Lear’s eyes searched my face. “My dad’s dead too.”
My fork froze halfway to my mouth. Of course. His file had said Father victim of vampirism. I’d never felt guilty for inventing stories about my dad. But here I was bragging about his imaginary death to a kid who actually lost his father. Meanwhile, my daddy was fine—snoozing in the starry sky.
“What happened?” I said, setting down my fork.
Lear scratched his hair right above his ear. “I’d rather not say, if that’s okay.”
“Sorry,” I said. Sorry for lying.
Lear shrugged. “I don’t know how to feel about it. You finished?”
“I guess I am.”
It was all I could do to stop myself from licking the plate clean.
• • •
Lear and I stood in front of St. Maria’s, our shadows long and faint against the sidewalk. I wanted to ask him a hundred questions—about his dad, about therapy, about how he’d broken his nose. I wanted to ask him why he didn’t ask why I was living in a church and why he didn’t stare at my legs like the other boys. I wanted to smooth out the wrinkles on his forehead.
But instead I just stood there.
“Well, good night,” Lear said, and headed down the walkway.
Romance wasn’t what it was like in the movies, I guessed. One boy plus one girl alone on a spring night did not always equal romance. I opened the door into the dark church and felt my stomach sticking to my ribs. Even though I’d polished off half the menu at the malt shop, I could tell I’d be hungry again soon, and I’d spent every cent from the donations box.
“Will you bring me food?” I called after Lear.
He turned around on the corner.
“Please,” I said. “I . . . I don’t have any money. Not right now. But I can pay you back. Somehow. If you’ll just please bring me food. Tomorrow. Or as soon as you can. Please.”
“Where’s your mom?” he said.
I hesitated, suddenly understanding Lear’s not wanting to explain his past. “Please, just, bring the food. And not an amount you think would be good enough for a girl. Bring enough to feed a pro wrestler. A pro wrestling team. I’m not joking. And please don’t ask any more questions. Just bring me food. Please.”
Lear gave me a look like he wanted to ask how he could possibly dredge up that much chow, but he gave a nod, which eased my stomach a little.
“Also, will you tell Beth Graham I’m at the church?” Rhoda’s candlelight eyes flickered through my mind. “No one else. Just Beth.”
Lear gave another small nod and disappeared into the night.
• • •
Inside the church, I clicked on the Roebuck and tuned it to a station playing “Call Me” by Johnny Mathis. While Pan-Cake licked my long legs, I pulled off my socks, and the page from Lear’s file dropped to the floor. I lit a votive candle and then unfolded the page slowly, curling its bottom toward the top to reveal a small bit of information at a time.
9/16/57—Lear Finley—First meeting
Uncle military general
Expresses interest in enlisting upon graduation
At first I felt Ma’s disgust for any man in uniform. But then I thought through it a bit. Marrying a military man might just be the ticket to staying safe in a world where Daddy always had to be entertained.
If Lear was in the military, he would always have access to guns and grenades and stuff like that. If trouble ever started brewing, he’d drive a tank right through the front of our ranch-style house and pull me inside, where we’d make love until the trouble passed. In between lovemaking, he could even shoot a monster or two. I wouldn’t mind.
I slid the paper down, revealing the next two items on Dr. Siley’s list:
Obsessed with comic books and stories of “super” heroes
Early prognosis: Infantile mind
Comic books, huh? Could I love a boy with an infantile mind? So long as he remained handsome, quiet, and brooding? Yes. Yes, I could.
The song on the radio changed to “The Book of Love” by the Monotones as I unveiled the next part of my and Lear’s romance.
Patient cares for invalid mother.
Well, if that wasn’t the sweetest . . .
Exhibits feelings of helplessness
Feels five years old when night falls
When asked why in therapy, patient is cagey, folds arms
Accessed previous records and discovered—
“This is Ant Lion to Palm Tree! Ant Lion to Palm Tree! Do you read me?”
The voice made me jump and I nearly tore Lear’s paper. I looked around the church.
“This is Ant Lion to Palm Tree . . . Phoebe?”
It was the ham radio.
I switched off the Roebuck and snatched up the speaker. “I’m here! Hello?”
There came a popping sound, like a gun going off, and then screaming. At first I thought something terrible was happening in the Buried Lab. The monsters had escaped their rooms, and everyone in the lab was being murdered under the desert.
“Hello?” I whispered.
“Phoebe!” Liz said. “Thank goodness.”
“Are you okay?” I said. “What’s happening?”
“Of course we’re okay! We’re celebrating!”
Among the pops and screams in the background, I made out a word: “Huzzah!”
They weren’t screams. They were cheers. Glasses clinked together. The pop must have been a bottle of champagne.
“I’m sorry I’ve been unavailable,” Liz said. “Things have been touch and go here. I had to explain to the men what I’d done. At first they were upset that I’d turned you loose from the lab, but then I calmly pointed out the value in having a rational being with whom we could communicate. You know, as opposed to releasing some monstrosity on an unsuspecting town to run amok like a bull in a china shop.”
My head flooded with so many questions, they all got caught in my throat.
“Oh, Phoebe, I wish you were here to celebrate with us,” Liz said. “We’ve made a cake bigger than your head! Well . . . maybe not bigger than your head. Not now, anyway. Oh, how I wish I were there to see you!”
I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to get a sense of my head’s size. “Why are you celebrating?”
“Father—Daddy has lowered his remote!” Liz said. “It’s the lowest it’s been in years. He even set it in his lap! We don’t have a measurement that low on the Doomsday Dial.”
This was good news, I guessed. But then the day’s events came flooding back to me.
“Hal got shot,” I said.
“Oh, darling, that’s sweet of you to worry,” Liz said. “Hal is perfectly fine. He’s in the sunroom now. He’ll have a couple of scars, but he’s otherwise none the worse for wear. He said you were very brave and asked if you’d take care of Lucky-13 for a while.”
I’d never heard of anyone being “perfectly fine” after they were shot in the throat and chest, but I’d never seen a man bleed clear goo, either. Pan-Cake licked my hand, and the dam in my throat finally broke. I leapt to my feet.
“Where did the lab go? Why wasn’t there a door in the rock? Where’s Ma? And—and what happened to Officer Shelley and Graham and the motel owner’s wife?”
“You needn’t worry about them,” Liz said with some metal in her voice. “We handled it.”
My stomach sank. “What did you do to them?”
“Phoebe, when I tell you we’ve handled something, you must believe me, okay? We wouldn’t do anything to harm someone unless it was absolutely necessary to keep the world safe.”
I wanted to ask what she meant, but something told me it wouldn’t get me anywhere. Instead I collapsed back on the cot and asked the question I’d been dreading.
“Liz . . . what’s happening to me?”
“Why, my dear,” Liz said, “haven’t you figured it out?”
A thought rose, like water in a basement. Of course I knew. A part of me had known since Principal Toll had pointed t
o the hem of my dress hovering inches above my knees.
I opened my hand slowly, my fingers stretching out long. It was just like Liz had said. Something Daddy had never seen before.
“Will you be able to change me back?” I said, then remembered the looks the boys gave me at school. “Or . . . leave me like I am right now?”
“Oh, shoot,” Liz said. “We’re having some trouble hearing you on this end. Phoebe? Am I coming through okay?”
“Clear as a bell,” I said.
She was ignoring my question. I could tell.
“Can you change me back?” I said more slowly this time. My heart was starting up something fierce. The locusts were closing in.
Another pause from Liz. “Oh! Yes! Yes. Of course. You needn’t worry on that front. All it takes is a combination of radiation and insecticide if you can believe it. For now, just enjoy the power you wield. Honestly, I’m jealous. I’d have zapped myself, you know . . . if I weren’t currently indisposed.”
Someone cleared his throat in the background. “I don’t know a soul who’d be entertained by a fifty-foot broad.” It was Mr. Peak. Droopy Dog. He sounded drunk. “Especially if she’s his daughter. Horrified maybe.”
“Not even if she cooked you a fifty-foot meat loaf?” the British scientist said.
Mr. Peak scoffed. “We didn’t zap any cows.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually,” Liz said. “We could make Phoebe a barbecue the size of a basketball court.”
Liz and the British man laughed.
“Hello?” I said, wondering if they knew I was still listening.
“We’re not in the clear yet, Phoebe,” Liz said. “Father setting down his remote is a victory, but it’s only temporary. He will get bored again. That’s why we need you to keep things interesting. We’ll have assignments for you soon.”
Assignments? Headlines flashed through my head. Monster attacks. People screaming.
“You want me to . . . terrorize Pennybrooke?”
Liz hesitated. “I wouldn’t use that term, no. I would say we want you to act as a diversion to the man in the sky so he doesn’t turn off the entire world. I do hope you understand. I worry sometimes that I’m not getting through to you because our mothers gave us different modes of communication.”
Yeah, Ma always said things plain while Liz’s ma kept things hidden.
“Phoebe?” Liz said. “We need to know where you are so we can bring you food. You must be starving, poor thing.”
My stomach ignored my racing thoughts and grumbled. I folded over, trying to silence it.
“Why would I tell you where I am?” I said. “After what you did to me?”
“Phoebe . . . ,” Liz said calmly, like I was a rabid dog. “Consider your position a moment. You’re growing at an alarming rate. You can’t afford food. Whatever money your mother left behind will not be enough to sustain you.”
Whatever Ma left behind? So the Buried Lab didn’t steal the money.
“We can feed you,” Liz said. “More food than you could possibly eat. We’ll give you a few assignments to do around town to keep things interesting. Once they are executed successfully, Hal will deliver a grocery store right to your doorstep. You just have to tell us where you are.”
She paused, waiting for me to respond.
“Phoebe, are you there? Do you understand what I’m telling you? Once this is all over and this little rascal is out of my system, you and I can raise a glass to two half sisters saving the world the way only women could.”
I yanked the cord out of the wall, and Liz and the rest of the Buried Lab fizzled out. My stomach growled again, louder this time. I knew it would only be a matter of time before I plugged the ham radio back in and begged for that grocery store. I was at Liz’s mercy. Unless Lear came through and brought me food, that was.
I looked at his file crumpled in my hand, his dark past waiting to be revealed. I suddenly felt dirty going through his business, like I was trying to learn about him so I could control him, make him mine. Just like Liz was doing to me.
I touched the corner of Lear’s file to the votive candle and watched it go up in flames.
“If you are going to rest your head in a house of the Lord,” Marsh said the next morning, “I need you to tell me precisely what you did to become like . . . this.”
He gestured from my head to my feet, lying across half of a church pew.
There was no hiding it now. No blaming my growth on shrunken dresses. Overnight, I had shot up a whole choral book’s length—the only thing I had to measure myself. That put me at about seven feet tall.
This would have upset me, should have upset me, but I found it hard to be mad about anything when I was eating. I tore open the plastic wrapping of another loaf of bread meant for sacrament and stuffed an entire slice in my mouth. “What do you mean what I did?”
Marsh placed his hands together so it looked like he was praying and pleading at the same time. “God’s punishment . . . can be forgiven. This curse can be reversed. By revealing all to Him, you will directly offset the growing. Or slow it down, at least. You just have to give me a full, um, confession.”
I gave my new airplane-print dress a tug down to my knees so Marsh couldn’t see any of “God’s punishment.” My old dress lay torn in half on the cot.
You’re wrong, I thought, eating another slice of bread. Only the Buried Lab could save me. And I had no clue where it had gone off to. Still, if Marsh was going to keep me housed in his church and feed me bread while I figured out what to do, I’d sing church hymns if he asked.
“What do I have to do?”
“It’s simple,” he said, wiping a bit of sweat from his forehead. “You just tell me what sins you committed to bring you to your, em, current state.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Normally we would meet in the confessional booth, but . . .”
“I can’t fit,” I finished for him.
I stuffed another piece of bread in my mouth. The loaf was half gone. What could I tell the reverend made me this way? That a bunch of mad scientists, including my half sister, had zapped me with charcoal pyramids so I could terrorize Pennybrooke—all for the entertainment of some pervy shlub in the sky that I called Dad?
I swallowed the bread and shrugged. “I don’t know what I did.”
Marsh shifted in his suit, as if trying to wriggle out of a snakeskin. “I . . . have been told . . . I can come across as . . . cold.”
Someone should have also told him that warmth came in the delivery, but it wouldn’t be me.
“But I want you to know that I . . . care about all God’s children.”
“Okay,” I said.
He straightened his horned-rim glasses, seeming relieved that the niceties were through. “Do you know about our Lord and savior?”
Right then God’s light was blinding me through a chip in the stained-glass lamb’s butt. Some believed God was a big invisible man in the sky who wore white robes and punished people for getting out and living a little. Meanwhile, I could actually see a big man in the sky who wore a bathrobe and wanted to see people punished for living at all. Ma might have called me her immaculate conception, but if there was a God, he most certainly wasn’t Daddy.
“Not really,” I said.
“Have you attended church?”
I once caught a piece of a sermon on TV that talked about the punishment God had in store for all unmarried women. Ma came home and found me crying and switched the TV off.
Now listen to me, Phoebe. You forget every word of that sermon, you hear? It isn’t God who decides what’s wrong with people and punishes them. It’s people, all right? They decide what makes them comfortable, then say it was God’s idea, and they punish you until you start looking and acting just the way they want you to. And if you don’t, they lock you up or kill you or, or abandon you. I’d rather deal with a dozen Shivers than be beholden to a man in power. At least you know you can’t reason with a Shiver.
I stuffed another piece of
bread in my mouth. “You mean besides the coven?”
Marsh’s eyes flashed, then calmed. “I can sense you’re kidding. But I would encourage you to resist that sort of humor. Even joking about these topics can tempt you into flirting with, em, unsafe experimentation.”
I tried to smile. I hadn’t had this much fun since Ma last plucked my eyebrows.
I crumpled up the empty bread bag. “I smoke cigarettes.”
“Yes?”
“And I eat a lot, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“And . . .” My mind drew a blank, a little disappointed with all the sinning I hadn’t done yet. “Oh,” I said, staring at the last slice of bread. “I took money out of the donations box. I’m sorry.”
Marsh gave a grim expression. “I suppose that is what it’s there for. Charitable cases such as yourself.”
That wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. “Thank you.”
Marsh nodded, then rubbed his hands together. “Perhaps you are . . . obsessed with dresses? Makeup, jewelry, things of that sort? Perhaps this growth spurt is God’s punishment for desiring . . . material things. He has seen to it that you cannot, em, wear anything pretty.”
I ran my hand along the airplane-print dress. It was made for a larger woman, but it fit my new body like the skimpy dresses banned from late-night television because they showed the women’s legs moving.
“Well, God doesn’t have to worry about that anymore,” I said. “Soon, nothing will fit me.”
Marsh’s cheeks paled.
I remembered that he had worried that Ma’s wantonness would destroy the town. And in a twisted way he was right. If Ma wasn’t such a firecracker, Daddy’s eyes wouldn’t have followed her, and there wouldn’t be any problems. But that wasn’t her fault, was it? It was the man in the sky who leered at her. It was the men in the lab who concocted Shivers to keep things interesting. People like Marsh blamed women like Ma because they had no idea Daddy and those men existed.
Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower Page 11