by Jon McGoran
Rex stood there with his mouth still open. I almost felt bad for him, but mostly I felt relief at having gotten that out there.
He closed his mouth, then nodded, slowly at first, then with a little more gusto, as if what I had said made sense. “Sure.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Which way?”
“This way,” he said, hooking his thumb to the left.
I started walking, and he fell into step beside me. I veered a little closer to him and looked up. “Sure is cold out,” I said, pressing my shoulder into his ribs.
He looked down and smiled at me, like he was struggling to keep the smile from going wider. Then he put his arm around me.
It was nice.
We walked like that for a few blocks, then turned onto a street of run-down stores—carpets, wigs, nail salon, a falafel place—each with a few stories of apartments above.
We crossed the street diagonally, toward an almost invisible door wedged between the falafel shop and the nail salon.
“How’s the falafel?” I asked as he fished his key out of his pants pocket.
He laughed. “It’s really good.”
He opened the door and stepped aside so I could go in ahead of him. On the other side of the door was a steep, narrow set of stairs, with worn plastic treads and metal edges. It creaked as I started up, then creaked louder as Rex followed me.
As we approached the top of the steps, he said, “To the left and up again.”
The next set of steps creaked even worse. At the top, he said, “To the right.”
Turning, I found myself in a narrow hallway with a door on either side and one at the end. “All the way down,” he said.
I walked to the end of hallway and turned to let Rex go by, but there wasn’t really room. I looked up at him and we both laughed. I flattened myself against the wall, and he reached past me with his key to open the door.
He tried to wait for me to go in first, but we ended up kind of spilling into the room together.
And inside, it was…nice.
It was tiny, yes, and it was humble, but it was neat and clean and it seemed well cared for.
It was pretty much one room, with a kitchenette to the right, a sleeping area to the left, and past that, a sitting area with a small but sturdy-looking sofa, a coffee table, and a pair of windows. The only thing remotely out of place was a book lying open and facedown on the sofa.
The bed was made. The sink was empty. If it hadn’t been my idea, and if he hadn’t protested, I would have thought maybe he had been expecting me. I smiled at that thought.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I know. It’s tiny,” said Rex.
“No, it’s nice. I really like it.”
“You want a cup of tea?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”
A single step put him in the kitchenette. He filled an electric kettle from a filter spout and turned it on, then grabbed a couple of mugs from one cabinet and a box of tea bags from another.
I walked over to the seating area and looked out the windows at low gray clouds over dark rooftops, and a cluster of supertowers, hazy in the distance. Much closer, just a few blocks away, I saw a glint of gold, from some kind of spire. I realized it was a side view of the new H4H cross atop the Church of the Eternal Truth.
I snorted, and Rex said, “What?” suddenly right behind me.
I looked at him over my shoulder. “Kind of a cool view, but it’s got to suck having that H4H cross poking up right in the middle of it.”
He laughed. “A lot of people in Silver Garden are mad about it—the other churches more than the chimeras, I think. It doesn’t bother me that much. Although it does sometimes feel like they put it there just to mess with me.”
The kettle clicked off and Rex went to make the tea.
I sat on the sofa and he returned with our mugs. He put them on the table and sat on the corner of the bed, across from me. I patted the sofa next to me and we both laughed, our eyes locked.
I just wanted him to be close. I hadn’t really thought past that.
“That sofa’s smaller than it looks,” he said. “And I’m—”
“I know what you are,” I said. I started to say it was more of a love seat than a sofa, but thought better of it.
He came over and eased down next to me. It was a tight fit, but I didn’t mind at all. I reached over and picked up his tea, then handed it to him and picked up my own.
“Thank you for inviting me over, Rex,” I said formally.
“Well, thanks for inviting yourself over,” he said with a grin.
I sat forward and looked back at him, pretending to be offended.
He laughed. “No, seriously. I mean it. It’s nice to have you here. I’m glad you suggested it.”
“Well, me too,” I said, leaning back against him and sipping my tea.
He put his arm around me and we were quiet for a minute or two, listening to another round of rain and sleet clicking against the windows.
“So,” I said lightly. “I know there are things you say you can’t talk about, but I bet there’s a lot of stuff you can.”
I could feel him tense up beside me. “Like what?”
I shrugged, keeping it casual. “I dunno. Like…whatever happened to Leo Byron?”
“Um…you mean why did I get spliced?”
“Well, yeah, but before that, too. What happened to Leo, my friend who moved away from the neighborhood and never got in touch with any of us again?” I squeezed his knee, to reassure him that I was asking, not accusing.
Rex set down his mug, looking thoughtful. “Well…I’d been intrigued by chimeras since the first time I saw one,” he said. “At first I couldn’t understand why someone would get spliced, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me.”
“How?”
“It just did. I never really felt like I fit in anywhere—”
“Not even in the old neighborhood, with Nina and Del and me?”
“No, you were all great. But after that. When we moved away. I felt like an outsider constantly. Plus I was tiny, really tiny, and that didn’t help either. It never occurred to me that a splice would make me bigger, but I wondered if getting spliced would help me lean into the whole outsider thing. If like, being a chimera, I could own it, have more control over it. And then…” He made a soft grunting noise, as if part of him didn’t want to say whatever was next.
“What?” I said gently.
“You’re going to think this is really corny, but when I did get spliced, it was like I discovered who I was all along.”
I nodded slowly. “So…what did your parents think about it? I remember they were pretty protective when we were little.”
“Yeah, they were. It got worse after we moved.”
“Really?” Mr. and Mrs. Byron had never been my favorite parents growing up, partly because they had so many rules, but also they seemed really cold. They kind of smothered Leo, but not with affection.
“Sometimes I felt like I was a little boy action figure,” he said, “like they were keeping me in all my original packaging to maintain my value. They worried about me because I was so small. They wanted me to be healthy and happy, but my dad…I think on some level he was embarrassed by it. By me.”
I craned my neck to look up at him. “Are you serious?” I felt a swell of emotion at the thought of it. Leo was the sweetest, smartest, cutest little kid. The idea that anyone could be ashamed of him was hard to contemplate.
Rex shrugged and looked away. “I know they loved me….Anyway, they’d already—they died long before getting spliced ever crossed my mind. But you’re right, they wouldn’t have been happy about it.”
I sat up straight, shocked. “Rex, I had no idea.”
“How could you have?” he said gently. “I’m only telling you now.”
“How did they die?” I asked softly.
“In a plane crash. My mom had a business t
rip to Antarctica.”
I picked up his hand and squeezed it.
“Her company was developing a lot of properties there, making a fortune on all that newly uncovered terrain. She brought my dad. They used to go away a lot, and leave me with my grandparents. Then one time they didn’t come back. The plane had a multiple engine failure.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
“So…you stayed with your grandparents permanently after that?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Well, there and boarding school. Which was its own special brand of hell.”
I pictured Leo back then, tiny little Leo. Del had also been a misfit, and he’d had a rough time, but Leo would have been a tiny misfit. If anyone was going to be mercilessly teased, it would be him.
Rex laughed again, such a sad, tired laugh. “I don’t know which was worse, actually. Boarding school was bad, but at home, I was clearly in the way. The only one really glad to see me was Juniper.”
“Juniper?”
“The dog.”
“I didn’t know you had a dog.”
“Well, they had a dog. They made it clear that Juniper was theirs. But she was my pal. They didn’t show her much affection either, so she was pretty happy to have me around.”
“I just can’t understand why your grandparents wouldn’t be happy to have you around, too,” I said.
“Well, let’s put it this way: I think my grandparents had been very happy empty-nester retirees. Like, they were always happy to see me when I came home from school, but within a day or two, they’d get antsy. I’d hear them on the phone with their friends sometimes, how they couldn’t do this or that or how they had to cancel plans because I was there. They were not one-hundred-percent overjoyed to have me there permanently.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.” Rex drained his tea. “In hindsight, it actually made me feel closer to my dad, realizing how he grew up. It’s a wonder he wasn’t more screwed up.”
“You’re not screwed up.”
He laughed. “Everybody’s screwed up.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Am I screwed up?”
He grinned at me, fully aware that I was messing with him. “Less than most.”
CHAPTER 11
When Rex put more water on to boil, I got up to look outside. “I missed you, you know,” I said over my shoulder. “When you moved away.”
Rex was quiet. “I missed you, too,” he said finally. “And that made it all so much worse. It’s so hard in this world to find your people, you know? And I’d found them. You and Del and Nina. But mostly you. You were my people.” His voice was thick with emotion.
“And then I lost you,” he continued, walking back from the kitchenette. “All three of you. Instead, I was living with two cranky grandparents at home, or with a bunch of really awful guys at school.” He let out a sigh. “I never felt like I had people again. Until I got spliced.”
“So when was that, exactly?”
“When I was thirteen.”
I turned to look at him. “Thirteen? That’s so young. I didn’t think genies would splice anyone that young.”
“They’re not supposed to. The good ones won’t.”
“So who did it?”
“I guess it was like the fourth genie I found. A guy named Walden. He left town right afterwards. But I remember lying there in this abandoned house, with this chimera I didn’t know who I’d just given all my money to, and I’m looking up at the IV bag hanging over me, and it was filthy. There were, like, fingerprints and smudges on it, and I was thinking, ‘Leo, what have you gotten yourself into?’ In the end, I actually think the splice he gave me was okay. But I had some sort of odd reaction. You remember how my parents used to send me to all those growth specialists?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Well, after we moved, as I got older, they tried harder. I must have seen every endocrinologist on the East Coast. They gave me all sorts of injections and treatments intended to jump-start my growth. None of them ever worked. Or not until later.”
“Until you got spliced?”
“While I was sweating the change, actually.” He laughed, thinking back on it. “So, I’m there with Walden, who I barely knew, and a couple of other people I didn’t know at all, and the fever hits me, and the shakes, and he’s telling me it’s all normal, it’s all part of it. So I’m like, ‘Okay, he’s done this before.’ But then the pain hit, and it was like nothing I ever felt. I tried to stay quiet, but after a while I couldn’t help it, I start whimpering, and then full-on groaning and crying, in and out of consciousness. I wake up at one point with Walden yelling in my face to keep it down, that I was bothering everybody else.”
It sounded awful, but Rex was laughing as he told me. “Finally, I come out of it, and I see Walden standing there with some other guy, another chimera, and they’re looking down at me, both of them like this.”
He half folded his arms, leaving one hand free to pinch his bottom lip, and furrowed his brow as if he were appraising something, thinking hard. “Finally the other guy shakes his head and says to Walden, ‘Nope. Never seen anything like it.’ And Walden says, ‘I know, right? He’s, like, doubled in size.’ I tried to ask them what was going on, but then the pain started up again. Apparently I was screaming, because they both started telling me to shut up.”
“Oh, Rex.”
“I know,” he said, laughing again. “It was terrible. Next time I wake up, the house is quiet and dark and empty. There’s a case of water next to me and a box of protein drinks, and a piece of cardboard leaning against them with the word drink written on it.”
“You must have been so scared.”
“I was mostly too hungry and thirsty to even think about it. I drank six bottles of water and three or four of the protein drinks.”
“And were you okay after that?”
“I was only halfway done.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was still growing and changing for two more days.”
“Two more days?”
The kettle boiled and Rex took our mugs over to refill them. “Yeah. It was crazy. I’m wandering around this empty house, sucking down water and protein shakes, and just as I’d start to kind of get a grip on what was going on, another ‘growth spurt’ would hit me, and the pain would knock me out.”
He came back with our fresh tea and I joined him on the couch again. “You must have been terrified,” I said, cradling my mug.
He paused, thinking back. “I mean…yeah, I must have been. But the whole thing was so bizarre, it’s almost like I was too freaked out to be scared, you know?”
“No, I’m pretty sure I could do both.”
“Sometime early on the third day, this guy hears me in there yelling—it was Sly, that’s when I met him. He told me later that when he found me, my pants were split and digging into my skin, and I was covered in bruises from all the internal rearrangements. But Sly and some friends somehow got me to Doc’s place, and that’s how I met Doc. He saved my life.”
“Did he try to fix your splice?”
“No. It was probably too late, anyway, but Doc knew I wanted to be a chimera. He kept me calm, kept me hydrated, and kept an eye on me in case anything went wrong. He said at one point he was afraid I was going to just keep growing, like a monster or something.” He paused to wipe his eyes with his shirt.
“It sounds terrible,” I said.
“Ah, I was unconscious through most of it. Anyway, finally, on the fourth day, I was done.”
I could hear the laughter drain out of him with those words. “What happened then?” I asked.
Rex let out a sigh. “I was just waking up from it all, on this double cot in a back room, and I could hear voices out front, angry voices. I realized right away something was wrong. There was this guy, this chimera-hater.”
“H4H?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t so big yet. Probably, though. Anyway, he’s there threa
tening Doc, saying he’s going to smash everything up. I don’t think this guy had any idea I was there. But I hear the sound of breaking glass, and the guy says he’s going to break Doc’s legs. I could barely move, but I knew I had to do something. So I kind of heave myself up, and stumble out there, and this guy turns and sees me and he screams.” He looked down at me, reading my face, seeing how I was taking it. Deciding how much he was going to tell me.
“Go on,” I said.
“He had this metal pipe, and he swung it at me. Somehow I caught it, reflex, or luck, really, but he didn’t know that, and now he looked horrified. Then I shoved him, just to get him away from me, the flat of my hand against his chest—and Jimi, it was like he disappeared. One second he was there, the next he was on the other side of the room, spitting out blood.” He paused, took in a breath and let it out. “I was scared then, terrified,” he said quietly. “I thought I’d killed him.”
“But he was okay?”
“Okay enough to get up and run away.”
“How about you? Were you okay?”
“Well, yeah. What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know you were different physically, but what about mentally? Emotionally? Did you feel different?”
“A bit, yeah, but I was still the same person. I mean, as much as anyone is from one day to the next.”
“I’ve heard chimeras say getting spliced changed the way they saw the world. Did that happen?”
He shrugged. “Kind of, I guess. But not all at once. I think that comes from being a chimera, not the process of getting spliced.”
I nodded, then shook my head. “Still, the whole thing sounds crazy. I mean, even if I wanted a splice, I couldn’t see putting myself through what you did.”
Rex looked thoughtful. “I know Del had a bad time, and I did, too. And it’s never fun, no matter what. But it’s usually not that bad.”
“Really?” I said, dubiously.
“It’s really not, Jimi. But even if it were, think of the good that can come of it. Think of what happened to me. Getting spliced was how I met Doc, and he’s one of my closest friends. Sly, too. And through them I met Ruth and Pell, and a bunch of other people. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Especially now that I have…I mean, now that I have you back in my life, too.”
