Weylyn looked confused. “What’s an alien?”
“Monsters from other planets that only eat boys.”
His eyes went wide with horror. “But … I’m a boy!”
I smacked June on the head with the rolled-up copy of Seventeen. “Don’t listen to her, Weylyn. She has issues.”
“My therapist’s writing a book about me,” June added.
“I love books!” Weylyn said. “Can I read it?”
June snorted. “He’s a trip. I bet your mom hates him.”
“She doesn’t hate him—”
“Yes, she does,” Weylyn said matter-of-factly. I guess he was more aware than I gave him credit for. He didn’t look bothered by it; in fact, he looked very slightly amused.
“Welcome to the club,” June said and winked at him. “Or pack. Whatever you wolves call it.”
I had yet to tell June about the animals in Weylyn’s bedroom or the rainstorm the night of the fireworks. Not because she wouldn’t believe me, but because I knew she would. June was into all things hocus-pocus. She was always trying to talk to the dead or lay curses on girls she didn’t like. When that tornado hit our school, she convinced herself that it was because she had tested out a new spell the night before. If I told her about Weylyn and the rain, she’d harass him until he agreed to help her flood the gymnasium the night before prom, or worse: she’d blab about it and ruin whatever social life he may have had. There was only one person I could talk to about Weylyn, only one person who might take me seriously.
* * *
I found Daddy in the garage—or at least I found his feet. The rest of him was hidden underneath his baby-blue ’75 Ford Thunderbird, or the midlife crisis as Mama called it.
I squatted down and waved at him. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Oh. Hi, sweetheart,” he said, rolling out from under the chassis. “You’re back from school early.”
“It was a half day. Parent-teacher conferences.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your mother mentioned something about it.”
I fiddled with the zipper on my jacket, unsure of how to say what I wanted to say next. Daddy noticed. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?” he asked, sitting up and wiping his hands off on a rag in his pocket.
I nodded. “I’m just worried you won’t believe me.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because what I’m about to tell you is completely nuts. If Mama found out, she’d have me committed.”
Daddy frowned with concern. “Should I be worried?”
“No, no. It’s just … who do you think controls the weather? God?”
“I’d say he sometimes has a hand in it, yes. Why? Has June been saying she started that tornado again?”
“No. Well, yes, but that’s not why I’m asking.” I took a deep breath and continued, “I think that Weylyn can do things that other people can’t.”
I instantly regretted saying it. By the look on Daddy’s face, you’d think I’d just told him I’d been abducted by aliens. “Not like God or anything,” I backpedaled, “but not exactly normal, either.”
Daddy studied me. I could tell he was trying to give me the benefit of the doubt. I had always been the sensible daughter, the practical daughter, the daughter who understood the difference between truth and fiction even though I spent more time doodling monsters on my arm than studying. Most important, he knew I would never lie to him.
“I agree that Weylyn doesn’t quite fit into the world we’re familiar with,” Daddy said, choosing his words carefully. “He’s a strange boy, but in a wonderful sort of way. Maybe that’s what you’re picking up on.”
My cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Thanks, Daddy,” I said quickly, then hurried out of the garage.
14
MRS. MEG LOWRY
I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that stupid ficus: dead one minute, alive the next. I tried to come up with any semiplausible explanation that would stop me from believing the impossible one, but I couldn’t. Occam’s razor, I thought. Can the simplest explanation also be the most absurd?
Eventually, I gave up trying to sleep and carried the zombie plant down to the basement where I kept my old microscope. I hadn’t used it in years, so the plastic cover was dusty, but the microscope itself was in reasonably good shape. I carried it by its base to Nate’s woodworking bench where I had set the ficus.
I clipped off a tiny piece of one of its leaves, placed it between a glass slide and a wetted coverslip, adjusted the magnification, and looked through the eyepiece. What I saw was, by all accounts, a perfectly normal clump of plant cells with healthy membranes. There was no evidence that this plant was dead or had ever been dead. In other words, what had happened to it wasn’t zombification so much as it was resurrection.
I must have drifted off at the table because when I woke, I had a glass slide on my face and it was already 7:44, seconds before the first bell was supposed to ring. I wiped the drool off my face and ran my fingers through my hair. Twenty minutes later, I stumbled through my classroom door with the same panic I had seen on the faces of dozens of students.
I wasn’t surprised to find that all the students but Weylyn had left. I was surprised, however, to find ten piglets chewing the tennis balls I had attached to the feet of the chairs to keep them from scraping the floor. Weylyn stood next to an empty wooden crate with a crowbar in one hand. “Hi, Mrs. Lowry.”
“Hi…,” I said, my brain still playing catch-up with my mouth. In my exhausted haze, I had forgotten about the pigs. The day before, I had spent an hour on the phone arguing with the school’s supplier of dissection specimens. After twenty minutes on hold listening to self-indulgent saxophone runs, I hung up and called the only other place I could get a pig on short notice: Dietrich’s Meat Supplier. The customer service rep told me I’d get ten pigs first thing the next morning. She hadn’t specified, however, how alive they would be.
“They were crying, so I let them out. I hope that’s okay.” Weylyn scratched one of the piglets behind the ears.
Finally, the reality of the situation sank in. “Shit. There are pigs in my classroom!” If Evans found out, I’d be applying for a job at McDonald’s by the end of the week. “Help me get them back in the crate.”
“Sure, Mrs. Lowry.”
Weylyn and I spent the next ten minutes chasing after squealing piglets as they skidded across the linoleum. We successfully got nine back in the crate and looked around for number ten.
A soft snorting noise came from behind my desk. Weylyn crept toward it, and when he bent down, a confused hmph escaped his lips.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This pig is … different.”
I joined Weylyn and looked inside my trash can to find a runty brown piglet chewing on an apple core. “Look at his forehead,” Weylyn said. I looked closer. On the pig’s forehead was a small, bony stump. “What do you think it is, Mrs. Lowry?”
“It looks like a horn,” I marveled.
“That’s what I thought.” Weylyn sat back on his haunches, thoughtfully. “What are you going to do with them?”
“Send them back, I guess.”
He looked grave. “Will they be killed?”
“I suppose they will.” I watched the little pig happily munching on the soggy, brown apple flesh, and something inside me stirred. “But I’m open to suggestions.”
Weylyn looked at the heavy crate. “We can’t move them all at once.” He pulled the little horned pig out of the trash and put him in his backpack. “Can I have a hall pass, Mrs. Lowry?”
All ten pigs made it out of the building without attracting too much suspicion. One of the piglets wailed like a banshee when Weylyn caught its tail in his zipper, which caused Freddy, the custodian, to poke his head in the door and ask if everything was all right. We were fine, I assured him, in a gluey, nasal voice that allowed him to believe the snorts he heard were a side effect of my sinus infection. I gave
Weylyn my keys, and he deposited the pigs in the covered bed of my truck.
I was on my way out to meet him when I ran into Principal Evans. “Mrs. Lowry? Shouldn’t you be in class?”
Out of panic, I continued my stuffy-nosed charade. “Ib was. But all ob my students were absent today.”
He looked doubtful. “All of them?”
“Yes. Which is a coincidence, ’cause Ib was feeling a bit under the webber, anybhow.”
“That is a coincidence,” he said suspiciously. Beads of sweat tickled my temples. “I hate to say this, Mrs. Lowry, but I think you’ve been the victim of a prank.”
“Sobrry?”
“Your students planned this.”
“Ohb,” I said, exhaling a little too forcefully. “A prank.”
“You can send them all to my office tomorrow.”
“No. Thankb you. I’b prebfer to discipline them myselb.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. They neeb to understand that I won’t tolerate that kind of behabior.”
Evans nodded, pleased. “I couldn’t agree more. Now, go home and get some rest. You sound like my daughter did when she had the flu.”
* * *
Weylyn insisted on keeping the pigs company in the truck bed while I drove. Every time I hit a bump in the road, I heard a collective squeal and one loud “Ouch!” When I turned, I heard a scrabbling of hooves and Weylyn’s laughter as the pigs knocked each other over like bowling pins.
He helped me ferry them inside the house and agreed to stay for a mug of hot chocolate. “Are you going to keep them?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I put the kettle on to boil. “I might see if an animal rescue will find them a home. Somewhere safe with lots of apples.”
He nodded in approval, then scooped up the little horned pig, “I want to take this one home.”
“Do you think the Kramers would let you keep him?”
“Mr. Kramer might. Not Mrs. Kramer. She hates animals.”
“That must be hard. After where you came from,” I gently prodded.
“Yeah. Sometimes it’s okay, but most of the time I just wish I had my wolf family back. I’ll probably never see them again.” The pig nuzzled Weylyn’s chin with his snout. Weylyn smiled.
I stirred cocoa powder into mugs filled with hot water. “I’m sorry. I wish you didn’t have to go through that.”
Weylyn shrugged. “Me, too. But I’ve got this philosophy…”
The corners of my mouth began to curl. I folded them back into a straight line. “What philosophy is that?”
“Don’t cry over the same thing twice. Get it all out the first time, even if it’s loud and messy. Then it’s over.”
“That’s a good philosophy.”
I put a giant handful of marshmallows in his hot chocolate and sat it down in front of him at the kitchen table. I nearly did a double take. Weylyn was actually seated at the table! I casually joined him with my own cup. “So. Any theories as to what that horn might be for?”
The pig was now wandering on the tabletop, chewing the corner of my music theory textbook. Go ahead, pig, I thought. I don’t want to teach it, anyway.
“Defense, maybe?” Weylyn suggested. “But that doesn’t seem necessary.”
“Boars have tusks.”
“Yeah, but this breed looks—what’s the word? Domesticated.”
“Then what else could it be?”
He considered this for a few moments before shouting, “Magic!”
“Magic?”
“Maybe the horn is magic. You know, like a unicorn. Lydia let me borrow her Wandering Wizards book, and the unicorns in there grant wishes.”
This was getting a little off track. “Unicorns don’t exist.” And plants don’t spontaneously come back to life, either, I reminded myself.
“You said last week that humans still know very little about the universe.”
“Well, yes—”
“What if magic is a part of that?”
I hesitated. I had no proof that unicorns didn’t exist on some nauseating planet where they granted wishes and pooped rainbows. I had no logical explanation for what had happened to my ficus, either, but I wouldn’t call it magic—unexplained phenomenon, maybe, or a curious coincidence. However, I knew one thing for sure: this strange boy had piqued my curiosity.
“I don’t really believe in magic,” I said, “but I’ve seen things in my life that I couldn’t really explain, this pig being one of them.” Although, at that moment, it wasn’t the pig I was watching closely.
Weylyn, satisfied with my answer, held out his mug to the little horned pig and said, “I’m going to call you … Merlin.” The pig grunted and slurped up what was left of his hot chocolate.
* * *
When Nate came home, he was greeted by nine pigs, seven dogs, and one bewildered-looking cat. He and the cat shared a moment before he noticed me feeding a piglet with a baby bottle. “Let me guess. Agricultural sciences?”
“No…”
“Are we having a hog roast I don’t know about?”
“God, no!”
He looked at the baby bottle again, and his tone was suddenly solemn. “Are we about to have that conversation again?”
“What conversation?” I gave the pig a kiss on the snout.
“Meg…” He looked tired.
I set the pig back on the ground. “It’s not like that. They were going to be killed.”
“And you had to bring them here?”
“Where else was I supposed to take them? The slaughterhouse?” I was standing now and probably yelling from the look on Nate’s face.
He started pacing, piglets darting in between his strides like an obstacle course. “I don’t wanna have this argument. Not again.”
“What argument?”
He looked me square in the eye. “The one where I tell you I don’t want kids and you say you don’t, either, but then you get sad because you really do. You want kids.”
“How’d you get there from a bunch of pigs?”
“You’re feeding it a bottle!”
He was right. I knew I had a choice to make, but I couldn’t seem to come to terms with the consequences of either.
“I love you, Meg. You’re all the happiness I need, but if you need more than you can get from just me—”
“You do make me happy…”
“But do I make you happy enough? Am I enough?” The room filled with an unbearable silence. I couldn’t hear any of the nine pigs, seven dogs, or one cat. All I could hear was the hiss of air between two people who had nothing more to say to each other.
Nate and I first met at the dentist’s office. I was getting a root canal, so I had to be sedated, but I had forgotten to arrange for someone to pick me up. As I stumbled out of the office, my cheeks stuffed fat with gauze, I bumped into a man I thought was the Swedish Chef. Apparently, “Herdy gerdy floop” meant “Do you need a ride?”
By the time I got home, the man’s eyes had wiggled out from behind his bushy eyebrows, and his nose had shrunk to a believable size. He even spoke English. “Are you going to be okay here by yourself?”
I gurgled in affirmation and passed out on the couch. The man sat in his car at the end of the driveway until I finally woke up and gestured for him to come inside. “You didn’t have to sit outside like that,” I said.
“I didn’t know if you’d remember me when you woke up. I didn’t want to scare you.”
I couldn’t eat solid foods, but we didn’t want to wait to have dinner together, so we went out for milk shakes the next day. He surprised me with a bouquet of neon curly straws and a bottle of painkillers. After nine months, I wanted to marry him, and I found out later that he already had a ring after six. He held on to it until our one-year anniversary, when he proposed to me at the same ice cream parlor where we’d had our first date.
That was five years earlier. In the years since, I often wished I could go back to that first date and tell him I wanted kids, not n
odded and smiled when he said, “I never really saw myself as a father.” To borrow words from my husband, he was more than I thought I’d get. The only difference was, I still wasn’t happy.
15
LYDIA KRAMER
“Lydia! Lydia! Get up! I have to show you something!” Weylyn burst into my room without knocking. I had fallen asleep trying to watch Jaws for the third time. So far, I hadn’t made it past the part where Brody tells Quint he’s going to need a bigger boat. In my dream, I was on the boat, too, showing them the scar on my knee that I got from falling off the monkey bars in the third grade.
“Shark!” I jolted upright in bed.
“Shark?” Weylyn said, confused.
“Weylyn! What’re you doing in here?” I looked up at the TV just in time to catch the last of the credits crawl up the screen.
“I need to show you something.”
“Show me what?”
“Come with me and you’ll see!” Weylyn tugged on my shirtsleeve.
I batted him off. “All right, all right. Gimme a sec.” I wasn’t in the mood for playing games today. Mama had been at my throat all morning for leaving a ring on her cherrywood buffet, and all I wanted to do was finish my movie in peace. I dragged myself out of bed, shuffled my feet into the sandals Mama calls hobo shoes, and followed Weylyn down the stairs.
Weylyn led me out the back door toward the carriage house that was tucked in a grove of birch trees at the edge of the property. It was a beautiful little cottage with white gingerbreading and a miniature front porch that only had room for a single rocking chair. Mama used it as a dumping ground for stuff she considered too tacky to keep in the main house: hand-me-down furniture, clocks that make animal noises, tchotchkes from various U.S. tourist traps, holiday decorations, and Daddy’s fishing gear. I felt at home there with the other misfit toys, all the things Mama had pretended to like, then rejected. Last year, I tried to convince my parents to let me live in the place, but Mama refused, saying that she didn’t want the neighbors thinking she had some troubled child locked up in the back house. So, I cut my hair into a shaggy mop and spoke only in riddles for two days. Ironically, I was grounded and sent to the carriage house so I wouldn’t frighten her Mississippi relatives who were staying for the weekend.
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