Adam lowered his arm slowly to his side.
Owen sniffed the air. His eyes narrowed. He studied the trash can at the center of the room, then opened the lid. His chin snapped back and he waved away a cloud of smoke. Carefully, he peered over the edge and quickly replaced the lid. “Fantastic. Destruction of evidence. A shiny, new line for the rap sheet. Right after criminal conspiracy but before desecration of human remains. Now where do you think that goes on my college application?”
“If you want out, all you have to do is say the word,” I said, crossing my arms.
“Really?” His tone was flat. “So I can just wave my hand and this all goes away?”
I responded with a signature eye roll. “Good morning to you, too.”
He huffed. “Sorry, I’m fresh out of those. And anyway, that’s not why I’m here.” He glanced between Adam and me. “I’m here because I was listening to the radio this morning.” Owen’s penchant for tinkering left him with an alarming number of radios of all sorts and variations, which he kept in his room and his car and a few he’d left for the laboratory. There were foxhole, utility, weather, and battery-less radios, all makes and models that he’d fixed up into working order.
“Okay…” I gave a halfhearted shrug as if to say So what? “And that became newsworthy when?”
“It became newsworthy when I heard…” He cleared his throat and leaned in closer to my ear. “When I heard a broadcast that a boy’s been reported missing.”
FOURTEEN
Stage 2 of the experiment continues. The subject is blending into life at Hollow Pines High, which means we not only managed to resurrect a body from the dead, but have also made him a functioning member of society, passable enough that no one has questioned his postmortem state. Certain improvements could be made. The most pressing concerns remain memory and emotional functioning as well as pain receptivity.
* * *
The word missing rattled around in the space between my ears all morning.
Missing.
Missing.
Missing.
It played on repeat as I trudged through my early classes and I could concentrate on nothing other than those two syllables as I walked down the hallway to PE, there but not really there. Students streamed past me, a blur of movement. I kept my head down and weaved my way through the crowd.
It wasn’t necessarily Adam, I had to remind myself. Boys went missing all the time. But it was hard to make myself believe it. If someone had reported Adam missing, or the boy that Adam used to be, then that meant somebody was looking for him, that somebody wanted to find him. It also meant that there was somebody who wanted to take Adam away from me. He had parents. He had—
There was a tap on my shoulder.
I jumped and yelped, “Meg!”
Owen popped up alongside me, and I squeezed my eyes shut, mentally chiding myself. So, yeah, there were a few things I had neglected to share with Owen.
“Meg?” Owen echoed my thoughts aloud. His shirt read World’s Most Complicated Equation, followed by an illustrated version of 2 + 2 = 4. “Um, no, just me. You okay? You look a little…” He widened his eyes behind his glasses and waggled his fingers next to his face. “You know, like you just saw Michael Jackson or something.”
We passed the trophy case in the school’s east wing, filled with ribbons and pennants and two state football championship trophies from a decade before. “Michael Jackson’s dead,” I replied.
“My point exactly. Now, who’s Meg?”
“What?” My eyes cut to him and then back at my beat-up high-tops. “Oh, nobody. It’s just”—I glanced over my shoulder—“the whole missing thing.” A shiver ran through me when I said it.
He adjusted his glasses. “Yes, I got that. You may as well have a billboard attached to your forehead that says as much. You’re acting weird. Maybe you should try acting a little, I don’t know, less guilty. That or try to find the people that are looking for Adam.”
“Are you kidding me?” I snapped. Two passing freshmen gave me a wide berth as they disappeared in the opposite direction. “Do we look like we’re running a lost and found, Owen?” I felt my face go hot. I squeezed my hands into fists, and my knuckles turned a stark white. I wanted nothing to do with the missing boy, nothing to do with anyone who might have a stake in Adam.
And that was the whole problem with the idea of Meg. Right now, I was Adam’s world, but there was another girl out there and she must be important to be a dying boy’s last word.
Owen pinched his shoulders to his ears. “I’m just saying that they must be worried about him, that’s all.”
“Well, stop saying,” I said. “It’s not as if we can return him in the same condition as we found him.”
Owen held on to his words but gave me a long look that I knew was supposed to jump-start my conscience. He was always overestimating my conscience. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t you want to know anything about him? Don’t you want to know if it’s really him?” I plugged my ears and kept walking. Owen fell behind. “His name’s Trent Jackson Westover!” I could hear his muffled call. “He’s a sophomore from Lamar High School!”
I whipped around. Hair flew into my eyes and I peeled it away. “Will you stop it?” I marched over to him, grabbed him by the elbow, and, spotting the library’s pale wooden doors, dragged him through them and away from the busy hallway. “What are you thinking?” I snapped. Glancing around, I shoved him between two stacks of books in the nonfiction section where nobody ever went. “I can’t believe you’d say his name in public like that. Are you insane?”
“Are you?” Owen said, rubbing his elbow. On either side of us, hardbacks dressed in shiny plastic covers squeezed one another for space on crowded shelves. The smell of crisp paper and pencil shavings drifted from the pages.
My heart was pounding. I turned my back to him and paced the aisle. “What are we going to do?” I dragged my palm down the length of my face. Somebody knew about the car crash. Now somebody was looking for Adam.
“You could start by looking at a picture. Here.” He held out the screen of his phone. I didn’t want to look. What I wanted to do was avoid the missing boy, avoid the phone, avoid the tire marks. Despite this, I snatched the phone from his hands and held it close. “Is that him?” I asked. My breath fogged the phone’s screen. “It’s … tough to tell.”
I squinted and angled the picture. The boy in the picture was smiling a wide, natural smile. His dark hair was longer than Adam’s and covered the tops of his ears. It could be Adam’s brother, but was it Adam? I really couldn’t tell. I moved the screen closer to my nose and tried searching for the gold specks in Adam’s eyes, but the photograph was too grainy to see.
“Well?”
I pushed the phone back in Owen’s hand. “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever this Trent kid is, we have Adam and this doesn’t change anything. Got it?” The bell rang, causing us both to jump. “Keep your head down and it will all be fine.” Then I added under my breath. “I certainly don’t think it could get any worse.”
He held my gaze, and when several moments had passed, he sighed. “So I suppose now isn’t the time to tell you that we’re playing dodgeball today in PE.”
Owen smirked like he’d just scored a point and headed for the doors, disappearing toward the boys’ locker room.
* * *
HISTORY TELLS US that while others were slaving to invent cures for measles and polio and whatnot, some numskull was hanging out in his garage, scratching at his balls and coming up with the game of dodgeball. And so it went that every geek every day thereafter would suffer the curse of having balls chucked at his face, which, as far as I was concerned, was pretty much the modern-day equivalent of Zeus sentencing Prometheus to have his liver pecked by eagles on the regular.
Dodgeball. A Nobel Peace Prize ought to be given to the first person who can eradicate that festering boil on the heel of society.
Ten minutes later, this was me: black gym sh
orts cut perfectly to show off my little boy legs. Gray T-shirt to showcase my pit sweat. Mismatched socks. Skin the color of jellyfish that worked double as a protective casing for my large intestines as well as a flashing neon sign to my classmates that read Caution: This girl sucks at sports.
I stood on the basketball gym’s baseline shoulder to shoulder with Owen and Adam. It was a small consolation that Owen maybe looked worse in his uniform than me. Every bit of him was pointy. It looked as though someone had wrapped skin around a skeleton, and his shorts were entirely too short not to be reserved solely for European beachwear.
“Jenkins,” yelled William. The process of picking teams should be outlawed. In fact, it probably was everywhere but Hollow Pines. I shifted my weight.
Blake Jenkins jogged over to where William was waiting with the rest of the chosen ones.
“Wheelwright.” The other team captain, Knox, picked Paisley, his girlfriend. Surprise, surprise.
The sole benefit of my conversation with Owen was that it had taken the edge off my nerves. Bickering with Owen did that for me. I’d consider picking another fight later just to achieve normalcy. Standing next to Adam made me feel better, too. I hated letting him out of my sight, but if the experiment were to have any success at all, I realized, the science might require it.
Still, today, the day of missing boys and returning phones, I’d settle for keeping him nearby.
“Fernandez.” William’s team gained another player. I snuck a look over at Adam, where he waited, face serene.
He filled out the gray gym shirt that hid his red branchlike scars underneath. Thin scabs flaked from his shins.
Something pinched the back of my arm. “Ouch!” I yelped too loudly. The remaining losers in the line stared.
“Earth to Frankenstein,” Owen muttered in a singsong tone. “You and your boy must both be in la-la land. They’re trying to call him.”
“New kid. Hello?” Knox clapped. “New kid. Over here. Christ, is he deaf or just mentally challenged?”
I elbowed Adam, and when that didn’t work—“Adam, he means you. You’re on Knox’s team. He has a name, Hoyle,” I snapped.
I leaned over to see how many people were still left unpicked—seven. I could have been imagining this, but I swore Owen tried to stand an extra inch taller just to get picked before I did. I tugged down on his arm and he wriggled away from me.
I rubbed the stinging spot on my skin where Owen had pinched me. Still feeling moody, I pinched him back. He let out a high-pitched shriek that sounded dangerously close to that of a little girl. I gave him a self-satisfied grin. “Well, if that doesn’t get you picked, I don’t know what will.”
He glowered. In ninth grade, Coach Carlson had made Owen climb the hanging rope. He’d made it up five feet before his arms gave out and he slid back down. He had rope burn between his legs for weeks.
William chose the boy next to me and now there were only three of us left without teams.
I’d have smacked the smug look off Paisley’s face if I didn’t know for a fact that she could do push-ups. She whispered something in Knox’s ear, and the next thing I knew the kid beside me was exhaling a held breath and then breaking rank with us.
“And we’re last,” Owen said.
I tapped my foot. “Seriously? That kid that just got picked has severe peanut allergies and carries an inhaler.”
“Bloch,” William called.
Owen squeezed my arm. “May the Force be with you.”
What made it worse was that I knew the only reason Owen had gotten picked before me was that he was a boy. He even had to wear those dorky straps around his head to hold on his glasses.
A leftover reject, I slinked over to join Knox’s brigade and tried to look useful. After all, Coach Carlson handed out actual grades in gym class.
Paisley toyed with a strand of hair and chewed gum in PE. It was a choking hazard. I hoped it worked. “Great. You’re on our team.” She pointed out the obvious.
“Trust me,” I said. “The feeling’s mutual.”
Knox clapped his hands. “Spread out team. Give ’em hell.”
The crazy thing was that Coach Carlson let us have dodgeball days as a break from running around the track in circles like hamsters, and other activities that furthered our physical education. Getting pegged in the boobs was supposed to be some kind of treat.
I went and stood in the corner next to Adam. “Do you know how to play the game?” I asked. He shook his head. “Just chuck the balls at the other team. Hit them, they’re out. You get hit, you’re out. Catch it, they’re out again. Got it?”
“Hit them?” Adam turned and lightly punched the scrawny kid with the inhaler. “Like that?”
“Ow,” the boy wheezed, rubbing at the spot where Adam hit.
I pulled him away. “No, with the balls.” I pointed at the colored balls lined up at half-court. “You throw them.” I mimicked the motion of throwing, though honestly I wasn’t even sure if my technique was passable for a third grader.
Paisley wiped her hands on her shorts, focused and itching to run.
Coach Carlson balanced the whistle between his lips. “On your mark, get set.” The whistle blew. “Play ball!”
Everyone but Adam and me charged to the centerline to make a grab for the dodgeballs. A second after, a ball whizzed past my face and I skittered to the side, narrowly escaping an immediate need for a nose job.
Adam picked up a ball. He turned back to me. “Don’t worry, Victoria, I’ll get him.”
He cocked his arm back and hurled it at Daniel Ferrera. The ball zoomed through the air, nailing Daniel in the gut. He groaned and doubled over.
I slapped my hand over my smile. “Nice throw.”
Adam shrugged and bent down for another. He pegged Caleb Bell so hard in the leg that Caleb had to limp over to the side of the court. And for that, I gave Adam a high five.
I jumped back when a ball nearly skirted my shirtsleeve. Adam instantly retaliated with a rocket to the shoulder of Spencer Hawkins.
At this point, a few other people on our team started to notice Adam’s skills. “Toss him a ball,” ordered Knox. Knox was shuffling from side to side like we were in the freaking dodgeball Olympics.
Another of Adam’s missiles made contact. A loud thwack. Plastic on wet skin. He ducked, dodged, and shuffled. Teammates fell around him. I stuck close behind, using him like a shield. I glanced over. Knox was dripping sweat. Paisley was out. Adam, though, wasn’t even short of breath. He was like one of those automatic tennis-ball machines.
He fired another shot. Bingo. Then another. A human strike force.
Knox hollered his appreciation. It was as if Adam were charged up on batteries. Or, I paused, watching him in awe from the free-throw line, an electrical charge. I felt my jaw drop. That was it.
In that instant, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a purple dodgeball floating toward me. I turned, but it was too late. The ball pegged me in the shoulder. Owen was just finishing his follow-through, a joyful gloat already parading over his face. He bounced up and down with one fist in the air.
“I got you!” he crowed. “I so got you!”
This was his mistake. Adam zeroed in on him like a fighter jet. Ready, aim, fire. Before Owen could calculate rate of speed plus velocity, the ball was already nailing him on the side of the head. I scrunched my shoulders as Owen’s head snapped sideways. He stumbled and then his palms squeaked onto the gym floor.
Coach Carlson’s whistle trilled. “Time! Time!” He waved his hands in the air. “Bloch! Get off the floor. It’s a dodgeball not a meteor.”
I ran over to Owen, who was scraping himself off the ground. He grabbed my hand and I hoisted him up. He cupped his ear and moved his jaw back and forth. “My ears are ringing, Tor. He destroyed my hearing. Ah! Ah! Ah! You hear that?” He pointed at his ear. “I’m completely tone-deaf now.”
Adam appeared by my side. “I saved you, Victoria,” he said happily.
Owen shra
nk back. “Don’t be such a drama queen,” I told him. He glared at me. “What?” I shrugged. “You have to admit, you’re a little soft.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I don’t have the modern-day Prometheus to hide behind.”
“You threw the ball too hard at Victoria,” Adam said, turning cross.
“I threw the ball too hard?” Owen pressed his hand to his chest. “I threw the ball too hard?”
Adam got that deep furrow in his brow, almost like a caveman. “Yes.”
I put my hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Adam, next time let’s agree to give poor Owen a free pass. He’s one of the good guys.”
“Good guys don’t hit my—”
“Adam.”
He dropped his chin to his chest. “Okay.” He scuffed his shoe against the gym floor, leaving a black skid. “This game is confusing.”
Our class was starting to funnel back into the locker room. Adam reached out his hand, which Owen reluctantly accepted.
“Let’s go.” I thumped Owen on the back.
“Smith!” It took me a moment to register that Coach Carlson meant Adam. The three of us spun around. Coach jogged up to us, whistle bouncing off the white polo that was working double as a bra.
Adam smiled when he approached. “Hi, I’m Adam Smith. I’m from Elgin, Illinois.”
A slight tilt of Coach Carlson’s head. “You ever think about playing football, son?”
“I threw one yesterday,” Adam replied flatly.
Coach Carlson gave me an is this kid for real look. That was becoming a popular one when it came to Adam.
I cleared my throat. “He hasn’t.”
Coach Carlson eyed Adam from the shoes up. “Never?” He shook his head as if he thought we might be fibbing. In Hollow Pines, even toddlers had thought about playing football. “You like running around out here? Throwing balls. Catching things?”
Adam scratched his head, then there was that same spark in his eyes. He liked orange; he liked pizza. “Yes, I liked it a lot.”
“You show promise. Come out to practice after school. I can’t guarantee you anything about spots on the team, but I can promise there’ll be a lot more where that came from.” Coach gave a small salute and pivoted on his heel.
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