Weird Kid

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Something in the tone of my voice convinces Agnes not to argue with me. Or maybe it’s just Agnes showing some common sense. Even if she really were Night Kite, she’d have no defense against an aggressive blob.

  Splooting and bubbling, the goo takes on the form of the Fosters, right down to the shapes of their noses and the color of their skin. If I got close to them, I bet I’d see every strand of hair in place. I bet their fingerprints would be right. But something tells me these aren’t the Fosters. Not the real Fosters anymore. These are goo Fosters.

  Maria Goo Foster takes the plunger and sticks it in the oven.

  Albert Goo Foster grabs a handful of forks from a drawer. He drops them into the sink and hits a switch. The garbage disposal sounds miserable as it tries to eat metal.

  Maya Goo Foster takes a can of Whizzy Cheese from the refrigerator, squirts almost all of it into the microwave, and sets the timer for twenty minutes.

  “They don’t know how kitchens work,” I observe.

  Agnes takes some notes. “Nope.”

  “What are we actually witnessing here?”

  “It’s an invasion,” Agnes says. “Or a takeover. Or another kind of bad thing. It’s . . . awful.”

  For once, there’s no excitement, or glee, or determination in Agnes’s eyes. They look haunted. This isn’t fun.

  I have to shut my eyes to conceal what I’m feeling.

  The goo did something monstrous. It is a monster. And I’m made of goo. So what does that make me?

  The glow of headlights catches my eye. On the other side of the backyard wall, a white van comes to a stop at the curb.

  There are no markings on the van.

  Everybody knows unmarked vans are bad news.

  Two people climb out of the front seat, dressed in baggy, one-piece white outfits with boots and gloves. Their heads are fully covered by hoods with built-in goggles.

  “Hazmat suits,” Agnes whispers. “For avoiding exposure to hazardous materials.”

  “Considering what happened to the Fosters, that seems like a good idea.”

  Forlorn, Agnes looks inside her backpack. “We need some hazmat suits. I wonder how much they cost.”

  I want to be encouraging and suggest that Agnes is probably handy enough to make her own hazmat suit, but when the two people in actual hazmat suits start climbing over the wall into the backyard, I make a quick dash to hide behind a patch of ocotillo cacti.

  Agnes chooses not to hide with me. She does a crouching-running sort of thing on nimble feet, sticking to shadows and sneaking around the grapefruit tree. She manages to get over the wall without the hazmat people seeing her.

  Total Night Kite maneuver.

  She turns to me and makes a bunch of hand gestures that could mean “stay still and watch” or “I am bouncing a ball and now I’m poking you in the eyes with two fingers.”

  The hazmat pair edges up to the hole.

  “How old?” asks one of them.

  The other one jabs the screen of a tablet with a stylus. “Geological outgassing indicates no more than forty minutes.”

  I don’t know what geological outgassing is, but I bet Agnes does.

  “Presence of xenogel?” asks the first.

  I bet I do know what xenogel is. It’s the goo.

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I know, Tami. You don’t have to ask.”

  “Asking is part of protocol, Leonard. I ask; you tell. That’s how it works.”

  “I have a question. What is Tami’s most annoying habit? Take your time; I know you have a lot to choose from.”

  “Is this about lunch? Those were good burritos.”

  “It was chopped baloney and broccoli in a tortilla. That’s not a burrito.”

  “John’s Burritos was recently voted the Most Interesting Burrito Restaurant in the Phoenix metropolitan area.”

  Leonard talks to the sky. “Baloney and broccoli is a crime against burritos. It’s a burrito crime.”

  “Is there xenogel or isn’t there?”

  Leonard consults his tablet again. “Five hundred forty-eight grams, pre-shift. But it’s out of the hole.”

  Tami says a bad word. “We’re too late.”

  “What are we supposed to do now? Contain the results?”

  “We don’t have facilities for that. We just file a report and let a vacuum crew handle it.”

  “That could take a while. They’ve been busy.”

  Tami shrugs, and they both head back to the van. Soon, taillights recede down the road.

  I stand in the cool night air and breathe. That was all a lot to take in. I’m looking around for Agnes when the end of a rope drops in front of my face. Agnes slides down the rope from the roof.

  Her landing is . . . just okay. I can tell by her frown that she’s not satisfied with it.

  “Why are you playing with rope?” I whisper-hiss at her. “And why did you leave me alone with the hazmat creeps? And what’s geological outgassing?”

  “I was avoiding detection while planting a tracking device on their van,” Agnes whispers back, trying to sound like it’s something she does every day, but I can tell she’s really excited about getting to do Night Kite stuff.

  “A tracking device? That’s a real thing?”

  “Sure. You just take the GPS unit out of your mom’s phone, tape it to a magnet, and then spend a month doing extra chores because you broke your mom’s phone. But totally worth it!”

  She shows me her own phone. A little red dot moves along a map.

  I give her a respectful nod. “So we figure out where the hazmat creeps are going and where they hang out, and then maybe we can find some answers. Also, you rappelled from the roof just to show off, admit it.”

  “How’d my landing look?”

  I’m about to answer, but noises come from the kitchen.

  “We fester,” says a little girl’s voice.

  “Yes,” agrees a man. “We are the Festers.”

  “Fosters,” a woman corrects. “We are the Fosters, and we are having family time in the ketchup.”

  “Kitten,” the man says.

  “Kitchen,” the little girl corrects.

  A dish shatters, and someone laughs.

  Chapter 7

  SATURDAY MORNING IS DOBUTT MORNING, a family tradition that means we get up early and Dad bakes oatmeal donuts. Oats are good for butts, apparently. Therefore, Dobutt morning.

  Mom’s on the phone in the kitchen while Dad interrogates me about school.

  “How’s Eirryk?” he says around a mouthful of dobutt.

  I shrug. “I haven’t seen him much. I don’t think we’re friends anymore.”

  Dad frowns, concerned, like he’s diagnosing a patient.

  “That happens a lot between elementary school and middle school. A lot of things start changing at your age. Maybe that’s why your shifting went a little wonky over the summer. Maybe you’re not so different from other boys after all.” He takes another thoughtful bite. “But what about Agnes Oakes? Seems like you’re spending a lot of time with her.”

  “Not that much.” I haven’t told Mom and Dad about the hazmat creeps last night. Part of me wants to pretend it never happened. The goo—the xenogel—did horrible things to the Fosters. And if I’m made of the same xenogel . . .

  My phone shudders once in my pocket.

  It’s a text from Agnes: “Say yes.”

  Mom emerges from the kitchen. “That was Dolores Oakes on the phone. She wants to know if Jake would like to accompany her and Agnes to the mall.”

  I haven’t been to the mall since before summer. Too many people there. Too big a chance I’ll expose myself in another ear-to-ear grin.

  “Yes,” I say.

  Forty minutes later—after answering a lot of Dad’s questions regarding itching, burning, and wriggling—I’m walking through the main entrance of Cedar Creek View Fashion Valley Galleria Mall with Agnes and her mom. Three levels of shops rise to the ceiling of the big, echoey space. Skylights let in w
ay too much Arizona sunshine. It’s early, but the mall is already noisy with oontz-oontz music and the footfalls of shoppers.

  I used to like it here because of the bookstore and the movie theater, but now it’s all too much.

  Agnes still hasn’t told me why we’re at the mall. I don’t think it’s to see a movie. She tells her mom that she and I want to hang out at the bookstore.

  “I will trust your good judgment to remain safe,” her mom says. “We’ll meet in the food court at noon. That’s one hour. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Yes, Ms. Oakes,” I say like someone who never sneaks out at night to witness an entire family being replaced by living goo.

  Agnes drags me to the bookstore and commandeers a table in the café.

  “I lost track of the hazmat creeps’ van somewhere on the south edge of town,” she announces, spreading a map of Cedar Creek View on the table. She points to where the van fell off the grid.

  “That’s the old part of Cedar Creek View. The only stuff out there is a retirement trailer park and the dead mall.”

  Agnes’s eyes get big. “What do you mean ‘dead’? Are there zombies?”

  “No, just the mall that used to be the mall before this mall.”

  “Oh,” says Agnes, disappointed.

  “There’s hardly any cell signal out there. That explains why your tracker stopped tracking them.”

  “Hopefully we’ll pick up their trail again.”

  “Should we check in on the Fosters?”

  “I cruised by before sunup,” she says. “They were barbecuing.”

  “Weird time to be doing it, but that doesn’t sound hugely weird.”

  “They were barbecuing milk.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “In the meantime, I’ve done some detecting.” Agnes draws a few X’s on the map in red marker. “These are sinkholes reported to the city. I’m still trying to hack into the nonpublic records, because there may be more holes they’re not telling us about.”

  “And if that’s true, then there might be a lot more . . . xenogel.”

  “And more people like the Fosters. Blob imposters.”

  “Imblobsters,” I suggest.

  “Oh, good name!” Agnes writes something in her notebook. “If we can map out all the sinkholes, maybe we’ll see a pattern. Maybe they’re all centered on a single location. If we can find that place, maybe we can figure out what’s causing them. And if it’s all part of some nefarious scheme, we can put a stop to it before we end up with any more imblobsters.”

  I love how naturally she says “nefarious scheme.” It’s so Night Kite.

  I’ve been wondering why being Night Kite is so important to her, especially after seeing her in action last night. You can’t just do push-ups and read a few books and become a nocturnal bird of justice. You have to be really dedicated to it. You need a reason. Night Kite’s origin story starts when her parents are murdered by a corrupt Grimm City police officer. Agnes still hasn’t said anything about her father.

  I want to know, but it would be rude to ask.

  We spend the rest of the hour in the graphic novel section. I page through any story set in outer space, while Agnes reads more Night Kite.

  We don’t say a lot, which is fine. It’s nice just to sit crisscross applesauce with a friend, going through stacks of comics. Eirryk and I would do this sometimes, and I guess I’ve really missed it. I wish this was my life all the time, just doing normal things, no blanket of dread weighing me down, no secrets to keep, no they. Just me and a pal and all the weirdness in the world confined to brightly colored pictures on paper. I wish this could go on forever.

  Agnes stands and loops her backpack over her shoulders. “Lunchtime!”

  “Pizza? Tacos? Corn dogs?”

  She gives it some careful thought. “I vote pizza.”

  “I meant all three.”

  Agnes laughs, which is rare for her. “I like the way you think.”

  On our way to the food court, Agnes talks about microbiology or maybe interrogation techniques or maybe the art of rappelling from roofs when the Hum starts, a big vibrating WOMMM WOMMM noise pummeling my head. I look around for a trash can in case I turn entirely liquid and need a receptacle to contain myself in.

  “Hey, Jake, are you okay? You look . . . mottled. Is it the Hum?”

  “I . . . I . . . Igottagotothebathroom.”

  I take off at a run, or at least I try to. My legs weigh too much. Am I getting even worse at keeping myself together? That would totally suck since I’ve already gotten so bad at it.

  Heavy and sluggish, I lurch along.

  “Jake!” Agnes calls after me. “Do you need a cold compress?”

  Color fades. My vision tunnels, and everything farther than a few feet away gets lost in a dark fog. I find the bathrooms more by luck than by sight and stumble inside.

  The smells are too strong, lemon cleaner and ammonia. Everything is so bright: the fluorescent lights, reflections off the tile floor, my face in the mirror.

  Oh, no. My face.

  What have I done to my face?

  Eyes like pools of black stare back at me. My nose is a rounded triangle with two wide, vertical nostrils. Short gray-and-black fur covers my face.

  With a long, paddle-shaped hand, I shove on the door of the nearest toilet stall.

  “Occupied!” grunts an irritated voice.

  “Sorry!” I say. It comes out as a moist snuffle.

  My whiskers twitch.

  I have whiskers.

  I collapse inside the second toilet stall. There’s barely enough space to contain my bulk.

  Breathe, Jake, I tell myself.

  Try to relax.

  Try to focus.

  I play guitar scales in my head, imagining my fingers pressing the strings down with precision. But I could never play guitar with these hands, because they’re not hands, they’re flippers.

  My legs fuse into a thick back end.

  My body is a big, blubbery mass.

  I, Jake Wind, have become a seal.

  A seal.

  I am an entire seal.

  In Arizona, of all places.

  On a tide of panic, I burst from the stall, snapping the door off its hinges.

  A janitor entering the bathroom takes a swing at me with his mop. I barrel past him out into the wider world of the Saturday mall crowd.

  Everybody does what I expect them to do. They hold their phones out at me like vampire hunters with crosses while I gallumph over the shiny floor.

  I flop through a blur of legs and faces and noise. There’re too many people in my way, pushing and jostling to get a look at me, to gawk and shout.

  The only thing worse than shifting into a seal at the mall would be shifting back into human form, right here, in front of everybody, captured by their phone cameras. The world will know about me. They’ll take me away from my parents. They’ll put me in a zoo, or some kind of prison for freaks, or a laboratory deep underground where they’ll perform experiments on their pet alien goo boy.

  But then, like a mighty rock splitting a raging river, it’s Agnes. She stands with her feet firmly planted, spine straight, shoulders broad, ignoring the chaos around her and focusing her gaze on me.

  Our eyes meet. Human to seal.

  I want her to recognize me, to see me for who I am. But at the same time, I really, really do not want her to recognize me and see me for who I am.

  Calm and controlled, she takes out her phone.

  She grips it tight, extends her arm all the way out, and shouts, “I’m going to get some pics!”

  The shutter-click of her camera sounds like a tree cracking in two. Light flashes like a bomb.

  But not toward me.

  “Hey!” someone screams.

  “Watch where you point that!” screams someone else.

  Agnes fires off another pic.

  Gawkers flinch and throw their arms over their eyes.

  “Sorry, new phone,” Agnes says
. She triggers the flash again and again, blasting the crowd with barrages of blinding light. People cry out in pain and shout nasty words at her. Agnes keeps apologizing and blasting them.

  She’s doing it on purpose.

  And these aren’t normal flashes. They are painful and shocking and massively bright. She must have modified her camera, turning it into one of Night Kite’s most effective weapons: the Night Kite Light.

  Boom, flash, explosions of light, cussing from the crowd, Agnes apologizing but not stopping.

  The crowd starts to back away.

  She turns to me.

  “Shoo, seal,” she says.

  She doesn’t have to say it twice.

  I flop my way back into the bathroom and keel over on my side. I just lie there, trying to catch my breath on the sticky floor.

  Gradually, my vision sharpens and color returns. My front flippers separate into fingers. My fur flattens and recedes. The blubber beneath my flesh thins. In a few more seconds, I’m Jake again.

  Panting, I fix my hair in the mirror and attempt a smile. It’s not good.

  I crack the door open and peek outside.

  Security guards keep the crowd at a distance while a guy in a tan-and-green uniform with an Animal Control patch on his hat loads a dart in a rifle.

  “There’s a seal in there!” I scream. “If I hadn’t hidden in the toilet stall I bet it would have bitten me and possibly given me rabies!”

  The Animal Control guy braves the bathroom, led by the janitor and his menacing mop.

  Agnes dodges around the guards and rushes up to me. She hooks me by the arm and drags me away. Nobody’s paying much attention to us.

  “I’m okay,” I tell her. “I didn’t get bit.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “It was really scary.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I wonder where the seal came from. Or maybe it’s a sea lion. I can’t tell the difference. I think sea lions are the ones with little earflaps?”

  She sighs with impatience. “Jake, I said I know. Boy goes into bathroom; seal comes out. Seal goes into bathroom; boy comes out. The seal was you, Jake. You changed into a seal.”

  I unhook myself from her arm. “I’ll take that cold compress now.”

  Chapter 8

  I’M ON TV. I’M ON the internet. I’m viral. I’m a meme. I’m #MallSeal.