Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  When school let out, the buzz in the hallways was all about Caitlin. “Can you believe her?” Nick heard people say. “Calling us her ‘so-called friends’? Trying to get dirt to use against us?”

  Nick was pretty sure Caitlin hadn’t said anything about using it against them—and since the machine stripped away any and all lies, he was sure she had no plans to do so—but that didn’t stop people from inserting things between the lines.

  Theo was in the hallway doing his own damage control—trash-talking Caitlin with the hope of deflecting his own embarrassment. Still, kids asked him what other big words he knew.

  “How about periorbital hematoma?” became Theo’s standard response, accompanied by a raised fist. It was the technical term for a black eye. Nick had to give him kudos for anticipating the question and Googling the perfect answer before class let out.

  Nick survived the afternoon exodus without being collared by the principal and went straight to Caitlin’s house.

  Her mother came to the door looking distraught, but she was only a fraction as upset as Caitlin probably was.

  “She’s had a bad day,” her mother said. “Are you in any of her classes? Could you maybe tell me what happened?”

  Nick thought it best just to give her a clueless shrug.

  Caitlin’s room was easy to find. It was the one with the sign that said CAITLIN’S ROOM made out of broken pieces of found objects. He knocked on the door so quietly it couldn’t be heard, so he knocked again.

  He heard Caitlin moan. “Go away.”

  “Caitlin, it’s me. Nick.”

  “In that case, go away even faster.”

  He had never walked into a girl’s room uninvited before. In fact, he’d never walked into a girl’s room at all. When he turned the knob it was unlocked, which meant that deep down Caitlin wanted someone to come in.

  The curtains were drawn and the lights were off. In the dimness it looked like there was a headless woman on the bed. But it was just that Caitlin’s face was under a pillow.

  “What part of ‘go away’ don’t you understand?” she asked, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Unless you have information about who played that tape, I don’t want you in my room.”

  But since she didn’t throw anything at him, Nick stayed, sitting down at the desk chair. “Sorry,” he said. “I have no idea.”

  He sat there saying nothing more, feeling horribly awkward, waiting for her to speak again.

  “You could have warned me about the recorder,” she said.

  “I did,” Nick pointed out. “Remember?”

  “I mean when you sold it to me.”

  “I didn’t know any more about the junk in my attic than you did, so don’t blame me.”

  Finally Caitlin tossed off the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “Why couldn’t I have just sprouted wings and flown?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, if something impossible had to happen to me, why couldn’t it have been something impossible but great, instead of something that would ruin my life?” She sat up.

  Now that Nick’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he could see how red her eyes were from crying. “Don’t say that,” he said softly. “It’ll be okay.”

  Finally she looked at him with a scowl, all of her misery, all of her frustration finding a target.

  “What do you know about it? You couldn’t possibly know what it feels like to have your life shred to bits in one stupid instant.”

  Nick took a deep breath. “I think I do.” Then he told her things he hadn’t spoken of since the day his own life had been shredded to bits.

  “We moved here because our house burned down. It happened in the middle of the night. My dad, my brother, and I got out. But my mom died in the fire. And the thing is…”

  This was the hard part. He had to close his eyes to say it.

  “…I think it was my fault.”

  Then Nick couldn’t hold it in anymore. He burst into tears. “I know it was my fault.”

  Nick realized any chance he had with Caitlin was now gone. What girl would be interested in a guy who barges into her bedroom only to burst into tears? If she hadn’t thought he was pathetic before, she most certainly did now.

  He did his best to wipe his eyes, and when he looked up, he saw she was crying, too.

  “I am such an idiot,” she said.

  “Nah,” Nick said. “I’m the idiot.”

  Caitlin thought for a moment. “I have friends who lost their homes in the wildfires a few years back.…”

  Nick remembered hearing about the Colorado Springs fires. If nothing else, he had moved to a sympathetic town.

  “I was in a fire once,” Caitlin offered.

  “What happened?”

  “My Easy-Bake Oven had a short circuit.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “Terrible,” Caitlin said. “I lost my brownies.” She said it with such a straight face that Nick unexpectedly found himself bursting out into laughter. She joined him. And before long their tears, while not forgotten, were at least behind them.

  “Okay,” Caitlin said, “so what happened today isn’t the end of the world. But how am I supposed to go back to school after the things everybody heard?”

  “Here’s what I think will happen,” Nick told her. “For a while, everyone will go nuts with it. Some of your friends will shun you. People who didn’t really like you to begin with will hate you even more.”

  “And this is helping how?” Caitlin asked.

  Nick held up his hand. “But your true friends will get it. They’ll stick by you. And then after a while—a week, a month—”

  “Ten years?” Caitlin suggested.

  “Maybe. What happened to you is kind of like a fire, in a way. I saw this thing once on TV. They said wildfires have to happen every so often. Brush gets too thick, trees get too dense. You have a hot day and whoosh! But the healthy trees survive. In fact, there are some seeds that won’t even grow until they burn first.” Nick shrugged. “So have you lost some friends today? Maybe, but they weren’t real friends. They were just brush. And the ones who stick by you, the ones who get it? They’re the healthy trees.”

  Caitlin thought about it and smiled. “I think you’re a pretty healthy tree.”

  “Yeah,” said Nick, “a weeping willow.”

  “At least you’re still poplar,” Caitlin answered, and they both groaned, then laughed again.

  Nick looked over at the tape recorder, sitting in the corner of her room. He imagined her running all the way home with it in her arms, a burden too heavy to bear, and yet she bore it.

  “So you really think I’m cute, huh?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “No,” Caitlin corrected, “that’s what I didn’t say. And if you don’t want me to find a lumberjack to hack you into sawdust, you’ll leave it alone.”

  Nick grinned. “All you had to do was ax.”

  Caitlin’s ensuing loud “Ouch!” brought her mother to the door. “Is everything okay in here?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Caitlin said. “I may vomit, but we’re fine.”

  “Should I get the Pepto-Bismol?”

  “Figurative vomit, Mom. God, sometimes you’re so literal.”

  Nick prepared to take the recorder, but Caitlin stopped him.

  “One thing first.” Then she rewound the tape to the beginning, hit RECORD, and they sat there in silence as the machine erased everything she had recorded.

  And sitting there with her in absolute silence, Nick didn’t feel awkward at all.

  Nick carried the recorder home. He thought about putting it in the garage, but he worried that Danny, or even his father, might fiddle with it. In the end, it went back up in the attic along with the toaster and the stage light that had somehow made his garage sale such an overwhelming success. Three unusual decorations in his new bedroom, all three of which he was afraid to use.

  As for the Shut Up ’n Listen an
d the reanimating wet-cell battery—he would have to count on Vince and Mitch to keep their word, and keep the things to themselves. Besides, he wasn’t as worried about what was known as about what was unknown. All those other objects that were out there. The TV, and the vacuum cleaner, and who knew what else.

  There was no way to know whether or not the new owners had discovered the peculiar traits of their purchases, or what those traits might be…and more important, why these objects did what they did. Nick wished there was a way to shed light on his situation, but it remained as dim as the attic bedroom, where no amount of incandescent light could chase away the shadows.

  Nick looked up at the pyramidal panes of glass where the roof came to a point above him, and the black paint that kept out the light of day. Well, maybe the purpose of his garage-sale items was obscured in darkness, but his room didn’t have to be. At least he could do something about that.

  Nick went down to the garage and got a folding ladder he’d seen there, grabbed a paint scraper from the old tool cabinet, and brought them both back to the attic. He climbed up to the skylight and began scraping off the paint.

  Peering through the patch of glass he had just scraped clean, he saw his father throwing a ball with Danny. It looked like Danny was using their dad’s old mitt and was doing pretty well. It made Nick feel good to see them sharing a simple, happy moment together, and he dared to allow himself to think that everything could be good again. Maybe not perfect, but at least okay.

  As he continued to clear paint from the windows, letting light into the attic, he noticed something wedged into the frame holding the pyramidal panes of glass together, and he pulled it out. It was the business card of Dr. Alan Jorgenson.

  Nick’s situation at school was leveling out in spite of everything. The guidance counselor had put him on a reasonable plan to get on track academically, and he had even intervened on Nick’s behalf with the principal, whom Nick had taken to secretly calling “Principal Who” because he had not yet learned the man’s actual name. As it turns out, the principal’s last name was Watt.

  “I’ll have you know that your records have finally arrived from Denmark,” Principal Watt told him. Indeed, the same computer glitch that had lost him and his brother like luggage now insisted that they had transferred from the Danske Akademi of Copenhagen. “We realize this is a technical error,” Principal Watt admitted, “but we’ll go with it.” Apparently, having a new international student made the school look good.

  During the busy school day, when everything felt so straightforward and ordinary, it was easy to temporarily forget about the extraordinary things from his attic, now spread around Colorado Springs and maybe even beyond.

  Caitlin and Vince would both slyly nod to him in the hall, as if the three were part of some secret society. Mitch was not as subtle, offering theory after theory, sometimes loud enough for other people to hear. The only saving grace was that this was middle school and nobody cared.

  “They’re relics from an alien spacecraft,” Mitch suggested. Or, “They were smuggled in from Atlantis before it sank.” Nick’s favorite of Mitch’s theories was “We’re all trapped in a dream and these objects were sent here to jolt us out of it.”

  Nick suspected that whatever the truth was, it was much more rational—but just as surreal.

  Socially, Nick was still an unknown quantity to his classmates, but any sense of mutual threat was gone. He was free to exist on his own terms, even if, on paper, he was from Denmark.

  Surprisingly, the one thing Nick thought would not be a problem was threatening him with grief—Little League. He assumed that he could just move right on to a Colorado Springs team, but baseball season had already started, the teams had been locked in, and games had already been played. At first he was stonewalled and told to come back next year, but his father’s status as a former Tampa Bay Rays pitcher carried enough respect to get Nick a special tryout that Thursday.

  “I have complete faith you’ll show them how this game is played,” his dad said before Nick headed off to school that morning, handing him a new baseball glove that he had purchased for the occasion, to replace the one lost in the fire.

  At lunch that day, Nick made a point of being last in line again so he could spend some quality time with Ms. Planck.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” he told her as she served him lasagna that didn’t look half bad. “Your tip about Heisenberg was gold, just like you said.”

  “I’m glad to see someone taking advantage of my knowledge, instead of just taking advantage,” she said. “Anything else I can help with?”

  Nick sighed. “Weird stuff you don’t want to know about.”

  “Honey, I serve slop for a living—a pinch of weird stuff spices up an otherwise bland day.”

  Nick grinned. He imagined Ms. Planck was somewhat like a bartender in the movies, seeing people from all walks of life and having a unique perspective that she was happy to share with those who would listen.

  “I had a garage sale this past weekend. Now I’m worried that I shouldn’t have sold the things I did.”

  Ms. Planck considered it. “Well, it’s like they say, if you love something, set it free.”

  “I didn’t love any of the stuff.”

  “In that case, you’re screwed.” Then she laughed and scooped him up a nice serving of bread pudding. She looked at him fondly for a moment, then said, “I have no doubt that, one way or another, you’ll fill the empty spaces left behind.”

  Across the cafeteria, Petula observed Nick having an extended verbal encounter with Ms. Planck. She timed it at precisely one minute and thirteen seconds. It thoroughly peeved her that all two of her conversations with Nick did not add up to this amount of time. What could he possibly have to talk about with the lunch lady?

  When he left with his tray to sit down, Petula headed straight for Ms. Planck.

  “Excuse me,” she asked, “but—”

  “Didn’t you already get your lunch, Miss Grabowski-Jones?”

  It threw her for a loop that Ms. Planck knew her last names. “Yes, but that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Oh, then you must be volunteering to help clean the silverware.”

  “Nice try. I just wanted to know what you were talking about with Nick Slate.”

  “Have you considered that maybe it was a private conversation?”

  Petula crossed her arms. “Have you considered that this is a public school?”

  Ms. Planck began to remove the food from the warming trays. “Very good,” she said. “You should take the Advanced Banter class when you get to high school. I suspect you’ll do well.”

  Only for a moment did Petula entertain the idea that there might actually be such a class, and that she might, in fact, excel, but then she realized she was being mocked. She gave Ms. Planck her best withering glare, but Ms. Planck was not one to wither. She was what Petula’s father would call “a handsome woman,” which Petula took to mean a woman who was once beautiful but has now reached the age at which she grows facial hair.

  Ms. Planck waved a ladle at her. “Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss, Petula. If you must know, Nick was thanking me for giving him the lowdown on things around here, and sharing thoughts about his garage sale.”

  “Did he mention me?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I was at his garage sale.”

  “Well, dear,” Ms. Planck said, “from what I understand, you weren’t the only one.” Then she took a moment to contemplate Petula. “You like the boy, hmm?”

  “No!” said Petula.

  “The proof is in the pudding,” Ms. Planck said, and Petula reflexively looked down at the pudding in the tray, even though she knew that wasn’t what Ms. Planck meant. “You’re the one who played that awful conversation over the loudspeakers, aren’t you?”

  Petula’s eyes went wide with shock.

  “Oh, don’t try to deny it—there isn’t anyone else in this school obnoxious enough to do something l
ike that. You thought it would push Nick away from Caitlin, but did it work?”

  Petula shook her head.

  “It was the wrong tactic, honey,” Ms. Planck said. Then she leaned as close as she could to Petula and spoke quietly. “If it’s your intent to make an impression,” she offered, “it’s best to have something he needs. Even if he doesn’t know what it is.”

  Beef-O-Rama was a burger joint a few blocks from school that was trying painfully hard to be trendy but was one trend behind the times. Kind of like that teacher who uses last year’s popular expressions, thereby becoming the very “epic fail” he just announced. People accepted the tackiness of Beef-O-Rama because they served decent burgers that hadn’t killed anyone yet.

  Nick and Mitch waited for the single overworked waitress to bring them menus, but Nick’s mind wasn’t on food. Nor was it on his upcoming baseball tryout. Once again his head was up his attic. Or, more accurately, on the things missing from it.

  “Besides you, Vince, Caitlin, and my cranky neighbor, I don’t know any of the people who bought stuff at the garage sale. This isn’t just looking for a needle in a haystack—we don’t even know where the haystack is!”

  “I’m sure it will sort itself out,” Mitch told him, signaling to the waitress again.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Mitch lifted the Shut Up ’n Listen and pulled the string. “Nick’s problem—”

  And the machine said, “—will sort itself out.”

  Nick glared at the device as the last of the string sucked in and the arrow stopped spinning. “I really, really hate that thing.”

  “The point is you gotta live in the moment, dude, and stop worrying about those things you got no control over.” Then he patted the device. “And enjoy the things you do!”