“No, I understand what you mean.”
“Really?” She looks at him with her beautiful yellow-green eyes. Tiger’s eyes.
“Yeah.” He nods. He wonders what she would say if he told her about being iCal or, more importantly, about how he feels when he is iCal, his gamer profile: confident and comfortable, but, most of all, normal. He wonders what boys like him did before the internet. “I’m moving to LA as soon as I turn eighteen. Or maybe to New York, I don’t know. I know it doesn’t seem far, but it’s like another world. I want to be a graphic novelist.”
Malaika gives him a strange look. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to kiss him.
“Yes,” she says softly. “That’s how I feel. It’s why I came here.”
“You didn’t like your old town?”
“Basel, it’s… nice. Very cultural. But it’s not for me. I want to live someplace that is too big for one person. Does that make sense?”
Calan nods. “I love Alma. But I can’t be me here.”
“I understand that,” she says.
Calan nods, though part of him wants to say, No, you don’t. Malaika couldn’t possibly understand his situation. And not just because he hasn’t explained it to her. Malaika is too beautiful to understand what it feels like to be an outsider, a freak.
Calan has known what that feels like for over two years.
He can pinpoint the day his life changed for the worse. On a hot late-April day, right in the middle of Spring Break, Ashley Higgins, the most popular girl in his grade, sent him a video on Snapchat where she was pouting her lips exaggeratedly in a fish gape. She added an effect where water came out of her ears. It would’ve looked dorky on anyone, except that on Ashley it looked bubbly and cute. Calan was sure that she’d sent him the video by mistake. Ashley was the sort of girl who hung out with high-schoolers—she had no business talking to him or any other shy, twelve-year-old boy who played the flute. But she had been meaning to text him, she wrote. She thought that he was cute and funny—did he like her, too? They began texting almost every day. Once classes resumed, Calan waited to see if she’d approach him, but she never did, which didn’t strike Calan as the least bit odd. She was the coolest girl in his grade: bold and confident at an age when most girls just wanted to blend in. And he? Well, he was all right, he supposed. Calan was conscious of being smaller than his classmates (a result of him having skipped the first grade) and made it a point to be nice and friendly to everyone (it’s how his mom had raised him), but were it not for his last name, he would probably eat lunch at the loser table.
Calan had felt the most like himself when he was talking to Ashley. She revealed herself to be bright and sensitive, with just a hint of a tortured soul underneath her trendy persona. Calan opened up to her in a way that would’ve been impossible outside of the electronic world, where a special blend of invisibility and nakedness thrived. He told her about his love of superheroes, his dream of being a graphic novelist, and his resentment of his family’s weighty expectations.
My dad thinks I want his life, he wrote. He doesn’t even recognize it as a career… he keeps referring to it as “doodling”.
They don’t appreciate your creativity, she wrote back. You’re an artist. Maybe one day you can draw me?
Hearing himself described as an artist had made Calan feel seen for the first time in… ever. It had made him feel like a full person—not just the Dewar heir. It had prompted Calan to open up about his family: his grandmother’s precise ways, how she kept looking at him as though he was missing something, which of course he was, his other half, his twin; how his dad loved his mom so much more than he loved him, his own son, and how he clearly resented the attention she gave him; his grandfather’s fretfulness around him, the way he kept teasing him about taking too long to grow up, saying things like, “Once you beef up a bit you’ll be a real ladies’ man, just like I was.”
I feel like a fish out of water, he wrote. Better yet, I feel like a horse living in water, but everyone expects me to be a fish. Act like a fish, swim like a fish. But it’s, like, I’m a horse!
Maybe you’re a seahorse, she wrote back, and he thought that was the smartest, funniest thing he’d ever heard.
The more he shared, the more Ashley praised his sensibility. Most boys only care about sports and violent video games. You’re the youngest kid in our grade but you’re also the wisest. You’re a sensitive soul. Tell me more. I want to know all of you.
Feeling encouraged, he told her about Uncle Nick, who was the only one in his family who really understood him. His mom tried, but she liked to play it safe, to color inside the lines. Uncle Nick was a nonconformist. He hadn’t cared what Grandpa Charles and Grandma Tish expected of him—he’d done his own thing, walked his own path. He had traveled the world. When he came back, it was on his terms—his job was cool, innovative. He worked with design, not numbers.
She confessed to being secretly insecure about her looks, and he reciprocated, telling her how he’d been intimidated when his friends had returned from last year’s summer break with broad, manly shoulders and deeper voices.
I look like a sixth-grader, he wrote.
Not to me, you don’t.
He felt like Spiderman right before the spider bit him, like he was just around the corner from something both surprising and inevitable, but ultimately wonderful.
It hadn’t occurred to him that he was being catfished.
Looking back, it
