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

and shampoo in there, and possession's nine-tenths of the law. one night I heard Mom say, "He's not hurting anything and you never really use it anyway," followed by some sort of monosyllabic grunt of accession. Victory was mine. I had taken over another corner of the basement. Let there be marching in the streets and dancing girls for my pleasure.
    It's cool in the basement, but not
too
cool, so I usually head to the shower with my towel wrapped around my waist and that's it. Imagine my surprise when I find Mom standing there by the washing machine.
    "Mom!"
    "What!" She jumps as much as a pregnant lady can, and for a second there I'm worried that she might miscarry or go into labor or do something else disgusting. But she just spins around. "What?" she says again. "Don't use that tone with me. I can be down here. You don't own the basement."
    "I was just surprised, that's all."
    "Surprised that I'm doing laundry?"
    Actually, yes. But that's beside the point. I don't really care one way or the other, so I shrug and make a beeline for my Conquered Territory, the First Shower.
    "Wait.
Donnie
, stop." Oh. God.
Bonnie.
Like I'm ten years old. Like I'm a little kid. I run through the possibilities and figure that I'm probably due for the "It's Time for All of Us to Think About How to Get Along, for the Baby's Sake" speech. It's one of Mom's favorites, mainly because it requires absolutely no decisiveness on her part. She just runs down the list of everything I've done recently that annoys her and sums up by telling me that she's disappointed that I have this "attitude" and maybe there are ways I can think of to work on that, hmm? Sure, Mom. Just dump all the work on me. No problem.
    She pokes my right shoulder and I want to scream, want to bellow in agony. "What's that? What is it, Donnie?"
    I hiss in a breath through clenched teeth, my arm suddenly numb with fire where Mitchell Frampton pummeled it yesterday.
    "What is this? What happened to you?"
    I look at what she's looking at, a massive bruise that discolors my arm from the point of the shoulder muscle up to the clavicle. At the center it's a deep purple that's almost black, lightening to a sickly jaundiced yellow at the edges.
    I don't know what to say. Or, actually, I know
exactly
what to say, and that's the problem.
What happened to me, Mom? I fol-
lowed your advice, that's what happened. I followed it for years and it's just that for once someone decided to go beyond name-calling and sniggering and flipping me off and sticking porn in my hands and the occasional shove or push, so someone finally left a mark that even you can't avoid seeing.
    But there's no point in saying that. I'm fifteen now. What would she do? Call the school? Call Frampton's parents? My word against his, and even if they believed me, so what? He gets suspended for a few days and comes back worse than ever.
    Well, there
was
that person I saw, that person in black up on the bleachers. But I don't even know who he was, and how would I find him anyway? It's too late to fix it now. I've made it this far. From age nine to here, six miserable years in this crappy little town with its crappy little people and their crappy little tortures. It's April. After this school year ends, I've got two more, then it's college and I'm gone, gone, gone, like the song says.
    And I guess there's one other reason not to tell her. I guess there's always the chance that she wouldn't do anything about it. She'd get exasperated and tell me that she can't believe I just stood there and let him hit me, that I didn't say something to anyone, I didn't make it stop and take care of myself—how
could
you, Donnie...?
    "I don't know what happened," I tell her, still looking at the bruise. Usually I'm a much better liar. Usually I can come up with stuff on the spot, like the Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight. But she caught me off-guard. I never thought about a bruise forming, even though my shoulder hurt and throbbed all night. And I