by Karen Karbo
Mark Clark, Quills, and I were driving downtown to the Narino Art Gallery, where Mark Clark was having an art show of his fractals.
“You already said yes,” said Mark Clark. “I need you to help me out. And once they see the fractal I’ll make from your brain waves, everyone will want one. You’ll be the most popular kid at the gallery.”
“I’ll be the only kid at the gallery.”
“That should make you feel better, then. No one to see Mark Clark make a fool out of ya,” said Quills.
“I don’t want to do it. You shouldn’t make me do something I don’t want to do. It’s bad parenting.”
Quills and Mark Clark roared with laughter. Quills spit out the SweetTart he was sucking on. I then heard about eight hundred hours’ worth of stories about how it was when they were growing up with Mom and Dad living together in Casa Clark, and how they had to clean the garage every Saturday and take showers every night and blah blah blah.
We parked two blocks away from the Narino Gallery, in front of a big warehouse that now housed a fancy sushi place and an antiques store. The air was warm and sticky. I snuck a whiff of my pits; I’d forgotten to put on deodorant after my shower. How could I have forgotten? How could I be so dang stupid all the time?
This was so totally unfair. Inequitable is what it was. Maybe I’d be a Gigantor my whole life, a snarly-headed loser who said yes to stuff without thinking, but I would have a good vocabulary.
Have you ever noticed that all art galleries look just like art galleries do in the movies? It’s always wood floors and white walls with a row of pictures all in a line, and not too close. Mark Clark’s fractals were big and bright. They looked like hippie posters dripping with color, or pictures of the human body as seen through an electron microscope, or those bright snowflakes at the end of a kaleidoscope. Sometimes they looked like pictures of complicated shorelines as seen from outer space.
I made a beeline past the fractals to the table at the back of the gallery, where there were all kinds of weird-looking grown-up snacks. I grabbed a handful of pale yellow crackers and stuffed them in my sweatshirt pocket. Then I remembered that Jupiter had taken a long nap in my pocket only hours before. Was it still gross to eat the crackers if no one but me knew Jupiter had been in there?
Mark Clark stood in the middle of a circle of grownups with sleek shoes and good manners. They held glasses of wine that they didn’t drink. The ladies all had big rings on their bony fingers. They looked young, but you could tell they weren’t. They had very neat hair. I thought they were rich people, and not the computer nerds Mark Clark worked with. Otherwise, they’d know about fractals, wouldn’t they?
“… all computer generated,” Mark Clark was saying as I stood next to him. He propped his elbow on my shoulder, as if it were a ledge. “These are basically prints of electronic images derived from mathematical equations. They’re so hypnotic because there’s only one shape in the fractal, and it’s repeated over and over and over again, to infinity.”
The people around him with the wineglasses nodded.
“A very simple example would be a fractal composed of small squares that creates, let’s say, a large propeller shape. If you zoom in on the propeller, you’ll see the smaller squares. The computer uses basic geometric shapes to create complex shapes, but if you looked closely at the simple shapes, you’d see the complex shapes inside of them.”
“But how do they know how to form themselves into a propeller?” asked a woman with her blond hair twisted up in a bun.
“That’s where the math comes in,” said Mark Clark, rubbing his hands together and grinning in a dorky imitation of a movie villain. “Every equation begins with a seed number. You’ll see. At eight o’clock, I’m going to demonstrate how it works.”
The people with the shoes and the wineglasses started talking about the rise of computers in modern life and then, like always, one of them asked Mark Clark a question about why her printer didn’t work.
I wandered around and snuck a cracker now and then from my pocket. I had seen all these fractals before. There was “I Am a Rock,” where the seed number was extracted from something having to do with the way light hit a piece of gray stone in our side yard, and “Groove Is in the Heart,” made from Jupiter’s heartbeat.
Through the big glass front door I saw Quills pacing up and down, talking on his cell phone. He was mad about something and almost crashed into one couple hurrying through the door. I wondered if he was talking to that creepy Toc.
Morgan showed up with some girl with a head of very cool blond dreadlocks. Since they were college students, they made a point of standing in front of each fractal and impressing themselves and each other with a lot of big words. I heard the dreadlocks girl say “fantasia of color.” What did that even mean? I thought only boys could be poseurs. Note to self: Ask Reggie. Could girls be poseurs, too?
As the gallery filled up I started getting stomachache nervous. It was almost eight o’clock. The food table had been moved against one wall and another table was being set up by a few computer nerds Mark Clark knew from work. I recognized them because sometimes they came over with their six-packs of beer and family-size bags of M&M’s to play video games. They put equipment on the table: a machine Mark Clark had made himself from parts he got at Radio Shack, a laptop, some kind of a printer, and other stuff.
I said “Hey” to DeMaio, who was Mark Clark’s assistant at work. DeMaio had a first name, but no one ever used it. He was just DeMaio. He was the tallest person I knew, and he had kinky black hair that he wore in a ponytail. It was so kinky the ponytail looked like a pinecone.
DeMaio was the one who got Mark Clark into fractals. Mark Clark said DeMaio was a fractal freak, and I knew he was here tonight to deliver his Fractal Manifesto. Mark Clark is just that kind of geek: He knows people who have manifestos.
“Everyone! Gather round!” yelled DeMaio to the people in the gallery. He was wearing a black velvet cloak, which made me think of magicians. DeMaio gestured with his long arms all dramatically. “Come see a fractal in the making!”
Mark Clark stood with his back to the gathering crowd. He booted up his laptop, turned on his machine, which was about the size of a microwave, but with various colored switches and dials, and plugged in a bunch of thin gray wires.
I felt my hands start to sweat.
I felt my feet start to sweat.
“Sit down, Min,” he said. I sat in a white wooden chair next to the table. I started bouncing my leg, all nervous. Why why WHY had I said I’d do this? This reminded me of one of my all-time best rebuses:
Sitting duck. That was me.
From where I sat I could see straight through the middle of the gallery and out the front door. Quills was still on his cell phone. The sky behind him was the same color as a bruise I once got on my thigh when I fell off my skateboard. Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder, like giants were bowling. More thunder. Quills turned up the collar of his army jacket; it whipped against his cheek in the wind.
Mark Clark took the spongy ends of the electrodes and dipped them in a bowl of salt water. He told the crowd salt water conducts electricity best.
He then put one electrode on each temple, one behind my ear, and one smack in the middle of my forehead. Suddenly, I wasn’t just nervous, but a little pissed off. Mark Clark was making me look stupid, with this electrode in the middle of my forehead, like I was some doofus in a lab experiment.
All this time, DeMaio was giving his manifesto. You could tell he loved having an audience. “What one must appreciate is not simply the beauty of the fractals, but also their perfection.”
Mark Clark fiddled with his machines. As if from far away, I heard him tell DeMaio to tell his audience that he was now recording my brain waves on his laptop. Everyone was staring at me like I was some freak show freak. I was a freak show freak. Why else would my parents have basically left me to be raised by my brothers, who turned me into a lab rat for art?
“Even the br
ain waves of a thirteen-year-old girl can produce a gloriously perfect work of art,” DeMaio was saying. “Perfect and beautiful. Total perfection.”
The audience smirked—I knew that look!—and a clap of thunder hit us, as if a giant had dropped a bowling ball right onto the roof.
DeMaio jumped, startled. He was saying, “beauty of perfection.”
Then it was like a black curtain came down in front of a stage, only the curtain was smack in front of my eyeballs. That’s the last thing I remember: the word “perfection” and that window-rattling thunder, before everything went black.
- 5 -
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES I thought I was in my room. But the bed wasn’t my bed. It was too high. The light in the room was low and the air smelled funny, sour but clean. The bed was surrounded by white curtains. Then Mark Clark’s face was in front of mine. He bent over me. He said, “Thank God.”
Quills stood at his shoulder, tugging at his short crayon-yellow blond hair. “Jeez, Min, you scared the living sh—snot out of us.”
Morgan stood up from where he sat in a chair on the other side of my bed. He’d taken off his earflap hat. Unlike the rest of us Clarks who had thick reddish brown hair, Morgan had a mess of wispy dirty-blond curls that were plastered against the sides of his head, giving him a mean case of hat hair. “I’ll get the doc,” he said, slipping through the curtains.
Was I in the hospital? For some reason, my teeth hurt, as if I had just had my braces tightened and gotten new elastics.
Mark Clark took my hand. He looked … Could he have been crying?
“Why am I here?” I asked. Someone had taken off my shoes and socks. For some reason, I kept thinking, “Perfection.”
Perfection?
Mark Clark must have known I was all right, because he clicked into semilecture mode and started giving me some long sciencey explanation about how the Narino Gallery was in a one-hundred-year-old brick building and had one-hundred-year-old electrical outlets. The building was struck by lightning and there was a power surge, which is when too much electrical power is forced through the lines, and then somehow, because I was hooked up to Mark Clark’s fractal-making laptop, the electricity surged into me. It didn’t help that I was wearing my purple Chuck Taylor high tops, with their thin soles, which allowed the electricity to zap right on up to the top of my brain. Or something like that.
Then Mark Clark said that he had tracked down our parents, or tried to. Charlie was tied up with some big lawyery business deal in New York City, but would call the next day to see how I was, and if he needed to cancel the conference or the summit or whatever it was, he would cancel it and come straight home. Deedee was in some mountains somewhere on a yoga retreat and couldn’t be reached at all.
Dr. Wong came through the curtains, with Morgan right behind him. He had very warm hands and short spiky black hair. He looked more like a snowboarder than a doctor. He asked whether any part of me was numb or tingling. He looked inside my mouth and asked me to say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
“Was I electrocuted?” I asked.
Quills laughed a little and Mark Clark gave him a look. “If you were electrocuted you wouldn’t be here, Minnie Mouse.” I hated when Quills called me that.
“Where would I be?” I asked.
“Pushing up the daisies! Singing with the choir invisible,” said Quills. I knew that meant dead.
“It was an electric shock,” said Dr. Wong. “You’re going to be all right. Not to worry.”
Then Mark Clark and Dr. Wong started doing that adult thing where they talk over your head, as if you’re not there. They talked about what medical tests I should take to make sure I was okay.
Dr. Wong asked me some more questions about how I felt. Mostly, I felt peaceful and weirdly empty of the normal thoughts that filled up my head all the time. When the lightning hit the building, I had jerked up out of my chair and slammed onto the floor, as if I were getting knocked around by an angry ghost. I must have looked like I was spazzing big-time, way worse than when I fell off DDR at Tilt.
Then Morgan got that funny frown that I knew meant his cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. He flipped it open. “This is Morgan … I’m not sure tonight is good … It’s already, what, nine thirty … I think one of us will be around tomorrow …” He covered the speaker part of the phone with his thumb.
“Jordan just got sprung. She wants to come and get her car.”
“I guess she isn’t the hardened criminal we all thought,” said Quills.
“What did she do?” I asked. I’d forgotten all about poor Jordan getting hauled off to jail. Had that really happened today?
“Tell her she can come tomorrow morning,” said Mark Clark.
I guess I’d have to wait to find out.
The next day I didn’t have to go to school, in case I suddenly keeled over from having been electrocuted and all. Plus, Mark Clark was going to be the BIC and take me to some special doctor. Plus Charlie was probably going to show up and act all concerned.
When I woke up I went right to my desk and took out my rebus journal. I wrote:
Freaky.
It was kind of lame, but I didn’t care. I liked making up rebuses, and that was all that counted. I still had that strange peaceful feeling, which got a little stranger.
I looked over and caught a glimpse of myself in the long mirror hanging on the back of my door. The edges of the mirror were covered with glittery stars and snowflakes and happy faces stuck there so I wouldn’t have to look at myself.
The girl I saw today was tall. She wore a pair of blue flannel pj bottoms with cowboy boots and hats on them and a black Humongous Bag of Cashews T-shirt with a giant cashew on the front that unfortunately looked more like a banana. Her face was square and she had a nice straight nose. She had curly/wavy/straight hair that was an unusual reddish brown.
I stood up and went straight to the mirror. I looked at my long arms and long feet. I always thought I was a fat Gigantor freak show freak, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t fat at all. I wasn’t skinny, but I wasn’t fat. I was okay.
I checked around inside my head to see if I could find my usual feelings when I looked at myself, the feeling like I wanted to hide under my bed forever. But there was nothing wrong with me, nothing that I could see. My mind felt swept clean of all my usual feelings of self-hatred. Without them, I had nothing to think about. What was with that?
Downstairs, I heard people talking, Mark Clark and someone else.
I snuck downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs I looked across the hallway to the computer room, where Mark Clark has two computers set up against the big windows. Outside, fat pink rhododendrons pressed against the glass.
Mark Clark stood by his desk, his hand on the back of the chair. Behind him I saw a video game on his computer screen. Probably EverQuest. Playing EQ was what Mark Clark did instead of go out on dates. He had that interrupted look he always gets when anyone tries to talk to him when he’s on EQ.
Jordan and her best friend, Tiffani Hollingsworth, stood in the middle of the room with their backs to the door. Jordan and Tiffani had been best friends since kindergarten. Tiffani was just as pretty as Jordan, but where Jordan was tall and fair, Tiffani was short and dark. Her real hair color was semisweet chocolate brown like Liv Tyler from The Lord of the Rings, but she dyed it light brown like Jordan’s, and ironed it straight like hers, too.
They both wore low-rise cords with thick black belts. Tiffani’s trademark accessories were platform sandals, the kind with the heavy wooden soles that weighed about ten tons. The kind that, when they slide off your feet, you sometimes come down on the edge of the platform with the bare underside of your foot and it feels as if you’re going to be crippled for life.
I know because I used to wear them around when Tiffani would babysit me two years ago, when everyone still thought I needed a babysitter. Reggie stopped having a babysitter when he was, like, in third grade.
“… and then, after t
hey got me down to the police station and took my fingerprints, they realized it wasn’t even me!” said Jordan. “The person they originally arrested back on Valentine’s Day had given the cops my information, but our fingerprints didn’t match. So they let me go, and I called Tiffani to come and get me!” Jordan was talking faster than I’d ever heard her talk before, plucking up her hair and letting it fall over her shoulders again and again. I noticed that she was wearing a necklace I’d never seen before, a small gold J filled with tiny diamonds. Those couldn’t be real diamonds, could they? My aunt Susie was a single mom with about ten jobs, and Jordan had had to save up for her car.
“Someone got arrested for something else and gave them Jordan’s name,” added Tiffani. “Then, when she didn’t show up in court for her hearing, a warrant was put out for the real Jordan’s arrest. Or something. I think that’s how it works.” She giggled even though it wasn’t funny.
“That’s how it works,” said Mark Clark. “It’s called identity theft.”
“Is that a new shirt, Mark? The color’s really good on you. It brings out the blue in your eyes,” said Tiffani.
Was Tiffani hitting on my brother? Eeeeow.
“But didn’t they take a mug shot of the original person when they arrested him, er, her?” I asked. It just leaped out of my mouth.
Both Jordan and Tiffani spun around, surprised. They looked me up and down. I was still wearing my pj’s, and my hair was snarling up pretty good on one side.
“How you doing?” Mark Clark asked, all concerned. I could tell he still felt pretty guilty about my getting electrocuted.
“Like … like … gack …” I stuck my tongue out and put my hands around my throat, like I was choking myself.
“Hey, people die from electric shocks every day,” he said.
“Not in an art gallery getting a fractal made from their brain waves in front of a bunch of strangers,” I said. I was surprised at my tone—normally I’m not allowed to give tone—but I felt entitled, somehow.