Out on the sidewalk, it was still dark.
Dirk appeared just as Howe and I were stepping onto the back of Grandma Van’s chair. He held out a flash drive. “From Nussbaum,” he said, taking the reading glasses off his head. “And for what it’s worth…” He used the glasses to scratch behind an ear.
I waited for him to finish his sentence.
But he didn’t. He waved the glasses toward the coolers, then at Grandma Van, all the while shaking his head. Then he looked at me, gave a single nod, and he and all his muscles disappeared into the Musicalarium.
I stared after him until Grandma Van beeped the horn on the scooter. Em was still talking about what she’d learned, but I kept playing back that last moment with Dirk. He was impressed with me. Right? I wasn’t making that up? I climbed on next to Howe, snagged the corner of the kidney on the chair briefly, and then pulled free. Grandma Van revved the scooter and we took off into the dark morning.
“Almost home,” I said, more to myself than anybody else. “Just a few blocks.”
There was a brief pause and then, from her perch on the rolling cooler, Em said, “Locks.”
“Rocks,” I answered automatically.
It was nothing big or important. Just a dumb rhyming game we used to play at the drama camp. But in an instant, it was like nothing had broken between us at all. A few random rhyming words, filling me with the rush of what it had been like when we were one whole thing. Those dumb rhymes felt more important to me than any actual conversation we could possibly have had at that moment.
“Shocks,” she said.
“Knocks.”
“International peace talks,” offered Howe.
“Diabetes compression socks,” threw out Grandma Van.
“Necks!” called Lake, longingly.
Em burst out laughing and I couldn’t stop smiling as we bumped down the sidewalk. Everything felt right.
At least, it did until Howe looked past me. “We’re going the wrong way.”
“Grandma Van?” I said, alarmed. “This isn’t the way—we came from that direction.”
“Surprise!” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “I decided we’re taking the scenic route!”
“Noooooo. We don’t need scenic. A regular route will be fine,” I said quickly. “We don’t have time.”
She waved me off. “There’s time. You need to live a little. I think ‘All Scenic, All the Time’ might be my new motto. And the fellas, no offense, are getting a little rank. I think we should air them out before the big party.”
“There’s a party, too?” asked Em.
“How do you know about the party?” I asked Grandma Van.
“The world moves in mysterious ways,” she said. “As you may have recently noticed.”
“She spied on us in the lab,” Howe said.
“I did no such thing,” she said, “and how did you find out?”
He mumbled.
“Speak up! Or don’t say anything at all!” Then she added thoughtfully, “That also might be my new motto.”
“In my Children’s Refinement Undercover Detective class—”
“In which class?” she asked pointedly.
He sighed. “In my CRUD class, we learned how to identify the weak elements of a plan,” Howe said. “That was a weak element. We weren’t watching our backs during that conversation.”
Something still didn’t make sense to me. “But why’d you stalk us like that?”
“You said you were going to be doing something dangerous,” she said, exasperated. “I’m your grandmother, Eyeballs. It’s part of my job to protect you from dangerous things. If I was the king of England, it would be easier to just stop people from doing things I don’t like, but as I have discovered with the whole Julia Klinger situation, I don’t seem to have that kind of pull. So I was just going to tail you. I didn’t mean for you to see me.”
I was so stunned that I couldn’t think of anything to say. Since when did Grandma Van look out for me? Then again, I’d never done anything dangerous before.
And then we turned a corner and I understood why this was the scenic route. I also completely forgot about the grandmotherly stalking. And pretty much everything else.
Suddenly all I could see in front of us was starlit Lake Michigan, endless and watery, dressed up like the edge of the world.
“All right!” Grandma Van’s voice seemed to go on forever now that we were out in the open. She came to a stop on the lake path, which stretched out in either direction, just as empty as the streets had been. The path lay between the city and the lake, the border of the abyss. “Let’s get reorganized!” She snapped her fingers. Howe and I glanced at each other.
“Reorganized how?” I asked.
“Well, it’s no good being scenic if half the people can’t see, is it?”
“Does this mean it’s time for me to take off the blindfold?” asked Em.
“Nope,” I said. “Not, um, you.”
She growled. But a little more nicely than before.
A few minutes later, we were moving again. I was still pulling the rolling cooler behind the scooter, but it was a lot lighter now.
“Stop leaning so hard!” growled McMullen.
“I’m doing my best!” said Andy.
“Just think about being light as a feather,” Lake cooed.
“Easy for you to say,” said McMullen. “You’ve got the best spot.”
“Guys,” I said. “Remember what I said about certain topics of conversation?” I didn’t want Em to start trying to picture what was going on.
Grandma Van had her purse in her lap now. She’d thrown the box of crackers in a nearby trash can. That left exactly enough room in her wire basket for the three heads. They were jumbled in there, free and open for anyone to see. Anyone who wasn’t blindfolded. McMullen got the short straw, so he was on the bottom. Andy was in the middle, leaning slightly to one side, and Lake was on top of him, leaning in the opposite direction. “I’ve been meaning to get a new basket anyway,” Grandma Van said when I mentioned the biohazard issue. “I want one you can’t see through. I value my privacy more than some of those other old coots, and that way people can’t tell if I have the Taser on me.”
“Taser?” I asked, not sure I heard her right. Except of course I heard her right. Ugh. “You have a Taser?”
“I borrowed one from a lady down the hall from me. I wasn’t sure what the night was going to bring.”
Boy, did I get that.
“This is splendid, Van,” Andy said. “Just splendid.”
“Well, hell, I always wanted a real sidecar,” said Grandma Van, clearly pleased with herself. “This is pretty close. I’ll call it a frontcar.”
“We’re like Thelma and Louise!” said Lake. “And Louise and Louise.”
“I don’t believe there was a sidecar in that movie,” said Andy. “Or, er, a frontcar.”
“There definitely was,” argued Lake.
“I’ve seen a lot of movies,” Andy said.
“Maybe your time on ice got you confused.”
“My time?” Andy said indignantly.
“Guys!” I said.
“Hey,” grumbled McMullen from the bottom of the pile. “The more you talk, the heavier you get. I’m no Bobby-Duran, here.”
“Who’s Bobby-Duran?” asked Howe.
He paused. “This guy I knew. Real strong. Almost became 1996 West Side Bowling Champion. Except he started throwing the ball too hard. You don’t have to be strong to bowl, but it helps. Helps right up until—”
“Can we go any faster?” I interrupted. “Didn’t we go faster earlier?”
“You know, kid, you should really stop trying to zoom through life so quick. Look around. Appreciate stuff. Be grateful for the splendors of nature.” Then Grandma Van hawked a loogie and sailed it over the heads.
We chugged on into the dark morning.
Too freaking slow.
To our left, the water was shuffling up against the shore and
then wandering away again, like it was totally not impressed by the sight of a scooter with two kids clinging to the back, one kid pulled behind it, and a frontcar full of heads.
Heads, by the way, that were still defrosting. They were clearly getting saggier in the face, and I couldn’t stop hearing the slow drip drip drip from the bottom of the basket. Another reason to get back to the A/C blast of the lab. And if anything, it seemed like we were going slower.
Some kind of night bug landed on the belly of the kidney costume and I watched as it paced drunkenly, like it was tracing my intestines underneath. I thought about my parents, hopefully asleep in their beds.
Almost there, I thought to them. By tomorrow morning, you’ll have all four heads again, and you won’t know about any of this. We’re almost there.
Right about then, the scooter came to a sudden and unexpected stop.
It took me a second to realize that we weren’t just stopping for Grandma Van to admire something or, equally likely, hawk a loogie onto it.
“Well, dang,” she said. “I guess that’s that.”
A wave crashed nearby, invisible in the darkness.
“That’s what, Van dear?” asked Andy.
“That’s the end of my battery life. Well, I should be clear. Ha! Not MY battery life. The scooter’s battery life.”
She cackled quietly and we all sat in the mostly dark, infinitely still. On one side of us, tall office buildings loomed. On the other side, the lake shushed against the shore.
“This seems inconvenient,” said Andy.
“It’s no problem,” Grandma Van said. “I just flip this switch and then it’s on manual. We’ll have the young people push the rest of the way. It isn’t far.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled to Howe as we stepped off the chair.
“It’s okay,” he said. “At least we’re close.”
He was right, but suddenly I was so tired. He pushed the chair and I kept pace alongside it, pulling the cooler and Em, leaning into each step like I was falling forward, endlessly, and using the cooler to keep me from going all the way down. I glanced back at Em, at the ropes of garlic tied around her, the assorted other vegetables swinging with the motion of driving along the path. I wanted to be friends again. I wanted it so badly, it hurt to even think about it straight on.
The grassy areas on either side of the path expanded and we started passing wooden posts, probably to keep people off the grass. Every three steps, another wooden post, regular, like a clock, ticking to remind me that time was running out.
Grandma Van narrated the trip for Em, but I ignored her until she finally said, “Hang a left! Here’s where we jog back into the city.”
“Scenic time is over,” I said, starting to stow the guys away again, but there was a lot of arguing, and frankly, I didn’t have the strength to argue with anybody anymore. So we compromised, reentering the city with a lap blanket draped over the wire basket. I could feel the lab pulling on me like a magnet. All I had to do was get us a few more measly blocks, hang a few measly streamers so that we could call it a party, and then I’d get the missing head back and my parents would be in the clear. That was all.
Break it down, like my dad said.
It was feeling totally doable.
And then we turned the corner. We stopped right in our tracks and stared at what lay before us.
The line snaked down the sidewalk, and people stood in huddles of threes and fours and fives, some of them on scooters, or with walkers, or just freestanding. I gasped.
“What?” asked Em. “What is it?”
“Senior citizens,” I said. “There must be hundreds of them. Waiting in a line that goes all the way to the front door of the lab.”
“Very surprising,” Grandma Van agreed.
“It’s after two in the morning,” I said. “How are they still awake?”
“Oh no, they’re already awake. We get up early, see.”
Wait a minute.
“Did you do this?” I asked her.
“Oh yes.”
“WHY?”
She threw her hands in the air, all innocent. “I did what your mother told me, that’s all.”
“My mom told you to bring the entire population of the Swan Song to the cadaver lab in the middle of the night? That doesn’t sound like her, Grandma Van.”
“Well, I believe your mother’s actual words were: ‘Try something new.’ So when we were at Nussbaum’s, I put in a quick call to the Swan Song while I was in the bathroom. You know…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Julia Klinger thinks she’s so fancy, but she has never once thrown a destination party.”
“This is what happens when you have weak elements in your plan,” Howe said, shaking his head. “Most successful plans are airtight.”
“Most grandmothers do not spy, become completely unhinged, and plan secret location revenge parties,” I replied.
“Most plans don’t have you-know-whats,” Howe pointed out.
“Recording sessions?” asked Em.
“Yes,” said me, Howe, and Andy all at the same time.
“Can we all please focus on what’s important here?” Grandma Van said, patting her hair. “We’re about to throw the party of the century.”
Groups of things have names, you know. Like how you have a Flock of Turkeys or a Murder of Crows or an Ostentation of Peacocks, that sort of thing. We covered that in sixth-grade English, in one of those fluffy mini-chapters, the ones called “Language: Spice Up Your Life.”
I was pretty sure that the group I was currently looking at should be called a Terror of Old People.
Three buses with the Swan Song insignia waited by the curb up ahead, motors running. They must’ve made multiple trips to get this many people here. I started to sweat. “Why did you invite so many of them?”
“Well, I just told my neighbor Victoria to spread the word. I didn’t do an RSVP or anything. Boy, she spread the word all right.” She whistled. “Must’ve been a slow night at the Swan Song.”
“How many people? How many exactly?” asked Lake from under the lap blanket.
“About a million,” I said.
“I want to see,” said Em. “Hey, Lake Michigan—”
“It’s just Lake.”
“I’ll give you twenty bucks if you untie me.”
Grandma Van snorted.
“That’s probably not going to happen, my dear,” said Andy.
“I’ll just describe them for you,” said Howe. “They are old and they are everywhere.”
“It’s going to be a tight fit in there, but we’ll manage,” Lake said. “We can also open the patio.”
“What patio? There is no patio,” I said. “It’s a cadaver lab.”
“Well, the back alley. But I bet it could be delightful. Just needs the right touch.”
We watched them all for a minute, unseen, and then Grandma Van said, “What are we waiting for?”
I desperately tried to think of something to wait for.
“Let’s go!” Lake cried.
“So many of them,” Howe said as we started moving. “So many old people.”
Grandma Van waved here and there like a queen. “Shh,” she said under her breath. “They don’t like it when you call them old. They prefer ‘mature.’”
“That’s a lot of extremely mature people,” Howe said.
“Better,” said Grandma Van.
We continued until we’d made our way to the front of the line, where, directly in front of the door, with her arms crossed, was an old lady wearing a small hat decorated with fake grapes. Aside from the hat, everything else she was wearing was drenched in sequins. She eyed us as we approached, and a chilly silence fell as I dug in my backpack for the keys.
“Julia,” said Grandma Van icily.
“Vanessa,” said the woman, matching her tone of voice.
“So good of you to come TO MY PARTY,” Grandma Van said, loud enough for the front half of the line to hear.
“Oh, look, I found
the keys,” I said.
“I wouldn’t MISS IT,” Julia said, ignoring me.
Grandma Van fanned herself with a hand. “We just have to do a few last-minute preparations, if you’ll excuse us?”
“By all means,” said Julia. “I’ll be interested to see what you’re able to cook up. My expectations, you should know, are low.”
“Ooh, snap,” said a feebly heckling old man a little way behind them.
“Oh, look, the door’s open now,” I said.
Julia finally noticed me, which didn’t feel like a win. “Why’s your granddaughter dressed like a poo?” she asked disdainfully.
“It’s a kidney,” I said weakly.
“You sure did get here early, to be first in line,” Grandma Van snarled. “It’s almost like you want to be here.”
“I drove,” Julia said. “I still have my license.”
“Should have been revoked years ago! Every time you get behind that wheel, you’re a danger to all living things,” Grandma Van hissed.
“She’s jealous of my ride is all,” sneered Julia Klinger. “1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor, bought it in Ypsilanti eight years ago.” She wiggled her eyebrows at Howe, who had slipped away from behind the scooter and was trying to become one with the wall.
“I don’t know much about cars,” he said weakly.
“It’s not a car! It’s a hearse! Another example of the decline of your generation,” she said looking down her nose at him.
“Oh, look, here we go,” I said, pulling Howe back into place so he could push the scooter and Grandma Van safely inside before an actual physical brawl could break out. Then I spun around to pull Em in after me, thankful at least that the elderly drama had distracted people from asking about the tied-up girl on top of the cooler.
The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 14