We went to Gray Rock first. The Navajo people were in the process of destroying some of the hogans that were still standing, though I didn’t understand why. I returned the kids to their parents, who sobbed in relief. One woman started to tremble, but Lear assured her that Connor was in the Pennybrooke hospital and that he was going to be okay.
Eugene came to greet us, his confident calmness replaced with a hollow expression. I explained that the kids had run away and I’d done my best to keep them safe.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We lost eight kids to the ants last night, Phoebe. And thirty-three adults.” He looked toward a tarp whose corner lifted with a breeze, revealing a pale arm. “It might have been worse if those kids had been here.”
“But Connor might not have been hurt,” I said.
He tried to smile. “Guess we’ll never know for sure.”
He extended his hand, and I shook it with my fingertips. I asked if they wanted any help cleaning up, but he said no. Only Maria waved goodbye.
Next, we went to the rocky outcropping.
“Where is she?” I asked Peak.
He crossed his arms.
I drove both hands into the sand and started to dig, flinging great wafts of sand into the air until my hand struck something metallic. I punctured the tunnel’s steel side with my thumbnail and then peeled it back easy as aluminum, exposing the haunted hallway.
While the sun rose, making the desert sparkle, I continued to dig up hallways and rooms like I was unearthing a toy in the biggest sandbox in the world. I came to a narrow hallway with white doors that looked just like a ward at an insane asylum.
On one of the doors was a note.
Until we meet again, Sister.
—L
I flicked off the door’s handle, and it slowly creaked open.
“Ma?” I said.
There was a breath of silence and then . . . “Phoebe?”
Ma, hunched and filthy, stepped into the light. She looked like she hadn’t showered or eaten since I last saw her. But she was breathtaking because she was herself.
Ma blocked the sun with her hand and looked up and up and up. “Phoebe?”
Oh. Right.
I moved my giant head so my shadow covered her.
“It’s me,” I said.
Ma recovered from her shock. “Who is this cover model and what have you done with my daughter?”
I laughed and put out my hand, and she stepped into it. I lifted her up to my face so she could squeeze my cheek with both arms and kiss and kiss and kiss it. We both cried, but my tears were much bigger.
“Guess I really do look like a Framsky now, eh?” I said.
Ma touched my cheek. “I don’t see it.” We both laughed and cried some more. Ma wiped her eyes. “Phoebe, do me a favor and open the cell across from mine?”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Peak said.
I gave him a look, then reached down and flicked off the other handle. The door slowly creaked open, and a starved-looking leopard crept out. Lear took a step back as Pan-Cake started to growl.
“It’s okay,” Ma said. “She won’t hurt anyone. She’s just having a hard time changing back.”
I set Ma down and then carefully scooped the leopard from the hallway. She was all bones and skin, and she slumped over on her side when I laid her on the desert sand. Ma knelt next to the leopard and petted her ears.
“Hi, Alexandrea,” she said. “It’s good to finally put a face with a voice.” She smiled up at me. “Lex’s voice kept me company through the long nights.”
So, I wasn’t the only one the lab had been experimenting on. There was a woman trapped in that leopard skin.
I turned to Peak. “Liz said she could make me normal again.”
“Hate to break it to ya, kid,” he said, “but she lied. Think about it. There’s never been a disaster out there that’s made creatures shrink. Where would be the fun in that for the big guy?”
My giant shoulders sank slowly. I should’ve known. There probably wasn’t a charcoal pyramid room big enough to fit me anyway. I stared at my shadow, stretching across the desert. So, this was my size now. A giantess for life. Where would I find enough food? Where would I sleep? How would I get new clothes?
“Phoebe?”
I looked down at Lear.
“Zap me,” he said. “Make me big like you.”
A new future flashed before my eyes. One where I was still a giantess . . . but not alone. I had Lear at my side. He wore a loincloth like Tarzan while we sat at the back of a drive-in, stuffing our faces with bathtubs full of popcorn.
I looked at my bruised fists and my bloodied legs and I remembered the locusts. Lear thought if he was big enough, he could outgrow his demons. But in my experience, they only grew with me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Lear.
I started to dig again. I dug through the hallway, past my cell, past the rooms with all the monsters, until I came to the room with the charcoal pyramids. I didn’t stop smashing until it was a pile of rubble and shards.
“You think that’ll help?” Peak said. “You think we don’t have labs in other places? Someone’s gotta keep the big guy entertained! What you gonna to do that all by yourself?”
I picked charcoal shards out of my hands. I knew this was the life I’d chosen when I decided to return to this channel. But now that I considered all the problems I still had to face, I grew so overwhelmed I thought I might collapse under the weight.
I felt hands on my leg. “We’ll figure it out,” Ma said. “All of it. It’s going to be hard for me to do your hair in the morning, but we’ll make do.”
I picked Ma up and held her to my neck for a long time. She was right. So long as we were together, we could figure it out. We’d found a way to get by since I was born.
Ma and I sat on the desert ground and caught up while Alexandrea the leopard slept in the sunshine and Pan-Cake kept a weary eye on her. When I told Ma how I finally got Daddy’s attention she laughed and said she’d never thought of trying that before. Then she told me she whiled away the lonely nights in her cell by telling Alexandrea stories about me—about how I always found new ways to keep myself entertained in every town. That was before Alexandrea transformed, of course.
“Did you know?” I asked Ma. “Did you know that we were putting people in danger by moving around so much?”
Ma dug out the dirt in her fingernails. “I . . . had an idea. But I couldn’t bear the thought of giving you up. I . . .” Ma held her tired head. “Oh God.”
I picked her up and squeezed her gently to my chest. “It’s okay, Ma. We do what we need to. Shh.”
We held each other for several minutes, and when I’d finally hugged her to my heart’s content, I saw Lear crawling out of the gutted Buried Lab, brushing sand from his pants. Mr. Peak climbed out after him.
“What just happened?” I said. “What did you guys do?”
Peak looked from Lear to me. “Nothing.”
Lear wouldn’t look at me. His skin was shining, like it was covered with a reflective mist.
“Lear?” I said.
“It’s nothing, Phoebe,” he said, and met my eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”
I didn’t know what happened, but I didn’t like it. What else could I do except wait for Lear to tell me?
My shadow fell over Peak. “You killed a lot of people.”
“Yeah, I did.” He crossed his arms. “Saved a lot too.”
I picked him up and I set him in the room with all the dead electronics.
“You love this lab so much?” I said. “You can live in it.”
And with one sweep of my arm, I buried Peak in the lab.
Lear and Ma and I sat in the desert while Pan-Cake sniffed circles around us, making little digs here and there at the sand. The sun sat bleary at the bottom of an uncomfortably open sky.
“What now?” I said. “Where will we go?”
Ma reached up and held my pinkie.
“Another roast chicken, Miss Lane?”
I glanced at the line stretching out of the entrance to the big top tent and my stomach tightened.
“Better make it six,” I said.
“Coming right up.”
The carny who had flirted with me all those months and a lifetime ago, ran off to the food tent, which was packed to the gills just for yours truly.
It had been the carnival owner’s idea. After he’d crawled out of the rubble of the roller rink, the laser from the flying saucer having barely singed off his eyebrows, he had seen the wreckage of his carnival and collapsed to his knees. “I’m ruined. Ruined.”
But then he saw me, bigger than life, wandering in from the desert—Ma and Lear, a Pomeranian and a leopard in my arms—without a place in the world to be. He said the sun was shining above my giant head, and it gave him one whopper of an idea. Ma and I didn’t have much choice but to officially join the carnival. After we found out Connor and Calvin were okay, of course. And that Rhoda and her father hadn’t survived the roller rink attack.
I needed to walk out my nerves before our first show started. I stayed low along the back side of the tents so no one would see me before the big reveal. It would be my first time onstage, and while throwing up in front of a live audience would be embarrassing, vomiting all over every person in that audience would end my career before it began.
I came to a tent that glowed with flickering light. The calming guitars of “Sleep Walk” played over the radio.
“Knock, knock,” I said.
“Come in.”
I parted the flap with my pinkie and found Lear hunched over a gas lamp, sitting on a booster seat, inking the pincers on a picture of a gigantic ant. The carnival poster read COME HEAR THE TALE OF THE BATTLE OF PENNYBROOKE! 75¢! Lear had caught up with the carnival a ways down the road, having left his mom in the care of the general. He made a deal with the carnival owner to draw promotional posters for the show and was sending every dollar he earned back home. I gave him extra to replace his mom’s food storage.
“How’s it coming?” I said.
“Like I never want to look at another antennae again,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“How are you feeling?”
I put a hand to my stomach. “Like I swallowed a lawn mower.”
He smiled, a swipe of ink across his cheek. “You’ll forget all about it the moment they start whistling at you.”
“Not if they start screaming instead,” I said.
Lear rubbed his face. He looked tired. And while he always looked small to me, he seemed more so these days. Like he might be shrinking. His shirt hung loose around his shoulders, his belt was cinched to the last notch, and the brush was much too big in his hand. I’d stopped growing months ago, but every night when we cuddled, he took up less space in my palm.
What had Peak done to him in the desert? I remembered Lear’s insistence on being zapped. I remembered his skin sparkling in the desert sun and the room in the haunted hallway, twining with sparkling mist.
I sighed and tried on a smile. I didn’t want to ask about it until Lear brought it up.
“I’ve been thinking,” Lear said, tapping the inkpot. “About your dad.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, sitting cross-legged in front of the tent.
“If he’s had a remote since your Ma could see him, but remotes weren’t invented until 1954, and the one he has doesn’t have a cord . . . what if he’s from the future?”
I looked up at the sky. Daddy had been gone a long while now. Months. His La-Z-Boy stood empty, like a throne waiting for its king. At least he’d left the television on.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I dunno,” Lear said, shrugging. “Maybe he doesn’t like this futuristic world, and he’s looking back on a simpler time. It was just a thought.”
These thoughts were too much for me. The world Daddy lived in. Whether Beth was alive there. How long our world would last. As Liz had said, sometimes it was best not to think about your insignificance in the universe. Besides, with rebuilding the carnival and rehearsing for the traveling show, I hadn’t had much time to think about these things. Or the fact that Liz and the rest of the lab were still out there somewhere.
A finished poster lay drying on the floor. It showed Lear and Marsh, the five Navajo children, and me standing in the inked carnival before the lights popped on. The caption read “The Quiet Before the Swarm.”
“You made my boobs bigger,” I said.
Lear scratched behind his ear with the brush handle. “Sorry about that.”
“I didn’t say I was mad.”
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, WELCOME TO THE WONDROUS, THE GLORIOUS, THE MOST JAW-DROPPING TRAVELING SHOW YOU HAVE EVER LAID EYES UPON!”
The lawn mower in my stomach started to rev. “That’s my cue,” I said.
“Knock ’em dead,” Lear said. “Not literally.”
“You coming to watch?”
Lear started tracing pincers with his too-big brush again. “I’ve gotta ink this before it goes to the printers tomorrow. I’ll catch the next one.”
I nodded and let the flap fall shut.
On the way to the big top tent I passed Alexandrea snoozing in her cage. The leopard was no longer skin and bones, but she was still having a hard time finding her way back to her human form.
The carny ran up with a platter of six roast chickens, and I gulped them down, bones and all.
“You water Pan-Cake?” I asked, trying to hide my nervousness.
“Soaked her,” he said. “Especially that little flower sprouting at the tip of her tail.”
“Thank you.”
I reached the big top tent.
Shit. Here we go.
I was numb from stem to stern. I couldn’t feel my toes and stared down fifty feet to make sure they were still there. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore, I reminded myself. Not even the staring eyes of an audience of thousands.
Now that I’d grown used to my crane-size limbs and tank-like feet, I had no one to compare myself to. Ook was dead and also a gorilla, and all the women I met were no bigger than my pinkie. Even Ma was just Ma.
As old Phoebe, I’d always felt like my space was not mine. But I’d outgrown that feeling now.
I slipped under the back flap of the big top tent. Ma was standing behind the closed curtain in her iconic torn dress, looking radiant.
“Ready to show ’em what we’ve got?” she said.
“I think I’m going to pass out,” I said.
“Try not to, sweetie,” Ma said. “I won’t be able to catch you, and you’ll bring the whole tent down.” She met my eye. “Remember, if anyone heckles you, you can toss them out. You’re your own bouncer.”
That made me feel a little better.
“Cleavage,” Ma said.
I looked down and readjusted the silken top made by the carnival’s seamstress. It was comfortable enough, but it didn’t have that same feeling of love and care as the piece Beth made. I still wondered if I’d ever see her again.
I stood to my full fifty feet behind the curtain with Ma standing by my side. The carnival owner had requested that we re-create Emperor Ook carrying Ma to the top of the Chrysler Building, with me hauling her up the support pole to the top of the big top tent. But we had nixed that idea and come up with a show of our own.
“AND NOW, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO,” the announcer said, “I ASK YOU TO TURN YOUR EYES UP-UP-UPWARD TO SEE THE BEAUTIFUL, THE SUBLIME . . . PHOEBE LANE!”
“Breathe,” Ma said through smiling teeth.
I put on a smile of my own and took a giant breath as the curtain started to rise.
The End.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following early readers: Mark S., Breana R., Chris T., and Brooke K.
He’d li
ke to thank his agent, John Cusick, for preventing him from submitting his bat-shit first draft; Christian Trimmer, for taking a chance on the bat-shit second draft; and his editor, Liz Kossnar, for directing the story to a more honest place (also for allowing him to include an anecdote about one of her real-life dates).
Thank you to the team at Simon & Schuster BFYR, especially designer Krista Vossen, jacket artist Francesco Francavilla, and comic artist Sam Bosma, for making the book resemble a bona fide 1950s sci-fi movie.
Thank you to the author’s parents, for giving him details he couldn’t find in his research; Greg of Black Cat Comics, for safely directing him through the splatter horror section; and most of all, Traci and Rebecca, for pointing out his missteps when it came to body image and race issues. The author takes full responsibility for any inaccuracies or ignorance these wonderful people didn’t catch.
Finally, thank you to Hannah for being so darned wonderful through all of this.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTIAN McKAY HEIDICKER watched a lot of TV as a kid. (Probably too much.) It disturbs/enthralls him to think that the characters he was watching were sentient. (They probably were.) Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower is his second novel. His first was about how he plays too many video games. Learn more at CMHeidicker.com.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Christian-Mckay-Heidicker
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Sam-Bosma
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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ALSO BY CHRISTIAN McKAY HEIDICKER
Cure for the Common Universe
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Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower Page 24