by Sechin Tower
“Your Institute consists of that one building,” Dr. Hart said. “In itself, Topsy is certainly not intrusive. It is meant to hold thirty-three students and three professors—those are the numbers spelled out in the Institute’s charter endowment. Thirty-three and three. But right now it consists of three students and you. A very small academy wouldn’t you agree?”
“If you say so.”
“Think of all that money going to support such a small handful of students. What I propose to do, Mr. Lazarchek, is to bring the two schools together. Merge them. We can use the Mechanical Science Institute endowment to expand the sciences for our other students. We could build new classrooms to serve three hundred young minds instead of your thirty-three. The board of directors would be very appreciative of such an arrangement.”
“And you would be the man who got it for them.”
“That’s right. You and I together.”
“How is that different from embezzling? Seems to me like you’re still trying to steal Institute money for personal gain.”
President Hart’s face went so tight that it looked as if his cheekbones were about to cut through his translucent skin.
“This is a political situation, Mr. Lazarchek. You need to know that I am empowered to absorb your school if you don’t increase student enrollment.”
“Sure, no problem,” Dean said. “How many students do we need to add?”
“Three. Each quarter you must add three students until you are at your full complement. You must also find professors for all the positions by the end of the year. Do you understand?”
“Sure. Got it. I just need to go find some students and some teachers.”
“No, I don’t think you understand. Your institute already has a bad reputation. You won’t be able to get the caliber of students you want, which means you must decide between losing your enrollment or offering admission to every meathead who wants a ride in college. If you pick the latter, your institute will lose its essence. Professor McKenzie saw that—she was ready to gamble the existence of the school rather than flood Topsy with students who don’t belong.”
“Don’t you worry,” Dean said. “I’ll make McKenzie proud.”
“Oh, I’m not worried. I’m delighted. You don’t think I could have challenged your little post-it note? You think that would have held up in court? If I had pressed the issue, your claim would have been tossed out with a laugh. Just like you. I could have picked whomever I wanted to sit as Dean of Students, but I could never have found anyone so perfectly unqualified as you. You will be the death of the Institute. As far as I’m concerned, your girlfriend couldn’t have selected a better candidate.”
“She wasn’t just my girlfriend,” Dean’s voice was low. “She was my fiancé.”
“I don’t care if she was your circus clown,” Hart said. “Think about my offer: turn over the Institute to me and I’ll take better care of your students than you could possibly manage.”
Dean let it hang in the air like a storm cloud. His fingers rose to his neck to grip the engagement rings until they dug into his palm. Dr. Hart, he had decided, was a sleazebag, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. Dean couldn’t disagree: he really was unqualified, and he stood every chance of wrecking the school that McKenzie had cared so much about.
Hart disappeared into the outer office, leaving Dean alone with his thoughts. He stared out the window at Topsy. It seemed like he had to pick between giving in and relinquishing the Institute, or muscling through and probably destroying it. While thinking this over, he saw, away in the distance, that someone was arriving at Topsy’s broad white steps. Three figures. And they were all riding motorcycles.
From what Dean had heard, the members of the Institute were a bunch of mild-mannered science nerds. Low-rider choppers seemed a little out of character for them. And the lead figure, even from this distance, looked like he dwarfed the other two.
Dean snatched the telescope that was propped in front of the window. Through the eye piece, the world seemed to swim crazily from blurry greens to blurry blues until he could focus it and find the white steps of Topsy House. Panning down and to the left, he could see the three men, all with shorn scalps and black leathers. Then the big guy turned around, and Dean recognized the face of the man called Brick.
Dean uttered a word that had probably never been spoken in the president’s office and rushed out the door.
Chapter 9 ~ Soap
The cab took me from the train station to the airport, where there was a freshmen-only shuttle waiting to take new arrivals to Bugswallow. I wore my best hoodie for the occasion, the one with silver, thorny rose vines entwining a steel-plated skull. My hope was that it would make me look a little older to the other students. Two years might not seem like a big deal on paper, but in real life a sixteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old might as well have been aliens from different planets. They could vote and I couldn’t. They had driver’s licenses and I didn’t. They had even graduated from high-school and I had technically dropped out to come here. Everybody’s supposed to be nervous when they go off on their own for the first time, but I felt like I had a better reason than most.
They came in groups of twos and threes, chattering away with each other. I could always recognize the Bugswallow students because each of them clutched a goldenrod sheet of paper sent from the college to explain where to go once they got to campus. I held my paper at my side, not because I needed it but because I thought the others might see it and come talk to me. They didn’t.
Once we got underway, a girl named Hannah started going around talking to every single person on the bus. She was tall and skinny and wore a blue and white Langdon University sweater, a blue skirt, and white tennis shoes. Her hair was a rich, coppery-blond that was done up in blue and white ribbons, and she looked like she was one pair of pom-poms away from running down to the football field to cheer on our team. I knew her name was Hannah because she introduced herself to everyone there, starting with the bus driver and working her way back, seat by seat. She was really good at breaking the ice: she might say “I like your hair” to one person, and “What are you listening to? Oh, you have great taste in music” to the next person. It made everybody like her. It made me wish I could be her.
I was sitting at the very back of the bus, so before she got to me I had time to think about the pattern she used to strike up these conversations. I decided that if I could figure out how she did it, then maybe I could do the same thing. If I had a system for speaking to people, an algorithm for making friends, then my life might suddenly get a lot better. I took out a notepad and continued to eavesdrop.
Hannah would always begin with a compliment and then move on to ask what dorm room the person had been assigned. She would nod enthusiastically as her subject responded, and sometimes she would pull out her goldenrod paper and the two of them would find it on the map together. The final stage of the conversation confused me until I realized it broke down along gender lines. When talking to girls, Hannah would ask if they knew of any upcoming parties. When talking to boys, she would ask them what sports they played. Finally, regardless of gender, she suggested a joint activity to be done in the future, such as “we should go to a party together some time,” or “we should go shopping together some time.” For the boys, it was usually “you should invite me to a game some time.” I also noticed that she spent the longest time with the boys who expressed interest in football, wrestling, or baseball, but I decided that might have been her personal preference and not a necessary factor in the algorithm.
I thought it was such a good system that I made a flowchart, just in case I met more new people later. I titled it the “conversation matrix.”
“Hi, I’m Hannah,” she said as she swung into the empty seat next to me. “Hey, that’s a really nice…” she had to pause for a half a second. It was enough time for me to get worried. Was I the only person on the entire bus she couldn’t find a compliment for? “That’s a nice sweatshirt,” sh
e finally said. “I like all the roses. I’ve never seen them go so well with… skulls.”
She smiled and showed off teeth that looked professionally whitened, which made her look even more like a plastic Barbie doll than ever.
“I’m Soap,” I said, returning her smile as best I could. Then I got nervous and had the sudden urge to show her that I’d been paying attention, so I blurted out the rest of the flow-chart in one go: “You have nice teeth; I’m living in Smiley Dorm; where are you living?; I’m not really interested in parties; we should go find some parties together some time.”
I think I went too fast. Hannah just kind of blinked at me for a few seconds while she processed what I had said. But she kept smiling.
“That’s…Nice?” She finally uttered. “Wait—did you say you’ll be living in Smiley?”
“Leonidis Smiley Dormitory, Room 414,” I nodded. “And I already know where it is, but you can show me on the map if you want.”
Her smile disappeared for just a second when I said that. “Oh, my goodness. I’m in Smiley 414, too. That makes us… roommates.” Then she looked me over really closely, like I was a research grant proposal. “What are you going to be studying?”
I wanted to tell her she was straying from her own conversational pattern, but I decided to trust that she knew what she was doing. Perhaps this was a special question reserved for roommates.
“I’m studying Physics,” I said.
“Physics?” she curled up her tiny little nose when she said it, as if the word smelled like dead worms. “Like with math and stuff?”
“Almost always,” For some reason, her question really annoyed me.
“That’s interesting,” she said, but she excused herself pretty quickly after that and went back to the front of the bus to sit in the middle of a group of guys wearing t-shirts with sports team logos.
That was fine with me, because it gave me time to think. Here was another conversation I had messed up, and with my own roommate, no less. That brought my success rate up to a whopping zero percent. Not a good start.
Since I obviously wasn’t going to have any luck with the people on the bus, I turned to look out the window. It was a different world out there from what I was used to. Here, the landscape was completely flat, like someone had run a razor over it and scraped away everything except for smooth, green patches with the occasional tufts of trees or clumps of houses. And then there were the lakes. No wonder they called this state the “land of ten thousand lakes.” I timed it on my watch and found that, on average, we passed 3.2 lakes every ten minutes, which means about one lake every three miles or so. They weren’t big, deep bodies of water, though. These lakes were little divots in the landscape, as if some titan had bounced all over the countryside on a gigantic pogo stick, poking irregular holes wherever he landed and the holes later filled up with rainwater. I’ve noticed that wealthy people always like to build houses as close to water as they can, but out in Minnesota there was enough water that every family could afford a natural swimming pool in their backyard. It started me thinking that if lakes raised property values, then it might be very profitable to design a lake-building device. I started picturing a sort of drilling machine that would grind up dirt at its front, spit it out the side, and lay concrete behind it as it moved.
I didn’t get too deep into this design before my attention was captured by an amusement park only a few miles off the freeway. I could see the brightly colored Ferris wheel and the tops of other rides protruding above the decorated walls. In the very center of the park was some kind of huge tower built with thick railings leading up to a hemispherical dome at the top. It looked kind of like a radio tower crossed with a Van de Graaff generator, which are those things at science museums that make peoples’ hair stand on end. As I looked at the park a little while longer I realized that something else was weird: nothing was moving. All the rides were still, all the lights were off, and the big black parking lot out front was deserted.
“Awesome,” I heard a boy in the seat ahead of me say. “Check it out: an amusement park.”
“Nah,” said his friend. “That’s Happy Fun Land. I Googled it: they closed, like, two years ago. They dumped all their money into some big ride and then went bankrupt.”
I was a bit disappointed to hear that, because I thought it might be fun to have a whole amusement park so close to school. It looked like the kind of place that had cotton candy and skee ball, and that sounded a lot better than the only other form of entertainment in the region, which I was ready to bet involved watching cows graze. Just to confirm what the kid in front of me had said, I dug around in my backpack and found my goggles.
Next to Rusty, my goggles are my favorite invention. They look a little too weird to wear in public because they have external sensors, antennas, and rotating lens packs, but they’re all kinds of useful because they can detect transmissions from outside the visible spectrum. For now, I only wanted the zoom feature, so I slipped them on, dialed in maximum magnification, and cupped my hands around the side of my face, as much to hide my goggles from everyone else as to cut down on the glare.
I could see that the big tower in the center must have been the ride that had bankrupted the park. Judging from my rangefinder, it was about 200 feet tall, and it had a big sign on it that said “The Doomsday Machine.” It must have been one of those rides that brought its passengers—or should they be called victims?—up to the very top and then dropped them like lead weights. Too extreme for my tastes, but some people love that kind of stuff.
I panned down to get a look at the rest of the park. Sure enough, there were no people anywhere. A chain-link fence ran the full length of the park just outside the decorated wall. Here and there along the fence were red signs that I couldn’t read (the zoom doesn’t give me great resolution), but it was pretty clear they said something to the effect of: GO AWAY. NO SKEE BALL FOR YOU.
I put away my goggles just in time for everyone to suddenly start murmuring about a road sign out the bus’s right window. I was on the left side of the bus, so I had to get out of my seat to see it. In blue, old-fashion letters like the kind you might have painted above an old-west saloon, the sign said: WELCOME TO BUGSWALLOW. POPULATION 16,147. It looked exactly as classy as it possibly could while depicting a big, fat housefly buzzing in circles over a swamp.
The sign was a good thing because it meant we were almost there. Still, I was a bit disappointed. I wanted there to be some explanation of the town’s name. I mean, who comes up with a name like that? This sign was the best chance the residents had to justify themselves with a catchy town slogan like “With a name like ours, we’ve got to be good” or “we already swallowed all the bugs, so you don’t have to.” I was at least hoping for an explanation of whether it was supposed to be Bug-Swallow or Bugs-Wallow.
Twenty minutes later, the bus crunched its way along the gravel road into the college’s east parking lot. People started getting off, finding their luggage, and heading out to look for their dorms. My plan was a little different. I would drop my stuff off in my room in Smiley, but there was something else I had to do before I could get settled in. I pulled out a card that had been mailed separately from the university’s registration information. All it said was:
Welcome to the Mad Science Institute
Please join us September 12th, 5pm at Topsy House.
Pizza Provided.
Chapter 10 ~ Dean
In his rush to exit the administration building, Dean bowled through the heavy wood and glass doors with such force that he almost knocked over a student who was chaining his bicycle to the rack.
Here on ground level, Topsy was almost totally screened by the trees and intervening buildings. Dean was only just getting a feel for the layout of campus, but he figured it was half a mile away, probably more. It would take him at least four minutes to get there at a run, and that was too long.
“Let me borrow your bike,” Dean said to the student. The kid, a skinny little mole of
a teenager with soda-bottle glasses, froze in place. He looked like he had been born with a “Steal My Lunch Money” sign on his chest.
“I’m not trying to rob you, I just want to borrow it,” Dean tried to sound soothing, but the kid quailed, his hand frozen on the unclasped kryptonite lock.
“I haven’t got time for this. Here, just… take this,” Dean pulled out his wallet and tossed it to the kid, who instinctively flinched instead of trying to catch it. Dean whipped the bike off the rack and pedaled away so hard he left a trench in the freshly watered grass.
“Stop! Thief!” The kid’s voice faded into the distance behind him, but Dean wasn’t about to turn around. He veered onto the sidewalk where the tires got better traction and thumbed the gearshift to the highest setting. He weaved around buildings and between the small groups of students who were arriving for freshman orientation day. Sixty seconds later, he was veering off the main walkway and approaching Topsy at a speed that could earn him a moving violation on most suburban arterials.
Ahead of him, the big mountain of a man and his two leather-clad friends were still on the greenway outside Topsy, evidently discussing their options. Dean blazed down on them with such speed that they hardly had time to turn to see him coming. He squeezed his fists closed on the brakes, causing the bike to skid and tear up great gouts of wet grass and black dirt. The bike frame wobbled and tilted, and he jumped clear of it just as it smacked onto its side and buried itself in the sod like a deformed javelin. Somehow, Dean managed to land on his feet and skid to a halt.
“You!” Dean marched forward with the roaring inescapability of a tsunami, pointing at the big guy, the one who went by the name Brick. “You were there the day she died.”
“Oh, I know you,” Brick’s voice was hard and cold, like gravel crunching under a boot. “You’re the boyfriend. You should have told her to get us the egg when we asked.”