by Julie Drew
“Um, hey, thanks!” Tesla called after Beckett. “You know, for saving our lives and stuff.”
Beckett raised a hand in acknowledgement and let it drop back by her side as she ascended the stairs and never once looked back.
“Who is that?” asked Mal.
“That’s Beckett. Beckett Isley. She lives here, too,” said Bizzy. “She grew up in Singapore. Thailand too, I think. She knows some martial arts.”
“Some?” said Mal, who couldn’t help a quick glance back at the stairs, though Beckett was long gone.
Keisha turned to Joley, a trace of her earlier, flirtatious tone back in her voice. “That’s weird, I would’ve thought you’d be the Kung Fu master.”
“What, because I’m Chinese?” asked Joley with a grin. “I grew up in Kensington and went to boarding school. The only ‘wax on, wax off’ move I’ve got is the one I use when I polish the Porsche.”
Keisha laughed, and Joley looked at her with a comical leer. “I’d be delighted to show you all the moves I do have, however.”
“Joley. Focus.” Finn was seriously out of patience.
Joley had the grace to look a little shame-faced, and Finn stood up and glanced pointedly at Malcolm. “Like he said, everybody’s fine, and that’s what counts. Sometimes parties get crashed, sometimes drunks are jerks. It happens. You kids should go home now, it’s all over.”
“For the record, my name is Malcolm, and I am not a kid,” Mal said, clearly offended.
Bizzy giggled, and Malcolm blushed.
Tesla looked at Keisha, who nodded, and they both stood up. “Okay, well, thanks for the hospitality, I guess,” Tesla said to no one in particular. “We’ll hope for something a little duller next time.” She turned and began to follow Keisha and Malcolm out the door.
“There won’t be a next time,” said Finn, who had moved quickly to her side. “I don’t want to see you here again.” He had leaned down to whisper in her ear and his breath moved the hair on her neck. She shivered as if she were freezing, though she could feel the heat that radiated off his body.
And then they were on the porch, just Mal, Keisha, and Tesla, the door to the old Victorian house shut firmly behind them. They stood for a moment, undecided, until the porch light went off and left them in darkness. Keisha looked up the street in the direction they’d come only an hour earlier, and sighed dramatically before she walked down the steps with Malcolm toward the sidewalk.
“Hey, Mal, didn’t you say something about food?” Keisha asked.
“I did, indeed,” said Mal. “Who wants Thai?” He turned to Tesla, who was still on the porch, in the shadows where her friends could not see her face. “You coming?” he asked. “C’mon, you know you want a big bowl of noodles.”
Tesla shook her head, as if to wake herself up. “Yeah,” she said quickly, then ran down the steps to join them. She had been stunned by two realizations as she stood there on the porch. The first was that for the past hour she’d forgotten to remember that she was The Girl Whose Mom Had Died—a reality that had long ago become a part of her, who she was and how she saw herself. And the second was that even though no one had said her last name out loud, those two creepy guys who’d tried to drag her outside had known it anyway.
CHAPTER 3
Tesla removed one earbud when Max positioned himself directly in front of the couch so she couldn’t ignore him. “What?” she asked, the tinny sounds of Dark Side of the Moon, piped from her iPod to her headset, adrift in the air around them.
“I said Dad’ll be home soon. Did you wrap his present?”
“What present?” Tesla asked.
“Tesla, it’s his birthday!” said Max, his exasperation plain.
“No kidding. You’ve told me every five minutes this whole week.”
“So you didn’t forget,” he accused her as he pushed his glasses up further on the bridge of his freckled nose. Her little brother looked like Tom Sawyer would look, she thought, his blue eyes mischievous, his wavy carrot-orange hair falling over his forehead and ears. Only his wire-framed glasses, which were often lost or mangled seemingly beyond repair, suggested the intellect that hid behind his decidedly non-intellectual looks.
Tesla shrugged and put the earbud back in her ear as Max stomped toward the kitchen, his shoulders tense. She felt a familiar pang of concern and irritation, both of which were the product of the many years she’d felt responsible for him. This isn’t his fault, she thought. It’s Dad’s. She had been mad at her father for as long as she could remember. Max tried to buffer the tension between them but his interventions accomplished little and never lasted.
Tesla put her iPod and headset on the coffee table once she’d made up her mind to go and talk to her brother, but then she heard the back door open and shut.
“I’m home, and I’ve got pizza!”
Immediately irritated, Tesla reluctantly walked into the warm, sunny kitchen.
“I thought you’d be late,” said Max, the pizza box in his hands already open. “Aren’t you right on the verge of something big?”
“Yes, but ‘on the verge’ could mean months, even years. I decided to come home and hang out with you two, like I said I would,” said their still-youthful father as he glanced at Tesla.
Dr. Greg Abbott—a physicist—had light brown hair, curly like his daughter’s. It looked a bit thin on top, Tesla thought, as the kitchen lights glinted off of his tortoise shell glasses. The glare hid his eyes completely, but they were a pale, powdery blue, like sun-bleached denim. Tesla supposed he was an okay-looking man for forty-two—no, scratch that, he was forty-three now—but all she could see when she looked at him was the black hole right next to him where her mother ought to be.
“All anybody at the lab can talk about is that gala for the new Director of the Physics Institute, anyway,” her father was saying. “I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“What, you aren’t psyched about the big party?” Max asked. “The paper’s done a story on the Institute twice this week, and they mentioned the gala on NPR this morning.”
“Well, of course I’m delighted that we were able to get Van Alden as the new director—he’s done some very important work in the last three or four years, and I’ve never met him. But I hate parties, and I’ll have to wear a tuxedo,” Greg Abbot confided to his son, his tone tinged with just enough horror to suggest that this was a nightmare of epic proportions.
“I suppose having to wear a suit isn’t the worst thing in the world,” he conceded when Max laughed. “But I don’t intend to suffer alone—I got tickets for all of us.”
Tesla looked away, her face carefully blank, and sat down at the kitchen table, determined not to get sucked into the conversation. Just because her father was willing to pretend they were one big happy family rather than this barely held together threesome living under a cloud of grief, didn’t mean she was going to help him do it.
“So, what’s up around here?” Dr. Abbott asked after a moment.
Max shrugged and chewed the pizza in his mouth. “Finished Wide Sargasso Sea this morning. It was okay. Clever conceit, but it’s no Jane Eyre.” He drank deeply from his glass of root beer until a wet, foamy soda-ring sat above his upper lip like a bad pre-teen moustache. “I’m not wild about the trend where authors take classic literature and write new back stories, or side stories, or whatever. Or those weird mash-ups of horror and nineteenth-century novels. Get your own characters, you know? It’s called writing.”
Clearly amused, Greg Abbott looked at his son with great affection. “It’s June, Max—summer vacation. Have some fun. Have a childhood.”
Tesla hid her smile behind her napkin as she pretended to wipe her mouth.
“Dad, we’ve been over this,” Max explained patiently. “This is fun.”
“Yeah, Max, we know. You slogged through Shakespeare’s comedies last summer when you were eight,” said Tesla. “Your third-grade teacher thought you were a freak, you know.”
“Mrs.
Timken loved me. Besides, you’re the freak, not me,” Max said defensively. “You’re the one who can do calculations as easily as most people breathe, but you fail your math and science classes just to make a point—”
“I do not!” Tesla interrupted, but her father intervened.
“Let’s not argue,” he said. “I thought after dinner maybe we could play—”
The sound of the doorbell cut him off, and Max leapt up from his chair and raced for the front door.
“—Bananagrams,” Dr. Abbott finished lamely. “I was going to insist, as the birthday boy, on a Star Trek theme,” he muttered to himself.
Tesla glanced at her father, who had picked up the newspaper she knew he had already read this morning before work. She looked down at her plate and said nothing as the front door slammed.
“It’s for you, Dad,” Max said as he hurried into the room. He handed the flat, square package to his father. “UPS. Looks like a birthday present,” he added triumphantly, with a huge grin aimed pointedly at his sister.
“Oh?” asked Dr. Abbott, genuine surprise on his face. “I’ve already talked to Aunt Jane today, and she’ll be here next week. She said we’d celebrate my birthday then.” He frowned and turned the package over so he could read the shipping label, and then looked at Tesla. “It’s from you.”
Taken completely by surprise, Tesla could only stare as her father tore open the package.
The brown paper drifted unheeded to the floor as her father opened the cover of a photo album. He was clearly shocked by the first page of photos, and the look of both pleasure and pain on his face made Tesla recoil.
They sat at the table, all three of them silent and still as Dr. Abbott slowly turned the leaves of the album. The overhead light glinted off of the clear, plastic-film-covered photographs.
“Tesla, this is quite a gift,” he said. He looked up from the album and Tesla noted with panic that he had tears in his eyes.
“I don’t know what to say, these pictures are wonderful.”
Max had risen from his chair and stood behind his father to peer over his shoulder at the album. He pointed at the open page. “Hey, that’s us.” Then he frowned. “I don’t remember these pictures.”
“You wouldn’t,” Dr. Abbott said. “You were too young. That’s you in your crib, and this one is Tesla’s old sandbox. Your mom built it for her.”
“No, Dad, I know that’s us in the pictures. I mean I haven’t seen these specific photographs before. Where’d you get them?” Max asked his sister.
Tesla finally found her voice. “I have no idea.”
“Actually,” their father said, clearly puzzled, “I don’t remember these from the family albums, either. Where did you find them?”
Tesla spared only the briefest glance at the album as she got up from the table and stood by her chair, poised for flight. “I didn’t get them anywhere,” she said. “I don’t know anything about that photo album.”
Dr. Abbott looked confused. “It says right here—” he broke off and rummaged on the floor for the scrap of paper that held the shipping label. “Here it is,” he said, the torn label in his hand turned toward her so she could see. “Tesla Abbott is listed as the sender, from this address. Three days ago.”
Thanks she saw Max mime in her direction, but she ignored him. “Sorry Dad; I did not send you this. I—I didn’t do anything for your birthday.”
She thought he looked hurt, but for such a brief instant she decided she’d imagined it.
“Well, no big deal,” he said evenly. “I suppose it’s a mystery.” He got up and moved to the counter for more soda.
“Not really,” Tesla hissed at Max, her voice low with suppressed outrage. “I can’t believe you got Dad a present and sent it to him from me. That is so not cool!”
“I didn’t—” Max began, but she got up in a huff and marched out of the room.
Upstairs, Tesla lay on her back on the bed. She stared up at the ceiling and fumed while the blades of the fan slowly turned to generate a faint stir in the air. This is a bad idea, she thought. To lay flat on her back in bed, do nothing, and feel like the unluckiest girl in the world could only remind her of that excruciatingly long week in the hospital last fall, and the humiliating event that had put her there. She had been right in the middle of two-on-two after school—she was literally on the court playing before varsity practice started and Keisha would have to go—when it happened. Tesla and Keisha were running the same pick-and-roll they’d done a thousand times together, perfectly in sync, the echo of the ball as it pounded the hardwood and the squeak of rubber soles on the polished floor so familiar she barely noticed them. And then suddenly Tesla had been slammed in the chest, but from the inside: dizzy and disoriented, her heart had tried to pound its way out of her body. She dropped the ball, stopped dead in her tracks, and her defender actually ran into her, instead of into Keisha, as planned, and had to grab Tesla hard to keep them both on their feet. Tesla heard the coach’s whistle from the other court, where the freshman girls’ team was busy with a three-on-two drill, but it sounded like it was a long way off, or as if she were in a tunnel. She put her hands on her knees and bent forward, her eyes closed, as she tried to breathe and fight the dizziness while sweat poured off her body.
“Tesla? You okay?” asked Keisha as she approached, and if Tesla hadn’t felt like she would hurl any minute she certainly would have ridiculed the unusually gentle and timid tone of her best friend’s voice. Keisha could make money as a female power-and-assertiveness trainer. The fact that she sounded so un-Keisha-like at that moment gave Tesla some idea of what she must look like: pale, damp with sweat, eyes closed and short of breath, none of which was due to her drive to the hoop.
Coach Winters had walked over from the sidelines, put her hand on Tesla’s shoulder, and asked if she was okay. Tesla opened her mouth to speak, glanced up at the coach, and immediately closed her eyes again, tight, as she fought off another wave of dizziness.
Great, Tesla had thought. Maybe I’ll puke right here, with half the guy’s basketball team watching from the bleachers. That will really make my junior year complete.
Coach Winters put Keisha in charge of drills and walked Tesla to the office with her arm wrapped tightly across her shoulders. Each of the coach’s hands had gripped one of Tesla’s arms to steady and support her as the shaken girl made her zombie-like way out of the gym and down the hall. Once they were in the office, Tesla slumped into the nearest chair while the coach conferred with the secretary and the principal, Mr. Dietrich. They spoke in low voices, with an occasional glance in Tesla’s direction, but she was still dizzy, with an odd buzz in her head. Her stomach lurched threateningly. She couldn’t have deciphered the words—or their meanings—if she’d wanted to. All she could think about was how soon she’d be able to lie down, keep her eyes closed, and do nothing while her heart slowed to normal and her head and stomach quit with the gymnastics.
“Miss Abbott? How do you feel?” asked a woman’s voice.
Tesla turned her head, slowly and carefully, and squinted up at the woman. Gray-streaked brown hair in a poofy style, a suit jacket over a frilly, high-collared blouse. And garish lipstick, the only off-note in an otherwise completely repressed look. Mrs. Babbit, the high school guidance counselor. The one whose job was to understand the students, relate to them on their own terms.
Brilliant staffing decision, Tesla thought.
She closed her eyes, put her head in her hands again and swallowed once, loudly. “I don’t feel very well,” she managed.
“I can see that. Do you have any flu-like symptoms? Fever, sore throat, muscle pain, headache?” Babbit leaned in, too close, and peered at Tesla.
Tesla shook her head gingerly, unsure if she’d moved it enough for Babbit to get that her answer was No.
“Then I have to ask…have you taken anything you shouldn’t? Smoked some marijuana maybe, swallowed some pills?”
Tesla couldn’t help it, she had to look at Babb
it, even if she threw up. “Are you serious?” she asked, incredulous. She swallowed again to keep the bile down. “I was playing basketball when this happened. No, I’m not high.”
Babbit patted Tesla’s knee, her pudgy fingers alarmingly, unnaturally orange against the girl’s milk-white skin.
Gross. Mrs. Babbit in a tanning bed, Tesla thought, immediately desperate to get the image out of her head.
“Of course not,” Babbit said. Then another idea occurred to her. “Could you be pregnant?”
Tesla was certain the woman sounded hopeful. “No, I couldn’t be pregnant,” she snapped. “Can I go home now?”
“Well, actually, given your symptoms we really are required to administer a drug test, so if you could take this specimen cup and…”
“I will not pee in a cup for you!” Tesla said too loudly, as she stood up too quickly. She couldn’t breathe, and a wave of dizziness washed over her, a loss of all orientation, as if she spun slowly and unstoppably through space. She remained conscious just long enough to marvel at the sensation. Her vision went to black from the outside in, and the last thing she remembered was the floor rising up to meet her.
Tesla had woken up in the ambulance, though it had taken her a minute to realize where she was. She had a mask on over her nose and mouth, and her wrist was held gently by a paramedic who looked rather like Peter Petrelli on Heroes, his thick dark hair parted on the side, old-school—rakish, Max would have said.
The paramedic reached out with his other hand and pulled the mask up to rest on top of her head.
“Great hair,” she said weakly, immediately horrified as she heard herself. She had definitely not meant to say that out loud.
“Thanks,” he said. He flashed a crooked, totally hot smile. “How do you feel?”
“Okay. Weird.”
“That’s to be expected.” He pulled the rubber-capped ends of the stethoscope up from around his neck and placed them in his ears. “I’m going to listen to your heart now. Try to relax.”
