Edison's Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  As for Carter Black, he scowled at Caitlin, staring invisible daggers into the back of her head, but he didn’t try to get the abacus back. Truth be told, he was relieved that his fifteen minutes of genius were over. Unnatural brilliance was uncharted territory for him. It was like rafting down a raging river, never knowing if the twists and turns would lead him to a deadly waterfall. Now he could happily go back to being the lightless singularity he had always been…but with the heady memory of momentary illumination.

  He had read somewhere that Einstein had failed math in school. In fact, some people had considered him an idiot. Carter Black could relate—and for the first time, he dreamed of aspiring to that kind of idiocy. Thanks to the abacus, he was now motivated to do something completely foreign to him: he was motivated to try.

  Chalking up one more failure was the last thing Nick needed, but the chest being sold online was not an antique card catalog, as the picture had suggested. It was just an ordinary dresser. Nick and Mitch went to see it, dismissed it, and the closer they got to the door, the lower the price became, until the woman was ready to give it to them for free if they would just haul the thing away.

  Nick turned back to the woman and waved his hand like Obi-Wan Kenobi. “These are not the drawers we’re looking for,” he said, and left.

  “It’s supposed to be ‘you’re,’ not ‘we’re,’” Mitch pointed out as they walked away.

  “Either way,” Nick said with a sigh, “we’re back at square one, and we don’t know where to look.”

  In the wake of their disappointment, Mitch suggested they go for comfort food at Beef-O-Rama. Not an unusual suggestion coming from Mitch.

  But as they arrived, Nick saw Petula through the front window, sitting in a booth, waiting.

  “Suddenly I’m not hungry.” He threw Mitch an accusatory glance and started to walk away.

  Mitch stopped him. “I know you hate her,” he said, “but she has been helping us keep Vince alive, since she’s in math with him—and she feels really bad about how she didn’t tell you he was gonna die in the first place…”

  “She didn’t know he was going to die,” Nick pointed out. “She just knew that someone would. How do you expect me to forgive her for not telling me someone was about to die in my house? It could have been you!”

  “And it could have been her!” Mitch reminded him. “She put herself in danger by coming to your house—but she came anyway, because she wanted to save you. At least give her credit for that!”

  Nick was still not ready to give Petula credit for anything. But maybe his anger was as misdirected as Petula had been misguided that day. She wasn’t the enemy. That honor was saved for Jorgenson and the Accelerati.

  “Anyway,” said Mitch, “she has something to give you…”

  Mitch slid into the booth next to Petula. Nick took the bench across from them and watched Petula put her hands gently on Mitch’s face, which was still bruised from his knock-down-drag-out fight.

  “Aw, my poor pumpkin,” Petula said.

  “Did you really just call me ‘pumpkin’?” Mitch asked.

  Petula nodded cheerfully. “Because after that fight, your head looks like a crushed one.”

  “So?” Nick said to Petula, not caring to endure more sweet nothings between them. “You have something for me?”

  Petula looked miffed. “No ‘hello’? No ‘how are you’? or ‘good to see you’?” She tilted her head back so she could look down her nose at him. “Manners count, you know. Even in the Beef-O-Rama.”

  The waitress, who, like Nick, wanted to be anywhere else, took their orders absently, and ripped the menus out of their hands.

  “Well,” Nick said to Petula, “since it isn’t good to see you and I don’t really care how you are, let me just say hello.”

  Nick meant his comment to be as stinging as it sounded, but Petula seemed genuinely pleased by it. “That’s an acceptable start. Hello to you, too. And although you can’t be bothered with my personal well-being, I am gracious enough to care about yours. So how are you?”

  “Not great,” Nick said honestly. “I’m pretty disappointed by the way things are going in general, actually.”

  “Well, maybe this will cheer you up.” With that, she lifted her backpack off the bench next to her, revealing the box camera. She handed it over the table to him.

  Nick didn’t know what to say. He looked over at Mitch, who was grinning.

  “You convinced her?” Nick asked him.

  “I only suggested it,” he replied. “She’s the one who decided.”

  “Hold on,” Nick said, looking at the camera more closely, studying the bare aperture at the front. “Where’s the lens?”

  “I’m hanging on to that,” she said. “For insurance.”

  “Insurance against what?” asked Nick.

  Petula shook her head and sighed. “If we knew the nature of the unexpected disaster we needed insurance against, we wouldn’t need insurance, would we?”

  “Come on, Nick,” Mitch said. “Take it. It’s a step in the right direction, right?”

  Nick took the camera. “Okay, fine.” And although it wasn’t easy, he added, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Petula said.

  The waitress brought out their malts and a basket of chili-cheese onion rings, perhaps the messiest food in the known universe—which was made worse by Mitch, who tended to talk with his hands while holding his rings, thereby flinging chili in all directions.

  Mitch talked about the fight, and his visit to Principal Watt’s office. Chewing thoughtfully, he said, “I got a three-day in-school suspension.” Then he pondered the other half of the onion ring in his hand, as if it held the answer to one of life’s unanswerable questions.

  “How is it a suspension if you’re in school?” Nick asked.

  “Don’t you know anything?” said Petula. “In-school suspension means they put you in a room with a teacher all day, but you’re not allowed to learn.”

  Mitch shrugged. “Could be worse. I had a talk with Ms. Planck and she kind of made me feel better about the whole thing.”

  Nick was surprised. “The lunch lady?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I think she oughta be running the school. I mean, she knows things.”

  Nick had to agree. Like the way she had told him to dump his lunch on Heisenberg during his first day. That single act had made Nick a school legend. Ms. Planck always seemed to have the right words of wisdom when kids needed them most. She did know things.

  What if that’s not limited only to school? Nick wondered. What if she has feelers throughout town? It wasn’t too farfetched to think that Ms. Planck had inside information that no one else had.

  The thought stayed with him as the waitress brought the check and Nick paid his share. Mitch put enough money on the table, Nick noticed, to cover his own and Petula’s tab.

  “Do you think Ms. Planck might have a clue about where some of the garage-sale stuff ended up?” Nick asked as they left.

  Mitch shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt to ask.”

  “I think that’s a great idea!” said Petula, and she grinned at Nick. “And imagine, it came from you!”

  Outside the restaurant, Mitch stopped short in front of the local-interests bulletin board, which was covered with business cards, postcards, and flyers for upcoming events. “Hey, look!” he said, jabbing his finger at one of the flyers. A large photograph graced the piece of paper. “The harp!”

  “What harp?” Petula said pleasantly.

  Nick grimaced. Petula was like sand at the beach—she had a way of getting into everything, making the world feel uncomfortable. He took a closer look at the flyer.

  According to the headline, a local harpist was putting on a benefit concert for charity. Mitch pointed at the photo of a woman sitting behind a harp.

  “That’s the harp from your garage sale, isn’t it?” Mitch asked. “I remember seeing it there.”

  Just then, another diner came out of the
restaurant, still wiping the grease from his lips with a napkin. He noticed them studying the flyer.

  “You kids like music?” the man asked.

  “Maybe we do and maybe we don’t,” Petula said.

  The man tapped the photo of the harpist with his finger. “Well, don’t waste your time. This isn’t music. I don’t know what it is. I saw her ‘play’ at a coffeehouse last week. Her harp had no strings, and yet…” His thoughts seemed to go far away for a moment, then he shook it off. “Anyway, whatever it was, it sure made the neighborhood dogs howl. And in key!”

  As soon as he left, Petula said, “Sounds like a Teslanoid Object to me.”

  Nick looked at the flyer and nodded. It was the same stringless harp he had sold. The performance was two days away. “We can’t take a chance that the Accelerati will get to it first. We need to find her before Saturday night.”

  “I’ll find her,” said Mitch.

  “And I’ll go around pulling down the flyers,” offered Petula, “so the Acceleroonies don’t see them.”

  “Accelerati,” corrected Nick. He was about to tell Petula that they didn’t need her help, but the fact was, they did. “Look, if we’re going to let you in on this,” he told her, “I have to know we can trust you.”

  She looked shocked by the suggestion. “Of course you can trust me,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do anything to add to your bitter disappointment.”

  When Nick got home that afternoon, Danny was playing video games in the living room, intentionally oblivious to the real world around him.

  “Lucky you didn’t come with us for pizza yesterday,” he said, without looking away from his game. “It made half the team sick.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  Through the window, Nick could see their father out back, planting a tree. Mom was the one who’d had the green thumb in the family. Perhaps this was one of his dad’s ways of remembering her. Or maybe it was just another one of his ways to keep busy.

  Nick went out the back door. “What kind of tree is it?” he asked.

  “Blood orange, so I’m told,” his dad answered. “But it won’t give fruit for a couple of years.”

  He took a break, wiping sweat from his forehead with his T-shirt sleeve, then looked at Nick with the kind of uncomfortably intrusive gaze that only a parent can deliver.

  “You doing okay?” he asked.

  Nick shrugged. Actually, there were quite a few reasons why he wouldn’t be, only some of which his father knew. “Yeah, fine. Why?”

  “It’s just that…you never talk about your friend,” he said. “The one who…passed away…in our living room. I know the whole asteroid business made it seem less important somehow…but it happened.”

  Nick stiffened. Since that day he had never discussed Vince with his father. “Yeah, I try not to think about it,” Nick told him. And then, in a sudden burst of crazy-mad inspiration, he said, “His identical twin brother is really having a hard time with it, though.”

  His father grimaced. “I can’t imagine.” Then, satisfied that had done his parental duty as bereavement counselor, he returned to the matter at hand. He pointed to the hole he was digging. “What do you suppose that is?”

  Nick looked down and saw the shiny edge of something metallic and smooth. The hole, he realized, was more like a shallow trench—as though his father had started out making room for the tree, but had grown more interested in exposing the metallic rail. He had uncovered at least five feet of it—enough to reveal that it had a slight curve.

  “When I hit it with the shovel, I got kind of carried away,” his father said.

  Nick instinctively knew whatever this was, it was Tesla-related. As such, it should not be his father’s problem. “Maybe just cover it back up,” Nick offered, “and put the tree somewhere else.”

  “Maybe so,” his father said, “except…when you cover up strange things, they never go away completely, do they?”

  No, Nick had to admit to himself, they certainly don’t.

  His dad sat on a stump, took off his cap, and scratched his head. “Funny thing,” he said. “After that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the bat cracked even though it never hit the ball, and how all those windows broke, and how the asteroid never did what all those genius scientists said it would do. And I can’t help wondering…what if it was me? What if I knocked it into orbit? That’s crazy, right?”

  Nick could feel tears welling up in his eyes. He tried to fight them but couldn’t. And when his voice finally came out, it was a whisper. “What if it’s not crazy?”

  His father looked right at him. “It has to be, Nick. Don’t you see? Because if it’s not crazy, the alternative is terrifying.”

  Without warning, Nick launched himself into his father’s arms, and they held each other as tightly as they could. And for a while, that embrace seemed to protect them from all the terror the world could hurl their way.

  Nick didn’t let go until he felt his tears subside. He couldn’t help but notice his father was wiping his own away, too.

  “Whatever that is in the ground,” Nick said, “let’s just bury it and plant the tree somewhere else. It might not go away, but it doesn’t have to be our problem right now.”

  Although Nick knew he’d have to deal with it later, whatever it was, he found another shovel and together he and his father hid the thing beneath the dirt. They planted the tree close to the house, where someday, Nick could imagine, it would spread its leaves, filling the kitchen window with a soothing green view, and give them the sweetest oranges they had ever tasted.

  Vince’s knack for ferreting out lost Teslanoid objects had nothing to do with the fact that his unwanted childhood nickname was “The Ferret.” The name originated solely from the unfortunate combination of how skinny he was, and the fact that his front baby teeth had made him look somewhat rodent-like for a time. It was the beginning of his life as an outsider.

  Even as an outsider, though, he had his own antisocial circle. It was from these shadowy friends that he got leads on the lost objects—because fringe folk loved nothing more than yakking about weird stuff, and weirder people.

  He was hanging out at the skate park, watching wistfully as kids did tricks he could no longer attempt without the risk of losing battery power, when a fresh lead came his way.

  “Dude,” said a skateboarder buddy with more scabs than flesh on his legs, “there’s this lady on my street with, like, cats coming out of her ears.”

  “Literally, or figuratively?” Vince asked—because, considering the devices he was tracking, cats coming out of someone’s ears was not entirely out of the question.

  His bud just looked at him, blinking, not quite getting the question. “Dude!” he said. “She’s got, like, a million of them in her house!”

  Vince sighed. “Literally, or figuratively?” he asked again. “Do you actually mean a million, or just lots and lots?”

  “Lots and lots,” the kid said. “But here’s the weird thing: they disappeared all of a sudden and now we’ve got, like, all these mice in the neighborhood.” Then he leaned in and whispered, “She’s still bringing cats to the house, though. The kitties go in, but they don’t come out.”

  In spite of Vince’s burglarizing misadventure, this definitely warranted investigation—even though curiosity might kill him instead of the cats.

  The house in question was on a street that had seen better days. Even the trees were leaning away from the homes as if they wished to have nothing to do with them. As he approached the residence, he heard the cats. Faint. Distant. But it was more than that. The sound of their meows seemed fundamentally changed, although he couldn’t quite say how.

  Vince had discovered that when it came to Tesla’s objects and their owners, front-door entries were to be avoided. Instead he went around the side and found a convenient doggy door, which was obviously not for dogs. It had been duct-taped from the outside, as if someone wanted to make sure that the critters within could no longe
r get out. He peeled away the duct tape, and being ferret-slim, was able to shimmy partway through.

  The first thing he noticed was the mice.

  They were all around him! He couldn’t go backward through the tiny door, so he had no choice but to squeeze all the way inside. The mice scattered, hissing. He stood up and found himself face-to-face with a woman in the kitchen.

  Big, fluffy pink slippers. Straggly hair, and a faraway look in her eyes. She was the very definition of “Crazy Cat Lady.” She wielded a Swiffer floor mop as a weapon.

  “Who are you? Get out of my house! Get out!”

  She swung it at him, cutting a wide arc, which he was easily able to avoid.

  The woman had mice clinging to her woolen sweater. But the noise these mice were making was wrong. They were mewling, like…like…

  All at once Vince knew he was in the right place.

  “Wow,” he said, “I love your miniature cats!”

  She hesitated before swinging the mop again, suspicious. “You do?”

  “Of course I do! Who wouldn’t? My friends told me you had miniature cats, and I just wanted to see for myself. May I?”

  The woman still looked at him suspiciously, then pulled one from her blouse. It was a palm-size tabby, and very cute, if you liked that sort of thing. She held it out to him and Vince reached for it, but the tiny cat hissed at him.

  “Maybe I’ll just look.”

  “The health inspector said I can’t have so many cats. But if they’re small…”