Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167)

by Schreiber, Joe; Smith, Matt (ILT)

  I was starting to notice a pattern.

  Harlan’s face was there...and there...and there. All of a sudden it seemed like everywhere I looked, I saw him laughing, talking, walking Zooey to her locker and playing badminton with her in gym class. Harlan wasn’t just on Zooey’s mind—he was all over her thoughts. The more I looked, the more I saw him. And the more I saw, the less I liked.

  Something inside of me went cold. According to the digital display, I had exactly sixty minutes left. I turned and started heading for the CSF flow.

  “Wait a second,” Astro said. “Where are we going now?”

  “To the hippocampus,” I said. “It’s time to finish what I started.”

  THIRTY-SIX: ZOOEY

  “Be careful,” Dad was saying. “I think she’s contagious.”

  “What?” My mom stepped back and stared into my eyes. “Zooey, honey, are you sick?”

  “No, it’s nothing, Mom,” I said. “Just a misunderstanding.”

  Dad shot me a confused glance, but I barely noticed. A headache had already started forming behind my eyes, a real skull-popper, like a swarm of metal shavings drawn to a magnet, and that dizziness that I’d felt earlier, on the way to gym class, came back with a vengeance. Also, I was getting hot again—except this time, it was chills and hot flashes, one after another. My stomach, still holding the chili and cornbread I’d eaten at lunch, began to tremble and quake.

  I looked around. Harlan had taken the golden opportunity to slip out the door, leaving Dad looking more confused than ever.

  If you think you’re confused, I wanted to say, try looking at it from my point of view.

  A lot of really weird things had happened, but nothing had prepared me for the feeling of somebody else’s words coming out of my mouth. My lips had opened with no idea what I was going to say, and the words had just been there, something about a fungus whose name I couldn’t even remember anymore, but at the time I’d just stood there reciting scientific facts like...

  Lenny.

  “Zooey?” my mom was saying from somewhere far away. She was holding my hand, which meant that she couldn’t be too far, and when I concentrated I was able to bring myself back to reality again. “It’s almost two o’clock. Shouldn’t we be heading back over to the school?”

  “Yeah, totally.” I was feeling really dizzy now, and I should have just sat down for a second, but there was too much to do. Rule #9: Never walk into a meeting without knowing how you’re going to walk out of it. I glanced at the keys to the Jeep where she’d set them down on the table next to the door. “Can we take your car?”

  “If it’s all right with your father.”

  “Fine with me,” Dad said.

  “But we have to go right now.” I took a step and stumbled, reaching out to catch myself and tumbling through thin air...

  ...and landing in total blackness.

  THIRTY-SEVEN: HARLAN

  The snow was starting to slow down, and I was half a block away from Lenny’s house, biking up the sidewalk with my hair caked in snow, when I realized it was already after two. Barring a miracle, there was no way I could get back to school in time to change into my costume before the curtain went up.

  But I had to do this. I needed to tell the truth.

  I dumped my bike on the lawn, ran up the front steps, and rang the doorbell. A moment later, Lenny’s dad’s face appeared in the front window. When he saw it was me, he flipped the latch and opened the door.

  “Harlan?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “Haven’t you wasted enough of our time for one day?”

  “It’s important.”

  He stood there for a moment as if he wasn’t sure he wanted me in his house, then finally stepped aside. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

  I stepped inside the cluttered entryway and down the hall, past floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lenny’s house was full of books, to the point where they actually seemed to be holding up the roof. You had to walk around piles and boxes of them just to get wherever you were going, and when I was younger I remember thinking that if I pulled out the wrong one, it would bring everything crashing down around me. It was all familiar from a thousand different visits, but it felt different now. The tension made the air feel thick and stale.

  In the kitchen, Lenny’s mom was sitting at the table with a cup of tea. She stood up when she saw me coming, and both parents were staring at me now, frozen in their tracks, waiting for me to say something.

  “He’s inside Zooey Andrews,” I said.

  They both blinked, and his dad frowned. “Who?”

  “Lenny was telling the truth the first time. He really did shrink himself down to the size of a molecule, and he’s been inside her body for the past five hours.”

  “Harlan, please”—his dad held up his hands wearily—“that’s enough. It’s not funny anymore, if it ever was.”

  “I totally agree,” I said. “It’s about the most pathetic thing I can think of. But it’s true.”

  “And you actually expect us to believe that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  Lenny’s mom and dad just looked at me. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, and at the moment, I didn’t care. I’d done what I’d come here to do, tell them the truth, and the fact that they were too stubborn or proud to believe it only made me angrier. “If either one of you had ever bothered to actually take this seriously and listen to him, none of this have happened.”

  “Excuse me?” his mother said.

  “Lenny’s had a crush on Zooey for years,” I said. “Years. Since third grade, when she saved him from getting beat up on the playground, he’s talked about her nonstop until even I was sick of hearing about it. But you guys...you’re his parents. You’re supposed to care about stuff like this. If you weren’t too busy, I don’t know...winning the stupid Nobel Prize or whatever—”

  “I beg your pardon?” Lenny’s dad said.

  “Was it worth it?” I waved one arm at the bookshelves that lined the walls around them, loaded and sagging with hundreds of textbooks, the framed certificates and awards on the walls, the half-finished experiments and diagrams spread around every surface. “All that time you guys just sat there obsessed with your research and told him to just be himself or whatever? Was it worth the tradeoff?”

  “We did listen,” his mom said. “We told him—”

  “You told him not to worry about it. That’s exactly what you said. Just stay cool and be yourself. That’s like the worst advice you could ever give a kid. I mean, seriously, just once did either of you ever stop and listen to what he was saying?”

  “Of course we did,” she said.

  “You know what? Forget it.” I threw up my hands. “You guys want to know where Lenny is? Now you know. Believe it if you want to, or don’t—I don’t really care. The fact is that he found a way to make himself really small, and he went where he thought he had to go to fix things, and all he did was make it worse.”

  Lenny’s dad glanced at his mother, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter, almost unsure of itself. “He called me a little while ago and told me that he was outside her brainstem,” he said. “He swore that he was telling the truth.”

  “But you didn’t believe him.”

  “No.”

  “Why did he call?”

  “He said he had a question. Something really important that he needed to ask.”

  “What was the question?”

  Lenny’s dad shook his head. “I don’t know. He—he hung up before I could find out.” His eyes flicked over to Lenny’s mom again. “He was upset. We’d just told him that we were sending him to Brixton Academy after winter break, and—”

  “You’re sending him to Brixton?” I felt the last of my patience drain away, and I turned to go. “You guys are really unbelievable, you know that?”

  His mom jumped out of her chair.

  “Harlan, wait.”

  But I didn’t stop.
I walked out, got back on my bike, and started heading to school, double-time.

  Lenny wasn’t the only one with a schedule to keep.

  THIRTY-EIGHT: LENNY

  We were floating down the third ventricle, close enough to Zooey’s hippocampus that I could actually feel the increased heat from what I guessed had to be the dentate gyrus, when I realized that something was wrong. Astro must have sensed it too, because we both stopped moving at the same time.

  “You hear that?” I whispered.

  “What?” He cocked his head and listened. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly.” From deep inside the limbic system, the soft, continuous whir of neurogenesis, the sound of new neurons being formed—the reassuring white noise that I’d been aware of from the moment we’d passed through the blood-brain barrier—had fallen utterly silent. It was like standing in middle of a factory that had suddenly stopped production. “It’s too quiet.”

  “What’s going on?” Astro asked.

  “I have no idea, but...”

  “Is it, like, really hot in here?”

  “Definitely.”

  “So where is everybody?” He stared at me, waiting. “Where are all the neurons?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, not liking the way it sounded. Ever since we’d crossed over the hypothalamus, this whole process had been way too easy. It was like something else had arrived here first and started shutting down electrical activity in the brain, circumventing Zooey’s defense systems and taking down the alarms before we’d even tripped them. And now this sudden rush of heat, with the temperature spiking higher than anything I’d felt in the rest of Zooey’s body, left me with an increasing feeling of unease, as if I were trapped inside an elevator that had just shuddered to a halt and could—at any second—decide to go plummeting downward.

  “Uh, dude?” Astro said. “You might want to take a look at this.”

  “What?”

  “See for yourself.” He was staring down at the river of cerebrospinal fluid that had carried us this far up the third ventricle. But the CSF wasn’t clear and colorless like before. Instead, it had begun to turn thick and yellow, with streaks and threads of brownish red running through in its lower depths. It looked like a badly polluted stream outside some ruined industrial city.

  “What is that?”

  I stared down, unable to speak or move. There was something solid floating in the CSF as it rolled past us. After a second I realized what it was—the corpse of a white blood cell, floating belly-up with its eyes wide open and its mouth gaping like a mackerel’s. I heard Astro make a shocked noise, not quite a gasp or a grunt, but something in between, and he cast an anxious glance around to look farther up the ventricle.

  “Oh, man,” Astro said. “Did you see that?”

  I saw. Immediately upriver, the CSF stream was absolutely littered with dead leukocytes and neurons. Their corpses filled the ventricle with a sickish sweet smell, like the bottom of a pile of rotting leaves.

  “What could do that?” I asked. “A virus?”

  “Uh-uh.” Astro shook his head. “No virus that I’ve ever seen. Zooey’s up on all her shots, and believe me, I checked. What about that fungus you were talking about?”

  “No, that was just a code word. And anyway, it wouldn’t look like this.”

  “So...what is it then?”

  “Do I look like a neurologist to you?”

  “I dunno,” Astro said. “What’s a urologist?”

  “Forget it.” I watched the flotilla of dead nerve cells and white blood cells clogging the CSF flow. “This almost looks more like a meningeal inflammation, or some kind of...”

  “What?”

  “Bacteria.”

  “No way.” Astro was peering down into the infected CSF, trying to get a closer look at it. “Those bugs downstairs couldn’t get up if they wanted to.”

  “Unless they came through when we did,” I said. “But how would they get in to start with?”

  “I don’t know,” Astro said, bending down so close that his membrane was almost touching the CSF, “but from the look of this stuff, I think it’s—”

  That was as far as he got before something reached up from out of the fluid and yanked him in.

  THIRTY-NINE: ZOOEY

  When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor with Mom and Dad both bent over me, looking worried.

  “Whoa,” I said woozily, staring up at the ceiling. “That’s some sun, huh?”

  My mom put her hand on my forehead. “Honey, you’re burning up!”

  “It’s that fungus, isn’t it?” Dad asked. “I knew it. That cytoplasmic whatever it was.”

  “Fungus?” Mom glanced at him. “What fungus?”

  “Dad, no.” I pushed myself up on my elbows and tried to clear my head. “There is no fungus.”

  “So you lied to me?”

  “Honey, for Pete’s sake,” Mom said. “She probably doesn’t even know what she’s saying.”

  If you only knew, I thought blearily. “You’re right, Mom. But first we need to get to school.”

  “School?”

  “The play starts in a half-hour.”

  “Zooey, honey, I’m sure it does, but you’re sick. You can hardly stand up.”

  I turned to my dad, then back to my mother. They both knew what this afternoon meant to me. They’d watched me pour hundreds of hours into the script, set design, and rehearsals, and they knew what was at stake.

  “Please, guys. We have to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dad said, “but your mom’s right. You’re in no condition to go anywhere. I’ll call the school.”

  “And tell them what? To postpone the play?” I flashed to the auditorium, where the cast and crew would already be setting up rows of chairs, where Monica Sanossian and Della Marlowe were already putting makeup on the actors. “That’s impossible. They need me there.”

  “Zooey,” my dad began, but didn’t say anything else. Neither he nor my mother seemed to know how to respond. Some part of me must have expected this, because the plan jumped into my mind fully formed, ready to execute. I felt one last burst of energy, just enough to get me through what I had to do next.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”

  “Honey—”

  I grabbed Mom’s keys from the table by the door. “You know where to find me.”

  Before either of them could say anything, I ran out of the house to the driveway, climbed into the Jeep, and managed to wiggle the keys in the ignition. The dashboard lights came on and my mom’s Michael Buble CD started playing on the stereo, but the engine refused to start.

  “Come on, come on.” I looked up to see my mom and dad coming out of the house after me and tried again, but I couldn’t get the motor running. Was she out of gas? How could it be, if she had just driven home?

  “Zooey Andrews,” my dad was saying, from the other side of the windshield. “Young lady, what on earth do you think you’re doing?” Now he was close enough to reach for the door handle on the driver’s side. “You’re fourteen years old. You don’t know how to drive a car.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” I mumbled.

  “Get out of there right now.”

  “Drive me to school.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Dad, drive me to school right now, or I’ll drive myself.” Or die trying, I thought. In my current condition, it didn’t seem so far-fetched.

  My dad and mom exchanged a glance, and then he turned back to me. “Get in the back seat.”

  “Dad, thank you,” I said, crawling into the back. “I swear, I’d kiss you if I weren’t so sick.”

  He didn’t say anything, just got behind the wheel while Mom climbed in the passenger seat. Michael Bublé was still blaring from the speakers, singing about how he just hadn’t met me yet. Mom switched him off and sat there staring back at me as if she were waiting for me to pass out again. The heater in the Jeep started blowing warm ai
r back. I felt myself fading in and out, reality wavering around the edges like a mirage in the desert. That was when I heard the voice.

  Zooey.

  “Huh?” Sitting up, I looked at the radio dial, but the voice wasn’t coming from the speakers. It had an echoey, reverberating familiarity, as if somehow it was using my own eardrums as an amplifier.

  It’s me. It’s Lenny. I’m inside your head.

  “What?” I said, startled. “I don’t—” I put my finger in my ear and wiggled it around. “What is this?”

  Just listen. You need to get to a hospital right away. Something’s wrong with you. You’re really sick.

  “Amazing,” I muttered. “Did you just figure that out? You really are a genius.”

  We came around the next corner, the rear tires sliding over the fresh-packed snow, slipping a little, fishtailing before they caught traction.

  Up ahead, I saw the school.

  FORTY: HARLAN

  My cell phone rang three more times on my way back, “She Blinded Me with Science,” over and over, until I finally just switched it off. If I never heard that song again, I’d be okay with it.

  When I got back to school, classes were already letting out, but most of the kids weren’t leaving. They were headed to the auditorium for the play.

  In the guest parking lot, I saw a black Jeep, the one that Zooey’s mom had parked in the driveway when she’d gotten home, sitting in front of the gymnasium.

  She’s here, I thought. She made it back.

  I jammed my bike in the rack down below and ran for the gymnasium entrance, grabbed the door, and yanked on it, but it didn’t open.

  “Well, would you look at this,” a familiar voice said from the other side of the glass. “You know, Mr. Williams, I believe this may be the first time I’ve ever seen you trying to get into gym.”

  I didn’t need to look closely to know that the voice belonged to Shovelhead. He was standing there on the other side of the door in his running shorts and T-shirt with a big grin on his face, holding the door shut. Watching him, I had an absolutely terrifying vision of Mick Mason twenty years down the road in this same position, intimidating and bullying whole generations of kids into a lifelong fear of physical fitness.