by Josh Allen
Brady sighed.
“And why is that?” Mr. Gough said.
“Because it’s cruel,” Julie said. “These frogs are innocent.”
Innocent? Such a weirdo.
Mr. Gough rubbed his chin. “Julie,” he said, “I know this is hard for you. But the frogs won’t feel a thing. I promise. Besides, if you don’t dissect the frog, it will have died for nothing. And you won’t get credit for the assignment.”
Julie sank in her chair.
Brady smiled. He picked up his scalpel. Take that, he thought.
“But…”—Julie pointed at the frog in her tray—“my frog’s eyes are open. I can’t dissect something that’s looking at me. It’s just…wrong.”
Brady leaned over. Julie was right. Her frog’s eyes were open. So were the eyes on his frog. They shone wet and glassy and dark.
“Julie.” Mr. Gough sighed. “The frog isn’t looking at you. It isn’t watching, and it can’t see a thing. Okay?” He tapped his watch. “You need to get started.”
With that, Mr. Gough turned away.
“Yeah,” Brady whispered to Julie. “Toughen up.”
She shot him a look. “How would you like it,” she said, “if you were the one in the tray?” Her eyes flared. A heat seemed to come from them.
“I wouldn’t mind a bit,” he said, “because then I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
Julie frowned.
“We’ll see,” she said, and her eyes flared again. She shot him a wild-eyed look Brady had never seen before—not in all the years he’d known her, since first grade. Her pupils seemed to shrink to a fine point and then flare back up to their normal size.
So weird.
Brady ignored her and pushed up his sleeves. Leave it to stupid Julie Simmons to make the one good day in Biology class less fun. Sure, the frogs’ eyes were open, but so what? It wasn’t like their eyes were working. Like Mr. Gough said, the frogs were dead.
Dead, dead, dead.
To prove the point, Brady brought his scalpel close to the frog’s eye. He formed a plan. He would call Julie’s name, and when she looked, he’d jab the blade into the frog’s pupil. That’d teach her. And her reaction would be priceless. She’d probably scream. She might even gag.
His scalpel blade shone as it gently brushed the frog’s eye, but before he could call Julie’s name and jab, his own eye started to itch, like something was in it, an eyelash or a bit of dust.
He blinked and squinted, but the itch didn’t go away. He dropped his scalpel, rubbed his eye with his wrist, and after a few seconds, the itch finally faded.
Next to him, Julie slowly pulled on her gloves and picked up her scalpel.
“Sorry, froggy,” she said into her tray. “I have to do this.” With a wince and one eye closed, she made her first incision.
Brady clicked his tongue at her. Weirdo, weirdo, weirdo.
He brought his own scalpel down to his frog’s chest, pressing it into the soft flesh of the frog’s lower belly. He broke the skin, and an ooze of clear liquid seeped out. Slowly, he sliced a straight line up to the neck.
Suddenly he felt a prickle on his own stomach and a hard scratch, like a sharp fingernail running up his sternum.
He dropped his scalpel. It clattered noisily onto the tray, and he stood, pushing his chair back with a loud screech.
He rubbed his chest.
Heartburn, he told himself. The pizza bombs. He’d eaten too fast. He’d been too excited about Biology class, and now his insides were shifting. That was what he was feeling. Normal, everyday heartburn. From too much pepperoni and sausage. That was all.
“Are you okay?” Julie said, and it seemed for a second that she smiled. “You look like you might be sick.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Did someone say ‘sick’?” Mr. Gough walked over. “Kids have thrown up doing this before. If you need a break, Brady, that’s fine.”
A few kids around him snickered. “Brady’s going to puke,” someone whispered.
“I’m okay,” Brady said loudly. He picked up his scalpel. “I’m alright.”
He went back to work. Slowly, he peeled open his frog’s chest, and the frog’s organs came into view—the liver, the intestines. The heartburn in his own chest swelled and spread, and he began to sweat from it, just a little. Why did this have to happen today?
Next to him Julie smiled again.
“What are you so happy about?” he said, pressing a gloved hand to his chest. “I thought you hated this assignment.”
She didn’t answer, but her smile stayed plastered on her face.
Brady tried to remember what to do next. Remove the liver? The lungs? The pain in his own chest kept swelling, and it began to cloud his mind. Everything was foggy. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. He poked his scalpel into the open chest cavity and shifted the liver and lungs.
His own chest rumbled. His breath caught in his throat. Next to him, Julie stopped working.
“Having problems?” she said.
He didn’t answer.
He shifted the frog’s organs again and grimaced. Then he saw it—the heart. He wanted it. He wanted to be the mad scientist. Julie Simmons and his stupid heartburn were ruining everything, but now he’d roll the heart between his fingers. He’d hold it in front of Julie’s face. That would wipe her smile away. Maybe he’d even press the heart into her cheek or toss it into her hair. He gripped his scalpel and, pushing through the pain in his chest, jabbed the blade down, like a spear.
He hit the frog’s heart right in the center.
The pain in his chest exploded.
He fell to the ground and couldn’t breathe. He tried to scream, but nothing came out. Julie stood above him, and he pointed up to his tray. The scalpel in the frog’s chest stuck up like a small flag. He knew what was happening. He needed Julie to get the scalpel, to take it from the frog’s heart.
Take it out! he tried to tell her. But the words wouldn’t come. He tried to stand, but his legs didn’t work either.
Suddenly there was buzzing all around him, and Mr. Gough was pushing students away and shouting, “Get back! Give him air!” and after a few seconds, “Call the nurse.”
Then everything became fuzzy and muffled, like he was underwater.
“I don’t know what happened,” he heard Julie saying, and her words seemed to be coming from far away. “He just fell down and grabbed his chest.”
And then the world darkened, and he passed out from the pain.
* * *
It took the paramedics eleven minutes to arrive. When they did, they loaded Brady onto a stretcher and wheeled him quickly out of the classroom.
“We’ll take good care of him,” one burly paramedic called as they pushed Brady out the door.
The second he was gone, the classroom buzzed.
“He wouldn’t stop twitching,” said a student in the back.
“I’ve never seen a face like that,” said another.
“He kept grabbing at his chest,” said a girl who sat up front. “Can kids have heart attacks?”
Finally Mr. Gough clapped his hands. “I’m sure Brady will be fine,” he said, and then he told the students to return to their work.
Julie raised her hand. “Can I clean up Brady’s desk for him?” she asked. “It’s the least I could do.”
Mr. Gough nodded. “Of course, Julie,” he said. “That’s very kind.”
Julie picked up Brady’s tray. The scalpel stuck out of his frog’s chest at a funny angle, like a javelin in the ground.
“Sorry, froggy,” Julie whispered, “but he needs to learn.”
And she left the scalpel in the frog’s heart.
She covered the tray with a sheet of plastic that Mr. Gough brought her. Then she slid the whole thing into the supply closet.
She’d remove the scalpel, she told herself, when the time was right. She just couldn’t bring herself to leave it in the poor frog’s heart forever.
But Brady was a stubborn boy. She closed the supply closet and returned to her seat, where she gently stroked her own half-dissected frog. It would take him days—maybe weeks—to learn his lesson.
The weirdo.
LIVVY couldn’t sleep. Again.
Even though she and her dad had lived in the creaky old house for nearly a month, everything about it—from the ugly windows that let in the nighttime sounds to the wood floors that squeaked even when no one was stepping on them—felt wrong.
“This house is a hundred and twelve years old,” her dad had told her when they’d started hauling in their boxes. “That makes it the oldest member of our family.”
Well, if this house is family, she’d thought, catching the old-house scent for the first time, dusty and a bit damp, like a barn, then it’s a creepy, weird uncle.
And creepy was right.
Livvy smoothed her covers.
That first day, when she’d set foot inside the house carrying a box of art supplies, a cold shiver ran down Livvy’s back, like someone had just traced a fingernail along her spine.
And it wasn’t only the old smell or the way the house looked that gave Livvy the shivers, though the faded yellow wallpaper hanging in peeled strips and the cracks that spider-webbed across the front window certainly didn’t help.
It was a feeling like the one she got whenever she had to walk through a metal detector at an airport. Like something was examining her to her core. It gave her goose bumps. And those goose bumps rose on her arms every single time she walked into the house.
Every. Single. Time.
It was like knowing someone was filming her but not knowing where the camera was. Lately, she’d even started imagining eyes all over the house, as if the walls themselves were watching her. The first eye she’d seen had been in a crack in a low corner of her bathroom mirror. That crack had a round divot at its center, like the mirror had been struck by something, and the breaks that circled the divot gave the crack a disturbing, wide-eyed shape.
The next eye Livvy found had been in the wood grain of a kitchen cabinet. It was just an eye-shaped knot, Livvy knew, but as she ate her cereal, Livvy could feel it peering at her, constant and unblinking.
Over the last few weeks, she’d even seen eye shapes in cobwebs. New webs seemed to show up all the time—the house had a real spider problem—and whenever Livvy found a new web, it always had an eye-shaped tangle of strings at its center.
Of course Livvy knew these eyes were just the result of her artistic imagination. She’d been reminding herself of that for weeks.
The house couldn’t be watching her.
But thinking of the eyes made her shiver under her covers. She pulled her blanket up to her chin.
“Just close your eyes,” she told herself. “Go to sleep.”
Her dad’s snores murmured into her room, audible through the house’s thin walls, and she tried breathing in sync with him.
She counted five breaths. Then ten breaths. Then twenty.
It didn’t help. How could he just sleep in this house so easily?
He didn’t seem to get that this house wasn’t…right.
“What an adventure,” he’d said brightly that first day as he’d turned on the sink and no water had come out.
He hadn’t seemed bothered by anything—not by the house’s smell or its creaks or even the layer of dust they’d spent two whole days clearing away. For him, the house was a hobby. Since moving in, he’d ripped out all the wallpaper and replaced the kitchen sink. He’d straightened the crooked front door and installed a new front window. He’d even put up shiny new rain gutters.
He whistled while he did all this, as if being a handyman was his new calling, as if moving two hundred miles to a new job and a new life was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
She sighed, listened to his snoring, and counted twenty more of her own breaths. Then thirty. Then fifty.
It had all started two months ago, when he’d sat her down at the kitchen table one night after dinner. He told her he was tired of being a doctor in a big city, and he said that he needed to be in a small town where doctors still knew their patients’ names, and bumped into them at the grocery store.
Then he laid out his plan and showed her a picture of their new house.
This house.
And just like that, everything changed. One morning, not long after moving in, she’d pointed out to him how the knot in the kitchen cabinet looked kind of like an eye, but he’d only tilted his head and squinted.
“Huh,” he’d said. “That’s pretty cool.”
Pretty cool. Livvy stopped counting her breaths. Well, the house still smells like the inside of an old suitcase. She straightened her covers realizing the house would probably always smell terrible, no matter how many repairs her dad made.
“Give it time,” her dad had said. “You’ll warm up to the old girl.”
The old girl. That’s what he called the house—like it was a living, breathing thing.
Well, she’d given it time. It had been almost a month. And Livvy wasn’t warming up to the old girl—not by one single degree.
“Stupid house,” she said out loud, and just then the house made a sound—a kind of moaning, like the roof beams above her were settling.
She sat up in bed. The sound faded, so she fluffed her pillow a few times and flopped back onto it.
She narrowed her eyes at the plaster ceiling, where the settling, moaning noise had come from.
She took in a sharp breath. She shivered and let out a little wince.
Because there was another eye—a perfect plaster eye, opened wide, looking straight down at Livvy from her bedroom ceiling. The eye’s shape was so obvious, so clear, she was amazed she hadn’t noticed it before. Its lines were sharp. Its pupil, a perfect circle. She didn’t see how she could possibly have missed it for the last month. This eye was huge, larger than a football, and it was right above her, staring down, without blinking.
She shuddered.
The feeling she’d had, of being constantly watched, filled her chest. For the hundredth time since moving in, her neck prickled.
“Stupid house,” she said again.
She breathed. She counted ten more breaths. She tried to calm down.
It’s just a bit of plaster, Livvy told herself. It was a strange accident of how someone had textured the plaster on a ceiling a hundred years ago. One of the splatters just happened to look like an eye. That was all it was—that and her imagination. That was all.
She tried to ignore the eye, but now that she’d seen it, she knew she’d never be able to stop seeing it. Every time she’d lie down in bed, there it would be, this stupid plaster eye hovering over her.
She took a deep breath and pulled her blankets up to her nose.
Maybe, she thought, she could get Dad to scrape the eye off first thing in the morning. Maybe his next project could be retexturing her ceiling. She’d ask him about it at breakfast.
She rolled onto her side. Still, she felt the eye. She thought about dragging her bed to the other side of the room.
She tried to lighten the mood by making a face at the eye.
“Staring contest,” she said, remembering the game she had played when she was younger. She hoped speaking out loud would chase the eeriness of the moment away, so she opened her eyes, glared at the ceiling, and whispered, “Ready! Go!”
The eye seemed to shift and open itself slightly wider.
It must be the light, Livvy told herself. The moon, she figured, coming out from behind a cloud and shining through her window. Still, she tried not to blink.
After a few seconds, her eyes began to water.
When she opened her eyes, the ceiling seemed suddenly lower, as if it had dropped a few inches, maybe half a foot closer to her face during the split second her eyes had been closed.
She shook herself. The moonlight, she told herself again. Playing tricks.
She looked at the eye.
“Rematch,” she said.
She stared for a minute, and again her tired eyes watered and burned. When she blinked and opened them, the room seemed shorter once more—the eye, a little nearer.
It’s nothing, she told herself. She was just missing her old house, the one back in the city. It had high ceilings, so her new ceiling seemed lower by comparison. That was all.
Outside the wind whipped, and the window rattled.
She focused on the eye once more. When she blinked this time, the eye seemed bigger and nearer than it had been just seconds before.
It’s because I haven’t been sleeping well, she told herself. Missed sleep was making her see things.
But when she blinked yet again, she wondered if the crummy house could actually be falling down. Sagging under the weight of its age in the strong wind.
After two more blinks, she simply couldn’t deny it anymore.
The ceiling was dropping. Bit by bit. Every time she blinked. She started to feel smothered under her covers.
“Stay up there,” she whispered, speaking to the plaster eye. “Please.” She kept her eyes open for as long as she could, but they started to water and burn. She held them open, looking deep into the ceiling for longer than she thought possible.
But when the burning became too much, she blinked.
Now the eye was so close that she could have stretched up a hand and touched it.
And she knew the truth.
The house was out to get her. Maybe it had been from the very first day.
Her neck and shoulders shivered. When she blinked again, the ceiling was just a foot above her face, hovering like a wrecking ball. She tried to move, to slink out of bed and run for her father, but the eye seemed to have her frozen, plastered against her mattress.
