Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  Jasper blinks, closing his eyes for a long moment. His expression pained.

  But she knows. Even before he opens his eyes again, she knows that she’ll have that key, have it for always.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 4

  Dany toys with the hex key. The brass cylinder hangs from her neck on a bit of twine. She’ll never again be without it. Already, an image is half formed in her mind. Another piece of the plan. She is testing the knot in the twine when Eva trips into the lab, a sandwich in one hand, a hideous orange mug in the other.

  “Deej!” she squeaks.

  As always, Eva is dressed like a rockabilly science nerd. She wears a lab coat with her initials, EAW, embroidered on the pocket. Eva is grinning madly – her eyes twinkling from the shadows of enormous rolled bangs.

  Dany nods at the lunchroom, and Eva grins – but there’s at least a dozen people she just has to say hello to on her way through the lab.

  Finally, ten minutes later, the two sit down across from each other in the break room.

  Dany sniffs the air, takes in the rich plastic smell of Eva’s coffee. Even with all the money Eva’s family has, they can’t get their hands on real coffee more than a couple times a year. One sniff and Dany knows it. The dark liquid in that cup is synth.

  “So, you’re going in the wet lab today?” Eva asks.

  Dany shakes her head. “Nah. Jasper’s got some killer virus in there. So, like, you didn’t miss anything.”

  “Ontologically speaking,” Eva asks her, tipping her glasses low on her nose, “bigger picture level, is it even possible for me to miss anything? All your rats ever do is squeak and shit.”

  “What do you want?” Dany asks. “Fireworks? An explosion?”

  “Oh my god, yes,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “That would be amazing. I may be a scientific agnostic, but exploding rats, that would make me believe.”

  Eva sounds better to Dany, at least, better than Friday night. “So, you okay?” Dany asks, her voice pitched low.

  Eva nods then shrugs – the two expressions cancelling each other out. It is what it is, then. “Thanks,” Eva adds, “for letting me crash the other night.”

  Dany nods, but she’s looking at the lunchroom floor. In the daylight, Eva was bright and fearless and full of words, but at night, you could tell that things at home got to her. On Friday night, she’d slept over, and the two of them had fallen asleep holding hands, ­Mac snuggled between them.

  Eva pushes half her breakfast sandwich over to Dany. “You need to eat real food,” she says, nudging the sandwich. “Even just once a week, say. My second cousin would only eat Velveeta cheese on Wonder bread – like that’s all he ate, ever. Guess what he got for his nineteenth birthday?”

  “A car?”

  “Well, yeah, that and a colostomy bag.”

  “Seriously?” Dany asks, eyes on the sandwich.

  Eva nods. “Eat it. Consider it a present, from me.”

  Dany nudges the sandwich back Eva’s way, and takes in her friend’s glasses. A little dot of light – almost imperceptible – blinks from the hinge. There, the little spot where temple meets eyeglass frame. “You are not videotaping this conversation,” she says to her friend.

  “It’s my diary,” Eva says.

  “I don’t like cameras,” Dany tells her.

  Eva touches her ear, and the tiny light goes out.

  “You want to see the virus?” Dany asks her. “Jasper put the sample in the wet lab under a digital microscope.”

  Eva shrugs and rolls her eyes.

  In her mind’s eye, Dany pictures the virus Jasper showed her. “It looks like a little planet.”

  “That’s more your gig,” Eva says. “I’m not into weird microscopic shit. I’m more into, like, weird ­macroscopic shit. You know, life forms … of an exceptional nature.”

  “Yeah, what life form’s that?”

  But Eva just looks at Dany and sips from her mug, a mysterious little smile on her face.

  Dany, only now, gets a really good look at the mug in Eva’s hands, the one she’s been toying with the whole time. It is hand thrown, the ceramic shell a hideous orange. At first, she thinks it’s a monkey, and yes, it is definitely some kind of primate. But as the features slowly resolve, Dany sees that Eva is drinking from the head of a grinning sasquatch.

  “Uh, so, what is that?” Dany asks, squinting at the thing. “Your drinking partner?”

  “This receptacle,” Eva says, taking in the bright orange mug, “is emblematic of my future studies.”

  Dany eyes the orange monkey.

  “And what’s that?” Eva asks, nodding at the key.

  “Jasper gave it to me,” Dany tells her.

  Eva must hear something in Dany’s voice, because she narrows her eyes and tilts her head. “I didn’t think you were … that attached to him,” she says. “I mean, that attached to anybody.” Eva guffaws. “Well, outside of ­Mac.”

  Dany stares at her friend for a beat, surprised.

  Her hand reaches for the hex key, and she remembers what they said about her in court. A lot of bullshit about survivor’s guilt and flattened affect and post-traumatic stress disorder. As if she’d been post anything. But then, that was a long time ago. Still, the thought is enough to make her pull at the long sleeves of her shirt self-consciously.

  Dany takes a second to find the words. “We’re friends?” she asks.

  Eva coughs up a laugh and gives Dany the side-eye.

  After a pause and only, Dany suspects, because she is staring a hole into Eva’s chest, her friend nods, embarrassed. “Don’t be a dummy. I know you ‘love’ me or whatever.” Eva puts air quotes around the word. Still, a blush of red butterflies out over Eva’s chest and neck, to blossom on her cheeks. In a whisper, she adds, “Vice versa, too, ’kay?”

  Dany’s heart is beating rabbit-fast. She looks at the floor in the break room.

  The floors are unnaturally clean – everywhere in the lab. It is as if, whenever you lift your eyes from the ground, tiny robots scurry out and scour the surface. At her apartment, the floors look nothing like this.

  “Yeah, me too,” Dany tells the floor.

  “No, yeah, I know, DJ. I know.”

  Dany hears Eva speak, but the words are far away. In her mind’s eye, Dany pictures the virus. The one that probably swims in the eyes of the woman who trawls their back alley, her gaze on Dany and ­Mac.

  And suddenly, just like that, the whole world feels unsure.

  Topsy-turvy.

  Dany’s breaths come quicker and her heart stutters out its beat. Because, yes, she sees an image of the virus and then of the woman. There is an image of Miss P and then a dozen angry beige suits – the Ministry of Child Services. Eva’s mouth is grinning – but her friend’s face grows small and distant, a tiny satellite, a thousand miles away. And then Dany can’t see Eva at all, because her head is flooding with pictures.

  First, there is an image of the virus – a tiny planet whose surface blooms with mushroom-like buttons. But no sooner does she picture its bumpy surface than it is replaced by an image of ­Mac. And then Dany sees the hospital and the courtroom and, as the psychiatrist’s voice drones on and on, she sees something worse. So much worse. There and then gone. In the flash of emergency lights, she sees children playing a sad and broken game of ring around the rosy. The last image hits her like a body blow, but one of such short duration she can breathe through it, breathe past it.

  Dany knows tricks.

  She knows how to shut the pictures down. How to turn the inside of her mind as dark as a theatre. How to push her mind down, under conscious thought, where all is dark and dim. No red ropes. No window well. No fire. No words. No Dany, even. A place beneath memory. But she hasn’t figured out how to stop the pictures. They float up. Snapshots, set down in mind by a painfully precise memory. Sh
e doesn’t know how to shut off the tiny light bulbs that are her neurons, the mind electric. Her brain is alive with flickering pictures. And through her picture-perfect memory the past lives on and on.

  Inside the lunchroom, there is a girl. And inside of her head, there are pictures. So, yes, she sees Eva’s mouth forming words. The sound is strange, delivered in slow motion. Dany tries to make the pictures stop, but the memories crash into her, a black river of dominoes. The pictures always end the same way – with ­Mac and her separated.

  Dany knows that her breathing is all wrong. This isn’t how you breathe. Because she isn’t breathing, now, she’s gasping.

  She pulls at the cuffs of her long sleeves – plucks at the worn seams, the hem half undone already. Eva stands, hand outstretched, and the chair, behind her, suspended in a slow topple.

  A moment later, her friend is by her side, holding her steady, and Dany, she’s looking right at her. Weirdly, she is looking Eva right in the face, but she isn’t seeing Eva, not now. Because the pictures are gone and in their place is pain. A throb of pain. An electric pulse of light. Dany folds over, her head hits the table – and her mind explodes. Electric tree roots shoot up into her brain. The pain takes on a colour, a hue. A blue-violet hum. The pain vibrates up, around, to the place where the knives are, just behind her eyes.

  Occipital neuralgia, the work farm’s nurse said. Have you fallen down again? Hit your head?

  Stress, the doctor in the burn ward said. Have you thought about taking up a hobby? Knitting? But, with a glance at her bandages, he changed his mind. Well, not now, perhaps. But catch up on your TV.

  Just breathe, her aunt would say.

  I’m sorry for what happened to you, I’m so sorry, Aunt ­Norah would croon, holding Dany’s head in her lap, smoothing her hair. Breathe, she’d say. Just breathe. Let it all go and breathe.

  But with her aunt gone, all Dany has are numbers. When things get bad, she recites primes or runs through a Lucas sequence. Today, she does Fibonacci sums.

  Zero, one, one. But inside her skin, the nerves are as sharp as piano strings. Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. With each sum, she eases knots and unwinds nerves. Two hundred and thirty-­three, three hundred and seventy-seven. Each number takes on a hue, shivers with shape and colour. She can almost feel her aunt’s hands, almost hear her whisper, Breathe, breathe. At twenty-­eight thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven the pain ebbs and dulls.

  “You’re okay,” Eva is saying, rubbing her back. But Eva’s voice drifts towards Dany from another galaxy. Still, Dany follows the thread of Eva’s voice back to the lunchroom. She takes one deep breath after another. And then she’s here again, a girl, sitting at a table.

  Red-faced. A total idiot.

  “You okay?” Eva asks.

  “Yeah,” Dany says. Luckily, it’s just the two of them in the break room. “Just, I, I had a rough morning. Wasn’t time to eat.”

  “You scared me,” Eva says, nudging the sandwich her way.

  And then Eva shakes her head and stares pointedly at the wall. There, by the door, a bullet list has been printed out and taped up.

  REPORT ALL SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS is written in all caps at the top.

  “Don’t tell them,” Dany begs her friend. “Please. They’ll send me home.” Dany knows that no one is allowed to come into the lab, not when they are even a little bit sick. But she isn’t sick. “I’m just hungry,” she says. Really goddamned hungry.

  Eva frowns and shakes her head, staring at her. Finally, Dany meets her friend’s eyes.

  “If you eat half of the sandwich,” Eva says, “I won’t say a thing.”

  Dany flicks a glance from the sandwich to the clock. There is time for a bite. One eye on the clock, she scarfs the sandwich down.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 5

  Isobel Lau, the principle investigator at BioGENEius, puts Dany in the positive pressure suit herself. She spends what feels like an hour going over everything, as if Dany is going into a real wet lab. Which she isn’t. Finally, when Dany has eyeballed every last square inch of the blue suit, looking for damage or flaws, Isobel nods.

  Dany draws in a deep breath. This is it.

  She takes one measured step after another, making her way to the rat house. She doesn’t walk so much as plant one foot after another on the ground. Not so bad, not once she gets used to the weight. And a person, in Dany’s experience, can get used to almost anything.

  As she makes her way across the lab, Lauren Ko and a couple of other lab coats stop to watch. “Oh my God, she’s so cute,” Ko says in a hush. Lauren’s lips twitch into a smile, and Dany flicks her gaze from Lauren’s upturned mouth to the clock.

  There, the bright red second hand is carving away time. Half an hour – that’s what the tank gives her. Thirty minutes in the blue suit.

  Ahead, Eva, in her headset, is waiting at the rat house door. Dany flicks to a channel only the two of them use. With the earbuds firmly socketed, she can hear Eva well enough, even over the hiss and click of oxygen intake.

  “You should have taken off your shirt,” Eva says, a wicked grin on her face. More seriously, she adds, “You must be broiling.”

  Dany shrugs, but the gesture is lost in the suit. Experience has taught her better. She always keeps her shirt on. Always. Besides, Dany likes it inside of the suit. When she’s inside of the blue suit, no one can touch her. Inside the suit, Dany’s world is carefully regulated. She is an undersea diver inside her second skin. But this skin is better. Thicker, seamless, stronger than hers, a skin that keeps everything at a distance.

  For now, Dany’s Wistar rats, Harry and Lolo, are caged in the rat house. Even if this is just a stupid high school project, still, one day soon her rats will be moved to the wet lab. There, the virus will be put inside of them. If not this week, then soon – very soon – the disease will kick in. Then one of Dany’s little rats will start wandering the alleys behind her apartment building, collecting up bottles and cans, family photos propped up in the child seat of its shopping cart.

  She’s thinking about her Wistar rats when Eva’s voice cuts into the fish tank on her head.

  “I wish I lived with you,” Eva says, her voice tinny and small.

  Dany glances at her friend, surprised.

  But already Eva is turning away. Her friend levels her gaze at Jasper, and Dany follows. She takes in his pressure suit, his gloved hands, and switches back to the official communication channel. The door to the rat house opens, and a moment later, Dany lumbers in. Next to her, Jasper begins the long and tedious process of taking baseline measures of her rats – more practice. And, for the first time since early that morning, she gets a good look at her biology mentor.

  Dany frowns.

  Droplets of perspiration bead his upper lip. With a plastic bubble over his head, yes, like her, he’s cooking in the heat of his own breath. But sweat is pouring off him. She can see the condensation forming inside his faceplate.

  Jasper Okello is … off.

  Even his voice sounds wrong. His tongue is thick and when he speaks, there is a subtle slur. An effect of the earbuds? The hiss of his air supply? She doesn’t think so. No, it’s something more.

  As Jasper works with the uninfected rats, Dany takes in his hands. She knows his hands. Has watched them day after day. They are deft hands. Quick. But now, she sees a stranger’s hands. Thick and clumsy. Dany raises her gloved palm, signals to Eva and flicks back to their private channel. “Something’s wrong,” she tells Eva.

  “Yeah,” Eva says with a smirk. “Jasper’s drunk.” Her eyes fly wide as she says it. Eva cranes into the rat house window, eyes on their mentor. “Seriously? He’s shit-faced, right?”

  Dany can see what Eva means, Jasper’s clumsy hands, the slur in his speech. But Jasper was sober enough that morning.

  “No,” Dany says. “Not drunk. But I don’t know …”


  “Hold on, DJ,” Eva says. “Let me hear what he’s saying.”

  With an audible click, Eva leaves their private channel.

  Dany stares at Eva through the glass. But, superimposed, she can see the reflection of her own face. Dany is everywhere. On the surface of her faceplate. In the stainless steel surface of the counters. On the glass between the lab and the rat house. Inside of her, there is a moiling mess of emotions. But the girl on the glass shows nothing. Dany closes her eyes on the girl, and turns back to Jasper.

  “Do you want to confirm the numbers?” Jasper asks.

  He should be asking.

  He might be asking.

  But it comes out more like this, “You wanna confum shnumers.”

  As he speaks, one of his eyes drifts to the right.

  Only one.

  Outside the rat house, Eva gawps at Jasper, a look of horror on her face. She tears off her headset and Dany can see her mouth moving. Can see her calling out.

  On the other side of the glass, they begin to gather.

  Tobias and Isobel arrive first, followed by a half a dozen others. All of them with eyes on Jasper. Dany turns and looks at her mentor.

  The swelling in Jasper’s brain is so bad that his eyes are being pushed out, the orbs protruding from their sockets. The pupils are large and dark. Over and over, the pupils list to one side, snap back.

  “Nystagmus,” says Isobel – her voice echoing inside of Dany’s headgear.

  Tobias nods, his expression grim. But whatever he says is lost on Dany, his voice contained on the other side of the glass.

  This is not the regular virus, because it doesn’t cause this kind of damage, not this quickly. The virus causes a long slow slide. It takes the you from you bit by little bit. One glance at Jasper and Dany knows, Jasper has the new strain. The hybrid. He’s got version 2.0.

  And so begins the last hour of her mentor’s life – Jasper’s real life, the one in which he is more than a collection of mere ­molecules. More than a chair or rock or soup ladle. More than the sum of the virus’s parts. One of the very last hours in which Jasper is Jasper.