“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“Fair warning,” Harlan said. “Be prepared to be amazed.”
I crossed my arms and pretended to shiver. “Ooh. Chills.”
As I leaned toward the microscope, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, I heard footsteps in the doorway behind me. When I looked back, I saw Mick Mason walking in with Keegan Hoke and Deke Chambers.
“That’s a great idea,” Mick said. “Let’s all take a peek, huh?”
FOUR: LENNY
I never even saw them come in—Mick, and the two jerks that followed him around like scavengers, bottom-feeders that lived on the random scraps of viciousness that floated in Mick’s wake like debris off a garbage scow. Their names were Keegan and Deke, but Harlan called them Sid and Nancy after some punk rockers from the ’70s.
Anyway, before I knew it, they were in the lab, Mick in front and the other two hanging back, sauntering over toward us with big, slanting yellow grins on their faces. Sid was actually cracking his knuckles, and Nancy was picking his teeth, as if they were both trying harder than usual to be tough-guy clichés.
I couldn’t believe it. For the first time ever, the girl of my dreams—whom I’d literally dreamt about just last night—was standing here in the lab, showing visible interest in my groundbreaking discovery, which was destined to shake the foundations of molecular biology to their very core, and Mick Mason had to show up again to humiliate me, possibly to death.
“What do you want?” Zooey asked. She hadn’t looked through the microscope yet, and now I had the sinking feeling that she never would.
“Oh, I dunno,” Mick said, looking around at the Bunsen burners and Florence flasks. “This is science class, right?” He walked past a rack of petrie dishes, where one of the biology classes had been cultivating some exotic bacteria. “Maybe I wanna do some research.”
“Leave those alone,” I said.
“What, these?” He picked up one of the petrie dishes, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it, cracking it under his boot heel. “Whoops.”
“Mick...” Zooey said.
“That’s what you do here, right?” Mick tipped over another petrie dish and shook it, looking slightly disappointed when nothing visible fell out. Then he shot a glance back to Sid, who stepped outside, while the other one, Nancy, closed the door and stationed himself there. “Like, experiments and stuff?”
“Yo, man,” Harlan said, moving forward with his chin up and his shoulders raised, “you heard him. Leave it alone.”
Mick turned and looked at Harlan. For a second I expected the usual back-and-forth between them: taunts, threats, jeers, sizing each other up, all the typical grunt-and-bluster that guys go through before one of them either backs down or blows up.
But Mick just punched Harlan in the stomach. I could actually hear the wind go out of Harlan’s lungs in a soft whoosh, and he doubled over, clutching his gut and trying to breathe.
“What’d you say?” Mick asked, towering over him. “What’d you just say to me? Huh?”
But Harlan couldn’t answer, and neither could I. That frozen feeling had spread across the entire corner of the lab where I was standing.
“Quit it, Mick,” Zooey said. “Just leave him alone.”
“Oh, I’ll leave him alone.” He started walking toward Zooey, his long arms swinging casually at his sides. Zooey stood her ground, put her hand on her hip and cocked her head, trying to act casual, but I could tell she wasn’t sure what he was going to do either.
“C’mere,” Mick said, grabbing her. “Hey, what happened to your sticker? Aren’t you nice anymore?”
“Knock it off!”
“Gimme a kiss.”
“I said stop!”
“Come on, it’s Christmas.”
Watching all this, I realized there was a pressure rising in my chest, like a balloon expanding somewhere between my stomach and my lungs. It had been building up until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Let her go,” I said.
Mick stopped and swung around to look at me, eyebrows arched, his whole face screwed up as if he couldn’t believe his ears.”What?”
“You heard me.” The words sounded even shakier, more of a mouse’s squeak than an actual human voice, but I managed to get them out.
Mick let go of Zooey as if she didn’t interest him anymore and walked slowly across the lab toward me. “You just don’t get it, do you, Cyrus?” Reaching out with both hands, he gave me the slightest finger tap in the middle of my chest, but it was still enough to move me three steps back. “You’re a nobody in this school. You’re freakin’ invisible.”
“Invisible things can still have mass,” I mumbled.
His head jerked forward and hung slightly sideways, like a broken jack-in-the-box on a loose spring. “What?”
“In physics.” Somewhere over Mick’s shoulder, I could see Harlan shaking his head back and forth, making furious slashing gestures across his neck and mouthing the words No, Lenny, stop. But I couldn’t stop. Something had cracked open inside me now, and it all came babbling out in an anxious, unstoppable flood. “Down on the subatomic level, there’s a certain type of elementary particle called a strange quark. It’s not one of the more common ones, and it’s not even particularly stable—it only exists through high-energy collisions.” Mick was still staring at me, his piggy black eyes narrowed and blinking steadily, as if he were waiting for the words to travel down a long and crooked tube to his brain. “But when it meets its antiparticle, which has the same mass but the opposite sign, the two will annihilate each other.”
“Annihilate.” Mick grinned, back on familiar ground. “I know that word.” He walked back over to the counter where my microscope sat. “Like, I’m gonna annihilate your experiment.”
“No,” I said. “Leave that alone!”
“Who’s gonna make me?” he said. “You?” The idea seemed to amuse and disgust him at the same time. “You’re a strange freakin’ quark, all right, Cyrus, I’ll give you that.” He ran his dirty, long-nailed fingers over the curve of the microscope’s arm. “Tell you what: You get down on your knees and beg me and maybe—maybe—I’ll leave it alone.” And then, with another look at me: “Go ahead. Anytime.”
He stood there, waiting.
But I didn’t beg him.
I just punched him.
Looking back, it was one of those moments that don’t feel real, even when they’re happening. Mick went stumbling backwards into the counter, arms flailing out to catch himself, and one of his elbows hit the microscope, knocking it sideways and sending it crashing to the floor. Glass splintered. Slides broke. Somewhere on the subatomic level, my microscopic Singer Award-winning nano-rats went scurrying away, lost among the dust particles.
Everything went red. The next thing I knew I was on top of him, swinging, and he was underneath me, calling me a psycho and trying to get free.
I didn’t stop until I felt the hand on my shoulder pulling me off and I heard a voice in my ear saying, “Lenny, please, stop, that’s enough.”
Even in the heat of anger, I realized I knew that voice.
It was Zooey.
FIVE: HARLAN
They didn’t suspend him.
It was actually weird seeing Lenny’s parents and our vice principal, Mr. Cheney, trying to figure out how to discipline the poor kid. The problem had simply never come up before. Sure, Lenny had been to the office before, but always as the victim of somebody else’s abuse. This time there wasn’t a scratch on him—unless you counted the knuckles of his right hand. Mick Mason, on the other hand, looked like he’d fallen out of the buttkick tree and hit every branch on the way down. He swore that Lenny had tried to kill him, and from the injuries on his face, people almost believed him.
But then they talked to me, and after I told them what happened with Mick and Zooey, the school decided to let Lenny go with a warning. It didn’t make Lenny feel any better. He’d lost his entire experiment along with the mini-rats, and D
r. Snyder suspended his lab privileges because of what happened to the microscope.
Lenny’s parents only made matters worse.
“All they talk about is how this is going to look for them,” Lenny told me. “You know, how humiliating it is for two Nobel Prize-winning scientists to have a kid who gets kicked out of the middle school science lab—for breaking a microscope. Now they’re talking about shipping me off to Brixton Academy next year.”
“Again?” I asked. “I thought they were over that.” Brixton Academy was an expensive boarding school back east, where geniuses like Lenny studied math and science for twelve hours a day. It was equipped with state-of-the-art lab equipment and staffed by guys who designed rockets for NASA, and generally sounded like a total nightmare. “Did you tell them about the experiment?”
“Are you kidding? My dad’s on autopilot. That’s the worst part. I mean, I know I’m invisible here at school, but I didn’t realize how invisible I was at home until I got in trouble.”
“Lenny—”
“They don’t even know Zooey’s name. I’ve been talking about her for five years, and they still think her name is Zephyr.”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“I went up to her in the cafeteria at lunch,” Lenny said. “I actually got up the nerve to walk over there. She looked at me like I was some kind of psycho.”
“Lenny, look—”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “You think she prefers jerks like Mick Mason to me? You think she actually feels sorry for him?”
“Dude, don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid! I’m the smartest kid in this school!”
“There’s different kinds of stupid,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Lenny,” I said, “you’re a genius, okay? Nobody disputes that. But she’s a girl. You can’t apply the properties of physics here.”
Lenny didn’t answer. I’d never seen him so down. For the rest of the day, he shrank so deeply into himself that it seemed like he’d eventually collapse into a black hole of total depression, another eighth grade casualty. Meanwhile, I had problems of my own.
“I’m burning up in this thing,” I muttered.
“Hold still,” Zooey said. “We’re almost done.”
It was Wednesday, our final dress rehearsal, and we were backstage at the school auditorium while Zooey tugged and plucked at my costume, trying to make it fit. Out on stage I could hear the rest of the cast chattering away—elves and scientists, soldiers and reindeer, along with Mrs. Cassidy, our music teacher, practicing scales on the piano. Aria’s voice rose above it all, sharp and bossy, telling everybody to quiet down and take their places for the next musical number. All the while, Zooey kept fussing with my headpiece, and finally, with a sigh, she finished and took a step back.
“Okay, turn around.”
I caught my breath. The creature staring back at me from the mirror was a massive, lumpy Santa-beast in a tattered red suit, with a scraggly beard and a huge, pillow-stuffed gut. The foam mask fit over my head like a hood, and I had rubber claws sprouting from the ends of my gloves.
“Holy crap.”
“What do you think?”
“How am I supposed to sing in this thing?”
“Just be loud. Don’t worry about staying on key. You’re supposed to sound scary.”
“I can hardly breathe.”
“You’ll get used to it.” She took me by both shoulders and guided me on stage. “Careful. Don’t trip on the jack-in-the-box.”
The set was a ruined toyshop made to look like the North Pole after some horrific catastrophe. Aria was playing Mrs. Claus—the main female role, naturally—and she was standing in her red sequined gown next to George McDonald, dressed as a broken nutcracker with his jaw gaping open. Hundreds of Styrofoam peanuts lay scattered across the floor to represent snow blown in through broken windows.
“All right,” Zooey said, clapping her hands, “places, everybody.” The cast got up and moved to their spots. “Act one, scene three. Harlan, hurry up, come on.” She grabbed me by the belt and swung me around behind the plywood sleigh, shoving me down until I was out of sight. “You remember your cue?”
“Yeah.” I was actually more worried about knocking over the canvas flat behind me, but I squatted down behind the sleigh and ducked my head. Drops of sweat were already trickling down my back.
“Okay.” Zooey signaled back at Jimmy Colton, who was running the light board. “Places, everybody. Lights?”
I held my breath and got ready.
SIX: ZOOEY
The lights went down, and I felt my scalp prickling in anticipation. Even though it was just a rehearsal, that moment when the auditorium went quiet I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. In those few seconds, I felt like I was playing every part on stage, like I was every actor saying every line that I’d written.
In the silence, I pointed at Tej Singh and Priscilla Shrewsbury, giving them their cue. They stepped out from behind the curtain, dressed in military fatigues, crunching their way through the Styrofoam peanuts.
“Wait a second, Lieutenant,” Priscilla said. “Look at this.”
“Whoa.” Tej shined his flashlight across the darkened stage. “What happened here?”
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t look good.”
“What could do something like this?” Tej asked, looking around. “Polar bears? Wolves?”
“Not this far north,” Priscilla said, and I realized that I was mouthing the words along with her. Rule #1: Know your own story inside and out. “North Pole security systems are top-notch. Which means somebody disabled them from the inside.”
Tej took another step, and I shot a glance over at Harlan in the zombie Santa costume, crouched behind the sleigh. My whole body tensed with anticipation. In about ten seconds, he was supposed to jump up, screaming, and scare Tej and Priscilla to death.
Then everything went wrong.
When Harlan jumped, his right knee caught the sleigh and the whole thing teetered forward. He tried to hold it in place, but his leg was still in the air and he lost his balance, bumping into the canvas set behind him so that the sleigh and the backdrop both fell over with a crash. When the echoes faded, I heard somebody—probably Aria—let out a loud groan of disgust.
“What?” Harlan turned around. “What happened?” Except that he hadn’t learned how to enunciate behind the mask and beard, so it came out mushy and muffled. Muh? Muh appen?
“It’s okay.” I clapped my hands. “Bring up the houselights.” The lights came on. “Jerry? Alisa? Can you guys give me a hand here?” I signaled to two elves, and the three of us lifted the fallen sleigh back into place while a couple of volunteer stagehands set the background upright.
“Hey,” Harlan said, and I could tell that he was trying to speak more clearly through the beard, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You know, maybe I should just run on stage instead of jumping up. I could still scream and everything. That way—”
“It’s fine, Harlan. Just be more careful next time. We’ll work on your blocking.” I caught a glimpse of white underwear in the torn seat of the Santa costume. “Oh—you, uh, ripped your pants.”
“What? Where?” He reached around in back, turning away from me. Other kids were drifting over, Aria and Macy Yi and George McDonald, and Harlan backed away, trying to find a quiet corner. “Can you help me take this thing off?”
“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll fix it later. We need to keep going.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“Don’t bend over.”
“Can I at least take off my mittens?”
“No time,” I said. “We’re going again in five minutes.”
Harlan plunked himself down at the foot of the stage. The houselights had come up and I saw Aria charging across the stage in her full red velvet Mrs. Claus regalia and makeup. She l
ooked like the Ghost of Christmas Gone Berserk.
“What’s going on?” she snapped, waving one arm across the stage. “What just happened?”
“Relax,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“Our first performance is the day after tomorrow!”
I took a breath and tried to stay calm. “Things happen, Aria. Martha Gelhorn-Smith says—”
“Don’t you get it?” She was shouting now, and everybody had stopped to listen to her. “You’re not some bigtime producer! You’re just some geeky eighth grade girl, and your big holiday production is going to be a total disaster.” Stepping closer, she lowered her voice. “If I were directing this play, it would have gone like clockwork. No ripped costumes or broken sets. No missed cues. Clockwork.”
I felt my throat tighten as a slow burn of embarrassment crept up toward my hairline. I looked over and saw Harlan sitting at the foot of the stage in his Santa costume. At some point during Aria’s outburst, Lenny Cyrus had drifted into the gym and was standing next to him. Both of them were watching me, along with the rest of the cast and crew, to see how I was going to handle this near mutiny. Rule #2: Everybody has a plan until they get hit.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Aria,” I said. “I hope you realize how much I really appreciate your hard work.”
“You hope?” Her mouth puckered. “You know, that’s the difference between you and me, Zooey. I make things happen, while losers like you sit around and hope.” She started to walk away, and turned back and looked at me. “Oh, and by the way, you need to change Harlan’s entrance. He’s going to kill himself jumping over the sleigh.”
“He’ll be fine,” I said—and hoped it was true.
SEVEN: LENNY
After Zooey walked out of earshot, Harlan turned and looked at me. He was still wearing a zombie Santa mask, and he should have looked scary, but at the moment I was too excited to notice. There was an idea exploding in my head, the biggest one yet, and I couldn’t wait another second to get it out.
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 3