Project Pallid

by Christopher Hoskins

  “ASSHOLE!!!” she popped to her knees and slapped me hard on the shoulder.

  My hands grabbed her arms, slid to her elbows, and held them to her sides. Motionless, I stared into her eyes in total adoration. She was … is … the strongest person I know.

  Chemistry took over and we leaned forward in front of her dad’s office. Our knees ground into the hardwood, but our heads were impervious to pain.

  Arms pinned tight to her sides, our faces met halfway and locked.

  And there was comfort in our closeness that was unlike any we’d felt before, and unlike any we’ve likely felt since our separation. It’s a connection that exists for anyone, in only one other person, and it’s one I felt with her. It’s one she felt with me, too. And if I know her like I know I do, we’ll both risk it all to have it again. Her dad couldn’t separate us then, and whatever this is, it won’t separate us either.

  Minutes passed before we pulled apart to speak again.

  “Catee …

  “Yeah?”

  “Something’s going on with your dad.” I spoke calmly and decisively.

  “I know.”

  “Okay. I know, too. So if we both know, we have to do something about it. We’ve got to figure this out.”

  “What are you proposing? What can we do?”

  “Well, first off, we’ve got to get inside.” I pointed back to the door.

  “Fat chance of that happening, Damian. He’s not about to go giving me the key.”

  “Then you just might have to take it.”

  “Are you kidding me!” she yelled and pulled her elbows from my hands. “You’ve seen how he treats me. He’d kill me if that key disappeared! There’s no way I can get it without him noticing!”

  “Then you have to do it without him knowing,” I asserted.

  Somewhere along the way, I’d lost the reserve that’d always held me back, and the new Damian Lawson was emerging as a stronger, more emblazoned person than I’d known before. My gut screamed that something wasn’t right, and as soon as it registered there, I couldn’t shake it from my head. Since I’d met him—even before I’d met him—I’d wondered and worried about Catee’s dad. Getting inside his office might finally ease some of those anxieties. Whatever we found in there, good or bad, it would at least be closure—or so I’d hoped.

  “So what do you want me to do? Knock him out cold when he comes home and just grab his keys? Dig through his things when he’s sleeping? You know he’s going find out about it, Damian.”

  “Is there another key? Can we make a copy of it?” I grasped at straws.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t know,” she replied, hesitant to offer suggestions for fear of the backlash that might follow.

  “Come on, Catee, we’ve got to figure something out. What about the window? Do you think it’s locked?”

  “I know I might seem simple,” she replied, “but trust me, I’ve tried it all on my own. It’s locked. It’s always locked.”

  “Okay, so what’s left?”

  The glisten in her eyes told me she’d found our solution. Her expression softened and she spoke assuredly: “No worries, Mr. Lawson, I’ve got it covered.”

  I was perplexed by her sudden epiphany. “What do you mean you’ve got it covered?” I asked. “How do we get inside??”

  “You just leave that to me, big boy.” She leaned in and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I’ve got it figured out.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We do nothing. I’ll handle it, and I’ll have us a key by tomorrow.”

  February 10th:

  I got off the bus that Wednesday to wintry winds that lashed at my face, and I looked downward to keep its skin from being peeled away in shaven, icy layers. With my head concealed, I burst through the lobby doors with the other Platsville drop-offs, and strode excitedly to where I knew Catee would be waiting for me. But when I got there, she wasn’t.

  “Hey, where’s Catee?” I asked Mara, the only girl whose name I remembered.

  Consumed by other conversations, she offered little insight. “I don’t know. Absent, I guess.”

  “Oh.” I dug my hands deep in my pockets to warm them up and to hide the discomfort I felt standing awkwardly alone in a group of mostly acquaintances.

  At lunch, I naturally noticed Catee’s absence, too. Without her there, I felt almost as estranged as I had on day one; I imagined the worst going down between her and her dad.

  What had she done?

  What had she tried to do?

  Did he catch her?

  Then what?

  I was the one who insisted she get the key to begin with, and I was consumed with guilt by whatever harm it’d done to her.

  By afternoon, I was completely dreading geometry class—the place where I’d feel her absence the most. Justin would be there. He’d be glaring me down like he’d done since Catee first swapped to my side of the room, and I wouldn’t be able to ignore him so easily without her around. Maybe he’d even take her absence as an opportunity to bash my skull in and to really drive his point home. I dreaded the thought of leaving class, even more than the thought of going in.

  But to my shock, there she was: smiling and waiting as I entered the room. It made the walk to my seat seem eternal. Why was she so late? What’d she done? Did something happen with her dad?

  “Where have you been all day!?” I asked. Emphatic urgency screamed from inside me as I pulled to my seat beside her.

  “I was handling business.” Her reply was a satisfied one.

  “What do you mean?”

  In response, she slid two, red, plastic keys across our desks.

  I looked down, then curiously at her, and I dove to cover them like they were radioactive plutonium.

  “It’s okay, Damian. You can look,” she laughed.

  I pulled my fingers apart enough to peek through, before I finally relaxed enough to reveal the gifts she’d somehow procured. I picked up the keys, one per hand, to turn and examine closer. “Wow! How’d you do it?!” I asked.

  “Eh, no big deal,” she brushed off my awe like her accomplishment had been as simple as buying a pack of gum.

  “No. Really. How’d you do it?” I asked, still turning and admiring the precision of her work. Albeit hard plastic, they looked spot-on.

  “It took some work,” she began, “but once I got started, they weren’t too hard to make.”

  “But how?!” I asked emphatically.

  “Well, I just waited until he was sleeping, then I took the keys from his keychain. I checked them on the door to make sure they were the right ones, first,” she assured, “and then I took them to my room. I used a lighter to heat them up and pressed them into bars of soap. It took a while, but it worked.” Her brilliance stunned me. “And eventually I had two molds. Then I just made sure to clean them up and had them back on his keychain before he left for work this morning,” she said satisfactorily. “He tried to get me up this morning, but I just pretended to be sick. It was easy. He left without a fight. No questions asked.”

  This girl’s a genius! My head drifted on her words.

  “And when he was gone and when I knew he wasn’t coming back, I got up, made a double boiler out of a pot and mixing bowl, and threw in some poker chips. It took a few tries to get it right, but I figured it out, and I melted them down. And when it cooled off, I got it in the soap molds to set, and … TA-DA! Keys!” she gestured to the keys that I held and admired.

  Silenced by the simplistic brilliance of it all, I turned critically inquisitive. “Are you sure they’ll work?”

  “I tried them before I came to school,” she flatly assured. “They work.”

  “Did you go inside? Did you look around?!” I badgered.

  “I wouldn’t know what to look for. No, I didn’t look around. I figured we’d do that together.”

  “Well, you better put these somewhere safe until tonight.” I handed the plastic keys back to her. “I don’t want to be the one responsible fo
r losing them.”

  “No problem.”

  As she leaned to stow them away in her bag, I reached to clasp my hand on her thigh. It startled her upright and caused her to drop one to the ground, that she quickly retrieved and zipped with first, before she turned back to me.

  “I love you.” The words fell from my mouth. They came without thought or logical reason. They came from somewhere deep inside, where adoration supersedes rationality, and the unplanned proclamation startled even me. Not surprisingly, the swift suddenness of it shocked her to silence.

  “I love you, Catee,” I stood my ground and reaffirmed my testament.

  The split second silence that followed was one of utter dread and worry for what she might say and how she might respond.

  “I love you, too.”

  Her words flipped a switch in me, and everything took on new, vivid form. I was instantly brought fully conscious to a world that I’d only half seen before. The invisible barriers I’d built and safeguarded had collapsed.

  “What’s wrong, Damian?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked again.

  “Me? What? Nothing? Nothing’s wrong, Catee. Everything’s perfect. It’s never been so perfect.” My hand squeezed her thigh in support of the unfiltered words that escaped my mouth.

  “Good. I’m glad.” Her hand settled over my own, and her fingers interlaced with mine. “I’m happy.”

  Geometry, Mr. Atkins, and even Justin—who still shot death looks our way—became entirely inconsequential from that point forward. Priorities change after you’ve opened Pandora’s Door, and while we didn’t know it at the time, that’s exactly what we were about to do. And when the evils of man swarm and fight for your soul, you start to appreciate the triviality of parabolas, hypotenuses, and jaded boyfriend wannabes.

  I bounced from foot to foot at our locker that afternoon. I was irreparably anxious for what the next three hours would bring, and it didn’t feel like she’d ever arrive. And when Catee rounded the corner, I couldn’t help but run to her.

  “Do you still have them??” I asked, foolishly questioning her abilities. She looked at me like I had three heads.

  “You’re crazy, right?” Her response propelled me to normality, or something like it.

  “Oh. Yeah. Right. Sorry. I’m sorry. My bad. How was your day?” I rambled nervously.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “Me? Oh. Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. I’m just excited. That’s all.”

  “Damian, you’re weirding me out. I don’t know what you think we’re going to find in there, but I doubt it’ll be anything more than office supplies.”

  “I know. I know. I’ve just got a feeling, Catee. There’s something not right about your dad, and his office might be the key to figuring it out. You know what I’m talking about.”

  And then, like a dam that’d been weakened by years of pounding waters, she opened up. “I don’t know if I want to know, Damian. He’s my dad. And he’s a dick sometimes, but he’s still my dad. Whatever’s in there, he’s got it locked for a reason. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

  I consoled her then, like a professed lover would, and I assured her that whatever happened, she’d never be alone again. It was a promise I made to her in the hall that day, and it’s a promise I’ll keep until my dying breath.

  “Which is which?” I asked, as we fumbled with keys in the curtain-drawn darkness outside her dad’s office.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t put labels on them, meathead,” Catee gave me a nudge from behind. My question was inconsequential anyhow. I’d already tried the first and had the second key in the lock by the time we’d finished the exchange. And with a cautious turn, the knob unlocked.

  “Never mind,” I smiled and slipped the second key into the overhanging padlock. The red plastic glided easily into the chamber, and it turned cautiously to the right. But when the lock popped open, the key snapped free in my hand.

  “Damn it!” I yelled.

  “What?

  “It broke!!”

  “Broke?”

  “Yeah! It broke!” I exclaimed, and held out the small, remaining nub.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I know,” I squinted and looked into the slot for the missing half of the busted plastic. I ran my thumb over the edge and hoped, against all odds, that enough would protrude for us to reclaim our deception. No such luck.

  “Let’s just deal with it after,” I relented.

  “Okay.” Her compliant response came easily and unaffected by the consequences of what would happen if we were caught, and we held hands as we crossed the threshold of Mr. Laverdier’s private sanctum.

  The room was more distinguished than the rest of their house: more refined in its own erudite sort of way. The shelving that lined its walls gave off a scent—mahogany, oak, pine, or something—and there was a methodic precision to the organization of the hundreds of books that lined them. The room had a deliberate feeling about it that stood in stark juxtaposition to the rest of their house; it was a room that’d been given a great deal of thought.

  The thick carpet sank under my feet and squished between my toes as I made my way across it. Catee in tow, we headed toward his desk.

  I wiggled the mouse and the desktop popped up: “SCREEN NAME” and “PASSWORD”. No luck there—we hadn’t come equipped for hacking.

  I went to the desk’s drawers, instead.

  Supplies …

  Paper …

  CD’s …

  Maybe one of these? I thought, thumbing the stack and reading labels. But there was nothing maniacal about any of them.

  “Start looking on the shelves,” I suggested. Catee turned and began scanning book titles.

  “What am I looking for?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. What am I looking for?” I questioned back. “We’ll know when we find it, I guess.”

  “But, what if we see it and we don’t know we saw it?” she asked.

  “Just keep looking,” I replied, and she continued to work her way through the rows and rows of books. Head cocked sideways, she scanned their spines. Up and down, up and down, Catee quickly made her way along the lavish shelves.

  “What am I looking for again?” she asked.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” The look I gave her was stoic. My hands stopped shuffling through the files they’d found their way into, and I stared at her with eyebrows raised in feigned confusion.

  Her response was a smile. White, bright, and wide, it solidified our unification in pursuit of whatever we searched for. Without words, we returned to the hunt.

  Minutes of silence passed.

  “Do you think this could be it?” She pulled a battered and used copy of Dinner for One: Strategies for Surviving Your Spouse, for me to examine.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t like him much, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel a little bad for him, then.

  “Hey!” I jumped. “What’s Project Pallid?”

  “Project Pallid?” she repeated, hearing the words for the first time.

  “Yeah, Project Pallid,” I came down from my toes with an unassuming, blue folder, pulled from the top of the cabinet’s three drawers.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “No?”

  “No,” she reaffirmed.

  “Well, that says something.” I replied, and dropped cross-legged to the carpet to examine its contents. Careful not to disrupt their order or to crinkle its pages, I began to flip through the inch-think stack of papers. I skimmed, read, and became more and more consumed in the process.

  Catee took up cross-legged position beside me. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It just sounded weird,” I replied. “I figured it was worth a look.” I read the first three pages and skimmed through the next several before stopping. The first few were distinctively different from the rest. For starters, they were cr
eased: like they’d come out of an envelope. And based on their formal heading, CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals, and their rigid formatting, they seemed more official than the others—in the strictest, most governmental sense of the word.

  “Did you know about this?!” I asked in alarm, waving the creased pages in the air.

  “Know about what?” Her response, innocently unaware, answered my question.

  “Did you know about your dad getting fired? About why you guys really moved here?”

  “He quit, right? What are you talking about, Damian??” she asked.

  “I’m talking about how they got rid of him. This CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals—whoever they are. They canned him and sent you guys here. That’s what this is. It’s his pink slip!” I fluttered the papers in the air. “They fired him and transferred him to Madison General and—”

  “Why?” she whispered, more to herself than to me.

  I reached for a comforting response that would console her hurt-soaked question, but I came up empty-handed

  “Why did we have to come here?” The emphasis of her words made me think her reaction had something to do with me. It didn’t.

  “Hold on, let me keep reading,” I insisted, handed off the creased pages, and moved onto the rest of the stack. She caught up quickly, and I began passing its sheets directly to her.

  And at 5:00, we finished. We’d barely spoken a word during the hour and a half that passed and, although we didn’t read each page word-for-word, we’d read enough to understand what her dad had so calculatedly hidden from her and everyone else.

  His research for CrossPoint Pharmaceuticals had been treatment based, and he’d worked in a government lab in DC, on cancer research, for three years before their move to Madison. His work there was focused on naturally occurring, blood-born antibodies—those that affected the quantity and combativeness of white blood cells during infection. His research had only gone as far as lab rats, but his results were decisive: Molecular-based manipulation of white blood cells showed promising results. A series of compounds, injected into the host, enhanced the body’s ability to detect and fight infection. White blood cells quadrupled and, by numbers alone, they eradicated cancerous, red blood cells. In doing so, they eliminated all traces of infection in test subjects.