Right.
In my room, I looked in the mirror. I took off my glasses. My reflection became a big blur. How could I know what I looked like without my glasses if I couldn’t see without my glasses?
I squinted, scrunching up my face until I could make something out, but all I saw was my own scrunched-up face, which looked disgusting.
I checked my bank book. I’d been saving money forever—for the dig, for college. They’re both way expensive. I could buy contact lenses, maybe some makeup…some new clothes….
That wouldn’t totally drain my bank account. I would have money left over, but I would also have a new Katya to show off, a new, evolved Katya to attract Jamie, maybe.
Back to the mirror. I wished my boobs were bigger. Then it would be easy to get Jamie to notice me. I knew how that worked. I would just wear a button-down shirt with a couple of buttons undone and my boobs would work their magic boy-power. Maybe I needed a new bra. I could get one with padding in it, make everything stand up and stand out.
(Dinosaurs didn’t have boobs. Dinosaurs didn’t need boobs. Lucky dinosaurs.)
I thought about Andi, effortlessly juggling with her knees and feet. I thought of her lithe form in gym. Everything physical came so easily to her. She could head-butt a soccer ball in less time than it took me to realize there even was a soccer ball.
And Jamie loved her.
I had two things I thought of: dinosaurs and Jamie. Sometimes—like that night—the two merged in my dreams, and I was a T. rex hunting him down. Or he was hunting me (don’t I wish!).
Predator and prey. Prey and predator.
The next morning, at breakfast, I guess I still looked depressed. Dad asked me what was wrong.
“I wish I was good at something, Dad.”
He jerked his head like someone grabbed his hair from behind and pulled. “Honey! Why would you say that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Like baseball. Or soccer. Or something.”
He said what he always says when I shake him up: “Maybe we should have held you back after all.”
I have the dubious distinction of being the youngest freshman in school. Back when I went into kindergarten, I missed the cut-off by two days. My parents could have held me back and then I would have been the oldest freshman…next year. I would have never met Sooz, though, and that’s a world I’d rather not contemplate. My parents—Dad in particular—think all of my ills stem from that decision they made a bunch of years ago.
“This isn’t about that, Dad.”
Dad said, “Everyone is good at something. Some people play baseball or football. Some people are musicians. You’re good at dinosaurs.”
Yeah, but dinosaurs wouldn’t make Jamie fall in love with me. I already knew that.
You’re not a girl, that boy said on the playground.
Dinosaurs are neutered. Dinosaurs are sexless.
(Well, not really. Dinosaurs were amniotes—they fertilized eggs internally, just like human beings. I wanted to be amniotic with Jamie, and I couldn’t believe I just thought that with my dad right across the table!)
“Honey?” he said, because I’d drifted off.
“Nothing.” God, what am I, a total slut or something?
But when I got on the bus, I still thought about it. Thinking about Jamie not just liking me or talking to me, but actually kissing me. And maybe more.
Did being a dinosaur geek have to mean being sexless? Did T. rex discoverer Sue have a boyfriend? Did anyone ever kiss Sue, out on a dig or down in some dark, musty museum basement? Passion among the catalogued artifacts of a dead world.
Sigh.
On the way to homeroom, I kept my eyes down, watching my own feet. No footprints on school linoleum. A million years from now, if some future paleontologist tries to retrace the steps of the geekus girlus, she’ll have no luck because there aren’t any pathways to follow. Not like the dinosaurs. We take the fossilized imprints of their feet and string them together into “pathways,” which we use to reconstruct the way they moved. Along with the skeletons, this allows us to figure out how they walked and how fast they could run. Like, T. rex had a sort of lumbering run/walk, with its feet staggered.
I watched my own feet and started to mimic the T. rex. They had to start slow because they were so big—it took them some time to build up to velocity, but then they could move at twenty-five, maybe even up to forty miles an hour.
This is how we learn. Indirectly. We can’t observe them, so we observe what they left behind, and even though they left behind a lot, it’s never enough. Never. So we keep looking. We never stop. Because it matters. It’s important. They’re extinct, yes, but they still have so much to teach us, if only we’d listen and learn.
I looked around me at the swarm of kids in the hallway. I felt so small in that moment. I knew I was the only one thinking anything even remotely related to dinosaurs or history or science. I was alone.
And I felt like that lizard, the one being hounded by the young T. rexes. Just little lizard me, slithering along on my belly and along comes a bunch of big, bad dinosaurs and they’re going to take their time to eat me. They’re in no hurry. You know why? Because I’m just a little lizard. I’m nothing. Less than nothing.
And I don’t want that.
I had gym with Andi three days a week. I tried to be nice to her. I wanted her to like me. Maybe then I could learn how to be like her.
I thought about it this way: I knew the names of more than a hundred species of dinosaurs. I knew the order of the periods and epochs. I spent hours reading Gould and Barsbold and Bakker. I tried to understand both sides of the debate: warm-blooded or cold? Feathers or not? I taught myself how to draw, for God’s sake, endlessly tracing bone patterns out of books, sitting in the museum for hours on end, sketching the fossils on display there. I sat in the backyard for entire weekends, chipping away at different kinds of rocks with three different hammers, testing them for the proper weight and hardness of steel. (A paleontologist’s hammer is her most important tool—too heavy and you get tired using it too soon. Too light and it won’t do you any good. Too soft and it’ll fragment and poke your eye out. These things matter.)
I lived in eternal frustration. I didn’t get it. I knew all of these things! I figured them out, sometimes on my own.
So why couldn’t I figure out the qualities in Andi that attracted Jamie? Why couldn’t I mimic them, improve on them? I was smart. This was one more science problem, a biology test set in real life.
Maybe that’s crazy. But I couldn’t help myself. I was desperate. I clung to the fantasy that—somehow—I could break up Jamie and Andi and yet be friends with Andi and make everyone happy all at once. There was no direct evidence that such a thing would work, but you know what? There’s no conclusive evidence as to exactly what made the dinosaurs extinct, either. Maybe it was a comet hitting the earth. Maybe it was disease. There’s a recent theory that bugs killed the dinosaurs. Tiny, insignificant insects. They weakened the dinosaurs enough that environmental factors were able to wipe them out.
Was that it? Maybe. We don’t know. But we know it was something because they’re definitely dead.
So maybe there was some way to live out my fantasy. Maybe I just hadn’t figured it out yet.
But I had to. It was killing me.
I never knew that being in love was a physical thing. I never knew your body reacted. Like when I saw Jamie and my stomach felt like someone had tied lines to it and pulled it in ten directions at once. Or the way I became suddenly aware of myself, of my body, when I sat across the aisle from him in bio—the way I felt my hair and my eyelashes and my lips and my nose and every motion of my body as I breathed, hyper-conscious in every way.
But it didn’t matter. Because one day it all became impossible.
That day was the worst day of my life. My own personal extinction-level event, right in the halls of high school.
I was leaving gym, following close to Andi. I did that whenever I could.
Watching her. Listening. Trying to learn. Doing my research, like a good scientist.
But then, suddenly, Andi turned around, as if she’d forgotten something. Maybe she had. I don’t know. All I know is this: The worst thing that could possibly happen, happened.
She bumped into me. Hard.
I dropped everything I was holding. Including my bio notebook.
Which fell, fluttering like a wounded bird, to the floor.
And landed spread open.
The reproductions of Jamie’s tattoo.
That tattoo. Over and over and over again. Meticulous. Precise. Because that’s the only way I knew how to draw.
I prayed that Andi wouldn’t notice it. But her eyes dipped down.
I prayed that she wouldn’t realize what it was.
Fat chance. Like I said—precise. It couldn’t be anything but Jamie’s tattoo.
Before she could say anything, I started babbling. I just couldn’t stop myself. I was terrified and embarrassed and strangely giddy all at once.
“Please don’t say anything. Andi. Please. Please. It’s nothing. It’s really nothing. It doesn’t mean…I would never try to take him away from you, really. Never.”
Her eyes got wide and then she laughed. She laughed.
“Are you serious? Do you think I’m afraid of that? He doesn’t give a shit about you. He needs you following him around like he needs a hole in his head.”
“Actually, um, that can be useful.” Oh my God! What on earth? Where was that coming from? “The theropods had holes in their skulls to make their heads more lightweight.” Shut up, Katie! I begged myself. Shut up!
But I couldn’t stop myself. I was on autopilot. It was like my brain and my mouth became disconnected and my mouth just kept on going.
“It’s something of an evolutionary advantage for a large predator to have at least one hole in its head, as a way of reducing drag when?—”
“Hey!” she snapped. Her eyes scrunched and her brows came together and her mouth twisted into a scowl. Andi was suddenly the one thing I never thought she could be—ugly. It shocked me into silence. “Shut your little prissy, geeky mouth and listen to me, okay?
“Look, Dino Girl. There’s, like, a natural order to things, okay? It’s the way the world works. And girls like you do not get to go with guys like Jamie, okay? Especially when the guy is already with a girl like me. Do you get it? Did that get through your little lizard head?”
Dinosaurs aren’t lizards! I wanted to shout. Just like spiders aren’t insects or rabbits aren’t rodents, you stupid piece of coprolite!
But I said—I shouted—nothing. I just stood there, pinned, frozen by her anger.
“Do you get me, Dino Girl?”
I thought about that lizard in the picture book. And wouldn’t it just shock the living hell out of those T. rexes if it suddenly stood on up on its hind legs and roared and bit one of their heads off?
Impossible, of course. A physiological impossibility.
But I wasn’t a lizard. I was a human being.
And yet…
And yet I stood there. And I said and I did nothing.
“I asked you a question, lizard brain!”
“I understand.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded like a very small girl who has just learned how to speak and is being punished by her parents.
Andi turned away, stepping on my notebook. She left an imprint of her shoe there, destroying two of my sketches. A pathway for the modern dominant girlosaur. What would a future paleontologist make of it?
I was proud of myself: I managed to scoop up my stuff and make it to the girls’ bathroom before I burst into tears. I thought about the girl Sooz had told me about, the one Andi made cry in the bathroom for an hour. All she had done was make fun of her. Me? She had destroyed my soul. How long would I be in there?
Why did she have to be so mean? Why? All I wanted was a kiss. All I wanted was for a boy to like me. A special boy.
I locked the door to a stall in the corner and sat down, bringing my knees up to my chest. No one else was there, so I cried and cried and cried, but I don’t think it would have mattered. I don’t think I could have held it in even if the entire school had been sitting out there.
She was mean. Yes. But the worst part was that she was honest.
Like she said, he wouldn’t like me. He would never love me. I was just a geeky girl who knew too much about dinosaurs.
No threat to her. Just a little lizard. The most pathetic example of prey—not even worth the time for a predator to hunt, much less eat.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the bathroom. I just couldn’t make myself leave. And when I left at the end of the day, I felt like everyone knew. Like Andi had texted everyone in school and sent instant messages and e-mails and then put up a Web page, just to make sure: “DINO GIRL LOVES MY BOYFRIEND! ISN’T THAT CUTE PATHETIC?”
Mom and Dad could tell something was wrong when I got home. I told them I had really bad cramps. They didn’t believe me. I’ve always been a lousy liar.
But I stuck to my story anyway and went to bed early and lay there, replaying those horrible moments in my mind over and over.
I fell asleep praying for a sudden Ice Age that would just make all of us extinct.
The next day, I went to school prepared for the worst. I somehow anticipated posters of my face throughout the school, with the word “LOSER!” plastered over them in big fonts.
But no one said anything. No one did anything. No one even looked at me funny.
Andi hadn’t told anyone. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. Sure, I’d blown any chance of being friends with Andi, but at least no one would be making fun…. And maybe I could get past it. Maybe someday it would be the kind of thing Andi and I would laugh about. Remember the time you tried to steal my boyfriend and I was mean to you?
But then came biology. I panicked. Jamie. What if she told Jamie?
Somehow, that had been the furthest thing from my mind. I had been so concerned with Andi that I couldn’t even make the leap to her telling Jamie about my crush on him.
Jamie sauntered into bio just before the bell.
My breath went out of me, entirely gone. I couldn’t find any more. I was in a vacuum.
He sat down.
He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, but he had the sleeves rolled up so that I could see the bottom of his tattoo.
The tattoo burned my eyes. I thought of those pages from my notebook, now carefully torn out and left at home, where they could no longer incriminate me—too late.
And then…
And then he rolled his sleeve down. Slowly. Like an afterthought. Like he was trying to be casual about it. He stared straight ahead while he did it, not looking at me.
She told.
She told him.
I wanted to die. I wanted to combust, to burn up and die right there, leaving nothing but the smell of fried hair and a black scorch mark on the chair and the desk and the floor.
I heard nothing throughout bio. It was my favorite class, my best class, but I heard nothing and when I looked at my notebook later that day, there was nothing on the page. Just the date, printed neatly like on the rest of the pages, and then nothing.
Same thing with my memory. Just a white space—a blank like my notebook—in my brain where the carbon cycle should have been.
I stumbled out of class. Jamie knew. He knew I was in love with him. She’d told him. I had lost everything.
She could have just walked away from me. She didn’t have to be mean. If I wasn’t a threat, she could have been kind and just walked away and never mentioned it to anyone, ever.
And that’s the thing: She could have been kind. Why wasn’t she? Why was she so mean? If you’re not going to eat the prey, why smack it around? It just doesn’t make sense.
I spent the day in my own little hell, trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out what she had to gain by it. If she was right, if Jamie would never be intereste
d in me (and she was right—I knew it, and I knew it all along), then why hurt me like that? Why?
Just because she could? Just because she was a dinosaur? Just because she was a dinosaur and I was a lizard, predator and prey, and she could?
She could. That’s what it came down to: She could do whatever she wanted just because she was Andi Donnelly, and there was nothing I could do about it.
And then…
And then, on the bus on the way home…
It hit me.
Like a comet.
It hit me:
The dinosaurs were more powerful, but the lizards survived.
Look around. They still exist. In forms almost identical to their dinosaur-age forebears. I could show you a salamander from the late Triassic and you would think, “Hmm, that looks like a salamander.” You would recognize it right away. Because it survived and the dinosaur didn’t.
They used to be prey, but they lived. They thrived, these lizards. Some of them are even predators now.
It’s scientifically, biologically impossible for a lizard to evolve into a dinosaur.
But prey can become a predator. It happens all the time.
All the time.
“Well, what are you going to do about her?” Sooz asked when I finally told her everything.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard the words come out of my mouth:
“I’m going to destroy her.”
Sooz stared at me as I told her my plan. I waited. I was nervous. Had I gone too far?
Finally, she said, “It’s about damn time.”
And then she said, “That bitch. I swear to God…Finally. Finally, Katya.”
I waited for her to get it all out.
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