“Re-education center, now.” The leukocyte in front of me grabbed my arms, taking a long look at my swim fins, the shredded diving suit, and mask. “You too, bug. You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cuff ’em and ship ’em both to One Kay.”
I started to argue, but then a pair of slippery-feeling handcuffs encircled my wrists. They felt rubbery, but when I tried to pull out of them, the spiral polymer only tightened around me in a double helix—DNA strands. They were actually using Zooey’s genetic material to lock me up.
I looked around and saw a low-slung white transport sitting at the entrance to the ovarian vein. It looked like a big semitransparent bubble. Two of the white blood cells swung me around and shoved me into the back. I was still trying to protest when they jammed Astro in next to me and slammed the hatch.
“Don’t worry about it,” Astro muttered. “Reeducation center’s a joke. My lawyer will have us out of here faster than you can say ‘metabolic uptake.’”
I wasn’t so sure, and I was about to say so when the headset on my ear started to vibrate. With my hands bound, I managed to nudge my cheek against the On switch, activating the phone.
“Hello?”
“Lenny?” Harlan’s voice sounded panicked. “Things are really bad here, man!”
“Yeah?” I said, my head thumping off the seat cushion behind me as the transport shot up through the ovarian vein, hurtling forward along the curve of the vessel wall. “It’s not exactly Disneyland down here, either.”
“Zooey’s gone completely haywire.”
“Okay, I meant to warn you about that,” I told him. “You’re probably going to notice some difference in her behavior. Her metabolic uptake is speeding up, so you may notice her appetite increasing. Maybe she’ll eat more chicken nuggets at lunch.”
“Dude, we just had square dancing in gym class and she tried to kiss me. Her face is all flushed and she’s breathing weird. It’s like she’s possessed. What are you doing to her?”
“Wait,” I said, “go back—you almost kissed her?”
“She almost kissed me!”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a big difference!” Harlan shouted, and his voice started to crack a little around the edges, as if he were going through a second puberty right here on the phone with me. “You think I would do that to you? I know how you feel about her, man. I’d never pull something like that!” He inhaled a breath and I could hear him trying to calm himself down. “Look—I don’t know why she’s behaving like this, seriously. It’s like she’s turned into Were-Zooey or something.”
“Okay, just calm down,” I said. “I think I know what happened. I was down in the ovaries—”
“Dude, what are you doing in her ovaries?”
“Just...let me finish, okay? We’re trying to find a steroid to get us across the blood-brain barrier, and it’s really difficult, so we went down to the ovaries to—”
“Who’s we? Who’s with you in there?”
“Just this virus I met,” I said. “It’s not important.”
“Hey!” Astro said from beside me, looking hurt.
“Things got a little out of control because I converted this steroid into a caffeine molecule and he started mixing it up with the estrogen and progesterone, and the white blood cells had to come and break it up, but everything should be calming down soon.”
“Oh, they’re calming down, all right,” Harlan said. “Zooey’s in the girls’ locker room right now and she won’t come out.”
I tried to think, but it was hard to clear my head when the leukocytes’ transport was careening back up the vein at what felt like Mach 3. Up ahead I saw a massive gray tower approaching in the distance, tall and flat and curved outward like some kind of modern skyscraper. The sign in front of it read 1 KIDNEY. Swerving toward it, we bounced up toward a checkpoint, skidding to halt in front of the booth with another leukocyte standing inside.
“Two more for cellular reeducation,” the white blood cell in front muttered.
“These the two from the ovary?” the leukocyte in the booth asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Heck of a mess down there from what I heard. Hormonal rioting, unauthorized steroid release, free radicals on the loose...” The white blood cell in the booth sounded disgusted. “They’ll be sorting this out all afternoon.”
The transport swung inside, dipping through a series of narrow vessels until we stopped at the end of a long gray tunnel.
“Out,” the driver ordered, hauling Astro and me from the transport.
“Look, Harlan,” I said. “I have to go. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Just do me a favor and don’t mess anything else up while you’re in there.”
“Thanks for your concern,” I said.
Click—he was gone.
We hustled down the hall to a giant freight elevator that hauled us straight up into the honeycombed levels of 1 Kidney. Rising up, I looked through the transparent wall and saw millions of little cubicles with individual renal cells slaving away. None of them even seemed to notice as we passed.
“We’re going to be fine,” Astro said. “Just be chill and I’ll get us out of this.”
The doors swung open on a huge horseshoe-shaped room full of squabbling voices. Everywhere I looked, thousands of viruses, bacteria, amino acids, and fat cells were packed in tightly, squabbling and trying to make themselves heard. Most were restrained like Astro and me, either cuffed or bracketed directly to the walls and benches where they sat, but a few of them had gotten loose and were running around pleading their case to anybody who would listen.
“Same thing every time,” Astro groaned and rolled his eyes. “Never changes.”
“Okay, listen up!” a leukocyte in front shouted, and the noise inside the room faded a little. “Welcome to biochemical reeducation. I need all infectious and possibly infectious organisms over on this side. Everybody else, stay where you are. We’ve got a brief orientation video and then we’ll start with individual reassignment.”
I leaned over to Astro. “What do I do?”
“Stick with me.” He stood up and I followed him down the row, toward a long line of molecules gathering in the far corner. A small army of leukocytes were standing at attention, shuttling us forward.
“Keep moving,” the one in charge snapped. “Viruses on the left, bacteria on the right, two orderly lines, you know the drill...”
“Watch it, bro,” Astro muttered as we stepped into formation on the left side, shuffling along behind a rotavirus and what might have been the last of the chickenpox that Zooey’d had when she was twelve. The line rounded a corner, muttering and complaining, and filed through another, narrower entranceway. “They talk a good game, but since we’re viruses, Whitey knows they can’t—”
Thump!
“Hey.” Astro turned and snapped a glance back at the wall that had slammed shut behind us, enclosing us inside a long, empty room. The thirty or so viruses that had filed in alongside us all started looking around in confusion. “What is this?”
“Looks like some kind of renal cyst,” I said. “They locked us in.”
“I can see that, but—”
“Shhh.” Without the light from outside, it took a second for my eyes to adjust. I switched on my halogen headlamp, but the beam wasn’t nearly as strong as before, the bulb just bright enough to cast long shadows along the wrinkled outlines of the walls. The other viruses shrank back, huddled in groups away from the door. All casual banter had ceased.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Nothing,” Astro said, “probably just more scare tactics.” But he didn’t sound too sure of himself anymore.
“No, man,” a voice said behind us. It was the rotavirus I’d seen coming in. “It’s different now. I heard they’re using NK cells down here.”
Astro looked at him. “Dude, don’t say that, not even as a joke.”
“NK,” I said. “What, you mean natural
killer cells?”
The rotavirus nodded grimly. “Yeah, for real. Leukocytes brought ’em straight out from the marrow, no lie.”
“But we’re just small-timers,” Astro said. Now he was starting to sound anxious. “I mean, look at me, I’m not a threat. You know the last time I even infected a cell? We’re not worth the perforin that it would take to wipe us out!”
“Doesn’t matter.” The rotavirus shook his head. “Pressure’s coming down from on high. New immunity initiative or something. My buddy told me last week NKs came through here and it was just a massacre, man. I’m not kidding—they’re still mopping up the stains.”
“And they’re coming here?” I said. “When?”
That was when we heard it—a faint rumbling from outside the room. It was already getting louder, building up, becoming a steady roar that filled the entire space around us.
Astro’s voice was just a whisper, realization filling his eyes with dread:
“They’re already here.”
TWENTY-SIX: HARLAN
By the time I got to the cafeteria for lunch, the whole school was already buzzing about what happened with me and Zooey in gym class. The only good news was that I’d managed to lose Lenny’s parents in all the commotion. Maybe they’d gone back to yell at Mr. Cheney some more about their missing son.
Considering how long Lenny and I had been friends, I didn’t know that much about his mom and dad. Whether they realized it or not, Lenny spent most of his life just trying to live up to their expectations—which basically meant trying to be like them in every possible way, right down to the color of his socks. And the older he got, the worse it was. Once he told me he’d actually found a timeline that his parents had sketched out for him, mapping his future from high school and college to a series of cutting-edge scientific discoveries. He got as far as “time travel” and “cures cancer,” and couldn’t read any more.
In the lunch line, I grabbed my tray, a bowl of chili, and a chunk of cornbread, and looked around the cafeteria, searching for an empty table. With Lenny gone, I wasn’t sure where to sit.
“Harlan?”
I turned around and saw two sixth-graders—Mark Nichols and Arabinda Choudhary—standing behind me. Mark was holding a coffee can with Lenny’s yearbook picture from last year taped to the side of it, along with the words have you seen me?
“What’s this?”
“We heard Lenny’s missing,” Mark said. “We’re collecting money to hire a private detective.”
“What?”
“Lenny was, like, a hero to us,” Arabinda said. “I seriously never understood Euclid’s proof of the infinitude of prime numbers until he explained it to me.”
“Yeah.” Mark bobbed his head up and down, the lights of the cafeteria beaming off the thick lenses of his glasses. “When we heard he was abducted, we just wanted to do whatever we could to help.”
“Guys, he wasn’t—”
“We’ve already raised almost thirty dollars in donations.” Mark shook the jar. “People around here really care about him, you know? They’ve really dug deep.”
“Just shut up a second, okay? Lenny’s not—”
But Mark wasn’t listening to me. He and Arabinda were both staring at something over my shoulder, their eyes wide in matching expressions of awe.
“Oh, man,” Mark said. “You think she’s actually going to eat all that?”
I turned around and immediately realized what he was staring at. Zooey was coming out of the line, struggling to carry her lunch tray in front of her. Piled on top of the tray was a metropolitan skyline of cafeteria food. From here, I counted six bowls of chili, an entire loaf of cornbread, two hot dogs, and a soft pretzel, along with three apples, a basket of onion rings, a giant dish of soft-serve ice cream, and at least five cartons of milk. Cutting through the crowd, she found the nearest empty place, set the tray down, unwrapped her plastic spoon, and tried to decide where to start.
“Hey,” I said, going over to sit down next to her.
“Oh.” She looked at me. “Hey.”
“Hungry, huh?”
“Starving. I seriously don’t know what’s gotten into me.” She spooned chili onto a piece of cornbread and devoured half of it in one bite, delicately blotting a drop of juice from the corner of her mouth. “I just need to eat. My whole body is just screaming, like, Feed me now, you know? It’s seriously ridiculous, but I don’t think I’ve been this ravenous in my entire life.”
I thought about what Lenny had said about her appetite increasing. “Maybe you should take it easy.”
“Mmm.” Zooey held up one finger, chewed, and swallowed. “Listen, I wanted to tell you, about what happened in gym class...”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, dunking an onion ring into her vanilla soft serve, then taking a big bite. The food seemed to help her focus. “It’s really not.”
I tried not to notice, but I could feel everybody in the cafeteria staring at us. Some of them had their phones out and were taking pictures. Over by the salad bar, I saw Aria standing with a handful of other eighth grade girls. She was just gazing at us with that cold blankness in her eyes, like a mirror that ate the light and reflected back nothing at all.
“Zooey, listen...I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but—”
Zooey stopped eating and looked at the tray in front of her as if seeing all the food on it for the first time. “Oh no,” she said in a small voice, and let out a shaky breath. “This isn’t really happening, is it?” All of a sudden, she sounded wrung out and exhausted. “I mean, really, I keep asking myself, nobody can possibly be having this bad of a day, can they? At least some part of it must be all in my head...right?”
“Listen,” I said, and tried to find a way to put my arm around her without making it seem weird. “It’s going to be okay. Everybody has bad days. Just—”
Zooey jerked upward. “Don’t touch me!”
“Oh, whoa, okay.” I reared back, yanking away my arm, startled by the anger in her voice while she sat there with her eyes burning holes in me. Her face was bright red again, but this time it was from pure rage. She looked less like an eighth grade girl and more like one of those primitive statues that we’d studied in non-Western world history, the ones that early tribal people put out to ward off evil spirits.
Nice one, Lenny, I thought. Was this what you meant to do to Zooey when you went in this morning? Because somehow I doubt it.
I took in a breath. “Okay, just...hold on, all right? There’s an explanation for this. Your hormones—”
“Don’t you dare start talking about hormones to me, understand?”
“Zooey—”
“Just do yourself a favor and quit while you’re ahead, Harlan.” When she sprang to her feet, her elbows caught the edge of her overloaded lunch tray and flipped the whole thing forward, slopping a tidal wave of chili, cornbread, and milk across the table and down the front of her shirt. Whirling around, she stormed out of the cafeteria and disappeared through the exit. The lunchroom had fallen absolutely silent, and for a second the only sound was the hydraulic hiss of the door shutting in her wake.
I got up and went after her.
“Mr. Williams?” It was Mrs. Henry, one of the math teachers, filling her cup with iced tea. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Out.” I cut through the doors without a backwards glance, heading past the row of vending machines that stood along the hallway leading back to the office, and looked around the corner and down the hall, to the right and left.
Zooey was nowhere to be seen.
I got out my cell phone and dialed Lenny’s number. Straight to voice mail.
“All right, listen up, jerk,” I said. “This has gone too far. If you care about Zooey at all, you’ll get out of there right now—you understand me?” I waited. “Call me as soon as you get this. I’m serious, Lenny. If you don’t stop this...” The words broke off, and then I finished the t
hought: “I don’t know if we can be friends anymore. Call me.”
I clicked off, and felt somebody coming up behind me.
“Harlan?”
“Look,” I said, thinking it must have been one of the teachers. “I know I’m not supposed to make calls during school hours, but...”
My voice faded as I looked around, and saw Aria standing there.
“We need to talk,” she said.
TWENTY-SEVEN: ZOOEY
I got as far as the front door and realized that I didn’t know how I was going to get home.
Usually I rode the bus to school, or Dad dropped me off on his way to work. But right now all I knew was that I couldn’t stay back there another second. I needed to change my clothes and get control of myself, if that was even still possible.
After walking out the door, I stood on the front steps with my arms crossed, shivering in the cold, trying to think of one of Martha’s rules that could apply to this situation. To my knowledge, she’d never had a moment when she felt like she was losing her mind. I had no idea why I’d reacted the way I had to Harlan, or exactly when I’d lost all control of my feelings, but if I couldn’t get it all straightened out by three thirty today, everything was going to be a total disaster.
Looking up, I realized that big fluffy white flakes had begun drifting down out of the sky.
It was starting to snow.
I walked down the steps and past the student and faculty parking lots, bracing myself for the long walk home. I’d forgotten my coat, and I didn’t have a pair of boots, mittens, or a hat. At this rate I’d be sicker than ever by the time I got back to my house, but at least I could finish losing my mind in private—assuming that I even made it that far before I had a total psychiatric collapse. If not, no big loss, right, Zooey? What’s one more hysterical middle-schooler?
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 10