Naked Mole Rat Saves the World

by Karen Rivers

  Kit ran straight up the door, her baggy-skinned hands gripping the glass. She went in through the mail slot, thumping to the floor, where she stopped, abruptly.

  It took her a minute to adjust to what she was seeing.

  Things were really blurry, but she could see enough to understand right away what was happening.

  She saw:

  Her mom.

  The man wearing a Batman mask.

  The orange record player.

  Kit became aware of a sound, and that sound was screaming and the screaming was her mom and it was like the scene had been frozen and suddenly jumped back into the action. The man in the Batman mask stepped toward kit’s mom and she stepped toward him, like they were going to dance, but kit knew this wasn’t that. This was going to be a fight. Did her mom even know how to fight?

  Kit wanted to scream at the man to STOP or GO or in any event to LEAVE, but naked mole rats may be superheroes who can run just as fast forward as they can backward, but they can’t shout. So kit ran up the leg of the sink and into the sink and she grabbed the nozzle of the sprayer with her hideously long front teeth.

  This is where I save you, she thought.

  She sprayed the water at both her mom and the masked man. Then her mom, who was scared of rodents, even if the rodents were superheroes in disguise, screamed even more and the man in the Batman mask swore loudly and said, “This is just not worth it.”

  And then the door of the salon crashed open and in came Clem and Jackson and Max.

  Big, giant Max.

  Max seemed to know in the way that dogs always know.

  In two seconds flat, he’d knocked the man in the Batman mask to the ground and was not going to let him get up, not for anything.

  Kit blinked or fainted or fell and all of a sudden, she was herself again, full size, complete with rainbow star hoodie. She pushed her glasses up and everything came into focus. She got up from behind the sink and said, “Mom?”

  Then her mom was there, all wrapped around her, her hair spilling over kit’s shoulders, her lips against kit’s skull. “Oh honey, I’m so sorry I missed your show,” she said, like that was the most important thing right now.

  Outside the salon, the lights of a police car flashed red and blue and red and blue.

  “That all happened really fast,” kit said, just as Samara came in. “I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

  “Kit?” Samara said. “You missed your own act! What happened here?”

  Kit looked around at all the people, crowded into the small salon. “I guess I knew that I was kind of needed here,” she said.

  “You saved me,” kit’s mom told kit, and she held up her wrist. “I always knew you would.”

  . . .

  Afterward, when everything had calmed back down again, kit had the idea that they could have the after-party on the roof of the hardware store.

  They all took turns climbing down the metal staircase, even kit’s mom. Kit could see that she was shaking a little bit, but she could also see how hard she was trying and how brave she was being. Jackson went next, and Max, and then Jackson’s mom and his stepdad, Doug, even though he kept saying, “This staircase is almost certainly not up to code.”

  Kit could see why he might not be Jackson’s favorite person.

  The Garcias were next, Clem and Jorge and Mr. and Mrs. G.

  Last, but not least, Samara, and then kit.

  It was all of kit’s favorite people.

  The air was sharp and chilly. Kit could almost, but not quite, see clouds of her own breath.

  After the burgers were gone, they talked about everything that had happened from the beginning, over and over, their voices layering over each other like leaves on the sidewalk.

  Kit and Clem set up a blanket a little bit away from the group and they lay down on their backs.

  “I didn’t know you were going to sing,” said Clem.

  “You were really good,” said kit. “I couldn’t have sung it like that. It was good that you sang it. I can’t even sing. If you weren’t my best friend, I’d hate you for being able to sing like that. I’m sorry I had a panic attack and ran out.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Yep.”

  “I didn’t know you had those.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of new.” Kit thought about telling Clem that the first time it happened was during The Most Talented Family in America, but she didn’t want Clem to feel responsible. She wasn’t. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just the way kit was wired.

  Kit heard Jackson whoop and then Max barked and Clem flinched. “I’m really allergic,” she said.

  “I know!”

  “Kit, can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.” Kit looked up at the stars. They were really hard to see. They always were. She knew from summer camp that there were places, even not that far from the city, where you could see the stars so clearly, millions of them. There weren’t fewer here, it’s just that only the brightest ones were visible because of the city lights. The supernovas, kit supposed. Supernovas were stars that were dying, it’s just that right before they died, they flared and became brighter than they’d ever been before.

  Clem took a deep breath. “That night on the show, when I fell. It wasn’t Jorge’s fault. He didn’t drop me.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “I sneezed. There was a dog backstage and I patted the dog and then I sneezed. I missed the part where I was supposed to catch his hand and I fell. It was my fault.”

  “I thought Jorge dropped you,” said kit.

  “Everyone thought that.”

  The silence pooled around them like water. A puddle of silence, kit thought. She could tell that Clem was waiting for her to say something.

  “I’m sorry” was what she said.

  “Why are you sorry? I’m the one who messed up. I patted the dog. I let everyone think Jorge dropped me. I might be a terrible person.”

  “I’m still sorry. It’s not your fault you’re allergic to dogs. You couldn’t have known. You’re definitely not a terrible person. And you’re a good singer. A good singer and a non-terrible person. Pretty good combination.”

  “You’re a really good friend,” said Clem.

  “Sometimes,” said kit.

  “Do you still think your father is, like, the sky?” said Clem.

  Kit rolled over onto her stomach. She rested her head on her hands. “No. My father was a guy named John Alexander Findley. He died a few years ago. Jackson found out. Jackson told me.” Her voice was muffled because she was talking into her sleeve mostly.

  “Jackson found him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you were so mad at him?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a lot. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Kit leaned up on her elbow. “I didn’t want it to be real. I think it’s like what you said about your grandfather and your grandpa. One is the one who made you but the other one raised you. The Night Sky can still be my dad. Right?”

  Someone was playing kit’s mom’s record. She sat up. It wasn’t a record. Her mom was singing.

  “Listen!” kit said.

  Clem sat up, too. Then she started to sing, too, really quietly.

  Then other people joined in.

  Kit couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought that even Jackson was singing. Everyone appeared to know the words, which was weird but not that weird. The song was on the radio a lot now. But it seemed to kit like everyone was singing her mom’s secrets, like all the things her mom was so scared of were being shared around somehow, and diluted by all the voices, making them less scary. That’s how it felt, like all their friends were lifting something away.

  Their voices got louder and louder and more and more powerful toget
her and kit felt like her heart might actually explode. Tears ran down her face. She wasn’t one hundred percent sure why she was crying. They weren’t sad tears, but they weren’t exactly happy tears either. Someone down on the street shouted, “ENCORE!”

  Samara sat down next to kit after the song ended. She leaned over and gave her a hug. “That was amazing,” she said.

  “It totally was,” said kit.

  Clem laughed. “That felt like something in a movie!” She stood up. “Jorge!” she called. “Did you record that on your phone?”

  When Clem walked away to find him, Samara rested her hand on kit’s head for a second. “So what do you get when you cross a mole with a turtle?”

  “I don’t know!” Kit laughed.

  “Why are you laughing already? You don’t know the answer yet!”

  “I don’t know! I think because I’m happy. So what do you get when you cross a mole with a turtle? A mortle?”

  “A tur-mol-eh!” Samara said. “Like a tamale, you get it?”

  “That’s terrible.” Kit stopped laughing. She groaned.

  “It wasn’t that bad!”

  “I know, I’m just teasing,” said kit.

  Clem reappeared just then. She had bubbles.

  “Where did you get those?”

  “One Buck Chuck!” said Clem. “Dad brought them,” she added. “He said he thought we might need them.”

  “One Buck Chuck is the greatest,” said kit.

  “Sort of,” said Clem. “Except the balloons.”

  Kit stood up. They held the bubble wands up as high as they could and swung them. The bubbles were huge. The wind lifted them and carried them gently toward the edge of the roof, where they slowly sank down toward the street. Kit could imagine people down below smiling when the bubbles floated by them, like magic falling from the night sky, while they waited in the dark, in the sharp, cool October night for the buses that just kept coming to carry them home.

  Then Jorge came over and grabbed the bubble wand from Clem.

  “Hey!” she said.

  “Pickle,” he said.

  He dipped the wand and held it up and slowly twirled. A huge bubble emerged and wobbled in the breeze, landing on Clem’s head, like a lopsided halo. She got her fork ready. “Take a picture!” she said and she reached up and popped it while Jorge took a photo with his phone.

  The night sky echoed with magic. From somewhere in the darkness, kit was pretty sure she heard a growl, and she thought she maybe smelled popcorn.

  “What are you guys doing?” asked Jackson, coming out from behind the air conditioning vent, and then it was finally normal again. The four of them were talking and laughing, making a constellation of four stars, a trapezoid of friends. The bubbles floated on the wind. There was the sound of the adults’ murmured conversation in the distance and the record playing on the orange record player, the rumble of the subway beneath the street, the sound of people’s voices drifting up from the sidewalk, and the sound of the wind pushing a piece of paper across the roof—a note that had fallen out of kit’s pocket—lifting it like a pale blue wing up into the sky where a single star was shining brightly, a spectacular ghost of itself flaring in the velvety blue darkness.

  A Note from the Author

  I’d like to talk a little bit about mental health, because even if it’s not immediately obvious, that’s a big part of what Naked Mole Rat Saves the World is about. It’s about how anxiety can make you feel powerless. It’s about how depression can make you feel like you are not yourself.

  I don’t know if you, Reader, struggle with anything like kit or kit’s mom or Clem, but it’s possible, even likely, that you or someone in your life does. It might help you to know that many people have anxiety or depression. Having anxiety is part of being human. Our built-in anxiety says, “I’m scared to be standing near the edge of this cliff in case I fall!” The other kind, the harder-to-explain kind, creeps around in the back corners of your mind and makes you feel scared, even if you may not be sure what, exactly, you’re scared of. It might make you feel less lonely to know that depression can make us push people away, even while we wish they would come closer, and that being depressed is not the same thing as being sad, although being sad can be part of being depressed.

  Sometimes our mental health affects our physical body: It can feel like a stomachache that happens only in math class, headaches that won’t go away until you go home, chest pain and a racing heart that makes you feel like you’re dying, or dizziness that stops you from participating in school or work or fun things just in case it happens when you’re not in a “safe” place. This can shrink your world down to your block, your house, or even one apartment building, just like kit’s mom in this story. Or it can show up like it does for kit, who gets dizzy and changes into something completely not herself (a naked mole rat!) in order to escape from stressful situations. Depression or low mood can make you feel like Clem sometimes feels: flat or angry or emotionless or disconnected or very much alone.

  I was an anxious kid. My anxiety sometimes made me hyperventilate, which in turn made me faint. But if you’d asked me, I definitely wouldn’t have known how to answer the question “Why are you so scared?” Mostly, I think, I was afraid of being afraid, but more than that, my brain was wired that way. It’s how I was born.

  If any of these feelings are familiar to you, know that you are not alone and what you are feeling is not your fault.

  You don’t have to have a reason to be anxious or depressed. Sometimes it can be triggered by something in your life (like with Clem), but sometimes there isn’t a clear explanation for why. It just happens.

  When kit gets anxious, she experiences a feeling of “fight or flight.” Her option is flight. This is why she leaves school seven times before the end of September.

  I know a girl who also experiences fight or flight, also usually when she’s at school. When she needs to escape from a situation because her anxiety is ramping up, she would do anything to get out.

  I know a boy with anxiety who suddenly, in an emergency, is the calmest person in the room. In situations where a lot of people would be afraid, he—an anxious kid—is not.

  People with anxiety or depression are natural heroes and helpers. They are so strong because a person who has these things is also a person who is working very hard to overcome this invisible something all the time.

  And all that internal strength helps them recognize when other people are hurting, and it helps them step up to help.

  Guess what we call strong, helpful people?

  Heroes, that’s what.

  Books and movies about fictional superheroes are often about people who were turned into heroes through some circumstance outside their control: a spider bite or an accident or an experiment gone wrong.

  Anxiety and depression can give us superpowers, too: empathy, kindness, understanding. We may not look like heroes. We may not feel like heroes. But when we need to be, we can be.

  I hope that you have a parent or a teacher or a friend or a neighbor in your life who you can talk to about what is going on with you. If you don’t, there are some other ways to find help:

  • Talk to your school’s counselor.

  • Visit adaa.org in the U.S. or anxietycanada.com in Canada.

  • Call the Girls and Boys Town Hotline in the U.S. (1-800-448-3000) or the Kids Help Phone in Canada (1-800-668-6868).

  • Call the Teen Line (1-800-TLC-TEEN or 1-800-852-8336) in both the U.S. and Canada to talk to another teen who may have experienced similar feelings.

  • The Crisis Text Line can be accessed by texting HOME in the U.S. to 741741 or in Canada to 686868.

  Heroes aren’t just the people who run into burning buildings; they are also the people who listen, the people who share, the people who help, the people who are there for you, the people who care.

&
nbsp; Maybe not now, but someday, that hero will be you.

  Acknowledgments

  A lot goes into writing a book, and a much larger number of people are involved than you might expect. I like to think of a book as a sculpture: As the first sculptor, I turn a lump of thoughts and ideas into a story-shaped object, but I have a lot of help refining that shape into defined paragraphs and chapters and then finally into a novel. So thank you to the entire team at Algonquin Books for getting out your sharp tools and making this book into what it is, right now, in this reader’s hands. I am so grateful.

  About the Author

  Karen Rivers’s books have been nominated for a wide range of literary awards and have been published in multiple languages. When she’s not writing, reading, or visiting schools, she can usu­ally be found hiking in the forest that flourishes behind her tiny old house in Victoria, British Columbia, where she lives with her two kids, two dogs, and two birds. Find her online at karenrivers.com and on Twitter: @karenrivers.

  Also by Karen Rivers

  The Girl in the Well Is Me

  Love, Ish

  A Possibility of Whales

  Published by

  Algonquin Young Readers

  an imprint of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2019 by Karen Rivers.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Carla Weise.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Columbia Arts Council.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

  eISBN 9781643750026