Kyle didn’t really know Gray. He suspected nobody really knew her. She was intense, deep, wrapped up in internal drama. Acceptance was her thing. Why couldn’t people just accept other people? Why was it everyone thought they had to change to be more like someone else? Why were people so threatened by someone who wanted to live their own life in their own way?

The tattoo had been Gray’s idea, but they had all done it—Brittany too.

But then school had started again, and Brittany found herself drawn into Christina Warner’s orbit.

Kyle saw Christina as an evil queen in a fairy tale and Brittany as the pure, innocent heroine being dragged away by the powerful undertow of Christina’s dark spell. And as Christina pulled her in deeper, Brittany let go of who she had been over the summer.

Kyle wanted her to break free. He supposed that cast him in the role of hero by default. He didn’t really see himself that way. He was no Ultor. He wished he were. He wished he had Ultor’s strength and the powerful energy currents Ultor could send from his hands to battle his enemies. But Ultor was fantasy, and high school was the real world. And maybe the truth was that the real Brittany was the one who called him a loser and told him to get a boyfriend, and the Brittany who got the Chinese symbol of acceptance inked on her body was the fake.

If he was writing that into the story line of his comic book, he would make it so the tattoo burned every time Brittany did something that went against the philosophy behind it.

Agitated by the thought, Kyle went to his small desk and opened his sketchbook, frowning at the ruined drawing of his superhero. All the painstaking time and effort he had put into the three views of Ultor, the deliberate care he had taken to express different levels of strength simply with the lines and shading, all ruined by a pack of juvenile morons who thought degrading other people somehow built them up.

He stared at the drawing, trying to detach from it emotionally, trying to see it as something other than an attack on him. What would his personal hero do in his place? It was hard to imagine the UFC champion fighter Georges St-Pierre being in this situation, but Kyle knew GSP had faced his own bullies as a kid.

He would have tried to find a way to turn the situation against his enemies, Kyle decided. On his website St-Pierre gave the standard advice adults gave to kids, telling them to turn to an adult for help. But Kyle figured the adult GSP would have done what he did when he was fighting in the octagon. He would have found a way to take his enemy’s power and defeat him with it.

That was exactly what he would have done.

Kyle sat down and dug an eraser out of a drawer as the idea took hold of him. He rubbed away, erasing not the ridiculous giant penises that had been added by Fogelman’s idiot buddies but the carefully rendered profiles of Ultor’s face. He beheaded his superhero, then went to work with a pencil, a kind of giddy joy rising in his chest as he worked.

In contrast to the realistic, anatomically perfect bodies of the three Ultors, the new faces he drew were comic caricatures, oversize heads with exaggerated features. Kyle started chuckling as the faces came to life—as he took the power away from his enemies and turned it into something else.

When he was finished, he was no longer looking at three images of Ultor. He was looking at two of Aaron Fogelman’s stooges—Thing One and Thing Two—and Fogelman, grinning like an idiot. The lead idiot at the head of the idiot threesome sex train.

Kyle admired his masterpiece, grinning, then laughing, feeling light and happy for the first time in days.

This was sweet. This was awesome. This was going to make Aaron Fogelman flip his shit.

He grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of the drawing. And before he could really think about what he was doing and what the fallout would be, he posted it to Twitter via @PSIArtGeek

The shit was about to hit the fan.

19

Brittany sat on her bed in her pretty yellow bedroom, her iPad on her lap, her iPod playing on the nightstand, feeling like a fraud and a bitch and someone who didn’t belong in a pretty princess bedroom.

When her family had moved to Minneapolis from Duluth, her mother had thought the transition would be easier if they didn’t change everything about their lives at the same time. Brittany had agreed. She didn’t like change. She hadn’t wanted to move and leave her friends. It did make her feel better to at least have all her familiar things surrounding her in her bedroom.

They had painted the walls the exact same shade of yellow as her old bedroom. She had her same ornate white iron bed with the quilts her grandmother had made. The same white wicker-framed mirror hung over the white painted dresser with the collection of old perfume bottles on top.

It was the frilly room of a sweet little girl. Brittany felt like she didn’t deserve to be there tonight.

Tonight she wanted to rewind the calendar to before the move to Minneapolis. She wanted to go back to Duluth and the kids she had known her whole life. Here she felt like she was swimming with the sharks in deep water.

She didn’t really think she was smart enough or talented enough to be in PSI. She was a good student, but she had to work at it. She liked to write short stories and poetry and songs, but it didn’t come easily to her, and she never thought what she wrote was very good. Socially, she felt like a hick among the city kids. Even though Duluth wasn’t exactly a small town, it was a world away from Minneapolis.

Brittany didn’t like being an outsider. She wanted to fit in. She wanted to blend in. To be yourself, to go your own way, to express yourself like Gray did, sounded exciting and admirable, but Brittany wasn’t brave enough to stand out. She didn’t want to be a rebel. She wanted to be accepted. She wanted to be popular. There was nothing wrong with that.

Gray acted like wanting people to like you was a sign of weakness, but Brittany didn’t see it that way at all—and she didn’t believe Gray really saw it that way either. Gray wanted to be accepted too. Her poetry was all about feeling like an outsider but wanting to belong. It had been Gray’s idea to get the acceptance tattoo.

To want to be a part of the group was a natural thing, Brittany thought. It felt good to belong with other people. It felt . . . safe. She had always been one of the popular kids—not the leader, not the trendsetter, just . . . a belonger, she thought, knowing that wasn’t a real word. It should have been. It expressed what she meant exactly. She just wanted to belong.

That was ironic, she supposed. She wanted to be accepted. She had gotten the tattoo along with Gray and Kyle. She had gotten the tattoo that stood for acceptance so she would be accepted by kids who wanted to stand apart. Now she wanted to be accepted by a group of kids who singled out other kids to be ostracized.

She lived in fear of Christina seeing her tattoo, and she was glad every day that she had put the tattoo on her hip, where she could easily cover it up. She wished she hadn’t gotten it at all. In the first place, getting it had hurt really badly. Then she’d been terrified trying to hide it from her mom. More important, she felt like such a phony and fake wearing a symbol of acceptance. Sometimes she imagined the inked marks burning every time she said something or did something that went against the philosophy behind the tattoo.

She felt that way now after tweeting what she had about Kyle. She felt wrong and bad, and a little sick in her stomach. She didn’t like saying mean things. She felt bad for calling him a loser, and she knew he wasn’t gay—not that it should have mattered to anyone if he was.