He still looked unsure. “You never know where danger lurks.”
“Tell me about it.” I nodded toward the lab. “But, okay? Does that work? It’s the only idea I’ve got.”
“Okay. We’ll meet here, make the record, and have a party?”
“The party,” I said, “is something I haven’t totally figured out.”
He shrugged. “I don’t go to many parties myself.”
“Maybe I’ll bring streamers? That’ll be fine, right?”
“Sure,” Howe said. “I’ll see if I can think of anything to bring.”
Before I could say anything, we heard a soft click: the unmistakable sound of the blue door at the end of the hall gently closing. We glanced at each other, identical looks of alarm across our faces, and then ran toward the lobby.
She was right in the middle of it, the clean chicken adobo dish in her lap.
Grandma Van.
“Oh, hello,” she said.
I had no idea how long she’d been there, but she had keys. She could have let herself in at any point. And the scuff marks on the walls indicated she’d had enough time to change directions more than once. We stared at each other for a moment and then Grandma Van said, “Well, here’s your dish.” Except that she said it very carefully, like there was some kind of secret message, and then she gave us both a long, meaningful look and drove her chair out. The dish was still on her lap. We watched as she drove down the sidewalk, the scooter bumping slightly over the cracks in the cement. She motored past Howe’s parallel-parked mom, played chicken with a couple pushing a stroller, and then drove out of view. Howe looked at me.
I felt like apologizing, but I wasn’t sure what for. “That was my grandma.”
“Oh. Does she have memory problems?”
“I don’t think so. I think she just likes to mess with people.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
And then, with nothing else for us to discuss, Howe left, exactly one hour after he’d arrived, precisely as the verbal contract had stated. I hoped I wasn’t making a gigantic mistake by trusting him. But it was too late to back out.
It was for real now.
On the walk home at the end of the day, something finally broke awesome.
My mom got a call. The ringtone was my grandmother’s—a song called “Old Lady & the Devil.” I wasn’t paying much attention because I was obsessively replaying every conversation with Howe, sure I’d screwed something up somewhere. But then my mom hung up and stopped us in the middle of the sidewalk, a giant smile on her face. “Guess who decided to eat in the Swan Song’s dining hall tonight?”
“Seriously?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Did she fall out of the scooter and hit her head?” asked my dad.
“Nope,” my mom said happily. “I think for the first time ever, she decided to take my advice and try something new!”
We passed the museum, and I smiled in the general direction of the banana.
Then we ordered pizza when we got home, to celebrate.
I have to admit, at the time, I really thought that phone call from Grandma Van was a sign that things were going to go smoothly.
Five hours later, I was lying in bed, in the dark, dressed as a left kidney.
It was exactly 10:45 p.m.
I had an hour and fifteen minutes to meet Howe at the lab, pack the heads, and get to the recording studio. It was going to be close, but I’d needed to wait until my parents were definitely asleep.
Sneaking out was one of those things I never actually thought I’d try, like getting a beehive hairdo or eating live roaches. I felt like a completely different person.
I rolled out of bed quietly, spylike, and the bottom part of the too-big kidney costume slumped against my knees. It had been my dad’s Halloween costume from the year before—he and my mom went as a pair of kidneys. Hers was smaller and definitely would have fit better, but I was going to need the bigger, baggier one to make my escape.
There had been a lot to plan out.
I’d decided against the classic fake body situation. My parents would have immediately noticed that it wasn’t anatomically correct, even under the covers, and that would have bothered them even more than me having left a fake body in the first place. “How could our daughter think that a hip joint bent like this?” I could hear the total wilt of disappointment.
I did leave a note, though. I went with BRB. It seemed casual enough that maybe they wouldn’t freak out if they discovered me gone in the middle of the night. Also, it was a teeny bit comforting to me. Like maybe I actually would BRB.
Then I slung my backpack on over the kidney costume and snuck through the dark apartment. I was picturing myself as a stealthy night cat, but a lumpy section of the kidney bumped a side table, and there was a loud clang as my mom’s bronzed gallstone fell over.
Removing that gallstone was my mom’s first-ever surgery, and she’d wanted the occasion memorialized. Personally, I’d always avoided touching the gallstone—even though it was covered in bronze, it had been in somebody’s gallbladder. I thought that was enough reason to not put it in the front hall, but, as usual, the vote was two against one. So I wasn’t surprised when it ratted me out, clanking onto its side and then rocking back and forth, like it was laughing at me. I froze, ready to scram back to my room if I heard any sound from my parents.
Nothing.
I unfroze, fixed the gallstone, and kept moving forward.
The front door was now a few steps away. My dad’s keys were in the key dish, which was actually a mangled pottery-camp drink coaster. The keys were always there, but it hadn’t kept me from checking obsessively all evening. I lifted them slowly so they didn’t clink against the coaster, then eased open the front door and ducked out into the hallway. I hit the down button for the elevator and waited, hoping none of my neighbors were around. The costume included a hood and I pulled it over my head, even though probably anyone in the building would instantly know that the short, shifty kidney was me. When the elevator arrived, I got on, feeling my guts dip as it started to drop to the lobby.
The floor numbers counted down silently and I tugged the hood lower. With a gentle bump, the elevator landed on the ground floor. I stepped out and immediately ducked around the corner, hiding behind the huge planter with the fake palm tree.
This was the trickiest part. Past the elevators in the opposite direction was a small office, and in that office, there was a night watchman. I’d been in there. I’d seen how the security camera pointed toward the front door and played endlessly on the little black-and-white screen, I knew there was no way I could avoid it. But every time I’d been in there, I’d noticed something else, too. That wasn’t the only screen. There was another one, and it was bigger, and it was full color, and it always had a game on it. Football, basketball, whatever was in season. I had to gamble that it was on again tonight. And that it was more interesting than the little black-and-white screen. And that as long as I didn’t make any quick moves, the night watchman wasn’t going to be distracted.
I glommed along the wall as far as I could until I knew I was almost in range of the camera. Then I squatted down a little, letting the kidney costume come to rest just above my ankles. I was trying my best to resemble nothing more than an unimpressive blob, just a technical problem with the screen. I took a breath and, still in a squat, slowly edged out. I scooted, then stopped. Scooted, then stopped. No fast movements. If the watchman on duty glanced at the screen, I wanted to look like Nothing. The kind of Nothing that you know has been there the whole time, you just never noticed it before. The kind of Nothing you don’t ask questions about or expect things of.
Inch by inch, I made my way to the door. I got about halfway there before I started to feel like the plan was actually working.
The other thing that happened about halfway there: I realized why people do squats for exercise.
Holy kidney.
I didn’t know how I was going to stand when
I finally made it to safety.
When I got to the door, I slipped out in one slow, smooth, non-attention-grabbing move. A bead of sweat was rolling down my face, partly from the costume and partly from the squatting, but I couldn’t relax until I was completely out of range. When I finally made it, I tipped over onto the sidewalk, stretching my legs to the sky and making a mental note that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get back in the same way.
I used the wall to pull myself up on my jelly legs, and then looked around.
I’d made it.
I’d snuck out. I was loose on the streets of nighttime Chicago.
Every part of me was more awake than ever before. And the night was somehow awake, too. All my edges felt clear and sharp, like I was made of lasers. I pushed back the hood of the kidney costume and let it hang down, just feeling the air around my head. The air outside my building was the most amazing air I’d ever breathed. It was sweet and it was clean and it was electric and for the first time, I actually believed I could pull the whole thing off.
I started to run. Running made me even more sure I could pull it off. Running does not usually give me positive feelings, but right then, in the middle of the night, it was incredible. It was exhilarating, like being shot from a slingshot. Like having a destiny. I ran down the sidewalk away from our building, my backpack slapping at me over the costume. I aimed for the pools of streetlight so that any lurking dangers would be able to see that I was a kidney and just leave me alone.
When I arrived at 11:05 p.m., out of breath and pushing at a cramp in my ribs, Howe was already waiting out front, still in his tux, but now looking additionally weird with vegetables on strings all around his neck and sporting a small turquoise fanny pack.
And next to him, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, was Em Taylor.
Oh heck, no, I thought.
“Hey, Eyeballs,” she said. “Why are you wearing the kidney?”
I glared meaningfully at Howe.
He looked back at me, completely unmeaningfully.
“Howe,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I need to talk to you inside. Alone.”
So, by the way.
The assembly at school?
That wasn’t actually the spectacular moment that ended my friendship with Em.
That moment was after the assembly.
What with the amount of slouching and sweating I’d done during the concert, my T-shirt and jeans stuck to me in weird places as we filed back to our homerooms. All the other classes looked half-asleep. My class was having the time of their lives slumping down the hall with limps and hunchbacks, miming their sacks of knuckles or whatever, and doing it to the everlasting mystification of Ms. Peters, who had somehow missed the entire thing.
I stood in the middle of the line, staring ahead of me at Igor impression after Igor impression, every single one making me feel worse than the one before it. I could hear them behind me, too. It wasn’t just that they were trying to make me feel bad. It was how much fun they were having doing it.
I could actually feel myself disappearing into the joke.
Our line moved onward, slowly creeping forward in the hallway traffic jam, and the next time we passed a bathroom, I slipped inside. Empty. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe again. I’d need to come up with an excuse for why I was late when I eventually got back to class, but I didn’t care. One more second in that line of Igors and I might have come apart, just crumbled into pieces, exactly the sort of pieces, in fact, that an Igor might have liked.
I turned on the cool water and let it run over my hands.
Maybe, I forced myself to think, it will be okay.
I could stay in the bathroom, running water over my hands until everyone else got old and died.
No. That plan was no good.
I was going to have to leave the bathroom.
Just.
Not yet.
The sound of Em laughing echoed in my head. I tried to push it down, to bury it somewhere I’d never look. In my anklebones, maybe. I never went there.
I splashed some water on my face, and then, as I reached for a paper towel, the bathroom door opened, startling me, and I dove blindly into a stall. I’d barely pulled the lock when I heard someone say, “Fovea?”
Em.
What was she doing?
Maybe she hadn’t realized what I’d known all along, that having parents who experimented on dead bodies was bad for a person’s reputation. Maybe she was there to apologize. Maybe. I stood in that tiny space, as still as possible. Water rolled down my nose and got the front of my shirt wet.
“Fo?” she said. Her voice echoed a little off the tiles. “Ms. Peters saw you come in here and sent me to see if you were okay.”
I was not okay.
“Fovea? I know you’re in here. I can see your feet right now.”
Stupid gravity. Stupid feet.
“Fovea. I don’t know what you’re freaking out about. It’s no big deal.”
It’s no big deal. She’d said that before, at zoo camp. This is natural selection. Natural selection doesn’t care what plans you had.
Oh. I was the tarantula here.
This was my life cycle.
My life cycle was an embarrassment.
“Are we…” I ran out of words and had to start again. “Are we friends?”
She sighed deeply, like this was all a huge hassle. “Eh.”
“Why?” I took a breath to steady my voice. To keep it matter-of-fact. “Why’d you replace me with Dana? Was it something I said?”
“No.”
“We did all those things—”
“We didn’t do them. I did. You were just there.”
“What?”
There was a short pause, exactly long enough for an owl to scoop up a tarantula in its beak.
“You’re boring.”
Crunch.
“So, I’ll just tell Ms. Peters you’ll be out in a little while.”
I’d really believed that Em would come back to me in the end, and that Dana was just a phase. I’d been wrong. The food chain of life is about the most permanent thing there is, I thought to myself. And then the door slammed behind her, and Em was gone and I’d been swallowed by something bigger than me, with no way out.
Except for being digested or barfed up, but that sort of confuses the analogy.
And this was pretty clear. Em had cut me loose.
By the time I finally left the bathroom, I knew where I stood. I was a holographic banana in full daylight. A cosmic joke, and also utterly, completely invisible.
11:25 p.m.
The night of the recording.
Em was not supposed to be standing outside the lab.
I should never have trusted Howe.
I unlocked the front door, ushered Howe in, and pulled the door closed behind the two of us. Turning on the light seemed too risky. A passing cop might think there was a break-in or something. Anyway, the glow from Herophilus’s tank and the streetlamp outside was enough to see by. Em was watching us through the window, and I turned my back to her so she wouldn’t see my face.
Before I could say anything, though, Howe whispered, “Guess what? The train wasn’t so bad after all. And on the way here, I calculated that as long as we leave by eleven thirty, we’ll get there by midnight. So it’s totally okay that you’re late. We haven’t even been waiting long.”
“I am not late!” I whispered back. “Anyway, even if I was, THAT ISN’T THE POINT.”
“What’s the point, then?”
“Who put this together? Was it Dana? Devon?”
“…You did, right? Or else I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What is she doing here?”
“I invited her,” he said, reaching into the turquoise fanny pack to pull out a schedule he’d written down. He’d already scratched off 11 p.m., travel by train to lab. “You can keep that for reference. I have another one.”
“Why would you invite her? Wha
t were you thinking?”
He looked sheepish as he zipped the fanny pack. “The guys made me promise I’d try to invite more people. For the party, you know. They can be very persuasive.”
“So there’s no plan? But why HER?”
“Oh.” He frowned. “Well, my mom and I ran into Em and her mom in the grocery store, and it sort of came up.”
“Tell me exactly.”
“Okay, well, there was an awkward moment in the frozen food, and it was really cold and uncomfortable, and our mothers were talking, and I just sort of said, ‘Hey, saw your friend Fovea at the lab today while we were not doing anything in particular.’ And she said, ‘You went to the lab?’ And then she demanded to be included in whatever it was we were doing.”
“Howe—”
“Also, the guys were very persuasive about more people at the party. You know how tricky they are. I figured I could catch two birds with one birdcage.”
“You mean kill two birds with one stone?”
“Oh, no. That sounds awful. I’m opposed to bird cruelty. Not that cages are much better, I guess….”
“Howe. Have you even been to school in the last few months? Have you seen me and Em be friends in the last few months?”
“What—are you guys in a fight?”
“Are we in a fight? We are in an apocalypse, Howe. We are in an atom bomb.”
“Why’d she come, then?”
“She’s always wanted to come to the lab.”
“Or maybe the fight isn’t as bad as you think it is.”
I glanced through the window at her. That wasn’t possible.
But.
“Did she know I was going to be here?”
“Yep.”
If there was even the smallest chance that he was right, I had to find out. “How much did you tell her?”
“About the guys?”
I nodded.
“Nothing. Our moms were there, so I was being very cryptic. All she knows is that we’re ‘doing’ ‘something.’”
“Well, that definitely is cryptic.”
“Thanks.”
The night had barely started and it was already a mess. On one hand, if we sent Em away, she’d be angry. Any chance at being friends again would be out. She might also be angry enough to tell her mom, who could tell my parents. It was risky. If word got back to my parents, Howe and I would get in serious trouble for sneaking into the lab in the middle of the night.
The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 10