Teen Frankenstein

by Chandler Baker

  “Deal.”

  I flipped off the covers and let him shimmy in next to me, where he pulled the sheets up to his chin. This time, Einstein lifted her head. The tags around her neck jangled, and her throat emitted a rough, uneven growl. She pawed her way closer to me, stuffed a cold nose beneath my arm, and whined.

  Adam folded his hands one over the other across his chest. I wormed my way back horizontal, wedged in between him and the dog. The space between the sheets instantly grew warmer. Einstein’s breaths quickly evened out into soft puffs on my skin. It was hardly like having a dead body in my bed at all. Adam smelled clean—like rainwater. The indentation made in the mattress by his form rolled me into him. I turned on my side and tugged the comforter underneath my armpit and tried to close my eyes and breathe normally.

  I’d never slept in a bed with a boy, but it wasn’t as if I was a total prude, either. Last year at the State Youth Science Summit, I’d made out with Daniel Berkovich, a senior from Southlake with an astrophysics project that didn’t place. I let him feel under my bra and take down my e-mail address, even though I never returned either of his messages, mainly because I didn’t see a point.

  Adam was different, though. Adam was mine.

  “Are you asleep?” I asked, low enough so that if he was I wouldn’t wake him.

  “No.”

  I twisted my chin over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  There was a pause. “Thinking.”

  “About…?”

  “I don’t like the rain.”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed, then tried to cover it up with the pillow. “Yes, I think we’ve established that.”

  “But I do like pizza,” he continued, which was the least disgusting item he’d devoured off his lunch tray today.

  I nudged Einstein away and turned over to face him. Our heads were on the pillows, my hands tucked beneath my cheek.

  “I don’t want to be blank, Victoria.”

  “You’re not blank,” I said. “You like pizza and … have full functionality of your motor skills. It’s actually a huge stride forward in the human condition.” Sometimes when I said things like that, I had a little voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Owen and it warned me that not everything was an experiment. I hated that voice.

  “I like the color orange, too, because it’s the color of your hair. I like your hair.”

  I grabbed a handful and held it out from my head. “Again! My hair’s not orange! It’s—I don’t know—amber or something.”

  “Then my favorite color is amber.” He had the air of a schoolboy who’d just answered a very difficult question correctly.

  I relaxed into the mattress and we lulled into silence. The invisible weight of sleep began to tug me under like an ocean tide. “You’re not the only one who doesn’t like storms,” I said. “Sometimes, anyway.” I wasn’t even sure whether I’d said this out loud.

  Half dreaming, I pictured my father wearing his yellow galoshes and yellow rain slicker while I watched from inside his pickup truck. He stared up at the sky holding an anemometer kit over his head. The gold cups spun like spokes on a wheel, measuring the wind. Soon, Victoria, soon, he’d said. But soon never came.

  My eyelashes fluttered. I tried to focus on his face, but my eyelids fell shut. “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “Okay? Just don’t. Because the truth is … well … we … shouldn’t fear what…” And here sleep tried to tow me under to where my father waited in his yellow galoshes. “What we don’t understand, Adam. That’s what my dad used to say.” I sighed.

  I couldn’t keep track of how many moments passed as my thoughts drifted into that tiny crawl space between dozing and waking. Only that it was enough for the sensation of falling to set in. I found my father again, gazing up at the clouds, watching lightning crack open the heavens like he was watching fireworks.

  “Why doesn’t he say it anymore?” Adam asked. The sound of his voice pulled me back.

  “Because he doesn’t say anything,” I whispered. “Because he’s dead.”

  “Then you should bring him back.” Adam mimicked the quiet tenor of my voice.

  I bunched the pillow tighter underneath my head. “It’s too late for that,” I said, and, unbidden, dredged up the image of my father once more, only this time his boots lay flat on the ground with the rest of him. The lightning generators that he’d invented loomed up into the angry sky above him. He’d been trying to harness atmospheric energy to disintegrate the atom and therefore, in turn, discover a superenergy source. Only he never managed it. A bolt of electricity had struck him in the heart, leaving red tree-branch scars across his chest and neck. He was dead and his experiment died along with him. After that night, I walked away from that forest and never returned.

  There was a rustle of bedding, then so lightly I could barely be sure it was happening, Adam reached up and pet my hair in a stiff, unnatural motion. I let his hand rest there. “Thank you, Adam,” I said. “That’s very kind.”

  “Victoria,” he said in that awestruck way that he had.

  “Adam.”

  And with the last word falling partially formed from my lips, I allowed the part of me still clinging to reality to let go while the body of the boy I’d killed lay beside me.

  THIRTEEN

  Observation of subject’s injuries show that all lesions and lacerations have formed scabs. Hematoma coloring has shifted to green, blue, and yellow hues at the outer edges. All signs point to healthy natural healing processes.

  * * *

  I woke up all at once, fingers splayed into stars on top of the mattress, head raised off the pillow, and breath coming in whistling heaves. My first thought was to feel around my left wrist and to panic for just a second when I found that the twine bracelet with the lightning charm my father had given me was missing. It took me several more seconds to realize that it had been missing for years and that it had been almost that long since I’d had the clawing empty feeling each time I noticed its absence.

  I dropped my head back into the fluffy down. Thin light trickled through the shades. The space next to me was empty, and any trace of Adam had disappeared along with him. I sat up, rested my elbows on my knees, and cradled my forehead. Sweat prickled my skin like beads of condensation on a glass of water.

  I pushed my fingers into my hair. My scalp was damp. Einstein lifted her chin and stared up at me through a face full of wrinkles. After a quick shower that left my skin pink, I wriggled into a pair of jeans and paired it with a T-shirt from my laundry pile. I found Mom in the kitchen cooking eggs. Mom’s eggs only came one way—flat and dry. She smashed the spatula into one of the cooked yolks, and air whistled out of it. The shriveling whites crackled on the frying pan. When it was the consistency of rubber, she slid it onto a plate and handed it to me. I wasn’t hungry.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Tor,” she said in a singsong voice, baiting me, probing, like I should have known that these eggs came with an agenda. Mom wiped her forehead with the backside of her wrist, then cracked another egg into the pan.

  My first thought was of Adam. The thing I wasn’t telling her was so big that it broke the scales of things that one would not tell their mother. I swallowed hard, clutching the ceramic plate to my chest. “What do you mean?” My voice sounded like it’d barely managed to escape the back of my throat.

  She jostled the frying pan by the handle and looked up at me. Her eyes were cool and blue, clear as a mountain lake, clearer than they’d been in weeks. I’d come to depend on the layer of fog that kept her from asking too many questions about my life. “You know I don’t like you keeping secrets from me,” she said. “I know you think you’re smarter than me, too, smarter than everybody maybe, but I’m still your mom.”

  Are you? I wanted to snap back.

  But sticky saliva coated the roof of my mouth. My palms grew wet and I slid them into my lap. Einstein sat looking up at me, expecting a bite of my eggs. I ignored her, knitting my eyebro
ws together. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom.” Deny, deny, deny. Always deny.

  Abandoning the eggs, she turned and placed her fist on the waistband of her light-wash jeans. “Then how do you explain this?” She reached for something on the counter. My breath hitched as she retrieved a dustpan and shoved the contents forward for me to examine. “You’re so careless with your belongings. First your car and now this? I could wring your neck. You know that? Who do you think’s going to pay for a new phone? And this is after the car?”

  I squinted at the pieces of shattered black glass in the dustpan. At first it was relief coursing through me as I realized that Mom didn’t know about Adam, didn’t even know I’d killed somebody. But no sooner had the glorious swell of relief washed over me than it was replaced with a sickening pit that opened up in the center of my stomach. The shattered glass in Mom’s dustpan was the remnants of my broken cell phone, and the last time I’d seen that cell phone had been in pieces on the road. Blood thumped against my eardrums.

  “How … how did you get that?” I stammered, touching my finger to one of the jagged edges to feel that it was real.

  “How did I get it? Tor, you ain’t that bright. It was right on the porch, apparently where you dropped it or ran over it or whatever you did to ruin a perfectly good piece of equipment. Doubt we’ll even be able to sell this thing back to one of the infomercials now.” She dropped the dustpan on the kitchen table and returned to the stove, where she removed the browning egg from the heat.

  “On the porch?” I repeated more to myself than to her. The blood that had been pounding my eardrums now drained from my face.

  “You and your father,” she muttered. “Never did have any common sense when it came to things. Acting like money grows on bushes.”

  I felt as if a weight were clamping down on my chest and cutting off the oxygen supply. The world was in Technicolor. Just then the weather vane emitted a rusty shriek from above us so loud that it seemed to come up the pipes and echo through the kitchen. Mom slapped her spatula on the counter, rattling her half-empty cup of coffee. “I thought I told you to do something about that weather vane, Tor!” But I was hardly listening. My chair squealed across the floor, and I staggered upright, leaving my untouched egg on the table. “Where do you think you’re going? Tor, I’m talking to you.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll … try to be more careful or something.” I pushed past another kitchen chair that was in my way and brushed by my mother, who was shouting my full name like a voodoo curse.

  “You’ve got to work on your priorities, Victoria. You hear me?”

  The screen door sounded like a mousetrap snapping shut behind me. The air outside was swampy with puddled rain and early-morning sun. The day’s first mosquitoes darted in and out of potted shrubs, and the weather vane creaked in short, spastic increments with the breeze. There was nothing left of my phone on the porch. I scanned the empty road that ran perpendicular to our driveway. In the dirt outside, I could only just make out the faded traces of that third set of tire marks. I felt feverish. Sick.

  Somebody knew. If not about Adam, they knew what I’d done. They knew it and they hadn’t called the police. Worry slid its way up my veins and through my heart. A thin trickle of sweat dribbled from my temple. They were toying with me. They wanted me to know that they knew. But why? Panic raked my insides. I scanned the horizon, but the yards around our home were empty.

  I knew only that I had to destroy as much of the evidence as I could. As long as I could conceal the truth about Adam, it would only be my word against theirs. There was my car, but that could have easily been a deer, just like I’d said, and there was a body, but if that body wasn’t dead anymore, then was it really a body?

  I imagined my mom watching me from the window. I straightened my back and, trying to act normal, followed the familiar path to the cellar door and descended into the ground.

  “Adam?” It was pitch-black. I felt my way down wooden steps that creaked beneath my weight. “Adam?” I counted the stairs. Four. Five. Six … On the seventh stair, I found the cord hanging from the ceiling and pulled. A single lightbulb switched on. Several feet in front lit up, but beyond the light’s edges was darkness too thick to see through.

  “Victoria.” I couldn’t tell from which direction Adam’s voice came. Goose bumps shot up my arm. For the first time, I realized that I didn’t have any idea what my creation might be capable of. In the cool darkness of the underground, the laboratory suddenly felt like his domain more so than mine.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I found the switch, and the overhead lamps flickered, then settled into an electric buzz.

  “Good morning.”

  I yelped and my hand flew to my chest. Adam was standing inches away, rail straight and still. I held out my finger while I waited to catch my breath for the second time this morning. “Good lord,” I panted. “You scared me half to death.” Then I quickly added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a little bit dead, of course. The scaring thing, though, that seems to be one of your talents.”

  “I got you these.” A stiff arm held out a flimsy bouquet of five white and yellow daisies. Their pitiful roots dangled from the bottom of his fist. He puffed his chest out and grinned.

  I instinctively brought them to my nose. They smelled like fertilizer and lawn mower clippings. “Where did you get these?” I said slowly.

  “In the field.” He pointed up. “How did you sleep, Victoria? You looked very peaceful.”

  I set the flowers down gently on a counter. I ignored how creepy his last statement had sounded. “Did you see anyone? Did anyone see you?” I thought of the phone on the porch and the tire marks and—“Adam, you have to listen to me,” I hissed, staring up at the ceiling to regain my composure. “You can’t go wandering around up there without me. Someone might see you.”

  His chest deflated. “You don’t like them.”

  My glance flitted to the wilted cluster. As a girl, I was pretty sure the female handbook required me to go gaga over handpicked flowers, but my idea of romance was more a Bunsen burner, an open flame, and highly combustible chemicals than candlelight and walks on the beach. “I do.” I leveled my chin at him. “They’re nice, but even still, you can’t go wandering around.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re different, and if people see you where you’re not supposed to be, they might start asking questions. My mom might start asking questions.” No one can see you, I wanted to say. No one can know what you are. But the words were choked by the still blooming knowledge of the shattered cell phone and the foreign tire tracks and the sinking realization that somebody knew my secret. Somebody might even know about Adam.

  The strands of worry hadn’t left my blood, and I felt them itching in my limbs for me to fix this. I crossed the room and dragged a metal trash can to the center.

  Meanwhile, a groove deepened between Adam’s eyebrows. “I don’t want to be different. I want to be like you.”

  I ducked below the counter and crawled, the knees of my jeans dragging along the dirty floor. Behind a set of tool drawers, I stretched my arm out and felt around until my fingers closed around crinkly plastic. I pulled out the hidden garbage bag and dusted off my jeans. “I’m different, too, just in another way. Trust me. You don’t want to be like everyone else. You’re a breakthrough. A piece of history. But for now, you’re also a secret.” Adam’s face went blank again. “Don’t you want us to have our own little secret, Adam?” I asked. “Just the two of us.”

  He seemed to consider this. “You and me?” I nodded. “Yes, yes I do.”

  “Good. But secrets have to be kept.” I pushed my arm shoulder-deep into the trash bag and pulled out a single article. “Otherwise they’re not secrets anymore. You understand?” The shirt was crusted and stiff with dried blood. Patches of white fabric showed through. I bit my lip and chanced a glance at Adam. His expression was still impassive, but his deep-set brown eyes were tra
ined on the blood-soaked clothing.

  I tossed the shirt into the garbage can and pulled out the pair of jeans, split where the road had torn into them. These were less gory than the shirt, but the waistband had been soaked to the point that the denim was dyed an even red. Farther down, droplets had sprayed the legs like flecks of paint.

  “What are you doing?” he asked when I dropped the jeans in after the shirt.

  “Making sure no one takes you away from me.” I rummaged around for the matches I used to light the burners and came back with a half-empty box. “We have to do all of this, keep all the secrets so that you can stay with me. That’s what you want, right? That’s what we both want.” I struck the match head on the rough siding, and it burst into blue then yellow flame. I looked at Adam through the thin curl of smoke snaking off the lick of fire.

  I let the match fall into the bottom of the trash can, then lit two more and did the same. It took several moments for the smell of smoke to reach me. Orange and yellow flickered against the gray metal. The fire flared, puffing up a thick column of smoke like a black belch.

  Across from me, the flames danced in Adam’s pupils. Smoke stung my eyes. I grabbed the nearest long, pointy thing I could find and prodded the fire with the wrong side of a broom. The once green handle came away charred. The cellar laboratory was thick with haze. Behind the fog, the floating specimens on the shelves looked like props in a haunted house, and the model skeleton, a set piece. I dropped one of Adam’s bloody shoes into the pile and watched as the flames ate into the leather, and before I closed the lid, I added its mate.

  A familiar rap came from above. Tap-ta-tap. Tap-ta-tap. The hatch door creaked, and sunlight flooded the stairwell. “Is someone barbecuing or did you recently pick up a nicotine habit?” Owen’s shoes appeared before the rest of him did. The hatch door clanged shut.

  “Owen.” Adam pointed.

  Owen’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s right, buddy. In the flesh. Not polite to point, though. We’ll work on that.”