Weird Kid

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Yeah,” I find myself saying. “Let’s figure this out.”

  Chapter 3

  AFTER SCHOOL, AGNES GETS ON her bike to go home, the goo safely sealed inside the plastic cup, snug in her backpack. “I’ll contact you when I have results from my analysis,” she assures me.

  She talks just the way Night Kite does. I like it. It’s nice not to be the only weird kid in school.

  My parents collect me at the pickup curb, and I’m not even in the car before they start peppering me with questions.

  “How did your day go?”

  “Did you have lunch with your friends?”

  “How were the chicken nuggets?”

  “Did you meet Agnes Oakes?”

  “Any burning, itching, or wriggling?”

  “Okay, not really, rubbery, yes, no, no, and jeez, Dad.”

  I tell my parents about the two boys in my math class who got in a fight because they’re both named Clint and there can be only one. And I tell them about our Physical Wellness teacher who got a leg cramp while lecturing us about the importance of staying hydrated when exercising in hot Arizona desert conditions. And I tell them about the sinkhole. But not about the goo strand. Or the stomach wriggling.

  Mom and Dad taught me that you can lie by saying something that’s not true, and you can lie by leaving out something that is true. The second type of lie is called a lie of omission.

  I am omitting through my teeth.

  “That’s the third sinkhole in town this week,” Mom says.

  Dad parks the car in front of Dale’s Guitar Shed. “Someone’s got to do something about this before anyone get hurt.”

  “Yes, definitely,” I agree, leaving out the part where Agnes and I have a plan to be “someone.”

  Dad reaches for a short stack of stamped envelopes. “I need to mail these, and then your mom and I will be working in the coffee shop across the street.”

  It’s just bills and magazine subscriptions, boring stuff, but I jump at the opportunity.

  “I’ll do it!”

  Dad laughs. “Yeah, I thought you might.”

  Whenever we’re downtown and there’s something to mail, I volunteer. Because of Big Blue Biter.

  Big Blue Biter is the mailbox on the corner. It looks like a regular mailbox, painted blue steel with a curved top and a hinged lid, but it’s not at all regular. It has a reputation.

  With my guitar bag on my back and letters in hand, I approach slowly, as if it’s a sleeping panther. Most people approach it this same way. Big Blue Biter’s been on this corner as long as I’ve been alive. I don’t know why I enjoy dropping letters inside. Is it the danger? The excitement? Don’t ask me.

  With one hand, I crack the lid open. With the other, I toss in the envelopes and jump back before the lid snaps shut like a triggered rat trap. Big Blue Biter likes fingers.

  The post office has fixed it a bunch of times, but the repairs never last. Its appetite is insatiable. Legend has it that one time it devoured an entire arm.

  I laugh at Big Blue Biter’s failed attempt to eat me and hoof it to the guitar shop, my favorite place in the entire world.

  I’m going to be a professional guitarist someday. I just haven’t decided what kind yet. Maybe I’ll join a metal band and be a guitar hero playing five-minute solos. Or maybe I’ll be a singer-songwriter and play songs about lonesome nights or whatever. Most of those guys have beards, so I’ll have to learn how to grow facial hair. Whatever kind of guitarist I am, I’ll need to practice a lot and get really good. Fortunately, I like practice. It makes me concentrate on what I’m doing with my fingers. How they move. What color they are. What shape they are. How many of them I have. Playing guitar helps me pass as human, and after today I really need the practice.

  Dozens of guitars hang from hooks on the wall: acoustics and electrics, solid bodies, hollow bodies, semi-hollow bodies, six-strings, twelve-strings, new, used.

  I pause in front of my dream guitar: a blue-sparkle Fender Stratocaster. And there’s my other dream guitar: a Martin acoustic mahogany Dreadnought. And my other, other dream guitar: a Gibson Flying V in fire-engine red.

  I have a lot of dreams.

  My own guitar is a humble, battered acoustic I bought with the family discount, since Dale is Mom’s cousin.

  I named it Stringy.

  A framed photo behind the counter shows Dale with his old glam metal band. His hair is poofy and he’s stuffed into leopard-print tights. He looks super dorky, but the expression on his face as he rips into a blazing solo is pure happiness.

  I know where the photo was taken, because Dale’s told me about sixteen thousand times. His band, Eërbleëd, got to open for a bigger band at Desert Sky Pavilion, the outdoor amphitheater just outside Cedar Creek View. He played for twenty thousand people, and it was the best moment of his life.

  Another one of my dreams is to play on that stage before a crowd of screaming masses.

  Only I won’t be wearing leopard-print tights.

  And hopefully by then I’ll have full control over my shifting so I don’t transform into a giant squid in front of my fans. Screaming at a concert is good, but not that kind of screaming.

  I head into the back room. Dale is bent over his workbench, doing something with a screwdriver to an electric guitar.

  “Hey, Dale,” I say. No answer.

  “Dale,” I say a little louder.

  “DALE!”

  He finally looks up. “Hey, dude!” His long hair is de-poofed and he’s in his standard uniform of ripped jeans and a weathered metal T-shirt. Today’s T-shirt is Anthrax, which is both the name of a band and a deadly disease you can catch from sheep.

  We go into a glass-walled practice room with Dale’s motto stenciled on the window: You Gotta Shed if You Want to Shred. “To shed” means putting in a lot of time to learn and practice. “To shred” means to play superfast and awesome.

  I break Stringy out of my gig bag and tune up.

  “Why the long face, dude?”

  Oh, god, what is my face doing now? How long is it?

  Wait. That’s not what he means.

  “It’s just . . . there’s a lot going on.”

  “You have stress? With a guitar in your hands? The keys to freedom? The starship that’ll take you anywhere your mind can fathom? And you still have stress?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That sounds bad. Play something.”

  I go through some scales.

  Dale closes his eyes and inhales as if he’s smelling the notes. He frowns. “Play something else.”

  I finger-pick some patterns, playing all the notes, in time, with good tone, but Dale crosses his arms and shakes his head.

  “You sound really pent-up. Like, all tight and clenched.”

  Who wouldn’t be clenched when they’re afraid their fingers might shift into spider legs? Clenching seems like the right thing to do under the circumstances.

  “Let’s try something else.” Dale heads into the front room and comes back with an electric guitar. It’s not one of my dream guitars, but it’s beautiful, a cherry Epiphone SG. There’s a huge buzz when he plugs it into an amp.

  “Play.”

  I settle the guitar over my leg, wrap my left hand around the neck, grip a pick between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and position it over the strings. And I have no idea what to play.

  “Do what your fingers tell you,” Dale coaches.

  My fingers tell me, “We promise to remain fingers. We will not turn into claws or tentacles.”

  I strike a power chord. KA-CHOOOOOWWWWW. The sound pummels the room and rattles the walls.

  Dale grins. “That’s more like it. I love a good G on an electric guitar. It’s a kick in the chest. It’s like riding a wild elephant. But remember, it’s not the instrument, it’s the song. Try something simpler. Just a single note.”

  I put my finger down on the D string, fifth fret, and strike it with my pick. WAAAAAAAAAANNNG.

  “Yeah!�
�� Dale says. “Now just hold that note. Bend it. Listen to it. Let it ring.”

  I bend the string up and the note climbs higher, giving me a nice, distorted scream. The guitar and the amp sound great together, but they’re not controlling me, I’m controlling them. My mind and my heart travel through my hands, into the guitar, and out the speaker.

  When the note finally fades and dies, I feel better than I have in months.

  Dale nods with approval. “That’s what happens when you forget yourself. When you forget where you are. When you forget everything that bugs you. You forget the gravity holding you to the planet. And then, young dude? Then, you are truly free.”

  Which sounds great.

  Unless you lose focus.

  Unless you lose control of your body.

  Unless your hand grows feathers.

  Stressed and clenched again, I give back the guitar.

  Chapter 4

  CEDAR CREEK VIEW LIES TEN miles from the bright lights of Phoenix, so our night sky is inky black. Sitting on the roof of my house with Growler snuggled in my lap, I stare up at the stars. “Which one do you think it is, Growler?”

  I whisper, because I don’t want my parents to know I’m up here.

  Growler growls. She’s a nine-pound terrier mix composed of messy black-and-tan fur and an active, fluffy tail. I’d describe her personality as both angry and cuddly.

  I point at another star. “How about that one? That’s Upsilon Andromedae. It’s forty-four light-years away. That means it would take a beam of light forty-four years to get from there to here, and that’s traveling at 186,000 miles per second. Can you even imagine that?”

  Growler is too busy growling at her own leg to wonder at the marvels of the universe.

  I’ve never stopped wondering. Because somewhere out there in all the cosmos is my origin story.

  When I was little I asked my parents where babies come from.

  They gave each other weird looks, and after a while Mom cleared her throat. “Jake, you fell to Earth in a flaming blob of goo.”

  Dad nodded. “The neighborhood was still under construction. There were a lot of vacant lots around our house, so we were the only ones who saw you land. We ran a few hundred yards into the desert and expected to find a smoking crater. Instead, there was goo. Goo and you.”

  According to Mom and Dad, I was a shapeless little puddle. Kind of like a big loogie. They didn’t know what I was, or even if I was alive.

  Mom worried I might be toxic and wanted to call the fire department. Dad wanted to poke me with his shoe.

  But then I made a noise.

  I cried.

  My cry didn’t sound like a human baby’s, more like air flapping out a balloon, but it was enough that Dad gave up the idea of kicking me. Instead, he leaned over and very gently touched me with his finger.

  “You changed, then,” Mom said. “Right in front of our eyes. Like a magic trick. Or a special effect. Or a miracle. You changed into you, Jake. You changed into our baby boy.”

  So they did the only thing they could think of. They freaked out.

  They also picked me up and swaddled me in Dad’s jacket. Freaking out but with love in their hearts, they carried me home.

  I keep looking at the stars and thinking.

  Agnes doesn’t want to talk about her “analysis of Goo Specimen Number One” at school. She thinks it would be much more effective to show me instead. After some quick texts during Physical Wellness, she wrangles her mom into wrangling my mom, and suddenly we have a playdate scheduled at Agnes’s house after school.

  “We are not calling it a playdate,” I say, breathing hard as we run around the track.

  Adrian and Eirryk peel themselves off the pack jogging in front of us. “Playdate, ha ha ha,” says Adrian.

  “Ha ha ha,” agrees Eirryk, as if “ha ha ha” qualifies as an actual joke.

  Adrian makes finger quotes. “‘Play,’ ha ha ha.”

  “‘Date,’” Eirryk contributes.

  “I’m gonna finish the lap,” Agnes announces. She shifts into another gear and sprints ahead, leaving me, Adrian, Eirryk, and the rest of the entire class in her dust.

  “You trying out for swim team, Wind?” Eirryk asks.

  When did I become “Wind” to him? I used to be Jake.

  “Nah.”

  Since the day of my ear-to-ear grin in the grocery store, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to faces. Surprise shows on Eirryk’s. Maybe even a tiny hint of disappointment. But his words don’t match. “Did you forget how to swim over the summer?”

  I used to be good at sports. I could always stretch a little farther to catch the Nerf ball that even kids older and taller than me couldn’t reach. And maybe I wasn’t able to pump my legs the fastest, but I could stretch my stride to win any footrace. And in a swimming pool? I can’t turn myself into a dolphin, but a tiny bit of webbing between the toes isn’t too hard.

  But it feels wrong.

  A lot of being good at sports comes from putting in hours and hours of practice. Everything worth doing takes hard work. You gotta shed if you want to shred. But aren’t most pro basketball players taller than average? Doesn’t having bigger hands help them with ball handling? Some of the best long-distance bike racers have big hearts. It helps them pump more blood and send more oxygen to their muscles.

  How is that any different from growing webbed feet when you need them?

  I don’t know.

  But I do know it is different.

  And knowing changes everything.

  So, even without the Hums and sinkholes and bird hands, I won’t do competitive sports anymore.

  Also, it’d be really bad to turn into a seal in the middle of swim meet.

  “I’m too busy,” I tell Adrian and Eirryk.

  “He’s got a girlfriend,” Adrian explains to Eirryk, as if they haven’t been laughing at me for hanging out with Agnes since school began.

  Adrian speeds up. For a few seconds, it’s just me and Eirryk, running side by side. Maybe without Adrian around, Eirryk and I can go back to being friends.

  But then Eirryk says, “You changed.”

  He catches up to Adrian, and then I’m running alone.

  Mom drives me to Agnes’s house, even though the Oakeses only live four blocks away. She wants to make sure I don’t have fish scales or spider eyes or a tapioca face if I’m hanging out with a friend.

  Agnes’s house looks almost exactly like ours: two stories, stucco-coated, sand-colored. The only difference is the Oakeses have a prickly pear cactus in front while we have a big saguaro.

  I press the doorbell, trying to wave my mom off, who’s still waiting at the curb with the engine idling. A woman in a blue T-shirt and black yoga pants opens the door. She smiles in a warm and confident way.

  “Jake! I’m Dolores.” I catch her giving my mom a thumbs-up. Mom returns the thumb and drives off. Just to be sure, I check to make sure I still only have two thumbs.

  Agnes’s living room is the same as my family’s living room, only less cluttered. There’s no big, sprawling sofa like we have, just a two-cushion love seat and a couple of chairs. The corner off the kitchen is outfitted with a desk and a computer and a stack of real estate flyers. On the wall where we have a TV, they have shelves with books, plants, and framed photos. Most of them are of Agnes and her mom. One of them is a selfie with a third person in it, a man with a nose that reminds me of Agnes’s. Agnes’s mom looks a little younger in the picture than she does now, and Agnes is a toddler. They’re outside with Christmas trees in the background. The man is holding a saw. They’re happy and smiling.

  Ms. Oakes—Dolores—gives me a chocolate-chip cookie. The chocolate chips are the perfect degree of gooey. A little gooey is fine when it’s confined to a cookie.

  “Agnes, Jake is here!” she bellows. I’m surprised the windows don’t shatter. At a more normal volume she says, “Sorry, sometimes it’s hard to get Agnes’s attention.”

  “Oh, sure, okay,
I—”

  “AGNES!!!!”

  There’s still no sign of Agnes, so Dolores supplies me with another cookie to give to Agnes and directs me upstairs.

  I find Agnes in her room, doing push-ups with a book spread on the floor.

  “Forty-five,” she grunts. “Forty-six . . .”

  “Uh, hey, Agnes.”

  “Hey, Jake. Can you turn the page for me? Forty-seven. Forty-eight.”

  I crouch and flip the page. It’s a biology textbook opened to a chapter on genetics. It looks pretty advanced. High school, at least.

  “Thanks. Forty-nine. Fifty. I do push-ups until I finish a chapter or my arms give out, whichever comes first. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Don’t eat my cookie.”

  While Agnes continues to read and torture herself, I nibble my own cookie and glance around her room. The layouts of our houses are identical, and Agnes has the same room I do, only with a color scheme limited to black and white and grays—Night Kite’s colors. She has a steel desk with a microscope, a stack of paper maps, and a rack of glass flasks and vials and beakers. A set of hand weights sits under her desk next to a coiled jump rope.

  I’ve totally got her figured out.

  “You’re trying to turn yourself into Night Kite.”

  Agnes scoffs between push-ups. “Night Kite is a comic book character. She lives in a mansion atop her own private mountain. Sixty-three. I just read and study and work out every day, including strength training and martial arts. Sixty-four. I practice Shaolin Kung Fu at the Shady Leaf Plaza shopping center. I’m a green belt. Sixty . . . five. And I’m taking an online class in crime detection while I perfect the design of a lethal slingshot.”

  “You are totally trying to turn yourself into Night Kite.”

  “Sixty-six. Sixty . . . seven.”

  She collapses on her belly with a disappointed “Ugh.”

  “Sixty-seven push-ups is pretty good,” I assure her.

  “It’s not good enough.”

  “Not good enough for what?”

  “To be Night Kite, okay? You were right. I’m trying to be Night Kite. I know, I’m weird.”

  “The crime-fighting part is maybe weird, but making yourself supersmart and superstrong is cool. You could end up being a professional athlete or an astronaut or something.”