All the footage is shaky, but there I am, a brown seal snorfling and flopping its way through screaming shoppers at the Cedar Creek View Fashion Valley Galleria Mall.
Most of the news stories treat it like it’s funny, but Animal Control is taking it seriously. “We assume the seal was an escaped pet someone was keeping illegally,” says the guy from the mall with the hat and tranquilizer gun. “And we would like to remind the public that under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, seals, sea lions, walruses and other pinnipeds cannot be kept without a federal permit.”
After the seal story, there’s a piece about a sinkhole that formed in the mall parking lot. It’s a big hole, but after the whole seal thing nobody seems to care much about it.
“And you were in the bathroom the whole time?” Dad says, yet again. It’s been a few hours since Agnes’s mom dropped me off, and I’ve spent all that time talking to my parents to assure them I’m okay.
“Yeah. I really had to go. Must have been those dobutts.”
“And you didn’t even see the seal?”
“I heard some weird sounds from the stall next over, but I really didn’t want to know what was causing them.”
“Understandable,” Mom says. “I’m just glad you and Agnes and Dolores are okay. I’m terrified to think what could have happened to you.”
“Yeah, phew, thank god we’re all okay.”
Mom’s face turns red. Dad’s turns a little redder.
“You’re not okay,” Mom says, her voice tight. “Give us some credit. You were the seal.”
I open my mouth. Dad points a rigid finger at me. “Don’t lie to us, Jake. Don’t make this worse. How long have you been turning into animals?”
Am I going to tell them about the bird hand on the first day of my very first class?
“This is the first time anything like this has ever happened,” I claim.
Dad pinches his nose.
Mom blows air out of hers.
They exchange looks for a long time, having a silent conversation.
“You’re done going to school,” Mom says.
“You’re done going anywhere,” Dad says.
My heart falls into a pit deeper than any sinkhole.
“This won’t happen again! I promise! It was only once. The mall was too crowded. Everything was too bright. That’s what triggered the shift. I won’t go to the mall again. Or anywhere with too many people.”
The argument lasts an entire hour.
The words “trust,” “judgment,” and “responsibility” are uttered at least three billion times. And through it all, the dark threat of they looms large.
There’s not much I can say in my own defense.
They have some more silent conversation with each other, negotiating with eyebrow raises, shaking heads, and nods.
“Restricted,” Mom says, finally, and a dark cloud descends.
No outings on my own.
No hanging out with Agnes after school, even though I tell them a dozen times that Agnes and her mom saw nothing, which is at least half true.
Mom will drop me off at school in the mornings, and Dad will pick me up.
“What about guitar lessons?”
They can’t take that away from me. They know how much guitar means to me. They have to let me keep going to guitar.
Dad crosses his arms. “No guitar lessons.”
My heart—or whatever solidified goo structure in my chest functions like a heart—dies a cold death of despair.
“Well, hold on,” says Mom. “It’s not fair to take money away from Dale. And he’s family.”
Dad squeezes his eyes shut. He looks like he has a headache. They both do. “Okay,” he says. “Jake can keep guitar lessons. But I’ll take him there and work from the coffee shop across the street, and then we’ll go directly home.”
“For how long?” I ask.
“For as long as we think it’s necessary,” Mom says.
When I open my mouth to protest, she shuts me down.
“If you don’t like that, it’s not too late to pull you out of school.”
“I thought home school was for my protection, not for punishment.”
“You were on television, Jake.”
I know they’re right. If the cameras had caught me in the act of shifting . . .
Part of me wants to scream how unfair they’re being. Part of me wants to tell them how sorry I am. Part of me wants to thank them for letting me keep guitar lessons. But my throat is too tight to say anything at all. I trudge up to my room to begin serving my sentence.
Agnes calls when I’m sitting on the roof with my guitar and Growler.
“Whatcha doing?” she asks.
“Looking at the stars.”
“It’s a clear night. There’re a lot of them. Deneb is really bright.”
“Are you up on your roof, too?”
“Yeah. Climbing and rappelling practice. So, my tracker picked up the hazmat creeps again.”
“Let me guess. They were at the sinkhole in the mall parking lot?”
“Yep. About an hour after the . . . incident. I wanted to bike over there and conduct surveillance, but after the . . . incident . . . my mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight.”
“Ah. Yeah. The incident.”
“So, there’s probably more xenogel out in the world. Maybe more imblobsters.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to say anything. Cicadas buzz in the dark.
“Looking at any star in particular?” Agnes asks, breaking the silence.
“Nope. Just the whole sky. Wondering where I’m from.”
“Ah. So you’re an alien. That’s what I guessed.”
I still can’t find words.
“Are we going to talk about what happened today?” Agnes asks.
I should hang up the phone. I should go back inside. I should get under the covers and never come out, not even to eat. Not even to go to the bathroom.
But I stay put and tell Agnes everything.
I tell her how I fell from the sky when I was a baby.
I tell her how my parents found me in the desert.
I tell her that I’m made of goo.
I tell her about my shapeshifting problems.
I tell her everything because she already knows the worst of it, and there’s no point in keeping the rest secret. But the real reason I spill is because I feel like I’ve been holding my breath my entire life. Telling the truth is terrifying, but it feels like I’m breathing for the first time.
“This is amazing! Incredible! Proof of intelligent alien life? Astonishing!” Agnes burbles on like this for a while.
“I’m not that intelligent. I’m only getting C-minuses in pre-algebra. Ms. Yoh says I’m not applying myself, but numbers are really hard.”
“Jake, be serious. Knowledge of your existence is a huge advance in our understanding of the universe.”
Everything she’s saying is true, but I don’t like hearing it. It just drives home how weird I am.
“I’m sure this is super fascinating to you, Agnes, but I’m not a specimen.”
“No, no. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. And you can’t tell anyone about me.”
“Of course not. You’re my friend. Your secret is safe with me.”
“Promise me?”
“The Night Kite/Star Hammer team-up. Night Kite learns Star Hammer’s an alien, and she gives up her life to keep his secret. She comes back to life in the next issue, but that’s not the point. She never tells. And I won’t either. I promise.”
She’s quiet for a while. I watch the lights of a plane pass overhead.
“We shouldn’t have any secrets,” she says, finally. “I know yours. You should know mine.”
She takes a breath.
“My dad died when I was four. He was a forklift driver at a warehouse, and some shelves collapsed on him. The company he worked for said it was his fault because he was using his forklift wrong. My m
om didn’t believe them, so she did a lot of digging and she found a bunch of safety complaints against the company. The brackets that held the shelves in place weren’t screwed far enough into the walls. So eventually they broke and fell on my dad and killed him.”
She says all this plainly, just reporting the facts, like she’s telling me her shoe size. But I hear the smallest quaver in her voice. All these years later, she’s still upset. Of course she is. She lost her dad.
“So, your mom found out that the company broke the law, and she made sure people got punished? Which is what Night Kite does?”
“No. The company had more money than we did. A lot more. They hired a huge team of lawyers, and they beat our lawyer. They killed my dad and got away with it.”
“That’s not right,” is all I can think to say. “That’s just not right.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it now. I don’t have the knowledge or ability or resources.” She pauses. And in that pause, I can hear the cocking of a fist, ready to strike. “But someday.”
“Someday,” I agree.
I don’t know what else to say.
But I do know what to do.
Using my phone’s self-timer, I manage to take a selfie with my wrists crossed in the Night Kite signal.
I send it to Agnes.
A few seconds later, she sends one of her doing the signal to me.
And that’s it.
Now we’re not just friends.
Now we’re allies.
Chapter 9
THE REST OF THE WEEKEND lasts approximately six thousand years. I never thought I’d look forward to hearing one of Mr. Brown’s anti-gum rants in Advisory, but here I am.
“The average person chews three hundred pieces of gum per year. They chew each piece for an average of seven minutes.” I still have no idea why he’s so down on gum. Maybe gum killed his grandfather. “That’s twenty-one hundred minutes! Or thirty-five chewing hours a year! What could you do with your time if you had an extra thirty-five hours each year?”
We all stare blankly at him.
“This is an essay question, people. Get out your writing utensils.”
I use my time to draw guitars, because it’s Advisory and you can’t fail Advisory.
Agnes uses her time to update our to-do list. She shows it to me at lunch. I can’t make any sense of it, because she’s written it in a secret Agnes code, because of course she has. So she reads it for me:
Learn how the Hum and the sinkholes are related to Jake’s shapeshifting.
Find out what planet Jake is actually from.
Help Jake practice shifting into anything at will.
I take a slurp from my juice box and hand her back her list. “Item C is a bad idea.”
She blinks, surprised. “Why?”
“Because that means trying to shift. I’m trying to do the opposite.”
“Star Hammer issue 123, ‘Lay Your Hammer Down, O Child of the Cosmos.’”
That’s the one where Star Hammer decides the Celestial Mallet is too much responsibility, so he buries it at Earth’s core. But then Volcamech attacks the world with magmadroids, and Star Hammer has to give up his new secret identity as a hairstylist to get his hammer back.
“The art on that one was really good.”
“The point is,” Agnes says slowly, “you have gifts. You should learn how to use them.”
“Being hashtag MallSeal is not a gift, Agnes.”
“You can change into animals! You can turn to liquid. I would give anything to have your abilities. Instead I have to make do with being awesome at push-ups and good at rope climbing.”
“And you’re great at those things!”
Agnes takes a breath. Her ears turn a little red. I brace myself, because I sense she’s about to unload on me. Mercifully, something else grabs her attention.
“We’re being watched,” she says. “Blond girl. Blond boy. Blue eyes. Both picking up trash. Boy, about five foot four. Girl, about five foot five and a half. Check your six. That means look behind you.”
“I know what ‘check my six’ means. If they’re paying attention to me, I don’t want to look at them. Describe them more.”
Agnes squints. “The wear on their sneakers indicates they walk on stony surfaces. The boy has a reddish tinge underneath his fingernails. That’s soil from the Superstition Mountains. The girl has a small scratch on her right cheek, consistent with the hoof of a mountain goat. Conclusion: They are mountain goat herders.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Yes. Turn around and look at them.”
“Don’t you have some kind of facial-recognition device loaded with a database of every human on Earth?”
“Not yet,” Agnes says with a wistful sigh. “Please just look at them.”
“Okay, okay.” I turn around, pretending to glance at everything except the twins. Oh, look, it’s a tree. And there’s a very fine bench. Fascinating. I turn back around.
“They’re coming this way. Quick, help me practice my French.”
Agnes claps her hands, excited. “I’m going to interrogate them!”
“Bad idea. If they confront me, tell them I’m not Jake.”
“For the last time, your ‘I’m Marcel from France’ plan is the absolute worst.”
Fortunately, I have taken the time to learn a little bit of French since the first day of school, which I practice in whispers now: “Un, deux, trois, voila, mon stylo.” In English that’s “One, two, three, here is my pen.”
Agnes denies me the opportunity to execute my foolproof garbage plan. “I’m Agnes,” she announces. “And this is Jake. Who are you?”
“We are collecting trash,” says the boy. He shows us a plastic bag full of empty milk cartons, candy wrappers, some random twigs.
“We are Dairy and Gravy,” the girl says.
Agnes and I exchange a look.
“Mary and Davey,” the boy corrects. “Forgive our words. We are not from here. We are from—”
I swear, if he says France, I’m going to scream.
“—Dutchland. No. The land of halls. Holland. Yes. We are from Holland.”
Agnes jots down some notes. “Are you new?”
The twins make startled little ulps, as if they’ve been accused of something.
Before they can answer, the bell chimes, signaling the end of lunch.
“That is the signal to flee the outdoors,” says Gravy.
“It’s the bell,” Dairy explains to him. “It means we have to go to class.”
That is the most normal thing either one of them has said. But then Dairy adds, “We still study you later,” and therefore loses all normal points awarded.
Gravy holds out his plastic bag. “Do you have any trash you wish to dispose of?”
I give Gravy my juice box, and they take off together and melt into the stream of kids heading for class.
Agnes and I watch them go.
“Yeah,” she says. “You should definitely stay away from them.”
After school, my stressed and busy dad drives me to Dale’s Guitar Shed for my lesson. He goes to the coffee shop across the street to do email consultations with patients, and I take refuge in the guitar shop. The air smells of sawdust and burning wires. Power tools whine and buzz from the back room. I go back to see what Dale’s up to.
On his workbench lies the biggest electric bass guitar I’ve ever seen. The body is a massive slab painted with green lizard scales. The neck is as broad as a diving board. I’ve seen plenty of four-string basses, a couple of five-strings, and pictures of six-strings. This has thirteen. It’s ridiculous. It’s bizarre. It’s frightening. It’s amazing.
Dale’s bent over the bass, his face hidden behind a welding mask.
“Dale?”
Nothing.
“Dale.”
Still nothing.
“DALE!”
He lifts the visor of his welding mask, which is funny because he’s not welding anything, just
doing some wiring work with a dinky little soldering iron.
“Jake, my young dude, meet Basszilla.” His voice is husky with emotion. “With this bass, it will be possible to conquer the world.”
“Or at least play some really low notes.”
“Really low,” he agrees. “Have a listen.” He plugs the bass into an amp and hits a string. A powerful BOOOOWWWOOOOOOM rattles the tools on Dale’s workbench. He hits the next-lowest string. Every guitar in the shop sings. And under my shirt, my belly ripples like a pond when you drop a big rock in it.
It’s not the Hum, exactly, but it’s close.
“You okay?” Dale says. “You look a little sick.”
“I’m just under a lot of stress.”
“Oh, yeah? Still?” Dale mercifully mutes the resonating bass string with his palm and switches off the amp.
“I got grounded.”
Dale nods. “I heard. Your mom was pretty vague on what you did.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“Well, then getting grounded is an injustice. But you’re not alone, dude. Life is a prison. We’re all grounded. But this,” he says, thumping my guitar bag with his finger, “this is the file in the cake.”
As usual, I have no idea what Dale is saying when he’s not talking about music.
“Your guitar, dude. It lets you saw through the jail cell bars. The guitar is your escape. And when you play with all your heart, you help everyone who listens escape their own prisons. It’s not just a musical instrument. It’s freedom.”
I could use some freedom.
Freedom from being grounded (or “restricted,” which my parents think sounds less like punishment). Freedom from the fear that people will discover my secret. Freedom from not having control over my own body.
I have a dangerous idea.
“Hey, Dale, could I play Basszilla?”
As soon as the words escape my lips, I have regrets. I want him to say no. But Dale doesn’t say no to many things.
“Aw, yeah, my first guinea pig!”
Moments later, I’m on a stool with Basszilla over my knee and a giant amp thrumming behind me.
I start small, volume dialed low, lightly plucking the thinnest strings high up the neck. I do a couple of walking blues lines.
“Pay attention to your timing,” Dale coaches. “Remember, the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves.”
Weird Kid Page 5