Naked Mole Rat Saves the World

by Karen Rivers

  “Are you submitting your talent show form? I’ve had three reminders in my email this week.”

  “No!” kit called back as she made her way to the back room. She sat down at the computer. She could hear her mom on the phone out front, doing appointment reminders. She quickly Googled “forgiveness spells,” which is what she knew Samara would have done. While she could still hear her mom talking, she clicked print.

  Back upstairs, she sorted through them. Most of them were silly (the eye of a toad! the tail of a newt!) but some of them looked real. She picked her favorite and then found a scrap of paper and wrote “naked mole rat.” She searched through the junk drawer for a sewing needle and got a lemon from the fridge. Then she went out onto the fire escape. Spells worked better outside, she reasoned. The sky would have a better view of what she was doing that way and that felt important, although she wasn’t sure why.

  Kit sat down and swung her legs a few times, watching the people on the street below. Then she stuck the needle through the paper and into the lemon and she chanted nine times “I forgive you” while picturing Clem’s face.

  A crow flew down and landed on the rusty railing and stared at her, his head cocked to one side. “It’s a lemon,” she told him. She held the fruit under her nose and closed her eyes. It smelled fresh and clean and delicious, which was deceiving because lemon tasted terrible.

  The thing was, she was a naked mole rat, so why was she even mad? Clem was right! But she knew the reason she was mad at Clem didn’t have that much to do with the whole naked mole rat comment in the first place. Maybe she was sad because Clem wasn’t Clem anymore, not the Clem she used to be. Maybe she was mad because Clem was always mad and being mad was contagious, like the flu. Maybe she was jealous because Clem was in a phase and she wasn’t. Maybe she was hurt that Clem didn’t seem to care about their inside jokes as much anymore, that Clem was leaving her behind.

  Kit pulled her knees up to her chest and counted to twenty, hugging her legs.

  At twenty, she took the needle out of the lemon and threw the fruit onto the roof of the hardware store. It bounced and rolled and stopped.

  “Eat it!” she told the crow. “Then you won’t get scurvy!”

  She climbed back in through the window and took a deep breath of the plant-scented air. She put the needle away and then she picked up the phone. It was heavy, or at least it felt heavier than usual. She held it up to her ear and listened to the dial tone until the voice came on and said, “Please hang up and try your call again.”

  It must be a very old recording, kit thought. It had sounded the same for her whole life. She imagined the person who originally recorded it was young and glamorous like Clem’s grandma in her old photos, but was now an old woman. She wondered if the old woman ever listened to the dial tone until her own, younger voice came on. In a way, it would be like her mom listening to her old record, hearing how she used to be before all of the rest of the things in her life had happened.

  Kit dialed Clem’s number. Mrs. G. answered and said that Clem and Jorge weren’t home, and kit couldn’t tell if it was the kind of “not home” that meant “they really aren’t home” or the “not home” that meant, “They are here, but they don’t want to talk to you.”

  “How are you, kit?” Mrs. G. asked, and she sounded so concerned that kit just knew that Clem had told her something had happened

  Something bad.

  “I’m super great!” she lied, and then she hung up without saying goodbye.

  She went down to the computer in the salon office again.

  “I thought you were done?” her mom called from up front. Her client was sitting under one of those big old-fashioned dryers. “That’s only for homework, remember? I don’t want your brain to turn to mush.”

  “It is homework,” kit said. “I have to look up some facts about . . . flags.” She had no idea why the word “flags” had popped into her head.

  “No more than thirty minutes,” her mom said. “What kind of flags?”

  “Okay, thirty minutes,” kit said, without answering the question.

  The first thing she did was to check Clem’s Pictasnap account, like she was looking for clues. Kit Hardison, Private Eye, she thought. Jackson wasn’t the only kid with detective skills, but the difference was that kit would only use her skills for good.

  Clem’s Pictasnap featured a new photo of Forky sitting on a purple velvet seat that looked like it was in a theater. It was tagged #forkinthecity. And there was another new photo of Clem standing with a group of three people who were dressed up as dogs. That photo was tagged #dogsofnewyork.

  Kit “liked” both posts. She never posted anything on her own account because she wasn’t allowed to. Her mom thought that if she put pictures on social media, someone would see her and find her and kidnap her. She knew it was her mom’s dinosaur brain talking and not reality, but kit certainly didn’t want the man in the Batman mask to have any clues. She knew the Batman guy was real. She’d seen him. He for sure probably couldn’t kidnap a kid, she reassured herself. He seemed to mostly just want or need small appliances.

  She checked Jorge’s Pictasnap, but there was nothing since the photo of Clem and his mom and dad outside the TMTFIA theater that he took before they went in to do the show. She had already “liked” it, a whole year ago.

  Then she checked Jackson’s. His account only had one picture on it. He did that all the time though, deleted everything except for one thing, so he would seem mysterious and aloof. This time, it was a photo of the letter he wrote to her with the purple pen. It wasn’t a lie! It had fourteen likes.

  Kit did not click “like,” she just closed the window. Why would he share it with everyone? Was it a joke?

  She opened Pictasnap again and before she could change her mind, she commented: “What do you want?” Then she closed it once more.

  She wondered what he’d done with all the old pictures that used to be on his page, the ones he used to take of all four of them when they were still a constellation with four corners, a trapezoid of friends.

  Then, just to make the lie she told to her mom true, she Googled “weirdest flag in the world.” What came up was the Sicilian flag, which was a picture of a face with three legs coming out of it. Legs! She printed the flag out and left it on her mom’s desk. She wrote at the top, “Weirdest Flag in the World, FYI (IMHO).” Her mom would laugh and then maybe she’d forget how upset she got before, about Disneyland and Dal’s. Maybe they’d still be able to get takeout and celebrate, even if they just celebrated upstairs inside in the kitchen that was so full of plants there weren’t many places to put plates anymore.

  “I’m done, Mom!” she called.

  Her mom waved. She didn’t look upset, but it was hard to tell with her. She had a lot of practice hiding how she felt in front of clients.

  Kit took the funny old access stairs across to the roof of the hardware store next door. The buildings had been built attached to each other, and no one else seemed to use these stairs for anything anymore. The staircase was a relic of another time. Maybe they were built as a shortcut for the owners, to get back and forth to work, kit thought.

  There was no sign of the lemon on the roof, which meant that the crow had taken it. “You’re welcome!” she yelled to no one. The crow was long gone. She wanted to laugh but laughing by herself just seemed bananas, so she swallowed the laugh back down.

  She really missed Clem.

  Then she heard a dog bark. She got up and carefully looked down over the edge. There, walking down the street, was Max.

  Max was on a leash.

  And on the other end of the leash was Jackson.

  She blinked. “No way,” she whispered.

  She took off her glasses and polished them on her shirt and then put them back on. It was unmistakably Max. It was definitely Jackson.

  “YOU!” she shouted
, but he didn’t look up.

  Kit made herself Samara-breathe.

  Slowly.

  In and out.

  Out and in.

  She swallowed hard so she wouldn’t throw up. “I told you we should have let the dog out!” she remembered Jackson saying. He was such a jerk. He obviously didn’t want to be her friend at all. What kind of friend would say that?

  “K.i.t., keep it together,” she reminded herself.

  She watched Jackson bend over and say something into Max’s ear. She saw Max sit and hold up his paw. She saw Jackson shake Max’s paw and then give him a treat. Then Max started pulling on the leash. He was dragging Jackson down the street, away from his building. Jackson had to run to catch up.

  “Max!” kit called, but Max and Jackson had disappeared.

  She climbed back to her own building and went into the apartment. “Mom?” she called, but the apartment was still and quiet.

  Kit went to the kitchen drawer and got out a purple pen and a piece of paper. She ripped the paper into small pieces. On the first one, she wrote, “I forgive you, Jackson.”

  “I don’t really,” she said out loud, “but I’m trying.”

  On the next piece of paper, she wrote the same words again, for her Dad who was the Night Sky. Then on another one for John Alexander Findley, who used to date her mom when she was famous and then stopped when she wasn’t and was her father but now was dead. Then she did one for her mom, who sometimes did the wrong thing. And for Samara, who thought she knew kit’s mom better than kit did. She added one for Chandra, who wouldn’t let her take the naked mole rat. Finally, she did one for herself. That one was the hardest but felt the best. She doused all of them with Truth. Maybe, she thought, making them smell like the truth will help to make them true.

  Finally, she scrunched each one up into a tiny ball and tossed it out the window.

  She felt a lot better when she was done even though nothing was different, at least, not yet. It wasn’t even an official spell, she just made it up. But that didn’t matter. One thing she knew for sure was that just believing a thing was true was the magic that mattered most.

  Clem

  Clem and Jorge were at their grandma’s apartment again.

  They were definitely old enough to be left by themselves, so it was insulting to Clem that every day, after school, when Mom was away and Dad was going to be at the store late, he had been saying, “Do you mind going to Grandma’s from school to help her with ＿＿＿＿?”

  It all felt contrived, like they were being babysat without their knowledge.

  “We mind,” Clem had said today, but Jorge had interrupted.

  “Of course we don’t mind.” He glared at her.

  Today, the made-up reason for being there was that Grandma had said she needed their help to scrub her tiny balcony, to get it “ready for winter.”

  “Why does a balcony have to get ready for winter?” Clem complained. “Won’t it just get dirty again? We’ll have to clean it again in the spring.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Jorge. “It’s kind of satisfying. I like this power washer.” He sprayed it at a bird poop and the poop flew off like he’d hit it with a light saber. “Ka pow!”

  “Have you been body-snatched? If so, say the code word.” When they were little, they had seen a movie about alien body snatchers that had given them both nightmares for an entire summer. To make themselves feel better, they had come up with a code word that somehow they believed aliens wouldn’t know. The code word was “pickle.”

  “Pickle,” he said.

  She threw a wet sponge at him. “Out, out alien!” She laughed but it felt fake, so she picked up the sponge and started half-heartedly wiping again.

  Jorge was still laughing. He had been laughing a lot. Especially since his non-date date with Marina.

  They had gone to the café across from One Buck Chuck while Clem had worked in the store, filling one hundred silver balloons with helium for a wedding. She actually thought she might die from the terrible smell of latex, but if she didn’t do it, Jorge would have had to. Then he wouldn’t have been able to go hang out with Marina. She was trying to be nice, to make up for how not nice she had been for what felt like a really long time.

  Jorge had been gone for exactly forty-seven minutes, which was thirty-three balloons’ worth of time.

  That wasn’t a lot of time.

  It wasn’t enough time for a person to change.

  But when Jorge came back, he seemed different.

  She couldn’t say how, not exactly. His whole body moved with a different energy. He was holding a rolled up place mat. She didn’t ask why, but he showed her anyway. It was a portrait that Marina had drawn of him, using a fat Sharpie. It was okay, but it wasn’t, like, excellent or anything.

  “That’s great!” Clem forced herself to say, like she was Grandma admiring a picture in a magazine. Marina had drawn Jorge with a mermaid tail. “You’re a merman now? She can’t draw legs?”

  “Hey,” he’d said. “She likes what she likes. Mermaids”—he grinned—“and me.”

  “Hay is for horses.”

  “Hang on.” Jorge disappeared down Aisle 5 and came back with a picture frame.

  “You’re framing it?” The balloons bounced against the ceiling above her, like they, too, couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  “No! I mean, yes. Maybe. Why? Is that dumb?”

  Clem gritted her teeth. “No,” she’d lied.

  He had shrugged and put the frame in his back­pack, carefully writing it into the book under the register.

  Clem scrubbed her grandma’s deck harder.

  She wanted to tell kit all about Marina and Jorge. She wanted to go with her to eat ice cream with colorful sprinkles. She wanted to lie on the roof and blow bubbles while they listened to kit’s mom’s record. She wanted everything to go back to normal.

  “Whoa,” said Jorge. “You’re going to scrub the paint off.”

  “It’s concrete. You can’t scrub it off.”

  “Okay.” He smiled.

  What could have happened in forty-seven minutes that could possibly explain how happy he was?

  Maybe Jorge said “I like you” and then Marina said “I like you, too” and then they just did their own drawings and left and that was enough.

  Maybe Jorge told her how Clem was acting lately. Maybe Marina reached over and took his hand or something and said, “It wasn’t your fault,” which is what Clem should have said but never had.

  The mark left by the big flower pot wouldn’t budge.

  She glanced over at Jorge. She was about to say, “This is never going to come off!”

  But Jorge smiled.

  “Stop doing that,” she said.

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You are, too,” said Clem. “You’re smiling. And stop waiting for me to ask, because I’m not going to.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you,” said Jorge. He stood up and leaned on the balcony, like a romantic hero in a movie, looking moonily off into the distance. The wind blew his hair back. “She ate two cookies.”

  “You look like someone on the cover of an old-timey romance novel, like Grandma reads.”

  “I could only afford two cookies and two drinks, so I had to say that I didn’t want one after she ordered two. I’m glad she ordered first. It was awkward. I drew her a picture of a dog. It was like the dog version of her. It was supposed to be funny. But she got super mad. She said, ‘Do you think I’m a dog?’ And I said, ‘Dogs are the best!’ and she said, ‘So you think I’m the best but also a dog?’ And I said, ‘Oh, are you a cat person?’ and I changed the ears to look more like a cat, in case cats were more complimentary. But then she was like, ‘Now I’m a rabbit?’”

  Clem giggled. “Oh, are you a cat person?” she repeated. She laughe
d harder.

  “I know!”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Then she drew me as a merman, and said, ‘I have to go!’ and she left. She gave me a high five.”

  Clem made a face. “A high five? Did she time-travel here from the 1980s?”

  Jorge laughed.

  “What did you think she was going to do? Kiss you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about the ending,” Jorge admitted. “I don’t even know now if she’s mad about the dog drawing still or what.”

  “Always think about the ending.” They were both laughing now and she didn’t feel lonely at all.

  She rubbed at her eyes. Her eyeliner left a big black streak on the back of her hand. It looked like she was leaking darkness.

  Maybe she was.

  Clem squeezed the sponge over the balcony. She hoped she didn’t sprinkle dirty water on someone, but when she looked down, she didn’t see anyone.

  “After she left, I sort of hung out and talked to Jackson.”

  Clem was so startled, she threw the sponge at him. “Jackson isn’t our friend anymore!”

  “He’s not kit’s friend anymore. But neither are you. Do I have to unfriend you, too?”

  “Yes!” Clem said. “I mean, I don’t know.” She scuffed her toe along the concrete and it made a satisfying bumpy sound. “He’s been pretty mean to everyone all year.”

  “Yeah,” said Jorge. “He had a bad year.”

  Clem wanted to ask what had happened, but she also didn’t. Her loyalty was to kit. “Kit is a unicorn,” she said.

  “Really bad,” said Jorge. “A really bad year. His dad left.”

  “I had a worse year.”

  “I know,” said Jorge. “But I still talk to you. Even when you’re a jerk.”

  “Good point,” said Clem, accidentally letting go of the sponge.

  “Hey!” someone yelled.

  “Sorry!” she called down. She punched Jorge’s arm, not too hard, but hard enough.

  “What was that for?”

  Clem went inside instead of answering. Answering was too hard.