“You’re not really a virus, are you?” the astrovirus asked.
“What?” I frowned. “Yes, I am. I’m a—new mutation, like you said.”
“Please.” It made a disbelieving lip-fart and splashed me in the face mask with some lymph. “I might not be the smartest virus in the mix, but your chemical makeup is all screwy. Way more complex than any virus I ever met. Plus, I’m pretty sure you’re wearing deodorant. And that phone call? Dude, come on. Dead giveaway.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Whatever,” the virus said. “It’s your call, but I don’t hang with liars. ’Fess up now or I bail.” It turned around and started swimming away.
“Okay, okay, wait.” I shook my head. “You’re right. I’m not a virus. I’m just a guy.”
He turned around, sizing me up. “Little small for your age, aren’t you?”
“I used nanotechnology to miniaturize my atomic structure.”
“Whoa, nice one!” Now the astrovirus actually sounded impressed. “And I thought I was twisted. So what’s the plan? You gonna infect her with something nasty?”
“What?”
“Colonize her bowel?”
“No!”
“So what’s the plan?”
“I just need to tell her something.”
The astrovirus just floated there in front of me for a second like it didn’t understand. “Excuse me?”
“I need to talk to her.”
“And you couldn’t just, like, send her a text message?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. It’s so much easier to, like, shrink yourself down to microscopic level, impersonate a virus, and smuggle yourself up to her brain. What’s your real name, anyway?”
“Lenny.”
“Okay, Lenny, call me Astro, okay? That way we can at least get past this whole interspecies thing.”
I stared at him for a second. “Maybe it’s the lack of oxygen in the hemoglobin, but I think I’m seeing things.” I squinted, pushed the diving mask up off my face for a second, and rubbed my eyes, but what I’d thought was a hallucination was becoming more and more real. When I’d first run into him down in the stomach, Astro had just been this gray, relatively amorphous, vaguely starshaped blob. But now I realized he actually looked like a guy, with a chubby face, half-lidded eyes, an upturned nose, and a mouth that was twisted up into a kind of permanent half-smile. “You’ve really got a face?”
“Well, duh, dude. What did you think I was talking out of, my pores?”
“But, I mean”—I tried not to make it sound offensive—“you’re a virus.”
“So?”
“So I’ve looked at plenty of viruses under the microscope, and I’ve never seen one with a face before.”
“Maybe you haven’t looked close enough,” Astro said. “You ever think of that, Linus Pauling?”
“No, but, I mean—” I shook my head. “Does everything down here have a face?”
“I dunno,” he said, mimicking me perfectly. “Does everything up there have a face?”
“Yeah, but we’re people.”
“So, maybe viruses are just like little tiny people.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Why not? We reproduce like crazy and cause all kinds of trouble in the meantime. There are some uncanny similarities.” He waited for me to argue, but when you put it like that, the comparison wasn’t easy to dispute. “Anyway, tomato, to-mah-to. I gotta ask, that doorknob you were talking to—that was your dad, wasn’t it?”
“Picked up on that, did you?”
“Viruses are pretty observant. What we lack in book learning, we make up for in street smarts. Another thing you seem to be sorely lacking, I might add.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying—”
A sudden, low-throated snarling sound rose up from somewhere in the deep tissue, filling the lymph node with echoes and reverberations. I whirled around and stared up into the gray outer capsule above us, listening to all the weird autoregulatory noises of Zooey’s body going about its business. I’d already gotten used to the continuous thump and whoosh of her heart and circulation, the sound of air billowing in and out of her lungs, the aftershocks of her voice like thunder far off in the distance, from way up in her larynx, although I could never make out the actual words.
But this noise was different—a menacing growl, like some primordial sea creature swimming up from the depths of the lymph to swallow us both.
“Gas bubble,” Astro said. “You’ll hear a lot more of those. She’s getting hungry for lunch. What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Yikes. Chili day in the caf. How long are you planning on hanging out here?”
“As long as it takes,” I said, flicking my eyes at the digital readout inside the mask. According to the display, I had a little more than three hours left before I started to get big again, but time passed differently on the inside. It seemed like I’d been here all day already, maybe longer.
“Well, if you’re smart, you’ll get out fast,” Astro said. “Zooey loves chili, but it does stuff to her that I wouldn’t wish on the worst vaccine in the system.” He turned around and looked at me. “Which reminds me—on your way up to the cerebral cortex to whisper sweet nothings to your beloved, how exactly are you planning on sneaking through the blood-brain barrier?”
“The...?” I opened my mouth to answer and snapped it shut again, stunned at my own stupidity. When it came to neural anatomy, the blood-brain barrier was Fort Knox—four hundred miles of narrow capillaries packed with epithelial cells whose sole purpose in life was to protect the brain from infection by keeping out large molecules like bacteria while letting other specific molecules through. If I’d been a molecule of alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine, I could’ve sailed right on in without a care in the world, but in my current situation, I’d have a better chance of sneaking a nuke through O’Hare Airport. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Yeah,” Astro said, “that’s what I figured. You can’t just boogie into the hypothalamus and start telling neurons what to do. You wouldn’t last five seconds up there.”
“So what do we do?”
He grinned. “You’re in luck. I know a guy. A steroid, his name’s Lug. Not too bright, but he’s lipid-soluble.”
“Where do we find him?”
“That’s the good news. He just happens to hang out with some pretty hot hormones nearby.”
“Hormones?”
“Oh yeah.”
I took in a breath. “Okay...”
“What?” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You sure you’re up to this?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why not? Let’s go.”
“Hold up a second,” Astro said. “Are you telling me you want to get down with the ovaries? You want to kick it with some estrogen?”
I didn’t want to, really, less and less with every second. But he was right—I wasn’t going to get through the blood-brain barrier alone. Steroids like Lug, on the other hand, could slip right through the BBB, entering into the cerebrospinal fluid without ever having to tap the brakes. So in my bravest voice, I said, “Let’s go.”
“I’m warning you, Einstein. These ladies party pretty hard this time of the month. I mean, it can get wild down there. You might not make it back.”
“You’re a virus, right?”
“I’m a virus, yeah. But you’re just some shrunk-down little punk who took a wrong turn at the esophagus. Fair warning: If things start going sideways, you’re on your own.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Fair enough,” Astro shrugged. “Follow me.”
FOURTEEN: HARLAN
I was still in Mr. Cheney’s office, trying to figure out how to make a graceful exit, when I looked out the window across the hall and saw Zooey backing out of the school nurse’s office with a note her hand. Even from this distance, with her face t
urned away from me, I could see that she wasn’t doing well. She looked shaky, a little unsteady on her feet, and she had to lean against the wall to keep her balance.
My first thought was, Lenny, you tool. Are you doing this to her?
“Mr. Williams?” Mr. Cheney cleared his throat, which actually made the classic harrumph sound. I wondered if he practiced in front of a mirror. “Are we keeping you from something?”
“What? No, sir. No.” I turned back to where Cheney was still sitting across from Lenny’s parents. Lenny’s dad was poised upright in his chair with that smacked-between-the-eyes look on his face. He kept staring at my cell phone, as if he somehow expected Lenny’s voice to come back and keep explaining the process, and then up at Lenny’s mother, who just kept blinking and shaking her head slowly back and forth.
I glanced back out the door. Zooey was gone, headed back to class. I hoped that she wasn’t really sick, but if she was—
A hand fell on my arm, and I jumped, then turned and saw Lenny’s dad standing over me. “Listen to me, Harlan. Do I have your complete attention?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Because I want you to tell me everything—do you understand? Every detail of every equation. I want to see his notes. How he did it, and how long the process is going to last, and most importantly, I want to know where he is this very second.”
“Honey,” Lenny’s mom started. “Maybe—”
“Right now,” Lenny’s dad said, not taking his eyes off me. “Is that clear?”
I stared back at them. Part of me—the 1.0 version that still feared adults and what they could do to me—wanted to spill my guts and tell them everything. I didn’t even know where Lenny’s notes were, but I could at least relay the tiny amount that he’d explained to me back in the lab.
But then, as I looked deeper into Lenny’s father’s eyes, I realized what was really bothering him. It wasn’t that his son might be in danger.
It wasn’t that Lenny might be endangering someone else.
It was that Lenny had done something that his father hadn’t been able to do.
I didn’t know Lenny’s dad particularly well, but I knew him well enough to understand that when it came to something like this, being runner-up—especially to his own son—would drive him crazy. With the possible exception of his wife, Dr. Donald Cyrus was used to being the smartest one in the room, always.
That was when I knew what I had to do.
“Dr. Cyrus,” I said, spreading my hands in front of me as if to show I had nothing to hide, “I’m sorry. This was all my idea, and it was a big mistake.”
“What was?” he demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“Lenny didn’t think you’d actually fall for it. But he promised he’d go along with the joke, so I—”
“Wait a minute.” Lenny’s dad glared at me. “Joke? You mean to tell me this whole thing was just a gag? He didn’t really undergo the miniaturization process?”
“Miniaturization process?” Mr. Cheney said. “What in the world...?”
“Of course not.” I kept my attention on Lenny’s dad, who was watching me very carefully now. He was still angry, but there was something else going on underneath the anger. It looked suspiciously like relief. “The process is...” I tried to think of the way Lenny would have said it. “...way too unstable. I mean, he found your notes, but he said that if a Nobel Prize winner like you couldn’t make the process work, there was no way that he’d be able to do it.”
“Well.” Lenny’s dad straightened his shoulders and nodded. “He’s absolutely right about that. It goes without saying.” He glanced back at Mr. Cheney. “There you have it. This whole thing was just a practical joke.”
“So where is he then?” Lenny’s mother asked.
“Who, Lenny? Oh, he’s...” I paused. “He’s in the auditorium. Helping Zooey and Aria get ready for the play. He’s fine.”
“Play? What play?”
“Come on, Susan. We’ve wasted enough time here.” Lenny’s dad was already taking her hand, looking at his watch, and gathering his coat from the rack by the door, then shooting a glance back at me. “I certainly hope you two are satisfied. You’ve disrupted our workday with your little prank, bringing us out here for nothing. I expected more of Lenny.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, getting up myself. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t wait to get back to English class.
“Well, you certainly should be. Come on, Susan.”
Hand in hand, they headed out of the office. But Lenny’s mom was still looking at me sideways as she followed him out the door.
FIFTEEN: ZOOEY
I was in the bathroom with my early dismissal note from the nurse’s office, trying to gargle the nasty taste from my mouth, when another one of Martha Gelhorn-Smith’s rules for success popped into my head.
Rule #2: Sometimes you have to break the rules.
I looked up at myself in the mirror, a little shocked. I wasn’t normally a rule-breaker. In fact, I’d always been the kind of person who did what she was told. Even the play had been written in my spare time, after I’d finished my homework.
But something had changed, and I wasn’t sure what. I felt different. Free, somehow. I thought about Nurse Fitch sitting of the floor with her hair stuck to her forehead, screaming at me, and I started to laugh.
“Rule number eleven,” I told my reflection. “It doesn’t matter whether if you’re a rule-breaker or not—once you puke in somebody’s face, there’s nowhere to go but up.”
When I got back to Mrs. Emeritus’s classroom, she was talking about how the Black Death had laid waste to Europe, killing twenty-five million people in the Middle Ages. “Some of you might have heard of this horrific disease referred to by its other name,” she said. “The bubonic plague.”
Somebody giggled in the back of the classroom.
“The word bubonic comes from the word bubo, meaning ‘swollen gland,’ and—” Now there were several boys sniggering in the back, but Mrs. Emeritus was glaring at me. “Back so soon, Miss Andrews?”
“She said I was fine,” I said.
“Really.”
“Uh-huh.”
I slipped back into my seat and listened to her talk about all the different unspeakable ways that the plague killed people. She was really getting into it, talking about rats and fleas and people dying in the streets. When the bell rang, I got up and grabbed my binder and textbook.
“Miss Andrews? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” I shouted back, and without waiting for her response, I ducked back out the door.
That was when I saw the news crew, cameras and microphones and all, coming up the hall.
SIXTEEN: LENNY
Astro and I heard Zooey’s ovaries a long time before we got to one. The pounding rhythm of what sounded like tribal electronica pulsated up through the fallopian tubes along with thousands of voices screaming, laughing, and cheering, getting steadily louder, like an all-girl rock concert going on somewhere inside the tubal vessels, until we came blasting through the ovarian artery and landed smack in the middle of the party.
For a second, I stood there looking around and trying to get my bearings. Like a lot of things I’d run into down here, the ovary—right or left, I wasn’t sure which one we were in—was a lot bigger and noisier than I’d expected. The place was packed with moving bodies. Flashing disco lights and strobes pulsed off the walls, and the floor was made up of thousands of different-colored squares that lit up and pulsed in time with the music.
“Awesome, right?” Astro shouted. “I’m telling you, bro, nobody parties like these girls! Nobody!”
I’d had my doubts about coming down here, but he was right—Id never been to a scene like this in my life. Granted, I’d never really been to any sort of party since Harlan had invited me to his seventh birthday at Chuck E. Cheese, but still...
“Go ahead!” Astro shouted. “What are you waiting for? Get out there an
d mingle. I’ll go find Lug.”
Before I could ask him where to start, something nudged into me from behind. When I turned around, a frantic sea of undulating bodies—curvaceous molecular clusters, colorful and bubbling, coiling and twisting around one another—started to push in around me, pressing up close on all sides. To my new, molecularly heightened senses, it all smelled like Juicy Fruit and papaya hair product.
“Woot!” one of them shouted, grabbing me and spinning me around. “Are you ready to get cah-razy?”
I looked straight at her, saw the molecule’s face—big shimmering eyes with smiling lips and a bundle of blond hair swinging from side to side while she danced. She was wearing some kind of sleekly kinetic black membrane that clung to her curves, shimmering like an electric prom dress.
The music got louder and everybody started dancing. Off to the left, I saw Astro plunging right in the middle of it, jumping from one hormone molecule to another. The compound in front of me leaned in close, and I could feel the heat pouring off her in waves.
“I like your chemical makeup,” I shouted.
“Thanks!” she shouted back. “What’s your name?”
“Lenny.” I evaluated her structure, trying not to be obvious about checking out the two hydroxyls swelling up out of her D ring. “You’re...estriol, right?”
“Hey, that’s right!” She looked impressed. “Have we met somewhere before?”
“I’ve read about you in books.” That wasn’t, strictly speaking, true—most of what I remembered came from a pretty embarrassing movie in sixth grade health class called Some Body’s About to Change!.
The estriol squealed. “That’s awesome! Have you met everyone?”
“Not yet.”
We started making our way through the crowd, squeezing between compounds I only vaguely remembered from biology. Up ahead I saw clusters of more estriol, estradiol and estrone, progesterone, and aldosterone, all decked out to the nines, dancing and pressing up against me in a jouncing sea of high-energy hormones.
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 7