Ancient, Strange, and Lovely

by Susan Fletcher

  The furnace snicked on, grumbled to life. A draft stirred the cobwebs at the tops of the shelves. I wished I’d put on my flipflops. The concrete was seismic frigid, and bits of grit clung to the bottoms of my feet.

  Ahead, at the far, dim end of the room, six or seven beat-up cardboard boxes sat in a heap on the floor. They looked so different from Aunt Pen’s pristine plastic bins, I knew what they must be.

  The ones Dad had sent last week. The ones he’d found in that storage locker in Alaska. Full of Mom’s research stuff, he said.

  We’d never even known about the locker until the overdue notice came. They were going to “dispose of the contents” unless someone paid like pronto. So Dad went right back up to Anchorage, hoping to find some clues, and left Piper and me to stay with Aunt Pen.

  There, at the top of the pile of boxes, were Stella and Luna. One each: cockatiel and canary. They seemed to be staring down into the narrow space between the boxes and the shelves. Ignoring me completely.

  Could they smell Mom, maybe? Was that why they’d come down here?

  I crept up behind Luna, pressed a finger against the backs of her twiggy legs. She lifted one foot and seemed about to fall for it—to step back onto my finger—but at the last second she tumbled to my nefarious plan and fluttered up to the top of the shelves.

  “Twit,” I muttered.

  The box, I saw, was marked up and tattered, having spent its previous life shipping ink cartridges from Taiwan. I strained to decipher the tiny postmark in the stuttering light. Anchorage, AK.

  I ran my fingers across Dad’s handwriting—the careful, rounded letters, the hopeful upward dips at the ends of words. Soon, he’d said when he’d called earlier this evening. He would come home soon.

  When is soon? I’d asked. It was nearly two weeks already. But he couldn’t answer that. Had he found anything, any clues? Too soon to tell, he’d said.

  I sighed, feeling the familiar ache hollowing out my insides.

  “Bryn?”

  I turned around. Piper was leaning into the doorway at the top of the stairs.

  “Bryn, did you find her?” She sounded a little wheezy.

  “Yes. I’ll be there soon.” I heard the echo: Soon.

  “With Luna?”

  “Yes. In a minute. Go get your inhaler, would you?”

  I looked to where the birds were staring and saw that one of the boxes seemed to have tipped off the stack and landed on the floor on its side. The flaps had popped open; little clumps of wadded paper spilled out across the concrete, behind the other stacked boxes, beneath the lowest shelf.

  A shiver brushed the back of my neck. Something had happened here. But what?

  I synched with Stella and felt a weird, restless energy. Curiosity—on steroids. Something drawing her in.

  I squatted beside the tipped box. It had been closed up with that brown paper sealing tape—not the stronger, plastic stuff you’re supposed to use for mailing. It looked as if the glue had come ungummed, and then the tape had torn.

  It was mostly dirt samples in the boxes, Dad had said. Dirt with microbes in it. Bugs, Mom called them. She was always looking for promising new bugs. Bugs that would eat toxic waste. Dad had sent half the samples to Taj at the lab and half here, just to be safe.

  I righted the box, set it on the floor beside the other ones. I raked through the crumpled paper inside. Nothing. I peered beneath the shelf, following the trail of newsprint.

  Something there. Roundish. Hard to see way back in the shadows.

  A soccer ball? A volleyball?

  From here, it looked kind of like leather, but it wouldn’t have to be. It could be that plastic synth leather. Pleather. It seemed to have sections, sort of, like crocodile skin or tortoiseshell. And it wasn’t quite round. More ovalish.

  An egg? Some kind of megahuge egg?

  Ostrich?

  Emu?

  Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t dirt.

  “What are you into, Mom?” I murmured.

  Luna fluttered down again, beside Stella. Both of them still fixated on that egg. “Hate to break it to you, ladies,” I said, “but this is way out of your league.”

  Maybe, when the egg had rolled out of the box, it had bumped the wooden post that held up the shelves. Ergo, the mysterious thumps.

  Maybe. But wouldn’t that happen just once?

  “Bryn?” Piper again. “Are you coming?”

  “Soon! Wait there.”

  I got down on my hands and knees, reached way back beneath the shelf. I touched the egg. It gave a little, like a rubber ball. I scootched forward, stretched full-out on the floor, gently cupped my whole hand over it.

  Weird. It felt maybe a teensy bit warmer against my palm than it should have. Not very warm, but it was chilly down here. You’d think the egg would be too.

  And something else. It had a funny kind of vibe to it. So faint, I almost couldn’t tell if I was imagining it. But I didn’t think I was.

  All at once, sprawled out there in the dark, with so many mysteries bumping around in my head … all at once, I knew one small thing for absolute certain.

  Whatever was inside this egg … it was alive.

  3

  THE ALASKA DIRT

  EUGENE, OREGON

  When Taj rounded the corner, he saw with relief that the small scrap of graph paper was still wedged between the door and the jamb.

  He had to laugh at himself, though. How many bad spy vids had he seen with that old cliché—the telltale scrap of paper to test whether the door had been opened while he was gone? Probably nobody really did the paper thing, even spies. Except for movie actors, Taj thought. And me. I’m paranoid, for sure.

  He swiped his card in the keypad and opened the door, retrieving the paper scrap from the corridor floor. Inside, the lab was dim, but Taj knew it so well he hardly needed light at all to find his way to his bench. He drained the last of his Coke, tossed the can into the trash, then shrugged into his lab coat and clicked on the little gooseneck lamp. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, perched on his stool, and wiped down his benchtop with ethanol. From the drawer, he pulled out four little stoppered glass bottles, each containing a slurry of media and dirt with broken shells. Alaskan dirt and shells, presumably. The last samples Robin had collected.

  Taj had put other stuff in the bottles, too, just fifteen minutes ago, before he’d stepped out for the Coke. A suite of toxic compounds: endocrine disruptors. He’d soon find out what was left of them.

  He lined up the bottles on the dark Formica countertop. He got out the syringes, the needles, the filters, the solvents, the pipettes and disposable pipette tips, the glass extraction and sample vials. He knew he had to hurry—it would be dawn in a couple of hours, and some of the other grad students came into the lab insanely early. Even Dr. Reynolds sometimes showed up at random times. And it wouldn’t do for Reynolds to find out what Taj was up to. Not at all.

  Still, Taj needed to sit there a moment. He needed to look at those bottles. He needed to breathe.

  What if this was for real? What would he do? Who could he tell?

  They looked so ordinary, the bottles did. Like a thousand other bottles in the lab.

  And probably they were ordinary. Probably he’d made a mistake. The first time he’d tested the Alaska dirt, he’d been certain he’d messed up some way. Well, virtually certain. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent. The second time, he’d probably done something wrong again. Ninety-eight percent sure of that. He had to have screwed up. The microbes in the dirt—they couldn’t have eaten the entire suite of nasty compounds. And they certainly couldn’t have eaten them so fast. The endocrine disruptors weren’t gone in days or weeks or months, but at time zero—fifteen minutes after he’d introduced them.

  Which never happened.

  Which never, ever happened.

  So, if he hadn’t messed up …

  Those little bottles, lined up there on the bench? They weren’t even close to ordinary. This could be h
uge.

  But with Robin gone and Jasmine pregnant, the timing couldn’t be worse.

  A wind gust rattled at the windowpanes. Taj turned to look. The orange, celumbral moon peered in at him, seemingly from just across the quad.

  Get it together, Taj told himself. Focus. He shook his head, trying to clear out the muzziness. If he was going to solve this puzzle, he’d better get moving right now.

  He turned on the Bunsen burner, adjusted it, picked up the needle and the syringe. Third try, with the Alaska dirt. He’d been extra, extra careful setting up the experiment this time. There was a control for everything. Most of them in triplicate.

  Time zero, now. Let’s go.

  Half an hour later, he had collected, extracted, and filtered his samples, then transferred them into four small sample vials. He’d tested the control in the GC-MS, and it had come out fine—just as he’d expected.

  Now for the moment of truth.

  He removed a drop of liquid from one of the sample vials. Injected it into the GC-MS.

  Pressed Go.

  The GC-MS cycled through its familiar ditty of clicks and beeps. Taj watched the screen, waiting for the graph line to form.

  “Tell me what we’ve got,” he murmured to the machine. Though he wasn’t 100 percent sure he really wanted to know.

  4

  DROPPED OFF THE FACE OF THE PLANET

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Somehow, I survived my morning classes the next day. I had an annoying, sleep-dep headache, and everything was processing slow. I’d texted Dad on the way to school, but he didn’t get back.

  Now I slogged through the lunch line. Nothing looked good. I settled for a bean burrito and a bottle of detox water. I would have killed for coffee, but they don’t let us have caffeine at school.

  It had been a monster long night. I’d put the egg back in its box and set it on the floor—no more falling off the stack for you. Then I’d had to snag Luna, who was totally ditzy and uncooperative. Piper came down to help with Luna and saw the egg; I made her promise not to touch it, and especially not to tell Aunt Pen. After that, Stella refused to be kenned. Flat-out dissed me. I settled Piper into bed, and then I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay awake and worried. As in: What was I supposed to do with the egg? What if it hatched? Aunt Pen would go nova. She’d call the Authorities, go on the news, turn it all into a huge production, the Aunt Pen Show, just like last fall, when Mom …

  Stop it, I’d told myself. Don’t go there. Sleep.

  But of course I did go there. I couldn’t push it away. It all came crashing in again and I had to ride it out, keep my head above water, try not to drown.

  Now I took my tray and scoped out the quad—kids on couches, on benches, on tables, on the floor. Last year’s junior high crowds had broken up and reformed into new ones. The Goths and ’tants were easy to spot, but the rest all blurred together.

  I didn’t really have a crowd, myself.

  Across the quad I spotted Lucy with her friends, the drama kids. Sometimes I ate with her. But they were into something now. Rehearsing, maybe.

  I wavered, feeling seriously off, kind of brittle and teetery. The old loneliness leaked out of its cave and into my chest—the loneliness that came from being different, from being outside. From the secret part of me my school friends weren’t allowed to know.

  I watched Lucy a moment. She was laughing. Talking with her hands, the way she does. How would it feel to be like that? Like you could be totally yourself, yet still slip into a group and belong?

  I took a couple of steps toward her, then stopped, uncertain. Someone plowed into me from behind, ramming a tray into my back. I heard her curse me out before I saw her—one of the varsity basketball players. A bright grape juice stain Rorschached her white sweater. Her sandwich sat in a purple puddle; juice dripped from her tray to the floor.

  “Would you move!” she said. “Don’t just stand there blocking traffic!”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You are majorly in the way. Oh. My. God. Look at this! My brand-new cashmere!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And what am I supposed to eat?” She pointed at her soggy sandwich.

  Did she expect an answer? I couldn’t give her one. Serious brain-freeze happening.

  “Let’s just go,” one of her friends said. “We’ll clean that up, and you can have half of my sandwich. C’mon.”

  Basketball girl made an exasperated sound, rolled her eyes, and left.

  My back hurt from where the tray had jammed into it. The sleep-dep headache had morphed into a multitentacled creature of pain, leaning its weight against the back of my left eye. I peered into the quad, packed solid with kids, with no place for me to be.

  I fought off that feeling, the one you sometimes see in the eyes of the slow-to-catch-on kids and the supertall ones, the kids who stutter and the ones who look way young for their age. Not just loneliness, but worse. Where you start to wonder if there’s something deeply wrong with you; if you might be, like, defective.

  I knew I should move, move right away, the sooner the better.

  Blocking traffic.

  Majorly in the way.

  I’d been an outsider all my life; I could deal. But my defenses were low now; I somehow couldn’t move my feet.

  “Have some dignity!”

  It was just above a whisper, right behind me. I whirled around to see a girl, one of the ’tants, passing by. Her name popped into my brain. Sasha. She jerked her head, signaling me to follow. I gaped at her.

  “Oh, for godsake,” she hissed. She shifted her lunch tray to one hand, gripped my elbow, and towed me to a bench on the far side of the quad.

  “Sit,” she said in a regular voice. “Eat.” She plopped onto the bench, yanked me to sit beside her, and began to wolf down a huge chili dog.

  I felt naked, as if I had no skin, as if all of my shameful rawness was exposed for everyone to see. I clamped my lips together, pressed hard against the trembling.

  “Here,” Sasha said, seeming annoyed. She thrust a wad of napkins at me. I swiped at my eyes, groping through my memory for everything I knew about her. She was a junior, maybe. In my pre-calc class. There were a bunch of ’tants at school, but not so many in accelerated math. And something else … The school newspaper? Yes, that was it. A picture blinked into my mind: the National Merit Semifinalists. All these Ivy-looking kids, and then Sasha. Smirking, as if the whole thing were a huge joke.

  “You can’t do that,” she said now, between bites of chili dog. “You dropped your shell.”

  I blew my nose. “What?” I said. Shell? What was she talking about? What shell?

  “Shell! You dropped your shell! You were completely out there, all like pasty-soft. Like a shucked oyster, or a slug. You—”

  I got up to leave.

  “No, wait,” the girl said. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. Sit down, would you? Sit!”

  “You mean it in a good way?” I demanded. “That I’m a slug?”

  “Hey, there you go,” she said. “That’s better. Anger looks good on you. No, seriously. That’s what I’m talking about. Anger can be an excellent shell, when your usual one starts to slip. Now, c’mon, sit down. There’s ten more minutes of lunch, so what are you going to do? Hide out in a bathroom stall? Pretend you’re texting all your bazillions of friends?”

  I had friends. I did. Nobody all that close, but … I talked to people. I ate with people. But I couldn’t go hunting for them now, all raw and … shell-less.

  I sat. I took a bite of burrito, glancing sideways at Sasha. She had quite the shell. Her hair, gelled stiff, sort of hovered around her face. She’d bleached it bone-white, except for a livid patch of purplish blue that resembled a giant bruise. She’d had herself skwebbed: a webbed flap of synth skin fanned out from one ear to her neck, and another flap of skwebbing stretched between the middle and ring fingers of one hand. Her arms had that patchy, acid-burn look the ’tants went for, which they achieved, I’d h
eard, with a combination of tanning gel and loofahs. There was a really big, uneven mole either painted or tattooed on one side of her neck. Melanoma chic.

  “Thing is …” Sasha sucked up a strawful of Antiox Splash. “People who drop their shells, they scare the living crap out of other people. ’Cause everybody’s like that inside—all pasty-soft and vulnerable—but nobody wants to be reminded of it.”

  I looked at her. Was she saying that she was soft like that inside? Hard to imagine.

  “In a way, it’s actually rude to go around without a shell,” she went on. “’Cause it puts it right out there in everybody’s face. That they’re all so … squishable, really. Don’t you think? That’s why some kids, they see someone without a shell, they just have to go and stomp ’em.”

  Sasha shrugged and smiled at me. It was surprisingly sweet, that smile.

  I took another bite. The burrito was going down okay. I blew my nose again. We sat there and chewed for a while. The headache had notched down a little.

  And it was true, what she’d said about the shell. If you let it slip, people treated you different. Not out-and-out mean, necessarily, but it was the dignity thing. You lost standing, sort of. Like you suddenly got younger. I’d found out about that last fall.

  “I get what you’re saying,” I said. “About shells. I’ve been through some stuff lately, though. My …” I didn’t know if I could say it. “My mom …” I stopped, pinched my lips together against a new surge of trembling.

  “Disappeared,” Sasha said. “Dropped off the face of the planet. That would frag anybody’s drive.”

  “You know about that?”

  Sasha swiped at her face with a napkin, crumpled it up, tossed it into the wreckage of the chili dog. “It’s not so usual, having your mom disappear like that. I mean, a divorce, who’d even notice? And cancer … one in four, baby. Happens all the time. But flat-out disappearing. That’s the kind of thing …” She shrugged. “Well, people hear about it. People talk. It’s not like they’re evil or anything. It’s just how they are.”