I kept my face blank and didn’t move my head as the students filled the high stools around me.
Lydia sat at the table directly in front of me, in the first row. She didn’t look back at me. Two kids took a seat at my table: a short boy with a large nose and fan-like ears, and a girl with blunt bangs and bloodred lipstick. She was the only girl I’d seen in the school who wore makeup. Bat Ears and Goth Girl didn’t introduce themselves, however. They barely looked at me—which made me decide that I sure wasn’t going to say the first word.
Dr. Herbert told us to take out our projects, and my lab mates opened a drawer in the table and withdrew a metal tray much like the one the doctor had been working on. This one, I was relieved to see, contained a normal frog. I’d done frog dissections in my freshman bio class.
Then the girl with the red lipstick took out a large battery, a transformer with a dial, and a bundle of wires. She pushed the battery to me.
“What do we do with this?” I asked.
She opened a three-ring notebook and pointed at a diagram of a frog, decorated with plus and minus signs. “Just hook up the battery to the transformer and the transformer to the subject,” she said.
“We keep going till we get a twitch,” the big-eared boy said.
“Right…,” I said. “And then what? It hops up and dances?”
My lab partners stared at me.
“You know, like the cartoon? Michigan J. Frog. The frog grabs a top hat and cane and starts singing, ‘Hello ma baby, hello ma honey, hello ma ragtime…’”
The girl with the red lips turned on the transformer.
“‘… gal,’” I said quietly to myself.
The rest of the period proceeded in silence. Only Dr. Herbert spoke. He visited the tables, murmuring things like “Very nice, very nice” or “More juice!” When he came to my table he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t give up hope, Harrison!”
“But it’s dead, right?”
“Of course!” he said.
“For, like, a long time?”
“True! But there’s no expiration date on the powers of galvanism!”
Beside me, the girl with the red lips rolled her eyes. It was the first sign of personality I’d seen in the class.
The boy filled out the lab report while I poked the corpse with wires. We never got our frog to quiver, much less dance. My lab partners, however, were doing their own twitching. While we were studying the diagram or waiting for the electricity to have some effect on our frog, they’d tap their fingers. First the girl, then the boy, as if they were playing two ends of an invisible piano. Then I noticed that Lydia was doing the same thing.
This was the problem with a small school in a small town. Not only did the students all look like each other, they’d all developed the same nervous tics. It made me wonder about inbreeding. Take off their shoes, and did they have webbed feet? Was the weird-looking fish boy who’d stolen my book just a relative on the more damaged branch of the family tree?
Only at the end of the class, when I signed the lab report, did I find out that my partners were named Garfield and Flora. “I think we’ve changed some lives today,” I said. That was what my friends and I used to say whenever we’d been forced to do busywork. In San Diego, this was hilarious. Dunnsmouth, however, seemed to be an irony-free zone. Flora rolled her eyes at me. It wasn’t quite so liberating to be on the receiving end of that.
As we left the classroom I managed to sidle up next to Lydia. “Mrs. Velloc still says I should follow you.”
“That’s going to be a problem,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
She didn’t answer. We went downstairs, turned right into a corridor that I may or may not have walked down before, then started down another staircase that I definitely hadn’t gone down before.
The stairs went down and down. The lighting became more sporadic, and the stone walls gleamed with moisture. Tufts of gray-green moss furred the seams between the stones. If I hadn’t been with Lydia and the rest of the junior class, I would never have guessed that there was a class down here.
The stairs emptied out in a big room. “Cave” may have been more accurate; the ceiling was unfinished stone. Loops of electrical cable connected a few yellow light globes. The steps of my classmates echoed strangely.
Opposite us were two rectangular doorways. Like the word “room,” the word “doors” was inaccurate. These were ragged holes, and from them wafted a strange metallic smell.
The girls went into the entrance on the left, the boys on the right. Symbols were carved into the rock above each hole, strange hieroglyphics that didn’t look anything like the friendly owls and bulls of ancient Egypt. Just looking at them made me queasy.
“See you on the other side,” Lydia said.
4
Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread.
Lydia had been right—following her was going to be a problem. But she couldn’t know that following the boys was also going to be a problem for me. They went silently into the dark mouth of the other door, and I did not want to go in there.
Garfield passed me, and then looked back. “It’s this way,” he said.
I took a breath and went through. The short passage made an abrupt turn, and then I entered a long narrow room. A single stone bench ran down the middle of the space like a spine. Boys were taking off their clothes and hanging them on hooks drilled into one rocky wall, and tucking backpacks into cubbyholes carved into the other wall. As they stripped off, each one seemed to be more pale than the last.
Oh no, I thought. Physical Education.
And then I realized it was even more horrible than that. The boys began to pull on swim trunks. This wasn’t just PE; it was swimming.
Some of the boys glanced at me. I stood there, holding my backpack, not moving. I was not about to get naked in front of these ignorami. I waited until one by one they made their way out the far exit. When there were just a handful of boys left in the changing room, I went out to the pool.
Again: Wrong word.
I’d stepped into a cavern. The high ceiling bristled with stalactites. The walls were ringed with stone benches, as in a Greek theater. Or a Roman arena. And below—below was an immense black pool.
The back of my neck went cold.
I took a breath, held it, trying to still my rabbity heartbeat. Yellow globes, Dunnsmouth Secondary’s sole lighting idea, hung down on cables to hover over the water, making it gleam like oil. The terraces of benches, enough to seat several thousand people, rose up into the dark. The air was cold and damp.
I told myself it was going to be fine. Nothing but a little H2O, H2. Nothing to fear but millions of cubic gallons of fear itself.
Most of the boys were already down on the wide stone deck that surrounded the pool. The girls were slower to leave their locker room. They came out dressed in dark one-piece suits, some of them in black swim caps. They looked so similar to each other that I couldn’t tell which one was Lydia. One of them glared at me, and I realized I’d been staring. Then I realized that glarer was Lydia.
I quickly looked away, and the heat rose in my face. I hoped the lighting was too bad to tell that I was blushing.
I walked down to the water. Goosebumps rose on my arms in the chill, and my leg—the one that wasn’t there—ached with the same cold I’d felt this morning. None of the students, however, seemed to be shivering; they stood as still as they had in class. I sat down on one of the benches. No one spoke to me, or asked me why I hadn’t changed clothes.
We waited, silently, for two minutes, three. Then a group of boys nearest me stepped back from the edge.
Something moved under the water.
I stood up and stifled a yelp. The pale shape coursed toward the edge of the pool at tremendous speed. At the last moment, the water broke, and the creature threw itself onto the deck. It slid a few feet, then threw out its arms and rose up on its belly like a walrus.
; It was a man. A bald man, fat and white as a beluga. He smiled. “Who’s ready for laps?”
Lydia and the rest of the students moved down to the end of the pool and formed two lines. They’d done this many times, I guessed. One by one they dove, slipping in with hardly a splash, and torpedoed under the water for dozens of yards. They broke the surface almost gently, pale limbs stroking the surface. They looked like an Olympic swim team. A silent, glum Olympic swim team.
The pale man had gotten to his feet. He saw me and walked heavily over, water dripping from his pale, hairless chest. He wore a tiny black Speedo that seemed to pinch the tops of his thighs. Hanging on a chain around his neck was a silver whistle.
“You’re the new boy,” he said. His voice was deep, and his vowels warbled as if water had settled into his lungs. He held out a hand. “I’m Coach Shug.”
I hesitated, then shook. His hand was cold as raw steak.
“Why aren’t you suited up?” he asked.
“I don’t swim,” I said. I dried my palm on my pants.
His small black eyes narrowed farther. “Everybody swims.”
“I have a medical condition,” I said.
“Parasites? Heartworm? Shankies?”
“No,” I said. “This.” I lifted the leg of my pants and tapped the carbon-fiber shin.
“What happened?”
“I got bit by a dog,” I said.
“Must have been a hell of a dog.”
“I was three,” I said. “Snack size.”
He grunted. “Well, that’s no reason not to get in the water. I know plenty of maimed and limbless people who swim just fine.”
Maimed and limbless? I thought. Then: Plenty?
“You can’t let a peg leg slow you down,” Coach Shug continued. “Hell, aquatics may be one of the few sports where a few missing parts is no impediment. You can’t be afraid of the water just because you haven’t learned to swim with it.”
“I’m not afraid of the water,” I said. I’m pretty sure I kept my voice even. “I’m just not going in it.”
He blinked at me. “You’re serious.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Huh.” He rubbed his belly. “You’ll need a note.”
“To say that I don’t have a leg?”
“To explain why your lack of a few parts should make a lick of difference. Medically speaking. Go to the nurse’s office, then hurry back.” He turned toward the water and lifted his whistle.
“I don’t know where that is,” I said.
“Behind the cafeteria,” he said without turning around. “Can’t miss it.” The whistle shrieked, and the sound reverberated in the arena like a silver headache.
* * *
Okay, I’d lied to Coach Shug. But “a dog ate my leg” has been my standard answer for so long that it didn’t feel like lying.
Besides, the answer was a little more complicated. My lower leg wasn’t gone entirely. I had a phantom limb that I carried around with me. Weirdly, it was a lot shorter than my other leg. My doctor back in California told me that there was a part of my brain that still thought there should be a shin and a foot down there, even if it wasn’t sure how big they were. Any random signal could be assigned to the missing limb. Some days it felt like I had a meat foot inside my fake one.
But this coldness in the phantom limb—that was new. Yesterday the feeling had died down as the day wore on. This morning it was still going strong, as if my ghost foot was missing the California sun. I know I was.
The main hallway was as empty as it usually was when class was in session. I managed to find the cafeteria in only a couple minutes, a new personal record for locating any room in this place.
The doors were open. No one sat at the tables. What did Coach mean, “Behind the cafeteria”? I walked in, looking for another exit door, but there were only the wide doors that led to the kitchen. I could hear women talking back there.
I walked up to the buffet line—the steam tables were mercifully empty—and called out, “Hello?” No one answered. The big silver table where the woman had been cutting fish was clean and gleaming. I called out again. A voice back there laughed, though the laughter didn’t seem to be directed at me.
I walked around the serving line and stood at the entrance to the kitchen. Over in the far corner, three lunch ladies were gathered around a huge metal pot. One of them, the horse-toothed lady who’d tried to serve me yesterday, was pushing a big wooden paddle through the liquid. None of them had noticed me.
I approached slowly. The women were dressed identically in olive green smocks, and differed only in their ages: Old, Older, Oldest. The most senior of them was hunched over the pot, her face hovering over the gray, bubbling liquid. A dense fishy smell kept me back like a force field.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for the nurse’s office?”
The old one—by which I mean the youngest of them—stopped stirring the paddle.
“Who’s there?” the oldest said. Her eyes were still closed.
“Give me the glasses,” the middle lunch lady said. The one with the paddle handed her a pair of glasses on a chain.
“Oh!” the middle lunch lady said. “It’s the new one.”
“The one with the weak stomach,” the first lunch lady said.
The oldest threw back her head and cackled.
“The nurse?” I asked again.
The old one nodded toward a door at the other end of the kitchen. “You can go through there. Once. Next time, use the outer loop.”
“Sorry,” I said, and hurried away from them. What was “the outer loop”?
The door opened to a waiting room with four wooden chairs and a small desk with nothing on it but a clipboard and a small metal bell. A hand-drawn placard said DO NOT RING BELL.
The clipboard held a sign-in sheet with columns for IN and OUT. There were only a few names on the list. All had signed in, but no one had signed out.
I signed my name and took a seat with my backpack beside me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell the nurse. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have any medical records with me, because there was no medical reason why I couldn’t get in the pool. I just didn’t feel like explaining myself over and over. At home nobody asked me to go in the ocean anymore; they just accepted that that wasn’t my thing.
I looked at my phone. No bars. To torture myself I paged through photos, looking at pictures of my friends. It was three hours earlier in California, and they were probably just getting up. I would have been just waking up. For a moment I could picture myself in my old room, lying in bed as the morning sunlight lit up the wall, listening to the seagulls argue outside my window.
A sound made me look up from my phone. Maybe thirty seconds passed, and then I heard it again: a low moan.
I stood and went to the door with the signs on it. The moan came again, louder, and definitely from the other side of the door. I pictured someone lying on the floor, bleeding, waiting for the nurse to come back.
I knocked on the door. “Hello? Are you okay?”
There was no answer. I turned the knob, pushed the door open a few inches. “Hello?”
A woman lay on a padded table. No, not just a woman, a nurse: She was dressed in a white skirt and white hose.
She turned her head to look at me, and her blond hair fell across her face. She groggily pushed the hair from her eyes and looked at me through half-closed lids. “Do you have…” Her voice trailed off.
“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me what you need.” The room was only big enough for a desk and chair, the exam table, and a big metal cabinet. The door of the cabinet was ajar, and several of the shelves were filled with orange pill bottles. “Something in there?”
“… an appointment?” she finished. That word “appointment” seemed to require a great deal of thought. A plastic tube was attached to her left arm. The IV bag dangled above her, half-filled with some yellowish liquid.
“I can come back later,” I said. “Maybe Mis
s Pearl can—”
“No!” The nurse lurched to a sitting position. “I can handle this.” She rubbed her hand across her face as if it were numb.
Her gaze swiveled toward me. Her eyes were bloodshot. “You’re not from around here,” she said.
“I just moved from San Diego,” I said. “My name’s—”
“… are you?” she said.
I took a breath. Talking to her was like trying to hit an off-speed pitch.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
But she was no longer listening to me. She slid the needle from her arm and sighed as she let the tube drop. She might have been beautiful if she didn’t look like she’d been up for a week straight. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her lipstick was smeared.
She swung her legs over the edge of the table and considered the floor. “Why did you come here…?”
I waited.
She looked up at me and raised a black eyebrow. So, maybe not a natural blonde.
“I need a note,” I said. “For—”
“… to Dunnsmouth?”
“My mom’s here doing research,” I said.
“For?”
“Herself. She’s got a grant and—”
“No, who’s the note for?”
“Coach Shug,” I said. “Swim class.”
“Idiot,” she said. She placed a foot on the linoleum, testing the surface as if it were pond ice, then put the other foot down. “Can’t stand him.”
She made it to the desk and sat heavily. Then she pulled open the center drawer and rummaged through it, picking up pads of paper, putting them down, scrutinizing pens. “I know what you’re going through,” she said. “It’s not easy to live.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.
“… here,” she said.
She licked the tip of a pencil, then jerked as if she’d gotten a static shock. She stared at the pencil, daring it to shock her again. After a moment she said, “And what … is this in regard to?” she asked.
“It’s because of my leg,” I said. “I need a pass out of gym class.”
“Pass out,” she said. “Can’t do that.” She began to write on the pad of paper anyway. “They hired me two years ago,” she said. “I needed the money. I was straight out of state college.”
Harrison Squared Page 4