Edison’s Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  “Boo!” said Vince again, and it fled so quickly it appeared to have vaporized.

  There was nothing Tesla-like in the laundry room. Just some liquid detergent, bleach, and a few other cleaning supplies.

  In the living room he found a retro Lava lamp, but he wasn’t sure whether or not it was old enough to have belonged to Tesla.

  Then he saw a tabloid newspaper lying open on the coffee table—the Planetary Times, one of those papers in which invading aliens and/or long-dead celebrities figured in every headline and photo. But the photo that caught Vince’s eye was something very different.

  “Nick!” he called. “Come look at this!”

  But Nick, upstairs, must have been too far away to hear.

  Just then a bright light began to arc across the room. Headlights! A car was pulling into the driveway.

  Vince turned sharply and hurried to get Nick, but he didn’t notice the coatrack. The middle hook snagged the wires extending from his backpack, they were yanked off his neck, and, once more, he became a demonstration of Newton’s famous theory.

  This time, Vince didn’t even remember to close his eyes before he died.

  Nick didn’t see the headlights or hear the car doors open. The only warning he had were their voices as they stepped out of the car.

  “I’m gonna hurl!” Seth said.

  “I told you not to eat all that pizza,” said his mother as they walked to the front door.

  “I’m gonna hurl!” Seth said again.

  “I’ll get you some Pepto-Bismol,” said his mother.

  Nick bounded down the stairs. “Vince!” he whispered. “Vince—we gotta go now!”

  But Vince wasn’t going anywhere. He was, in fact, cadaverously positioned in the absolute worst place at the absolute worst time. He was lying like a doormat just inside the front door.

  Which was now opening.

  Dead bodies have been found in the strangest of places. Take the case of the Canadian tourist who, after hotel patrons complained of low water pressure, was found floating in a rooftop water tank. Or the poor soul who left this life, but whose body showed up on Google Maps for the world to see. Then there was the case of a TV series about crime-scene investigation—while shooting an episode about finding someone’s mummified remains in an apartment building, the crew found someone’s actual mummified remains in the apartment building where they were filming.

  Beverly Webb and her son, Seth, however, were not considering the prospect of finding a dead body in their foyer when they arrived home that night. Seth was beset by the kind of nausea that can only come from eating thirteen pieces of Everything pizza, and Beverly was focused on getting him to the bathroom before he left a mess that she would have to clean.

  She pushed the front door…only to find that it wouldn’t open. Something was in the way.

  “I’m gonna hurl!” Seth wailed.

  Beverly pushed the door again, with all her might. It wouldn’t budge. Did she really need this? What could possibly be worse than having a kid ready to puke and not being able to get in the front door?

  Well, perhaps opening the front door and watching your kid puke all over the dead body in your foyer—but luckily for everyone, she didn’t know about that particular dead body.

  “It’s happening!” yelled Seth. “It’s happening now.” He turned to the side, but when he saw that he was about to empty the better part of his digestive tract into the garden his mother had recently planted, he ran back to the car, opened a door, and barfed ten or eleven pieces of partially digested pizza all over the backseat, because he figured that leather was easier to clean than flower petals.

  Beverly observed him with the sort of numb wonder that one might have while watching a truly bad dance performance. In the realm of all things possible, why would the universe conspire to deliver this?

  She went to her son as a mother must, and patted him gently on the back. She tried not to think about the prospect of having her automotive interior cleaned and detailed, and then she remembered that she did, after all, have a stain remover that worked wonders.

  “Better now?” she asked.

  “No,” Seth told her, but instead of an encore performance, he ran off toward the house and—wonder of wonders—this time the door opened like it had never been blocked.

  Seth was not quite finished, but this time he felt he could make it to the bathroom, which was the preferred location for the tossing of tacos. Even when those tacos were pizza. But what he encountered when he got inside the house was not at all what he expected. He saw one teen dragging another out the back door.

  They made eye contact.

  “Whoa! Who are you?” Seth said, his spasming stomach temporarily forgotten.

  The teen hesitated like a raccoon at a trash can, but then he got on with his business. He was gone in an instant, but his face lingered in Seth’s mind. And before he could call out, his stomach rumbled a demand that could not be ignored.

  He turned and released the last of his pizza on the kitchen floor, where the family cat had chosen precisely the wrong moment to stand its ground.

  Nick had never been happier to see someone be violently ill. Seth had given him the few additional seconds he needed. Nick had dragged Vince to the side yard, but in the dark, even with the faint shimmering of the aurora up above, he couldn’t find where the wires attached, and he didn’t dare turn on the headlamp he was still wearing. But he did know that water conducted electricity, so rather than mess with the tape on Vince’s back, he shoved the two wires right into Vince’s mouth and pushed his jaw closed.

  Vince’s eyes, which were already open, instantly ignited with sentience.

  “Don’t talk, don’t open your mouth,” Nick said. “Just bite down on those wires until we’re out of here.

  Vince growled at him, but he did as he was told.

  Nick could see Beverly inside, tending to her son, and from the sounds that were coming from the open kitchen window, it was clear that the kid was not yet in a state where he could tell her what he’d seen. Nick could only hope that Seth wouldn’t be able to identify him.

  Nick and Vince got on their bikes and pedaled away, their mission a failure on every level.

  The patience of scientists is a well-documented fact. Many natural phenomena move at a glacial pace, not just glaciers. For instance, in order for particle physicists to study atoms that would vaporize in a billionth of a second, they had to bide their time for over a decade as the Large Hadron Collider was built. And that was just a blink of an eye compared to the pitch drop experiment, ongoing for nearly one hundred years, to measure the flow rate of room-temperature tar. That flow rate turns out to be about nine drops per century (although the scientists monitoring the experiment somehow managed to miss the most recent drop).

  The NASA scientists studying the newly orbiting copper asteroid were no exception. They were weighing the possibility of considering an examination of the factors involved in embarking on a study about sending a probe.

  In the meantime, an electromagnetic charge was building up in the atmosphere without a means for it to be released. What people noticed most were the little things. Random incidents of magnetized paper clips standing on end on office desks. Cars starting for no apparent reason. Kids’ braces sending out sizzling arcs of electricity. Some of these small-scale events were mere curiosities, others were nuisances, but the one thing that could be agreed upon by all is that they were becoming more and more frequent. The world’s leading scientists assured the public that everything would work itself out. At least that’s what they said.

  Like the scientific community, Mitch Murló had great patience and a very long fuse. In fact, no one in recent memory had seen it burn down to its devastating payload. There’s a reason the most destructive explosives have such long fuses. This was the day Mitch reminded everyone of that reason.

  Mitch didn’t know why he lost control. He had been teased about his father’s prison sentence many times before. He
knew firsthand that kids were cruel, especially in groups. He had always been able to take the nastiness of jerks in stride. Yes, their comments bothered him, angered him even, but they had never provoked him into a fight. Until now.

  Perhaps it was his budding relationship with Petula. Maybe that gave him more confidence, or just enough anxiety to shorten his fuse. Or maybe it was the recent revelation by the Shut Up ’N Listen that his father would never be paroled. The information had left his mind in a whirlwind that was getting harder and harder to control.

  “Hey, Murló,” taunted Steven Gray, just before lunch, when everyone in the world is at their most irritable. “Here. I think your dad forgot these.” And with that, Gray hurled a handful of pennies at Mitch. They fell on him like shrapnel.

  It was old news that Mitch’s dad had been convicted of robbing one cent from every bank account in the world. And although he claimed he had been framed for stealing 725 million dollars entirely in pennies, no one but his family believed his story.

  The coin toss was a tired gag as far as Mitch was concerned. But this time one of the pennies lodged in his shirt pocket. His fingers were stubby, the pocket was narrow, and he just couldn’t fish it out. At that moment he realized he would never fish it out. He and his family would never be free of the stolen pennies for the rest of their lives.

  That’s when Mitch detonated.

  The fight that followed was a three-teacher battle. Meaning it took three teachers to pull Mitch off Gray. And one of those teachers wound up with a black eye.

  And as they fought, in his anger, Mitch found himself turning back into a human Shut Up ’N Listen. The problem was, Steven Gray wouldn’t shut up.

  “Murló, when I’m done with you—” started Gray.

  And Mitch finished, “—you’re going to go home and play with your stuffed animals!”

  Gray’s eyes went wide. “Shut up! You don’t know—”

  “—the fifth answer on today’s science test.”

  “That’s it! I’m gonna—”

  “—drop out of high school and become a rodeo clown.”

  Beyond that, Mitch didn’t remember any other specifics, except for the satisfying feeling of his fists connecting with various parts of Gray’s anatomy. And although Gray got in some of his own shots, too, he was far bloodier than Mitch when all was said and done.

  Needless to say, Mitch wound up in Principal Watt’s office, while Gray was sent to the school nurse. Mitch had calmed down by the time he got there, but not enough to regret what he had done.

  Already waiting for an audience with the principal was Theo Blankenship, not the last person Mitch wanted to see, but definitely among the bottom ten. By now Mitch had two tissues shoved up his nostrils, which made Theo laugh.

  Mitch took a deep mouth breath and held it to keep himself from losing his temper again.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Gray came to collect her boy from the nurse’s office and take him home—where he would most certainly play with his stuffed animals and wonder how Mitch had guessed his secret dream of being a rodeo clown.

  After Gray and his mother left, Theo said to Mitch, “Must have been some fight. Sorry I missed it.”

  From Principal Watt’s office they could hear the muffled sounds of a girl crying.

  “Sydney Van Hook,” Theo explained. “She wrote an inappropriate essay.”

  “So why are you here?” mumbled Mitch.

  Theo looked down. “You know how Galileo School is like our biggest rival?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well…I barbecued their mascot.”

  “What’s their mascot?” Mitch asked.

  Theo shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

  While Mitch considered that, Theo leaned a little closer. “So, you’re really good friends with Nick Slate, huh?”

  Mitch had known this was coming the second he saw Theo in the waiting room. “Hey, what goes on between Nick and Caitlin is none of my business, okay? So don’t ask me.”

  “So there is something going on between them.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Theo glared at Mitch, and poked him in the chest to emphasize every word. “You tell your friend he’d better watch out…because jealousy is a green-eyed mobster—and if he’s not careful, he’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

  “Uh…you mean you’re gonna put a fish in his bed?”

  “Exactly. And it’ll only get worse from there.”

  The door to Principal Watt’s office opened, and Sydney Van Hook ran out in a veil of tears. Watt beckoned Theo in with an intensity befitting the Grim Reaper.

  Theo stood up, but before he went in, he turned to Mitch and said, “Whatever Nick’s doing, he won’t get away with it. Like they say, he’s going to find himself between Iraq and a hard place.” And with that, he turned and walked into Principal Watt’s Office of Doom. The door closed behind him, and in a few moments Mitch could hear Theo crying.

  Mitch found himself alone once more with only his thoughts and the penny in his pocket. Angrily, he tried again to fish it out, but it seemed to be stuck to some old chewing gum that had melded with the fabric.

  He wished there was some way he could get back at the corporate creeps who had framed his father, but such justice was even further out of his reach than the penny.

  Then, out of nowhere, a voice said, “Mind if I try?”

  Mitch looked up to see Ms. Planck, the lunch lady. Without waiting for an answer, she reached into his pocket with long, tapering fingers, strong from ladling slop day in and day out. She grasped the penny and pulled it free in one try, then held it out to him.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “Keep it,” said Mitch bitterly. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of them.”

  Ms. Planck sat down next to him. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “If it means anything to you, I don’t think your father took that money.”

  Mitch looked at her, trying to figure out if she just wanted to make him feel better or if she meant it. She was a no-nonsense kind of woman. Mitch could tell she was sincere.

  “What are you doing here?” Mitch asked. “Did you get called to the principal’s office, too?”

  She held up a clipboard. “Next month’s lunch menu for Principal Watt to approve. He’s got his fingers in every pie.”

  Mitch grinned. “I knew there were fingers in those pies.”

  Ms. Planck raised her eyebrows. “Protein! Tastes good and good for you.”

  From behind the closed door came Theo’s wailing pleas for clemency. Mitch resolved that whatever punishment was levied upon him when it was his turn, he would bear it stoically.

  “So I understand you’re spending a lot of time with Petula Grabowski-Jones,” Ms. Planck said.

  “Petula has a big mouth,” grumbled Mitch.

  Ms. Planck shrugged. “There are worse things. She’s unusual, it’s true. But in a good way. And I told her the same thing about you.”

  “Where is this going?” Mitch wondered aloud.

  She put the penny in his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Someplace worth the price of admission,” she said. “I promise.” Then she got up and left.

  When Mitch opened his hand, he discovered something remarkable. Through sleight of hand or some other clever trick, the coin in his palm was now a nickel.

  Meanwhile, Caitlin was having her own troubles. She had always been a fairly decent math student, but during today’s test, she found herself stricken with such inexplicable dread that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was not prone to panic attacks, and she was becoming more anxious over the fact that she was becoming anxious than by the cause of the anxiety itself. Then, when she looked around, she realized that she wasn’t the only one suffering. Everyone in the room—including the teacher—was either sweating, or shaking, or moaning. One kid was chewing his pencil with such nervous intensity that he bit it in half.

  In the midst of the turmoil there was, however, a calm oa
sis of one: Carter Black, who always sat in the back of the room and had gone unnoticed for most of his life. He was now a hot zone of focused energy and calculation. He was zipping through the test like it was nothing.

  This was one of those “open book” kind of tests where calculators and other computational devices were allowed. Carter did not have a calculator. His stress-free hands were deftly flipping the beads of a small abacus—the kind of counting device used in days gone by.

  Carter Black was not a math whiz by any means. In fact, he had earned the nickname “Carter Black Hole,” because his brain seemed to have an event horizon beyond which mathematical concepts broke down, leading to D-minuses on all of his tests. Any other kid would have to work pretty hard to achieve such consistency.

  As Caitlin’s own math terror increased, Carter’s focus intensified, and although at the moment even adding one plus one was a difficult stretch, she managed it, and came up with the only possible solution.

  The abacus was from Nick’s garage sale.

  Each time Carter flicked a metallic bead, the wire that held it sparked, giving him brainpower and confidence—by stealing it from his classmates.

  And so, while the rest of the room became more and more mathematically unsound, Caitlin got up out of her seat, made her way over to Carter Black, and ripped the abacus from his hands.

  “Hey, that’s mine!”

  She slipped it into a rather heavy case that was, no doubt, woven from lead-infused fabric, and the moment she did, she felt her tension dissolve.

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” she told Carter. Now that his math skills had sunk back to caveman levels, he was left to grapple with the concept of nine-tenths while the rest of the room breathed a communal sigh of relief, not knowing what had happened, or why it had ended.

  “Pencils down,” said their teacher, blotting his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “We’ll take this test tomorrow.”

  Caitlin gripped the abacus to her chest as if at any moment it might be ripped away by Carter Black, or the Accelerati. She had an urge to run out of the classroom, find Nick, and hand it over to him, but she knew she could make a better play. Nick hadn’t given her as much as the time of day since she refused his movie invitation, and the rift between them wasn’t helping anybody. But now she had an excuse to bridge the gap. The abacus could be her peace offering. Peace offerings had to be treated with care and ceremony. She would bring it to him at his house when she felt the time was right. She would watch as he placed it into the machine. And that would make them a team again, if not a couple.