Dinosaur Boy

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “There has to be something,” I muttered.

  “There isn’t,” she said. And she sounded so sure that I looked up at her questioningly. I had a sinking feeling.

  “You’ve already checked, haven’t you?” I asked.

  Mom nodded, looking a teeny bit embarrassed.

  “Back at the beginning of the summer when this first started, your father and I looked into it. Just to see what our options were. And it didn’t take us long to figure out that there were no options.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “What about surgery? Can’t I just get all of this stuff cut off?”

  “No,” my mom said. “Species-reassignment surgery is unethical. Any doctor who performs it would lose their medical license.”

  “What about the lab that created the stupid gene in the first place?” I pressed her. “Can’t they figure out a way to turn it off ?”

  “Gene therapy for dinosaur hybrid DNA is still in the testing stages,” mom informed me. “They won’t reach the human trial stage for at least another five years.”

  Five years. I’d be in high school by then.

  I grabbed another handful of fruit, and Mom put her hand on my shoulder.

  “There is no cure, Sawyer, because what you have is not a disease. It’s simply who you are.”

  “No.” I shook her hand off, determined not to let her last sentence settle into my brain. “That can’t be right. It can’t be!”

  “Sawyer—” Mom began.

  “I HATE IT!” I exploded, nearly knocking the computer off my lap. “I. HATE. IT.”

  I picked up my tail by one of the tennis-balled spikes and threw it off the front of my bed. As though I could make it go away that easily. As though it wasn’t attached to me. The sore underside of my tail screamed with pain, but I ignored it. “This can’t be who I am! I’m not a f-f-f-reak!”

  My chin wobbled and my eyes filled with tears. All the humiliation of the entire week came down on me at once. The stupid movie. Butt Brain. The crickets. The underwear. And the staring. All week long, there had been the staring. A million questions behind a million staring eyes. But nobody actually talked to me (except Elliot). They’d all rather talk about me. Like I wasn’t even a person anymore.

  My mom set down the fruit bowl, moved my computer out of the way, and tried to put her arms around me. But I pushed her away and moved to the other side of the bed, over by Fanny.

  “I don’t want to go back to school,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “You have to go to school,” Mom said quietly. “It’s the law.”

  “So? Homeschool me!”

  “I work, Sawyer,” she reminded me. “And so does your father. You’d be alone in the house all day.”

  “Fine.” Actually, that sounded pretty great. “I’ll teach myself! Just get me some books or something.”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Our only option is to learn to live with it,” she said, standing up. “I’m sorry the first week was hard. But it’s bound to get better. You’re going to figure this out, Sawyer.”

  “Sure,” I said sarcastically.

  I leaned over, grabbed the bowl, and started stuffing fruit into my mouth with both hands.

  Mom walked to the door and paused in the doorframe to look over her shoulder at me.

  “At least it isn’t boring,” she tried. “Never a—”

  “If you say, ‘never a dull moment,’ I will attack you with my tail spikes,” I growled.

  My mom pursed her lips. But she knew I didn’t mean it.

  I didn’t. Not really.

  “For what it’s worth, Sawyer,” she said, “you’ve been part dinosaur since the beginning of the summer, but you never asked me about a cure until today. Do you think this might have more to do with how your classmates feel about it than with how you do? Maybe it’s good you can’t make any hasty decisions about surgery or gene therapy that you might regret one day. Maybe it’s good that you have some time to get used to it.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  Mom sighed.

  “How about your grandfather? Maybe it would be helpful for you to talk with someone else who has gone through this? He hasn’t responded to any of my messages—you know how he is—but you could try emailing him. He still works for that lab, so maybe he has more information than I do.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed, chewed, and swallowed until my mom left and there was no more fruit.

  Get used to it?

  Was she kidding?

  She could get used to it. I was going to find a cure.

  I retrieved my computer and opened up my email.

  From: SBronson@jackjames.com

  To: DrSteg@BCemail.com

  Dear Grandpa,

  This is Sawyer, your grandson. I don’t know if Mom told you, but I’m part dinosaur now. And I need to know how not to be.

  Please help me. I don’t mean any offense. I know you’re part stegosaurus too. But you didn’t become part dinosaur until you were an adult. It’s much harder to do it when you’re a kid. School is hard enough.

  I really need to find a cure. And you’re the only person I can think to ask. Please say you can help me!

  Love,

  Sawyer

  P.S. The underside of my tail is getting scraped up from being dragged around on the ground all day. Does that happen to you too? What do you do about it?

  Sylvie

  On Monday, I didn’t want to go to school any more than I had the previous Friday. But my mom marched me through my morning routine with such efficiency that I ended up being the first person to arrive in my classroom.

  The only upside to this was that I was able to squeeze into my desk before anybody else got there to witness my horrid awkwardness.

  A few minutes before the bell, I heard kids start to arrive and fill up the desks behind me. I sat facing the front of the room, determined not to turn around. Or move. Kind of like in Jurassic Park, where the T. rex could only see you if you moved.

  Only here, the roles were kind of reversed.

  I was concentrating so hard on being invisible that it took me a while to notice that the desk next to mine, which had sat unoccupied for the past week, was no longer empty.

  Someone was sitting in Parker’s old seat.

  I tried to catch a glimpse of the newcomer without turning my head, but all I could see out of the corner of my eye was an oversized sweatshirt the color of a traffic cone. The hood was pulled up, and the owner’s face was buried too deep inside for me to be able to catch more than a glimpse. The only thing sticking out was the tip of a nose.

  It was red. Like mine got when I forgot to put on sunscreen at the lake.

  The newcomer was also wearing white shoes. Really bright white sneakers, without a single scuff. They must have been new.

  “Class.” Ms. Filch clapped her hands to get our attention. “We have a new student with us. I’d like you all to meet—er, why don’t you take off your hood, dear?”

  “No,” came a determined voice from underneath the sweatshirt.

  Ms. Filch looked momentarily startled, but then her face hardened.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t allow hats in the classroom.”

  “I’m not wearing a hat,” the figure inside the sweatshirt pointed out. I thought it sounded like a girl’s voice, but it was hard to be sure. “I’m wearing a hood. And I like it.”

  “It’s a very lovely, er, color,” Ms. Filch said hesitantly, blinking at the neon. “But a hood is the same thing as a hat. And I must insist that you take it off.”

  The girl—I was slightly more sure it was a girl now—sighed. Her bony shoulders gave a shrug from underneath the roomy sweatshirt, and she threw the hood back off her head.

  It was a girl. Her hair
was dark brown and very curly. Half of it was stuck in her hood and she had to pull hard to get it out. It stuck out in all directions after that, kind of like the arms of an octopus. The skin on her hands and face was light brown, except for the very tip of her nose, which, as I already mentioned, was red. Also, a little bit peely.

  She was a perfectly ordinary girl.

  I don’t know why I was disappointed. I don’t know what I had been expecting.

  “I would wear a hood too,” Cici’s voice floated up from the back of the room, “if I had hair like that. Yikes.”

  Muffled giggles exploded around the room, but Ms. Filch didn’t appear to notice.

  “There now, isn’t that better?” she said, beaming down at the new girl. “Class, this is Sylvia Juarez. Sylvia—”

  “Sylvie,” the girl corrected Ms. Filch. “My name is Sylvie.”

  “Sylvie just moved here from New Mexico. What do you think of Portland so far, Sylvie?”

  Sylvie glanced over at me. I expected her to look embarrassed because of Ms. Filch’s questions and Cici’s snarky comment. I certainly would have been. But instead, she just looked kind of bored.

  She grinned slightly and rolled her eyes at me. As though the two of us were sharing some private joke. As if she wanted to say, Isn’t this stupid?

  Sylvie turned back to our teacher.

  “It rains here a lot,” she answered.

  “Oh, well, you’ll get used to it,” Ms. Filch assured her, smiling kindly before she turned back to the front of the room. “If everyone will open their books to page twenty-four, we will continue our discussion of the first American colonies.”

  Sylvie scrunched down in her seat and pulled her hood back up so that it was halfway over her head. Probably not enough so that Ms. Filch would tell her to take it off again, but enough to hide at least most of her hair.

  She caught me watching her and rolled her eyes again.

  It was a friendly eye roll, just like the one before. I smiled in response. I couldn’t help it. She had one of those faces you just wanted to smile at.

  But there was still something weird about her.

  I thought about it the whole time Ms. Filch droned on about Jamestown. It wasn’t Sylvie’s crazy hair. Or even her neon orange sweatshirt. I didn’t care that she was from New Mexico or that she had a sunburned nose.

  It was around the time that Ms. Filch started describing the Starving Time (in gruesome detail) that I figured it out.

  Sylvie had definitely looked right at me, at least twice. And both times, she hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised to find that she was sitting next to a boy who was part dinosaur.

  Yeah, there was definitely something weird about the new girl.

  • • •

  For the second half of last year, at lunchtime, Elliot and I had sat at the long table by the door. Along with Mary and a few other kids from our class.

  But now that I was part dinosaur, it was just the two of us. And we had had to move to the table closest to the bathroom. If we were demoted any further, we’d probably have to sit in the bathroom.

  Elliot probably still could have sat at the table by the door, if he’d wanted to. Actually, I’m pretty sure he did want to. He only sat with me out of loyalty, the same way I had sat with him for the first half of last year, when nobody else would sit near “Gigantor.”

  It was nice of him. But I could tell that remaining friends with me was making him pretty miserable.

  “It’s only the second week,” he said, smiling bravely as he unwrapped his sandwich. “Everyone will get over it. You’ll see. Something else will come along.”

  “Like what?” I said, prying the lid off the jumbo-sized mixing bowl my mom had packed my salad into. “Something weirder than me? I doubt it.”

  Elliot’s gaze flicked down to my tail, which had started twitching happily at the smell of my fresh greens. The tennis balls at the ends of my spikes made cheerful bong, bong sounds against the floor with every twitch.

  Elliot shook his head sadly.

  I shoved a giant forkful of lettuce into my mouth. I looked up just in time to be half-blinded by a patch of neon orange.

  Sylvie stood uncertainly in front of our table. She was holding a large, insulated lunch sack.

  “Can I sit?” she asked, when neither Elliot nor I said anything.

  I nodded, my mouth still full. Elliot cleared his throat.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Under his breath, he mumbled, “Why not? It can’t get any worse.”

  Sylvie either didn’t hear or didn’t mind, because she smiled and set down her sack. Her hood was back up, and when she went to sit down, it fell forward so that it was almost impossible to see her face. She unzipped her sack and busied herself with setting out her lunch.

  First, she removed a pink, disk-shaped tortilla warmer. Next came a tin-foil pie plate with a white lid. Sylvie peeled back the lid to reveal a pile of peppers, onions, and strips of chicken. They were so hot I could see the steam rising from them.

  Then she took out small containers of salsa, cheese, and sour cream. Last was a medium-sized container of rice.

  Elliot watched, fascinated.

  “What is all of that?” he asked.

  Sylvie surveyed the feast, wrinkled her peely nose, and then sat back in her chair without touching any of it.

  “Chicken fajitas,” she answered, sounding bored.

  “For lunch?” I asked. It reminded me of the takeout my dad would sometimes pick up on his way home from work. But I would never get to take something so fancy to school with me. Not even back when I ate things like fajitas.

  Elliot was looking down at his half-eaten sandwich with chagrin.

  “My mom owns a restaurant,” Sylvie explained. “These are just leftovers from the kitchen. Do you guys want any? We could trade.”

  I shook my head and pointed to my salad.

  “I’m good,” I said. “But thanks.”

  “I’ll trade!” Elliot exclaimed.

  “What d’you got?”

  Sylvie leaned over to examine his lunch.

  Other than the half-eaten sandwich, which I knew from experience was probably filled with sprouts and some sort of meat substitute, Elliot had only some carrots, a container of hummus, and a cup of chocolate pudding.

  “Not much,” he admitted. “My mom is a health nut.”

  Sylvie pointed to the pudding.

  “I’ll trade you for that.”

  “OK,” Elliot said, and quickly handed over the cup.

  Sylvie shoved the fajita makings across the table at him.

  “All of it?” Elliot asked uncertainly.

  Sylvie nodded and opened the pudding.

  “I’m sick of Mexican food,” she explained. I found this kind of funny, considering that she probably was Mexican. At least, I thought she might be. It was hard to tell, considering most of her was hidden under the giant sweatshirt.

  Sylvie took a bite of the pudding and immediately made a face.

  “It’s soy,” Elliot explained. “My mom makes it herself.”

  He paused, a half-made fajita in one hand. Probably worried that Sylvie might be reconsidering their trade.

  But Sylvie just set the pudding down, reached into the front pocket of her sweatshirt, and pulled out a handful of candy. She deposited it on the table and studied the pile carefully, finally selecting a banana Laffy Taffy.

  She unwrapped the taffy, popped it into her mouth, and turned to me.

  “So,” she said. “You’re part dinosaur. What’s that like?”

  “Pretty crappy,” I admitted. It was sort of a weird question, but I didn’t mind. It was nice that somebody was finally asking me, right to my face, instead of wondering behind my back.

  Sylvie seemed surprised by my answer.

>   “Really? I think it’s kind of cool.”

  I snorted.

  “You don’t have to live with it.”

  Sylvie nodded, her face serious, as she unwrapped a second Laffy Taffy. This one was pink and smelled like strawberry to my hyper-sensitive dino nose.

  “That’s true,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “Oh my GOD,” Elliot broke in, taking a second bite of an overloaded fajita and causing sour cream to squirt out of the opposite end. He rolled his eyes in happiness, chewed, swallowed, and then added, “This is ridiculous. Your mom’s restaurant must be awesome. Where is it? I’m going to eat there every day from now on.”

  “The one in Portland isn’t open yet,” Sylvie told him, with a slight smile. “Not until next week. But she and my dad own a couple of other ones, and they all do pretty well.”

  “Back in New Mexico?” I guessed, remembering Ms. Filch’s introduction.

  “There. And a couple of other places,” Sylvie mumbled, rooting through her pile of candy.

  “Your dad?” Elliot prompted her. When Sylvie didn’t respond, he added, “Sorry, you made it sound like it was just your mom who owned the restaurant…”

  “My parents are separated,” Sylvie said, and her slight smile faded. “That’s why my mom and I moved to Portland. But I’m probably not going to be here very long. I’m really supposed to be living with my dad. He’s on a business trip right now, but he’s coming to take me home with him as soon as he gets back.”

  “Won’t your mom mind?” I asked her.

  Sylvie shrugged.

  “She only cares about the restaurant.”

  “Does your dad live around here?” Elliot asked.

  Sylvie considered this.

  “He lives a little bit outside of Portland,” she answered finally.

  Elliot nodded wisely.

  “You’ll probably have to change schools then. When you go to live with him, I mean. That sucks.”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie agreed.

  There was an uncomfortable silence after that, so I filled it with the only thing that came to mind.

  “I used to like Mexican food,” I said, feeling a little bit sorry for myself. “But ever since…this”—I gestured to my plates—“all I’ve really wanted to eat is salad. And fruit. Lots of fruit.”