving me to school I think the school parking lot would be a good place for The Committee to attack. The Committee is the government agency Dr. Praetoreous used to work for that’s now pursuing him through time. They are ultra-secret, their motives are unclear, their funding is unlimited, and it’s very likely they’re connected to some ancient architects-behind-every-great-historical-disaster-type society. (Eric and I have decided the scientist’s name should be Dr. Praetoreous.)

The Committee decides to kill Dr. Praetoreous back when he’s a teenager, before he can do them any harm, so under the protection of the Temporal Ranger, an immortal avatar Dr. Praetoreous accidentally awakened with his TimeBlaze technology, they send a legion of bio-engineered AltraTroops back in time to carry out the task. Dr. Praetoreous erased his own history, but they’ve somehow gained the name of his high school and the year he graduated so they’re going to eradicate everyone at his high school just to be sure they get him.

The troops timejump onto the marching band practice field. They’re cloaked, but there’s hundreds of them so the grass moves in this unnatural way as it gets trampled by a legion of invisible feet.

One of the troops sends out an electromagnetic pulse. Simultaneously every car in the parking lot dies. They’re all new, people’s sixteenth-birthday gifts, so they won’t run without a million computers working right inside them and the electromagnetic pulse just took those out. Everyone’s green parking pass hanging on their rearview mirror is like a toe-tag on their freshly killed cars.

At the same time, every cell phone in everyone’s pocket winks off. Kids text messaging in the back of class are cut off in the middle of their thoughts. Their iPods and PSPs and BlackBerries all become bricks in the same second.

The troops take the doors with extreme precision, fearing Dr. Praetoreous may have forseen their attack somehow and protected his young self with a battery of dinosaur-mounted Plasma Calvary sitting right outside the school library, or counterinsurgent nano-mines that will release a million self-replicating mecha-wasps as soon as the enemy cracks the door to the teacher’s lounge. But there’s nobody: just teachers and kids and lockers and soda machines and plastic furniture, and the AltraTroops go through them all, fist-cannons blazing blue.

Through the chaos and screaming kids walks The Man. Skinny with close-cropped hair, a black suit, a black tie, and black sunglasses. He is the seeming head of The Committee. He’s a hologram, given weight and mass when necessary by The Legitimacy Engine, a technology the teenage Praetoreous will invent one year from today, if he lives. No one has ever seen The Man in the flesh, no one knows if there’s even flesh to be seen. Cannon discharge rips through him doing no damage, just passing through his unwrinkled suit and out the other side to incinerate a hand-painted homecoming poster. He strides into the attendance secretary’s office and punches a few keys on the keyboard. He wants to know who’s absent.

Utilizing sub-thought communication, he signals small battalions of AltraTroops who scatter through the surrounding neighborhoods. Kids faking sick watching TV in their living rooms scream as the troops take out their sliding-glass patio doors. Kids who really are sick get the waiting-room magazines blown out of their hands as troops level their doctors’ offices with concussion grenades. A kid who looks a lot like Bret Embler is still asleep with a baseball cap on in bed next to his Catholic-school girlfriend when rocket boots scatter the red tile roof of his house in the hills and crash into his bedroom. There’s no blood: the fist-cannons’ antimatter fire just makes it so things don’t exist.

My dad laughs at something the satellite-radio DJ says about the band Supertramp, then he tells me to have a good day and I hop out of the Jeep. As I walk into school, I imagine cannon discharge passing harmlessly through me.

I tell Eric about this scene at lunch. He likes it, he says, except we could never storyboard it. We both agree that if we ever put it down on paper someone would see it and we’d be “red-flagged” and suspended like Carl Whiteman, who they found with a “hit list” of kids he thought “deserved it” freshman year.

Eventually, Eric and I agree, Dr. Praetoreous will go back and counteract the high school hit and all the kids will be safe, restored to their places in the timestream whether or not time and space have missed them all that much. But in order for that to happen, it had to actually happen at one point in the timestream, so Eric and I both agree that it did. And our high school works because Dr. Praetoreus would be our same age at this year in time. We sort of hope we were born late enough in history that by the time we are in our forties and fifties “existence engineer” and “clone wrangler” will be viable career paths.

“You should come over to my house this weekend,” I tell Eric at the end of lunch on Friday. “To work on this.”

“Absolutely,” Eric says. Because Cecelia Martin and Carter Buehl and people like that, they hang out. Eric and I work.