He glanced toward the front door.
“If you’re going to be here for an hour anyway, it couldn’t hurt anything, right?”
He looked back to me. “I guess not. Except—”
“What?”
“Why are you organizing it?”
Howe was easier to talk to than I’d thought he’d be, but that didn’t mean I trusted him with any part of the truth. “There’s a chance I might know the desperate girl.”
His eyes narrowed on me for a second.
“Betta fish, by the way,” I said. “Not guppy.”
We both looked at the tank, which was easier than looking at each other. Then he nodded. “Okay. I guess I’ll take a verbal contract. I, Howe Berger, will sing with some shut-ins for about an hour for charitable purposes.”
Then he stood and shook my hand.
Oh, let me recap.
He finally agreed to do it, and everything was going well. And then.
HE SHOOK MY HAND.
Technically, I guess I’d been holding it out, so it might have looked like an invitation. But now WE BOTH HAD DISGUSTING FROZEN CUSTARD HEAD ALL OVER OUR HANDS. It was spreading—for just a second, I wondered if this was how the zombie plague was going to happen. I tried to stop myself from hyperventilating. I closed my eyes and imagined myself glopping around in a sea of hand sanitizer. In my imagination, I directed a giant hand to pick Howe up and drop him into the sea, too, tuxedo and all. We glopped together. Plague averted.
“Stay here,” I said, opening my eyes and feeling much calmer. This picturing strategy was working. “And don’t touch anything.” I left and came back seconds later with a huge bottle of lavender-scented hand sanitizer that I pillaged from my mom’s desk. “You want this,” I told Howe as he looked at me suspiciously. “Trust me.” I squirted large amounts of goo all over our hands and then I explained the plan while we squeegeed the stuff around until it dried.
“So,” he said when I was done, “I have to be blindfolded because of the agoraphobia?”
“It’s pretty bad.”
He seemed to consider it for a minute. “Okay. I’ll be blindfolded. But for future reference, I’m guessing this is the kind of thing that goes in the contract.”
“Andy, Lake, McMullen, this is Howe.”
“This is how what?” Lake asked.
“No, this is Howe,” I said. “That’s his name. He’s your baritone.”
“Am I facing them?” Howe whispered.
“Yes,” I said.
“Baloney,” McMullen grumbled. “He’s awfully young-looking.”
“We’re awfully old-looking,” Lake sang. “And does anybody smell lavender?”
I pretended not to hear the last bit, and hoped they weren’t going to be too picky about Howe. For the sake of my school reputation, I needed this to go smoothly. Also, it wasn’t like I had a ton of baritones up my sleeve. “He can sing baritone, isn’t that what matters?”
“That is exactly what matters,” Andy said. “Young man, let’s do a little singing, shall we?”
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Howe said, standing straight again.
“Now, have you ever been in a barbershop quartet?”
“No.”
They started talking music, and then the doorbell rang, making me jump a foot. “I’m going to get that,” I said, but they were so involved in four-part harmony this and tenor that and bass whatever that I just slipped right out and they didn’t even notice.
“How come the box is in a bag?” I asked the deliveryman out front. It wasn’t the same guy from before, but definitely the same company—I wondered briefly how many people were running around Chicago wearing berets and carrying boxes of body parts. Probably safe to say too many. This particular guy had a smallish box that he was holding in a clear bag.
“Oh yeah. Started leaking. Have a nice day.”
Nice. As if. In my opinion, no day that involved a body part in a baggie should ever be considered nice. I walked back down the Hall of Innards toward the lab, holding the small biohazard out in front of me. This day had been all kinds of things, but nice definitely wasn’t one of them. And shoot. It wasn’t even lunchtime.
I stepped into the lab.
“Well, no use having an unconscious baritone,” McMullen grumbled.
Howe was passed out on the floor, the blindfold lying next to him.
What.
“I was gone for a single minute!” I shouted, not sure whether I should keep holding the bag or put it down and help Howe. “Who took off his blindfold?!”
The guys looked at me innocently, all big eyes and eyebrows up. Well, Andy and Lake did. McMullen looked as cheesed off as I felt.
“We didn’t touch a thing,” Lake said. “No hands.”
“You know that is not what I mean! I mean, who said he could take off the blindfold? What am I going to do with him now?”
“Slap him!” Lake crowed.
“Cold water,” Andy advised.
“That’s not WHAT I MEAN!” I took a couple of breaths. I walked over to the body parts freezer. I opened it very quickly, shoved the bag in, and slammed the door behind me before anything else could get out and drive me crazy. It felt good to slam something. “I mean, what am I going to do now that he has SEEN YOU? There’s no reason for Howe to keep you a secret. He could tell everybody at school, and this is the absolute last thing I need at school. He could tell everybody at the Children’s Refinement, his mom, who I am pretty sure would not exactly keep a lid on this sort of thing. I’m going to have to move to Alaska. And if he tells anybody that I let him hang out with you, that’s going to be bad news for my parents, really, super-bad news. Maybe as bad as them losing that other head. Guy. Whatever.”
And then I heard some movement from the floor.
“It’s okay,” Howe said, sounding a little woozy. “I really want to work on the album.”
I turned to the heads. “The what?”
Andy smiled somewhat toothlessly.
I did not smile back.
“Four-part harmonies, a lot of 1920s music, maybe a little experimentation,” Andy was saying. I couldn’t see him because my head was in my hands and my eyes were closed. This was spiraling out of control was what it was doing.
“Stop,” I said. “Stop everything. Nothing else is happening until you tell me the whole favor. Every single part.” Howe looked up from the floor where he sat, holding the emergency ice pack I’d found.
“You got us a baritone,” Andy said. “Next is the recording session.”
“And then the wrap party,” said Lake. “Non-negotiable.”
I was starting to get a headache. “How…”
“Yes?” said Howe.
“Not you,” I said weakly. “How…is all this going to happen?”
“We’d been planning this for a while, and we were counting on Whitney, but then she left…”
McMullen added, “Plus the whole—”
“Never mind that,” Andy jumped in, cutting him off. “Now we have you and we have Howe, who will do splendidly, by the way, and thank you.” Howe beamed. “The next step will be the little recording session.”
“I don’t know how to do that kind of thing,” I said.
“I see,” said Andy. “Well, that’s fair. You being new to the music business and all. It shouldn’t be that hard. You just call up some places, see who has availability to come out and record a quick session here. Tonight, that is. It should really be tonight.”
“Tonight.”
“The later in the evening, the better. That will certainly help guarantee that your parents don’t discover us in the middle of the Delaware, so to speak.”
McMullen grunted. “Middle of the—just talk like normal people, Andy.”
“And then a party?” I asked. “I don’t throw parties.”
“Never?” Lake asked incredulously.
I shook my head.
“Not New Year’s?” he asked. “Solstice? Día de los Muert
os? Not even birthday parties?”
I shook my head again. “You never know if anybody’s going to show up. It’s too risky.”
“I agree,” said Howe. “Parties: risky.”
Huh. It was nice having somebody agree with you. That hadn’t happened to me in months.
“Well, this will be a crash course for both of you!” Lake said. “I’ll teach you. You can be my protégés. This will be marvelous.”
I took the bag of ice away from Howe and put it right between my eyes. “How many people need to be at this party?”
“As many as possible,” said Lake.
“And then you tell me where the you-know-what is?”
“Then we tell you where the you-know-who is.”
“The you-know-who-what?” Howe asked. “Is there more I should know about this?”
Oh, what the heck—he’d already seen the worst of it. If he was going to flambé what was left of my reputation, he had more than enough information already. I sighed. “There’s a missing head. The ex-boyfriend of the former lab receptionist is using the missing head as romantic blackmail. But she’s in Florida, somewhere, and didn’t get the message, besides which, she should probably not be giving this guy any more chances because he’s a creepazoid and a cremator.”
“Double whammy,” murmured Howe.
I nodded. “I don’t want my parents to get in trouble, so I’m finding the head before he reports it missing and they get shut down or go to jail or whatever the penalty is for losing a head.”
“It can’t be good, that’s for sure.”
I pushed the ice harder into my face. It was the perfect kind of unbearable. “But these guys won’t tell me where the other head is until I do their massively unending favor.”
“It’s like a blackmail and a counterblackmail,” Howe said. “Or extortion.”
“Gentle coercion, really,” said Andy.
“I did a report once on a book called Heists and Other Schemes. This almost qualifies as a Tiger Kidnapping,” said Howe. “If you were also going to make the missing head open a bank vault. Wait. Or maybe Fovea opens the bank vault belonging to the missing head?”
“Ooh, tell me more about a Tiger Kidnapping!” Lake said. “I like the sound of that one.”
“You would,” said McMullen.
They continued discussing the technical terms of how exactly they were ruining my life while ice water dribbled slowly down my nose. I halfheartedly swiped at the dribble. Being ganged up on by three heads and Howe Berger was not making me feel very good about myself.
Eventually, I reminded the guys that we were on a limited timetable and I left them to practice while I found somebody to come record the album. Out in the lobby, I looked up recording studios. I could hear the guys down the hall taking Howe through what they were going to sing on the album. They sounded pretty sharp. It absolutely did not make up for what they were putting me through, but at least the music was decent.
I dialed the number for AHHH Recording Studios. Maybe this crazy plan was possible.
“Our first available appointments are at the beginning of October.”
Or maybe not. “Your first appointment is in four months?”
“Do you want it?”
“No, thanks.”
The second place I called was even more depressing.
“First of all, I’ve never heard of you,” said the snippy man who answered the phone. “We don’t do walk-ins. And secondly, no one, no one in this business is going to go to where you are. My advice? Buy yourself a cheap microphone and spend a few years working up your game.”
I hung up. He didn’t know anything about my game.
Plus, years? Please. I had less than twenty-four hours before Inko ratted on my parents and they paid the price. A new and terrible thought washed over me, giving me straight-up goose bumps. If that head was still alive, or whatever Lake and Andy and McMullen were, and my parents didn’t take care of it properly, could they be charged with murder? They couldn’t be charged with murder, could they? And how long did it take for somebody who was already dead to die?
My mouth went dry. Worst-case scenario here was becoming really, really bad.
As I clicked on link after link, and called one disagreeable recording studio after another, I tried to fight the feeling that the favor was doomed, that this was as far as I was going to get. Soon I ran out of recording studios, and was just calling anywhere in the area that mentioned music. I almost let myself get talked into guitar lessons by somebody at a music school, but aside from that, I wasn’t getting anywhere until I clicked on the link for a place called Nussbaum’s Musicalarium.
The link took me to a single sad page that looked like it had been made when the internet was first invented. In the middle of the page was a roughly drawn bird whose beak blinked open and shut. When it was open, a music note appeared above the bird.
I picked up the phone, and after a few rings, a woman answered.
We worked out the details. Like the snippy guy predicted, they didn’t make house calls. But after a few minutes, I’d booked us a recording session.
It looked like we were going to visit Nussbaum’s Musicalarium.
I stepped back into the lab, and they broke off in the middle of a song. “We’ve got a recording session scheduled,” I announced, and they cheered.
“My hour’s almost up.” Howe straightened his bow tie. “Just so you know.”
“Short rehearsal,” grumbled McMullen. “We barely got one run-through.”
“It’ll come together,” encouraged Lake.
“Who’s coming to do the recording?” Andy asked.
I shifted a little. “Somebody named Nussbaum. We’ll, um, be going to Nussbaum’s Musicalarium.” They all started talking at once.
“Wait—”
“Going?”
“We’re going?”
“We’re GOING SOMEPLACE!” cried Lake. “What’ll I WEAR! Kidding, kidding, but oh, this is great news.”
“Are you sure about this?” Andy asked.
I shook my head. “It was the only way I could get anybody to agree to do it. But no, thanks for asking, I’m not sure about it. We need to figure out how to keep everybody from seeing you and obviously blindfolds aren’t going to work—”
“Sorry,” Howe said.
“—but at least it’s only about fifteen blocks away from here. So it could be worse.”
“When?” Howe asked.
“Tonight. The only time they had in the next twenty-four hours was midnight.”
“The stroke of midnight!” said Lake. “An inspiring time for creativity! The Chunnel between dead of night and dead of morning!”
“Get a grip,” said McMullen.
“Fovea?” Howe sort of half raised his hand, the too-small tuxedo jacket keeping him from raising it all the way. “I need to go.”
“I’ll walk you out,” I said, and we stepped into the Hall of Innards. About halfway down, I slowed. I wanted to thank him, but it suddenly felt weird. “Is your head okay from when you landed on it?”
He nodded, then stopped. “Except I probably shouldn’t nod for a little while.”
“I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated. When I called you.”
“But you did know they were heads,” he said.
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s just…”
“I know.”
“The weirdest.”
“I know.”
“Are we going to cover this in eighth-grade biology, do you think?”
“I asked them. They kind of dodged it. Anyway, sorry to get you involved. I just thought that blindfold thing would work. I didn’t count on them being so sneaky. They’re really sneaky for not having bodies.”
“It could happen to anyone.”
“Thanks.”
He nodded. “Ow.”
“And thanks for not telling anyone about any of this,” I said.
“The truth is, my mom’s birthday i
s next month.” He reached up to fidget with his hair. “I, um, needed to get her something. An album of music I recorded secretly will be perfect. So it’s really no problem.” He stopped. “Actually, there is a problem. I’m not really that experienced in the sneaking-around department.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t exactly an expert either. “Well, sneaking shouldn’t be that complicated, right? Let’s meet here. Then we can grab the guys and all go together to the recording place. The heads aren’t walking there on their own, plus it’ll be safer to sneak as a group.”
“What about before all that? How do we get here?”
I could probably get as far as the Holography Museum with my eyes closed, I knew it so well—that was about halfway. I’d never made the trip to the lab in the middle of the night, but there were streetlights. If I ran, it would only take a couple of minutes. “I’m going to walk. Or run. Probably run-walk. I live close by.”
“I don’t. It would take me almost an hour from my house.”
“I guess you could take the train?”
He recoiled, gasping, like somebody had told him he could never wear a tuxedo again. “The train is dangerous at night. And often in the daytime.”
“Don’t they have judo classes or something at the CR?”
“Only tai chi.”
“So just defend yourself.”
“Tai chi is about the movement of energy. It’s not about beating people up.”
“You can’t move your energy into fighting someone?”
“I don’t think that’s part of the rules.”
“Then I don’t know.” I realized it wasn’t something I was looking forward to either. Running around at night. On the scale of one to dangerous, it was straight-up dangerous. Howe picked the lint out of his cummerbund, looking slightly less James Bond–y. As he flicked the fuzz away, he leaned back against one of my dad’s drawings of a spleen mid-surgery and knocked it off the wall. He caught the drawing before it fell far, but ripped one armpit of the jacket.
“Dag,” he said, examining the tear. “Now my tux looks weird.”
NOW it looks weird? I wanted to say, but then I had a brilliant idea. “That’s it. We make ourselves look weird. For the sneaking out. People leave you alone if you look weird.”
The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 9