The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga

have a choice."
    "There's always a choice." I'm Mr. Empowerment.
    "No. The court makes me go."
    The—? What?
    "Court? Why?" Mistake. As soon as I say it, I realize it's a mistake. I've gone over the line, crossed the Rubicon, left Dagobah too early.
    She sits up, tucking her knees up toward her chest again, resting her cheek on them so that she can look at me. Her eyes aren't brown, I notice—they're hazel. Glimmering sienna-gold. What? What am I saying? I don't know. It's like messed-up poetry, like e. e. cummings. She's so pale. It can't just be powder, can it? It's like there's something missing from her skin, like she's an albino. She grins the magic grin. That ring in her lip ... God, suddenly I want to kiss it. I want to brush my lips against it. Black-smudged lips.
    "It's OK," she says. "You can ask. I don't mind." She fiddles with the leather bands around her wrists and slips them off, then holds both hands out to me, palms up, so that I can see the crisscrossing pattern on each wrist. The scar tissue is white, a dead white, almost a match for the hue of her skin. If she hadn't shoved it in my face and if it weren't for the fact that the scars are raised from her otherwise flawless flesh, I wouldn't even have noticed them.
    "Oh." My shyness and my curiosity fix bayonets and go to war—I want to pretend I never said or saw anything, but I also want to touch her wrists. They're like a topographical map: raised ridges representing mountain ranges built through trauma and age. What would they feel like under my fingertips? I think of the scar tissue on my knee, memento of my mad dash up the stairs when Dad's old coat goosed my imagination; it's senseless, a dead zone on my body where I can feel nothing.
    Could I feel her pulse through her scars, or are they too thick? Would it be like reading the pulse of someone who's dead?
    "I'm sorry," I say. It's what adults say all the time when they're actually not apologizing. When someone dies or is injured. When something bad happens. They say it so easily then, when there's nothing really at stake for them. I say it to her, meaning it the same way, but somehow when it comes out, I'm apologizing for asking the question, apologizing for looking, apologizing for not having been there, even though I only just met her.
    "It doesn't matter." She straps the bands on, covering up the scars, as if they never were.

Chapter Eighteen
     
    S ILENCE . S ILENCE FOR A LONG TIME . It bothers me until I decide that it's not a big deal, that someone doesn't always have to be talking. And then the silence just becomes relaxing, and we're just two people lying on the grass together, watching the sun as it starts to dip beneath the horizon.
    "It's like I said before," she says at last. "People suck. Period. They're stupid and clueless and when you tell them that they're stupid and clueless, they just get pissed off because they know it's the truth and they can't be bothered to change it. I mean, it's like Mrs. Sawyer, in history. Do you have her?"
    "Last year."
    "You had her as a freshman?"
    I shrug. I skipped most of the usual freshman classes and went straight into sophomore-level classes.
    "Anyway, she's so stupid that she doesn't even
know
she's stupid. Someone made up some story about turtles or something and she believed it—"
    "The Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight of 1928?"
    "Don't interrupt me. But, yeah. The tortoise thing. Someone made it up and she believed it, and even when she found out it was a lie, she still goes around telling people about it, telling people how she got fooled! I mean, how stupid is that? It's like
advertising
that you're a moron."
    "I made that up."
    She sits upright and leans over me. I smell grass and tobacco and something sweet. Perfume? Her eyes dance and the ring in her lip jiggles as she grins. "You made it up? Really? You're not shitting me?"
    "No. It was me."

The Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight of 1928
     
    In U.S. History last year, Mrs. Sawyer asked