Weird Kid

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Agnes leaps to her feet. “I don’t want to be an athlete or an astronaut. I want to be Night Kite. I mean, I won’t use that name. I need my own name. And I’ll never be a billionaire. Night Kite inherited her fortune from her parents. My mom’s barely a thousandaire.”

  Agnes doesn’t mention a dad. I’m curious, especially after seeing the family picture on the shelf, but I don’t like it when people pry into my own secrets, so I don’t ask.

  Agnes picks up the jump rope and starts swinging and hopping. I flinch to avoid getting hit with the rope. “What do your parents do?” she asks between jumps.

  “My mom does marketing stuff at a soap company. She tries to get people to feel emotional about soap. And my dad is a doctor of butts.”

  “You mean a proctologist?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  She laughs, which I like. She gets my humor.

  “Let’s look at goo.” She puts down the rope and moves over to the microscope. It’s old and heavy, like an ancient piece of factory equipment.

  “You have your own Night Scope.” That’s what Night Kite calls her microscope.

  “I got this from a thrift shop,” Agnes says, proud. “It was in really bad shape, but I taught myself how to fix it up. Have a look.”

  There’s already a glass slide in place, clamped down by flat little strips of metal. I bend down to peer through the eyepiece.

  I expect the goo to look like goo under a microscope. But it’s much more complicated than simple goo. It changes colors. Blood-red, ice blue, tropical-parrot green. And it changes shape: a circle, then a sharp-edged star, then lengthening into a strand, then contracting into a pinpoint, then expanding out again like an ink stain.

  Is that what’s going on inside me when I shift?

  “This is just a small sample from what I collected at school. The rest of it is in the back of the refrigerator in a cup filled with dirt. If it can survive underground, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “Your mom doesn’t mind?”

  “No, I keep all kinds of specimens in there. She learned to leave them alone after the scorpion incident. Anyway, it won’t be there long. Tomorrow I’m going to pack it in dry ice and mail it to a biology professor at Arizona State University.”

  I clench myself real tight. “Maybe we should keep this to ourselves,” I say, trying not to sound like a person clenched real tight.

  “Why? They have an entire research department over there. Lab equipment, chemical testing stuff, DNA sequencers, an electron microscope—”

  “Night Kite number 83,” I say, thinking fast.

  “The Star Hammer crossover?”

  “Right. Remember, she found a shard of Star Hammer’s hammer hand and sent it to Doctor Krudd at Galaxy Labs for analysis, but—”

  “Doctor Krudd used the shard to clone Star Hammer and the clone destroyed half of Glimmer City and then Night Kite and the real Star Hammer got into an epic battle that destroyed the other half of Glimmer City.”

  “Right.”

  “And that’s your argument for not sending the goo to a university research lab?”

  “Exactly.”

  “There’s just one problem.”

  Only one? “What’s that?”

  “This situation is nothing like Night Kite number 83.”

  Ugh.

  I try another approach: “But won’t it be more fun if we investigate this ourselves?”

  Agnes strokes her chin. “I guess handling this on our own would be good training.”

  I nod with energy. “Totally, it would!”

  Agnes claps her hands once. “Okay. So, we’ll keep our ears out for word of more sinkholes. And when we hear about the next one, we investigate. We might have to do some extreme things. Are you prepared to do extreme things, Jake?”

  I don’t know what she means by “extreme,” but I’m relieved she’s not going to reveal the existence of goo to a bunch of strangers, so I agree to go along with whatever she wants.

  I’m sure there’s no possible way this could turn out to be a mistake.

  Chapter 5

  DAD TALKS ABOUT BUTTS WHILE spooning a pile of steaming fried rice onto my plate. I’m trying not to pay attention to him for reasons that should be obvious, but every now and again words like “extraction” and “inflammation” leak through.

  I raise my hand like I’m in school. “May I eat dinner in my room, please?”

  “No,” Mom says, “but if you stay at the table with us your father promises to stop talking about rear ends.”

  Dad hands me my plate. “I make no promises. Sharing my work with family is very important to me. Besides, nasi goreng is not to be eaten alone.”

  Nasi goreng is spicy Indonesian fried rice. Both my parents are Dutch-Indonesian, which means their families are part Dutch and part Indonesian. Neither Mom nor Dad has ever been to Holland or Indonesia, but food reminds them of home, even though it’s a home they’ve never been to.

  I wonder what people on my planet eat. I wonder if there’s some food on Earth that could make me feel closer to my original home.

  Mom’s talking about emotional soap to keep Dad from talking about butts when the doorbell bing-bongs.

  Mom and Dad look at each other, tense jaws, tight frowns. That’s their reaction anytime someone unexpected shows up at our door, because of they.

  Mom and Dad both get up to answer. I hang back to spy.

  Peeking around the corner, I see a tall white woman through the cracked-open door. Her hair is neat, her clothes are neat, her face is neat, and even her voice is neat. “I’m so sorry to bother your family, and I’m not selling anything or asking for donations—”

  “We’re in the middle of dinner,” my mom interrupts. Mom usually has welcoming manners, but she can turn them off whenever she wants.

  The neat woman smiles. “Then I won’t take more than a few seconds of your time. I’m with a private research firm investigating the sinkholes plaguing Cedar Creek View, and I’m reaching out to residents and asking them to contact us if they experience any odd occurrences.”

  Mom and Dad both relax their shoulders.

  “A private research firm?” Dad asks.

  The woman hands him a business card. “The Collaboratory,” she says. “We’re providing our services to the city to investigate and hopefully prevent new holes.”

  Dad reads the card. “Dr. Claudia Woll, Project Director. I’m a doctor myself, you know.”

  “Oh, what kind?”

  “A proctologist,” he says, proudly.

  “How wonderful,” Woll says. “Have you encountered any holes close up?”

  Dad opens his mouth to say something.

  “She means sinkholes,” Mom interrupts. “No, we haven’t seen any close up. There was one at our son’s school, though.”

  “Oh? Cedar Creek View Middle School? Is your son home? Would it be okay if I talked to him?”

  “He wasn’t nearby when it happened. He just heard other kids talking about it. Mostly rumors and exaggerations, I imagine.”

  I wince. That’s the lie I told my parents. Hearing them repeat my lie makes it worse.

  “Those holes are really becoming a problem,” Dad says.

  “A big problem,” Woll agrees. “But we hope to get to the bottom of it, so to speak.”

  Bottom, ha. Not a bad butt joke.

  Dad appreciates it. “That’s outstanding!”

  Mom shakes her head at him. “We’re happy the city has you looking into it. I wish we could be of help.”

  “Well, if you happen to come across a sinkhole, please contact me. You have my card. Thank you so much for your time.”

  We go back to dinner.

  Mom talks about soap, and Dad talks about butts. I move my fork around my fried rice. It’s a good thing this Dr. Woll person is looking into the sinkholes, but since I’m somehow connected to them, I want to figure out what’s going on before she does.

  After dinner I charge upstai
rs to my room. Growler is happy to see me, which she expresses by growling from under the bed. I grab my phone to text Agnes, but there’s already a message from her: “Someone came to our house asking about sinkholes.”

  “Same here,” I text back. “Dr. Claudia Woll from the Collaboratory. Did you tell her about the sinkhole at school?”

  “Yeah.”

  I swallow and type, “What did you say?”

  Instead of texting back, she calls.

  “I told her there was a big sinkhole at school and I was right there when it opened up,” she says before hello.

  “Did you tell her about me?”

  “Tell her what about you?”

  “Anything. What did you say about me?”

  “You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”

  It’s a fair question, but not one I want to answer.

  What would Woll do if she found out I was a goo boy from another planet? I envision military complexes out in the desert. Guards with machine guns. Barbed wire. Containment cells. White operating rooms with gleaming steel instruments.

  A whole bunch of they.

  I am being paranoid.

  If Woll is investigating the sinkholes, and if the sinkholes have something to do with me and the problems I’m having with shifting, then maybe we should help Woll out.

  “I told Woll that everybody at school saw the sinkhole and ran over to check it out,” Agnes says. “That’s all.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I didn’t mention the goo, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Good. Yeah. I want to keep the investigation between the two of us.”

  “I know. Because it’s more fun that way.”

  “Right.”

  “But are you sure? We want to figure out what’s going on, and Woll wants to figure out what’s going on. We could help each other.”

  “Maybe later. But for now, just the two of us. Okay?”

  There’s a long pause before Agnes says, “Okay.”

  Chapter 6

  THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS pass without anything interesting or alarming happening. No Hum. No accidental shifting. No sinkholes. Things are boring. I like it.

  It doesn’t last.

  I wake up with the Hum in my head and my skin feeling like applesauce. Growler growls while I inspect my body. Two legs, two arms, normal amount of thumbs. So far I’m holding myself together.

  So far.

  My phone buzzes.

  “Agnes? It’s 3:40 in the morning.” My voice doesn’t squelch, which I take as a good sign.

  “There’s something you need to see,” she says.

  I sit up. “School’s in”—I’m too bleary to do the math—“a whole bunch of hours.”

  “It’s urgent. You have to come now.”

  “Why are you even awake?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I went out on patrol.”

  “Does that mean you snuck out and rode your bike around the neighborhood?”

  “That’s what I just said. There’s a new sinkhole, and I’m the only one who knows about it. We have to check it out before the site’s swarming with city workers and cops and Dr. Woll.”

  I need to be firm with her. There’s no way I’m sneaking out. “If my parents caught me I’d be spending the rest of the school year in my bedroom, twenty-four/seven.”

  “You won’t be gone more than a few minutes. It’s on 35 Redwood Drive.”

  I know that address. It’s just around the corner.

  Twelve years ago, when the neighborhood was mostly just desert, that’s where I splashed down.

  A sinkhole.

  Right where I arrived on Earth.

  “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  I throw on some jeans and a T-shirt and shoes and a hoodie.

  Growler growls.

  “You think this is a bad idea? Going out during a Hum?”

  Growler growls.

  “You think it’s a good idea?”

  Growler growls.

  “You think knowing how to multiply fractions will be useful later in life?”

  Growler growls.

  It must be nice to be confident in all your opinions.

  Out my window I go, down the drainpipe, down the paloverde tree, feeling more like I’m dripping than climbing, until my feet touch the backyard paving stones. Creeping to the sidewalk like an escaped inmate, I expect to be pinned by blinding floodlights and stopped by armed guards. But there’re only some distant coyote howls and the rumble of air conditioners.

  Agnes waits for me in the dark in front of 35 Redwood Drive. An SUV sits in the driveway.

  “The hole’s in the backyard,” she whispers.

  “Why are you peeping into people’s backyards?”

  “Crimes don’t always conveniently happen in front yards, Jake.”

  Thirty-five Redwood Drive looks like every other house in the neighborhood: sand-colored stucco and a gravel front yard with decorative cacti.

  We peer over the low concrete-block wall, into the backyard. It’s scattered with typical backyard stuff: a hammock, a little kid’s bicycle, a basketball, fallen fruit from a grapefruit tree. And a sinkhole. It’s not all that great of a sinkhole, maybe big enough to swallow a BBQ grill. But it’s fresh. Clumps of grass and dirt crumble off the edge.

  “I wonder who lives here.”

  Agnes consults her notebook.

  “Albert and Maria Foster, and their daughter Maya, six years old.”

  “How do you know that? Wait, don’t tell me. The less I know, the less I’ll have to tell the cops when they arrest us for trespassing.”

  Agnes gets out a plastic cup. “Let’s collect some soil samples.”

  We hop over the wall and tiptoe toward the hole. I manage only a few steps when the Hum dials up the power. It’s even worse than it was in my room, like swallowing a power drill.

  “Are you okay?” Agnes says. “You look weird.”

  I check my fingers and feel my face. “What do you mean, weird?”

  “Like, pale. Are you going to puke?”

  Actually, I feel like I’m made of puke. “I’m fine.”

  She cocks her head. She knows I’m not fine. She knows I’m lying.

  “Sometimes . . . sometimes I hear a hum,” I find myself telling her. “The Hum, is what I call it. It’s deep and low, and nobody else can hear it. I know, it sounds really—”

  “Annoying?”

  I was going to say “suspicious,” but I like Agnes’s conclusion better. “Yeah, annoying. It makes me feel sick to my stomach sometimes. That’s all.”

  Agnes gets a bottle of water and a washcloth out of her backpack. She pours some water onto the cloth.

  “You need a cold compress. Put this on your forehead.”

  The cool, wet cloth doesn’t help with the Hum, but it does feel nice.

  She looks down the hole for a while.

  She’s going to figure out the connection between the Hum and my shifting.

  She’s going to learn that I’m an alien.

  She’s going to know I’m a big loogie.

  A blob of goo bursts from the hole, arcing through the air and landing in a sploogey puddle. It’s the size of a large pizza, but it’s not anything I’d ever want to eat, bubbling and pulsating and convulsing as if it’s alive and in pain.

  Agnes lurches toward it with her sample cup out, but I grab her arm to hold her back.

  “Leave it alone!” I say. I don’t know why, exactly. I just know she shouldn’t touch it.

  “Discovery entails risk,” Agnes says, doing some kind of jujitsu maneuver to free herself from my grip. But she hangs back when the goo starts shivering, mirroring the sensation in my belly from the Hum.

  The glob shoots out in a long gooey tentacle and lands with a splash against the Fosters’ back door. It grows a thin tendril, probing the doorknob, and then it slurps itself through the keyhole like a spaghetti noodle.

  “Whoa,” Agnes says.

&nb
sp; “Whoa,” I totally agree.

  “C’mon, let’s get a closer look.” We sneak up to the window to spy inside. The goo puddles on the kitchen floor, glistening in the glow of the oven clock. It wiggles in beat with my own heart.

  Agnes starts rummaging through her backpack and pulls out a set of lockpicks.

  “You are not going inside.”

  “Why not? I thought you wanted to investigate the goo. If we’re not going to do it, it’s going to be Dr. Woll. You want her to have all the fun?”

  I sigh. “Fine. Pick the lock.”

  Agnes beams as if I’ve just given her a birthday present.

  She’s about to get to work when the kitchen lights snap on. A woman stands with a toilet plunger, and through the window, I can make out some muffled curse words about plumbing problems. This must be Maria Foster. Frowning, she sleepily stumbles over to the kitchen sink. She’s almost there when she notices the pulsating blob of goo spread over the floor. Her frown deepens. She takes a cautious step toward it.

  “No!” I shout. “Don’t touch it!”

  She lets out a startled shriek as the goo springs at her.

  The blob washes over Maria’s feet, climbs up her calves, stretches up her middle, crawls up her neck, pours into her screaming mouth. Her fingers desperately claw at her face as the goo spreads across her cheeks and covers her eyes. In a few seconds, Maria Foster is just a vaguely human-shaped statue covered in goo.

  A man with bedhead rushes in. This must be Albert Foster.

  Agnes works frantically on the lock while goo-slathered Maria Foster reaches out with dripping fingers and clutches Albert Foster’s shoulders. He flounders backward, trying to push his goo-wife away, but the goo spreads over him, sealing his eyes, filling his mouth, flowing over every square inch of him.

  And then Maya Foster, their little girl, enters the kitchen.

  “Kid, run!” I scream.

  She’s smart enough to do what I say.

  But she’s not fast enough.

  She only gets a few steps before her goo-parents descend upon her.

  And now, the goo family is complete.

  The door lock clicks. “Got it!” says Agnes.

  “Agnes, do not go in there.”