“One Mississippi … two Mississippi…” My breath wavered. I cut the engine but left the headlights on.
There, in the middle of the road, lay a heap. It wasn’t moving.
I squeezed my eyes shut. This was not happening. I was supposed to go to Harvard or Penn—not penitentiary. But all I could see was his face lit up by the glow of headlights. Over and over, I saw his features morph into surprise.
Swallowing hard, I unlatched the door. Rain poured over me as if from a showerhead. Sodden strips of auburn hair, dangling almost to my shoulders, cleaved to my throat and chin like leeches.
It was the sort of moment that didn’t seem real. The part in a dream where you suddenly become self-aware and start looking around for clues that your surroundings are projections. But the asphalt was hard beneath my sneakers. The rain turned my thin black sweatshirt into dead weight that stuck to my ribs and clung to the waist of my jeans. I gulped a sticky wad of saliva, and the roar of the storm grew louder.
One foot in front of the other, I trudged on wobbly legs closer to the heap. The nearer I got, the more human the heap became.
My insides lurched.
“Hello?” I yelled through the sheets of rain. I glanced back at Bert looming in the distance. I’d seen horror movies begin this way. “Hello? Are you all right?” I used my cupped hands as a megaphone. There wasn’t so much as a flinch.
I should leave. Right now. Get in my car and go. To Mexico, maybe. The thought lingered, but only for that instant.
“Sir?” I called, louder this time.
Rain continued to splash onto the blacktop. I swiped strands of hair off my forehead and ran the rest of the distance, at which point I immediately wanted to revisit that whole Mexico thing.
His teeth chattered.
At first, he didn’t look at me and that was bad, but then he did and that was worse. He had eyes the color of maple syrup. Wide and alert as a cornered animal. His jet-black hair was plastered to his forehead, and he lay flat on his back, one arm stretched out with his palm open like he was waiting to be crucified.
Not knowing what else to do, I kneeled on the road and took his hand in mine, our skin slick with water. Drops poured down my nose and into my mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. Or at least I thought I sobbed. I couldn’t tell on account of the monsoon beating down against us. “I couldn’t see you. Or I mean, I didn’t see you,” I corrected myself. I hated to lie, but not nearly as much as the thought of telling the truth.
His eyes seemed to register me for the first time. He had high cheekbones and tan skin, the good looks of a high school Homecoming king. He was about my age, too. There was a gash over his left eyebrow, but the rain fell too quickly for him to bleed much. I bit my lip and glanced away from his face, my own eyeballs stinging.
Farther down, dark crimson bled through his white V-neck T-shirt, spreading into fuzzy edges on the fabric. My stomach flopped over like a beached catfish.
His Adam’s apple spiked. He looked up at the sky and then back at me.
Gently, I peeled the edge of his shirt up over his ribs. A long, curved gash ran down his side from just below the right side of his breastbone to the top of his hip. Pink, tattered skin flayed open, creating a crevice where blood pooled and oozed while he panted for breath.
“It’s not that bad,” I told him, knowing full well it was exactly that bad. “See, I’m—” I patted myself until my fingers closed around the hard rectangle of my phone still stuffed inside the pocket of my jacket. I pulled it out. “I’m calling 9-1-1 right now. They’ll be here any minute.” He nodded a silent agreement and I felt a ballooning in my throat.
I pushed the top button. The screen stayed dark. Frantic, I pushed it again, hands shaking more than ever now. It’d been working two minutes ago when I got Owen’s text. This time I held down the button. I tried counting to five. Counting to five felt like an eternity. Nothing happened except the boy moaned.
I shook my phone as hard as I could and held it up to my ear as though I might hear the ocean if I listened hard enough. But it was no use. The screen was soaked.
I felt the corners of my mouth curl downward and my face break apart with the horror. My phone was waterlogged. No help was coming. Not quickly, anyway. I took the phone and threw it against the concrete. It split open on the pavement. I wanted to scream, but the sound was trapped inside.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry.” I pushed my hand into the gummy swamp of his side to stanch the flow, but blood oozed through my fingers, and more pools of red leaked onto the concrete than I had hands for. The asphalt had ripped into his legs, leaving tears in his jeans that revealed bloody scrapes of road rash. I sucked in a lungful of air. “Okay. You wait here.” Like he was going anywhere. “I’m going to get help. I’ll be back before you know it, I swear.”
His hand squeezed tight around mine, clamping down on my bones. I stared hard at him, refusing to cry out in pain. “All right, I’ll stay,” I said at last, and his grip loosened. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. I’ll stay.”
Shiny red bubbles started to form at the corners of his mouth. Trying to look unfazed, I tucked my toes underneath the back of my jeans and rocked. One of my hands held his, and the other pressed into the chewed-up edges of his wound. Without thinking, I began humming the tune of one of my mother’s old hymns. I had to hum with such force to be heard over the raucous weather that my lips tickled and I felt my nose get twitchy. But still, I hummed on.
I was in the middle of the chorus when his head jerked off the pavement. His eyes went round and rabid. I froze. His chest heaved.
He gasped in one desperate inhale and said, “Meg,” before his head fell back to the ground.
FOUR
Observations: A pattern has emerged regarding the use of the brine water in the experiment. Aldini used troughs with zinc and copper, but I’ve found the solution of saline to be a better conductor. Brine water was first used as a conductor in the early nineteenth century. When the brine water is used, the core body temperature of the subject heats up more before burning than during experiments without. At first, I marked this as a correlative relationship, but enough evidence has been gathered that I’m prepared to count the use of the conductor as a cause for better results.
* * *
I unlaced my fingers from the boy with the bluing lips and bent my ear down to meet them. Not even a tickle of air escaped his open mouth. I pressed my fingers into his glands, pushing through sinewy flesh in search of a pulse, but the veins remained flat and still. Placing my hands, palms down, on his chest, I leaned in with the full force of my weight and pumped. I pushed into his ribs until my muscles burned and breath rushed through me like fire, and when I couldn’t pump anymore, I tilted his head back and pressed my lips into his. He tasted like blood and rain as I blew as much life into him as I could muster. It wasn’t enough.
With each thrust, his body plopped against the pavement. At last, I collapsed onto his chest, crying big, fat tears until they collected in the back of my mouth and threatened to drown me.
I didn’t know how long I stayed like that, lying with my cheek flattened against a bloody T-shirt, but by the time I peeled myself away, I was numb. And not in the metaphorical way, either. My nail beds tingled. I couldn’t feel my face. There was the feeling that my head had literally separated from my shoulders and was starting to float off.
My palms bit into the blacktop as I levered myself to my feet. I walked in a trance back to Bert. I should have asked his name. Why hadn’t I asked his name?
I slammed the door. The cabin filled with silence even though outside the rain kept beating down. Water trickled through the cracked windshield onto the dash, reminding me of what had happened, just in case I tried to forget.
A blank pair of hazel eyes stared back at me in the rearview mirror. Smudged liner smeared down pale, pink skin, creating an inkblot test on my face. I played with the volume dial on the radio, but the engine was cut, so nothing happ
ened.
I clutched my forearms, wrapping them around my stomach and hugging. “I … k-killed him.”
There, I said it.
My forehead fell to the steering wheel. I was at a point beyond tears. On the road to total ruin, there was anguish, hopelessness, misery, despair, and then there was me. My temples throbbed. A dreamlike quality still shrouded the recent chain of events, and it was that surreal-ness that kept me from crumpling in on myself like a paper bag. But before long my legs were restless and I couldn’t sit still with my thoughts. I reached for the door handle once more and stepped out onto the shoulder of the road. The rain’s initial fury had ebbed from a torrential downpour to a soggy mist. The asphalt took on the translucent sheen of wet oil reflecting a cloud-obscured moon.
I paced the length of the car, back and forth, shaking my head. I couldn’t just leave him there while I went for help. I glanced over at the body-shaped heap down the road. Someone might think they’d come across a hit-and-run.
My phone. My stupid phone. Already I was imagining my picture plastered on a public service announcement that warned against texting and driving. My heart slipped lower.
What did Owen mean by Eureka when he texted, anyway?
Eureka. I shook my head. That text had seemed so promising for a single moment.
More pacing. My shoes struck out at the pavement.
This was why we needed a breakthrough in the first place. If—
I stopped dead in my tracks. Owen had a breakthrough.
That was it. My heart beat faster. If we discovered how to make Mr. Bubbles come back to life, then I could save the boy. I could do better than any hospital or doctor. I could do what medicine couldn’t.
What if what was wrong with our project wasn’t the process but Mr. Bubbles himself? More mass. More watts. The blood in my veins buzzed as if charged with electric volts. I tried to shove the thought into a corner of my mind like a pile of dirty clothes pushed into the back of the closet. But the more I paced, the more the idea kept tumbling out and spreading.
The thing was, once I did this thing, there’d be no turning back. One door opens and every window in a thirty-mile radius slams shut. Except through the open door, the boy might live. He might be the breakthrough. It only takes one person brave enough to find out. That person could be me.
I felt my gait take on the grim weight of an executioner’s march, even though the execution had already taken place. As I drew closer, the boy’s glassy eyes became unavoidable. Hard and unseeing as marbles, he stared up at the night sky like he might be studying the constellations. What had he been doing walking across a country road in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm? And who was Meg?
A pang of guilt twisted through my side. Dogs started barking in the distance. I looked over. Every light was on in the closest farmhouse. The highway butted up against a fence connecting the cornfields, but the fields were huge. Surely nobody could hear the crash from here, let alone see it. I quickened my pace and the dogs barked even louder. A correlating relationship, not causal, I had to remind myself. If two events occur together, that didn’t mean they had a cause-and-effect relationship. The dogs weren’t barking because of me. They couldn’t be. Could they?
I took a deep breath, then crouched and slid my wrists underneath his armpits. The heft of his torso pulled me down. My back strained against the mass of what felt like a six-foot-two linebacker.
I arched, hoisting him higher on my skinny frame. My thighs quivered as I shuffled backward, taking tiny steps in the direction of Bert. I really should have pulled the stupid car closer. I wrapped the body in a bear hug. My fingers barely touched across his chest and I caught a whiff of tropical-scented shampoo.
After a few feet, my biceps were screaming for mercy. I let his upper half collapse onto the road. Stretching, I wiped a hand across my forehead and felt a smear of wetness the texture of leftover jam. I jerked my hand away. My fingers were covered in a fresh coat of blood.
“Oh god.” I coughed, hocking over my shoulder.
I squeezed my eyes shut and lugged the boy back upright. His jeans skidded across the blacktop.
“Almost … there…” I huffed as if he were somehow invested in the journey. With a final heave, I leaned my unwilling passenger up against Bert’s back tire. His chin slumped onto his chest and a chill ran through me.
I popped the trunk. I started with his upper body, digging my shoulder into the boy’s belt buckle, and winched him over my shoulder so I could use the full force of my body to propel him up into Bert’s spacious trunk. There was a clunk as his skull hit the trunk’s fiberglass lid.
His legs hung out the rear end like a dead deer. I swung one limb over the side, where it landed on the black carpeting with a dull ker-thunk, then the other. Crystallized in time, this was the sort of life moment that’d be better left on the side of the road like discarded luggage, and, in truth, I never thought I’d be the girl to cart around emotional baggage. It was almost comical how wrong I’d been. Because I was clearly more the type of girl who took her mistakes, bundled them up in the back of her car, and drove.
FIVE
The Final Dissection of Mr. Bubbles Six:
I began by carefully removing the skin to expose the muscles below, using scissors and forceps. I began the incision at the top of the neck and continued toward the tail. The muscular structure, including the biceps brachii, the triceps brachii, and the latissimus dorsi were all still intact despite the effects of the higher electrostimulation, a fact which is promising. The lymph glands, however, appeared darker than on Bubbles Four or Five. Will preserve them along with the heart, lungs, and liver for the laboratory.
* * *
I cut quietly across the lawn to Owen’s window on the rear side of a large brick house. Owen had one of those houses you could just tell had a real family inside. Trimmed shrubs, a pebbled walkway leading up to a cheery red door, and a wooden bench swing that hung from one of the trees. I stalked through the grass. We didn’t hang out at Owen’s house much. Mainly because we didn’t like his housekeeper chasing us out of rooms or his mom constantly checking if we wanted cookies. Plus, his house didn’t have a place where it was okay to store flammable liquids.
I looked both ways, then tapped the glass. “Owen,” I hissed. His light was off and my breath fogged up the glass as I smushed my nose to the windowpanes. “Owen! Owen Bloch, open this window right now!”
When I couldn’t see movement in the shadows, I dug the tips of my fingers underneath the sill and tried to pry it open myself. I was making zero progress when the window slid open and Owen popped his head through. His hair stuck out at sharper angles than usual and he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He squinted out into the night. “Tor, is that you?”
I was instantly annoyed. Owen had a breakthrough and now he was sleeping? “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do many other girls stop by your window in the middle of the night?”
He fumbled around inside and after a moment located his glasses. Spectacles in place, he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and yawned. “I’m going to guess there is a ninety-nine-point-five percent chance that whatever it is you’re about to tell me could have waited until morning.”
Misty rain still drizzled from the sky, and the dull rumble of thunder sounded in the distance as if the clouds were hungry. I crossed my arms, impervious to the droplets that were turning my skin cold and slick. “Further proof that you’re not very good at statistics.”
He scrunched his forehead, and it was as if his retinas snapped into focus and he was seeing me for the first time. “Is that blood?”
I swiped my hand across my brow where the blood was beginning to coagulate. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine.”
Owen disappeared from the window. I heard rummaging around, bedsprings squealing, sheets rustling, car keys jangling. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
His foot shot out the window, followed by a leg and then the rest of him.
&nb
sp; “Well, it’s definitely not supposed to make you feel worse.” It was only when we were halfway back to the car that I realized we’d left his window wide open. I didn’t mention this to Owen, who was trying to keep up while at the same time hopping on one foot and attempting to wrestle on his second sneaker. The presence of another person made me feel more calm and in control. I took quick strides around the front of the car and dropped into the driver’s seat. Time was of the essence.
Owen stood slack-jawed outside the passenger-side window. “Um, Tor…” He was seeing my car for the first time. Jagged cracks branched out from a crystalline puncture wound in my windshield, and my hood looked like the site of a meteorite crash. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I am fine. Now can you please get in?” My mind spun with echoes of imagined sirens. As I closed the door and moved the sole of my foot to the gas pedal, I knew that the truth would color Owen’s view of me. Maybe forever. He’d look back and remember that I’d been calm—too calm. But this had always been a problem for me. I’d never acted like people wanted me to. I didn’t cry or get weepy when I was exhausted. I didn’t wonder why I hadn’t been invited to so-and-so’s birthday party. I didn’t doodle boys’ names in my notebooks. Instead, I pulled the tails off lizards and observed them until they grew back, or pinned dead beetles to corkboards so I could label them with their proper scientific names. That was my thing.
Still, I knew the whole morbid tale would sound so much better when I told it to Owen if only I’d been trembling and sobbing from the moment I showed up. I thought about this as he made a show of clicking his seat belt into place and checking the tension in the strap across his chest. I swallowed hard. I was too focused on the end goal now to revert back to quivering girl in distress. He’d probably love a quivering girl in distress. All guys did. Even Owen, I bet.
A few houses down, I had to make a three-point turn to go back in the opposite direction. A single thud sounded from the trunk. Owen twisted to stare into the backseat. “What the hell was that?”
Teen Frankenstein Page 2
