The Goodbye Time by Celeste Conway Page B

Then he turned off the screaming teakettle and ended up making our tea after all. He flipped out his own second or maybe third grilled cheese sandwich, then shuffled out of the kitchen to get back to his beloved computer.
    Johnny gazed after him. Then he said, “Doesn’t Uncle George have any clothes? I mean, clothes that aren’t wrinkled that he could wear into Liverpool?”
    “Don’t be criticizing your uncle,” I snapped. “You don’t look so great yourself in those leather pants with those chains hanging off ya and those spikes in your tongue, laddie.” Which shut Johnny up for a while. Plus we were busy eating our sandwiches now. Tom could have gotten a scholarship to Harvard just based on what a genius he is at making grilled cheese sandwiches. We washed them down with the tea, which we had actually begun to like.

Chapter Three
    By now you’ve probably figured out who we were when we played. Unless, of course, you don’t own a telly and don’t watch
Wild Star,
which comes on every Friday night between
Treeville Place
and
Mystic Girls
and is about the life of a struggling English rock star named Johnny. He plays guitar and sings in his band, Riot. My mom says it seems like the life story of the dead Beatle John Lennon, because he was orphaned too and raised by his aunt, whose name also happened to be Mimi, like the aunt on
Wild Star.
But I can tell you, our Johnny doesn’t look at all like a dead Beatle. He’s gorgeous.
    First of all, he’s kind of skinny. A little hungry-looking, I mean, like he could use about a week’s worth of my brother’s grilled cheese. And he looks sort of sad, like a puppy, and hardly ever smiles—so that when he
does
smile, well, it just about makes you keel over, it’s so cute. He has longish hair that’s all wild but not dirty or knotty. He wears black leather pants all the time, or once in a blue moon, jeans with holes all over them. And he has pierced ears and a pierced eyebrow and tongue, which is the only thing I wish Johnny didn’t have. The pierced tongue, I mean. I like the eyebrow, though, because it makes you really notice his eyes. And his eyes, well, wow. They’re green with some golden specks swirled into them. And then there’s his mouth, which is pink and soft like the mouth of a girl. But the rest of his face is like a boy’s, so it makes the mouth very special, sort of like a rose.
    I think I know Johnny’s face better than any other face on earth. I used to have pictures of him all over my room. Sometimes I’d pretend that the life-sized poster over my bed was the real Johnny. I’d climb on the bed in front of it and pretend we were outside a fish-and-chips joint in Liverpool, where Johnny lives. It would be nighttime, and I’d be an American visiting England. I’d tell him thanks a lot for the dinner, that I’m barmy about fish-and-chips. Then all of a sudden he’d be kissing me (I’d press my mouth against the poster lips) and telling me what a bloody beautiful Yank I was. I did that a lot in my spare time. Once I told Katy that I did it, and she started to do it too. Katy couldn’t do stuff like that in her room because Bug Eye was always there, and also there was no space on the walls for a poster of Johnny, what with all the weird little pictures of fairies taped up there.
    After our grilled cheese, Johnny and I cleaned up the dishes and went into my room, which we called the parlor when we were playing. We brought our teacups with us, which my mom wasn’t wild about, since they’re real English bone china, whatever that means. But she sort of liked how we were into what she thought were tea parties, so she let us, even though we might have broken the cups. We were pretty careful. If Tom/Uncle George had ever taken a teacup into his crazy room, it would have been broken in about five seconds.
    In the parlor Johnny started moaning about how important Clarissa was to him (that’s Johnny’s girlfriend on the TV show) and how Aunt Mimi