Naked Mole Rat Saves the World

by Karen Rivers

  She felt so terrible and dizzy, she didn’t know what to do.

  Maybe she was going to faint and then no one would be able to pick up the hair color and her mom would lose business and, almost worse than that, kit might start hallucinating again.

  “It was just a dream,” she said out loud, accidentally.

  “That’s no dream, that’s an idiot who has no manners. Using a speakerphone on the bus,” the lady said to kit. “Some people.”

  Just then, the man in the Batman mask dropped his phone.

  He swore.

  The phone slid along the floor and stopped right by kit’s foot. She stared at it. She knew she should do something, so she gave it a kick. But she kicked it away from the man instead of toward him.

  “What is wrong with you, you bald freak?” he asked, pushing past all the standing people to get to his phone. The bus was very full.

  “Hey,” yelled the lady. “This kid has cancer, be nice. You don’t know what he’s going through.”

  “It’s alopecia universalis,” said kit. “It’s not cancer. And I’m a girl.”

  “Calling a sick boy a freak,” the lady continued loudly. “Who raised you? Wolves?”

  The man in the Batman mask tipped back his head. Then he howled. The howl was so big and loud and high-pitched that it felt as though it was coming from inside kit’s head. She was so dizzy, she thought she might fall over. Everything seemed to be flashing. She had to get off the bus.

  “Excuse me,” said kit. “This is my stop. This is where my grandmother lives. I’m going to help her get her Christmas decorations.” She didn’t know why she added on lies like that. Maybe it was just, in that moment, she thought it would be nicer to be Clem than herself.

  She got off through the back doors and took some big gulps of air and then remembered about hyperventilating so she tried to stop by holding her breath. She started to walk but that didn’t feel fast enough, so she ran, even though she didn’t know if she was running from something or running toward something. It didn’t seem to matter.

  She looked at her hands. She wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but they did look like they might be smaller, her skin looser.

  “This is not happening,” she said. “Anyway, it was just a hallucination. Science!”

  Her body shivered, even though she wasn’t cold.

  Something twisted hard inside her, somewhere near her heart.

  “Not happening,” she said. “No way.”

  But it was happening.

  The thing that happened was happening again.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, squeezing between pedestrians. “Excuse me.” Her voice sounded squeaky and all wrong.

  This block looked similar enough to her own to make her feel disoriented, as though she should be able to turn around and see the salon and the bodega and Jackson’s ugly apartment building and the familiar cracked sidewalk. But instead of a bodega and a hair salon, there was a 7-Eleven and a kids’ play place with a huge balloon guy out front. The sign above it said “Play-rama.”

  “Play-o-rama,” she said, which would sound better.

  Her heart pounded and her mouth was dry. Her brain didn’t seem to be working properly but she did know she needed a drink, fast. A kids’ play place would have a water fountain, she decided. She didn’t have any money for 7-Eleven. She pulled open the door to Play-rama and stepped inside.

  “Where’s your bracelet?” said a woman. She looked sweaty and frantic. Her shirt said HOSTESS. “You need one.” She grabbed kit’s wrist and stuck on a bright pink band.

  “Thanks,” kit said, and then she was in.

  The bracelet slipped off her hand. Her wrist was getting smaller. How could that happen? Hallucinations don’t shrink your joints. She shoved the bracelet back on.

  Whatever was happening was now happening faster, she realized. She didn’t have time to look for water, she had to hide.

  Of course, she had to hide.

  Her whole body pulsed with it. Hide, hide, hide, hide. The hide-voice drowned out any other thoughts she might have, even ones about being scared. She was scared, but she couldn’t worry about that right then.

  Kit ducked into a tunnel and began to scramble up and down tubes and ladders, around corners and through narrowing gaps. It might have been fun if she weren’t so focused. Hide, hide, hide, hide. She wiggled her way into an impossibly small crevice as far up as she could go.

  No one was that small, but she was.

  At least, she was now.

  She was smaller and smaller and smaller.

  Her dried-beans-falling-down-stairs heartbeat rat-a-tatted through her, woodpecker loud.

  She pushed her nose against the plastic, and her teeth clicked against it.

  Then a boy’s face filled the gap.

  He screamed, his mouth wide open, showing a big space where his four front teeth should be. “RAT! RAT! RAT!”

  “Look!” she wanted to yell at him. “Don’t get hysterical! There are rats everywhere! This is Brooklyn!” But she couldn’t yell because she couldn’t even talk.

  She squeezed her eyes shut tightly. She couldn’t see much when her eyes were open, just blurs now, but having them closed felt safer.

  She started to count.

  Counting made it feel like she was somehow in control, which she wasn’t.

  She could hear the sounds of kids shouting and someone yelling, “Everyone out of the tunnels!” as though there weren’t just one rat, but a whole mischief of rats, wreaking havoc in the structure, spreading diseases with tiny spray guns.

  She rolled her eyes, or tried to. It didn’t exactly work. Her eyes were distinctly not rollable.

  A whistle blew, which made her yearn for Mr. Banks’s terrible gym class. Even that would be better than this. She wished as hard as she could that she was pretty much anywhere but where she was, but nothing changed. Someone banged something against the slide. “Out, rats!” a voice yelled. “Get out of there!”

  What good is magic, kit thought, if it doesn’t work when you need it to?

  She counted to ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. When she got to one thousand and one, she noticed that the banging had stopped. No one was shouting. And, most importantly, she couldn’t hear her heart quite so loudly.

  Her heart felt normal.

  She looked at her hand.

  It was her actual, real hand, with normal-sized skin that wasn’t gray.

  She exhaled, checked to make sure her glasses had magically reappeared on her face (they had), straightened her clothes as well as she could, and started to crawl, which was harder than it sounds. She’d really got herself wedged in.

  When she slid down the exit slide, a staff member who looked not much older than her rolled his eyes. “Did you have fun? You’re basically the only kid who didn’t panic, so good for you. People are such idiots. There are no rats in here. No rat in their right mind would want to be in this noisy place.”

  “I didn’t see any rats,” said kit.

  “Duh, there are no rats,” he said. “Kids are idiots.”

  “I’m a kid,” kit pointed out.

  “Right, sorry.” He winked and smiled, showing a mouth full of braces that had a lot of food stuck in them. “You probably aren’t an idiot. But you’re, like, the exception.”

  She made her way to the lobby and no one stopped her. She pulled open the heavy door and stepped back onto the sidewalk. It was over. She’d survived it.

  Again.

  When she got to the hair place, she gave the girl at the front her mom’s account number, like everything was normal, even though her heart was still beating all over the place—skittering, really—and the girl went to the back to get the order. When she came back, she was with a man in a suit. He had a huge beard, like Santa, except it was black, and he was wearing a suit with a
tie and everything. He looked very official and not even slightly jolly.

  He glared at kit and then shook his head. “She sent her kid? How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” kit lied. Thirteen sounded a lot older than twelve. Thirteen definitely seemed old enough to be running this kind of errand, at least in her estimation. “I’m small for my age,” she added. “I have alopecia, not cancer.”

  The man looked at her over the top of his glasses. They were gold and had tiny diamonds sparkling on the corners. “I like your glasses,” she said.

  Kit wondered if the man knew her mom, if he missed seeing her and her long blond hair and her wide, slow smile, if he had any idea that she was Cyng. Kit felt like she should apologize for being herself and not her mom, but then the man sighed and said, “Thank you. But tell your mom she can’t keep owing us.” Kit nodded. Then he added, “And tell her you’re too little to be wandering around the city alone! Jeez!” He laughed. “You aren’t thirteen.”

  “I’m not scared of anything,” she told him. “It’s fine. I don’t mind doing it.” Liar, liar, pants on fire, she thought. She knew she shouldn’t lie, but she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t herself.

  “She shouldn’t ask you to,” he said. He put his hand out and kit shook it. His hand was warm and soft. He probably had access to a lot of moisturizers or maybe he just conditioned a lot of hair. “Are you okay, kid?”

  Kit felt as though if she answered, she’d end up telling him about Play-rama and then about what happened when Clem fell and how she was kind of sure it was real and that she was somehow turning into a rat.

  Sometimes.

  Maybe only once a year.

  But what if it was more than that?

  She thought about her wrinkly hand, how loose her skin got.

  “Mmm hmmm,” she said.

  “Pardon?” said the man.

  “Nothing!” she said. She suddenly felt like she couldn’t breathe. She coughed. “I mean, I’m totally fine. Thank you for asking.”

  When kit got home, she put the supplies away in the salon and she didn’t tell her mom that she shouldn’t have asked kit to go in the first place and she didn’t mention the Batman-mask-wearing guy on the bus and she didn’t tell her mom what happened to her or that she owed the man money because her mom really didn’t need more things to get stressed out about.

  She had to protect her mom from all of that.

  It was her job.

  Maybe that’s what made her the hero her mom had been waiting for her whole life. Kit blinked back tears. “It isn’t fair,” she mumbled.

  “What, honey?” said her mom. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Nothing,” kit said.

  A couple of months ago, Samara had been sitting with kit on the roof of the hardware store, where they sometimes had picnics. It was a really hot day, kit remembered. The kind of hot where the tar on the roof got sticky to the touch and burned her feet if she stepped on it without her flip-flops. They were sitting on the blanket in the shade of the stairs, eating sandwiches made from sweet pickles and peanut butter on grocery-store white bread that was so soft and light you could roll a piece of it up into a tiny ball and fit the whole thing easily into your mouth.

  Then Samara had started to try to explain kit’s mom to kit.

  “I have to talk to you, to tell you some things about your mom,” she said.

  It was the first time that kit could remember being really angry with an adult. No one knew kit’s mom as well as kit did! They were a team. Kit already knew everything there was to know. She understood about the Argentinosaurus of her mom’s fears. She got it more than Samara did.

  “Your mom loves you so much. She’s doing the best she can, but right now, she is showing you what she’s capable of, and you can’t ever expect more from her.”

  “I know,” kit had said. “I know her.”

  Then Samara told kit to stop even asking her mom to take her places. She said that kit should take the jar off the kitchen counter where they stored her mom’s tips. The jar was labeled Disneyland. That was kit’s dream, to go there with her mom, like a normal kid who had a mom who wasn’t afraid of everything.

  Kit knew it was just a fantasy, going to Disneyland, that it would never happen. She got that it was a kid-dream, that it was pretend. But it was important to her to go through the ritual of counting the money and looking for cheap airfare online and seeing how much more they would need.

  “It feels like pressure on her,” Samara had said. “I know you’re a child and you don’t really understand, but she can’t take that much pressure. I’m worried it’s too much.”

  Kit had been so mad, she’d thrown her sandwich as far as she could. A flock of pigeons had descended on it.

  “It’s not pressure,” kit had said.

  After that, she hadn’t told Samara any jokes for a whole month and when Samara had told them to her, she hadn’t laughed.

  Now her mom was working with Samara, both of them smiling and chatting while they wove curlers into the long, dark hair of a really pretty girl who was probably a model. “My head is so heavy!” the girl groaned, like she hadn’t asked them to do it. “I’m going to die!”

  Samara looked at kit and winked. “Hey kit! Joke of the day?”

  “I guess,” said kit. Things hadn’t quite gotten back to normal between her and Samara, but they were close to normal. Normal-ish. Besides, she loved Samara, even when she got things wrong and said dumb things, like she was the authority on kit’s mom, not kit.

  “What do you call witches who share an apartment?”

  “Um, I don’t know.”

  “Broom-mates!”

  “Good one,” said kit, even though it wasn’t good. “Ha ha,” she managed to add.

  Samara laughed. “Broom-mates,” she repeated. “Who thinks of these things?”

  “Great question,” said kit.

  “Homework?” said her mom, which was shorthand for, “If you have homework, please go do it.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” said kit.

  Upstairs, kit went into the bathroom and looked hard at herself in the mirror to see if she looked any different, but she didn’t. She looked exactly the same. She opened the tiny purplish bottle labeled Truth. She took a sniff. She wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but it smelled like pine trees.

  She dabbed a bit of Truth on her wrists and then she looked in the mirror and asked, “Why is this happening?”

  But either Truth didn’t know or that’s not how it worked because she still didn’t have an answer for herself.

  At least it smells good, she thought. If the truth smelled like trees, what would lies smell like? “Garbage,” she said out loud.

  She went to the kitchen and found the marker and a piece of paper and she wrote a note. “FYI, THE TV IS BROKEN AND VERY HEAVY.” She underlined the VERY and then she taped it to the kitchen window, but in the corner that was mostly hidden by the plants where her mom would have to bend down and really look to notice it. But from the fire escape, the Batman guy wouldn’t be able to miss it.

  She did not want that terrible man to prove her mom was right to be afraid.

  She also knew she was being really childish and sort of stupid—what were the odds of the man coming here, to their top-floor apartment, to steal an old TV?—but she left the note up anyway. Better safe than sorry.

  Clem

  “Clementine is no longer my name,” Clem announced to her mom, once she had caught her breath from her run home. “Call me Mento.”

  Mom was making dinner, browning ground meat in a pan. The beef spickled and spat. Clem took a picture for her Pictasnap account. She only ever posted three things: dogs, photos of Forky in weird places, and super-gross-looking food. She had a lot of followers who must have also all been huge weirdos, like her. Who else but a weirdo would
specifically like small forks, dogs, and gross food? “My people,” she thought. They could join her utopian cult. Their leader would be a dog. They would worship Forky. They would only eat food that looked gross.

  “Why are you photographing my meat, Minto?” Her mom laughed.

  “No reason,” Clem lied. “And it’s MENTO. Not Minto. MINto would be dumb.” She dropped onto a stool and started editing the photo. The meat smelled delicious. It was hard to imagine that it used to be an animal. Cows didn’t smell good when they were wandering around in fields or barns. “We should think about being vegetarian. That used to be alive. You know, with feelings and big eyes and a beating heart, stuff like that.” She wished she hadn’t said that, because now the meat looked too upsetting.

  “No way!” Her mom laughed again. “That’s bananas! You’re a growing girl! Girls who don’t eat meat faint all the time.”

  Clem’s mom loved the word “bananas.” Pretty much everything was bananas to her. It was her go-to word. Even Clem had started saying it, like it was contagious. Lately, she’d noticed kit using it, too. Soon maybe the whole world would be afflicted by banana-itis.

  “How was your day?” Clem asked, just to test her theory.

  “Bananas!”

  “Ha!” said Clem, but didn’t explain why.

  “You have to eat meat, Clemmy. Please don’t quit on me. Where would you get iron?”

  Clem rolled her eyes. “MENTO.”

  “No offense, honey, but Mento is a terrible name.”

  “We could eat raisins for iron,” Clem said, ignoring the insult. “Lots of raisins.”

  “That’s good, but not enough!”

  “I’m joking, Mom.” Clem took the photo out of her pocket. “Anyway, look.”

  Her mom stepped away from the noisy pan and peered over the top of her glasses at the photo. “Oh!” She laughed. “My father!” The way she laughed before she said, “My father!” made it sound like it was the answer to a riddle, like the ones that Samara was always telling. But this wasn’t a joke. It for sure wasn’t funny. It was her grandfather and he was dead.