Another Jekyll, Another Hyde

by Daniel Nayeri

  “Dinner?” said Thomas. “No . . . no, it’s only like two p.m.” Thomas remembered having just come from lunch at the T-shirt restaurant. But, come to think of it, he did feel hungry again. His clothes smelled funny, as if he had been sweating, and looking up at the tiny single window in the upper corner of the basement wall, he could see it was already dark. He touched his forehead. His head was throbbing again.

  “Whatever,” said John. “You can’t be in here.”

  “Relax,” said Thomas, deciding to ignore the fact that the clock seemed to have jumped ahead six hours without his knowledge. “I need help.” His voice sounded wrong.

  John’s eyes grew round. “Um . . . OK.”

  Thomas tried to wipe his brow, but the feeling of his hand enveloping his face sent a jolt of fear through his body.

  “You OK?” said John. “You look weird. Do you have allergies or something? Because in seventh grade, I got stung by a bee and my face got all swollen and I —”

  “Shut up,” Thomas interrupted. He thrust a shaking hand into his pocket and took out the bottle. He held it between two fingers, thinking he might crush it. “I need you to look at one of these under a microscope or something. I need to know what it is.”

  At the sight of the pills, John glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking. “Where’d you get that?” he whispered. “I’m not touching that. You think you can just waltz in here with your highly sketchy jar of unmarked pills and just demand stuff? What if someone sees you? I know you’re on drugs. I was at your dad’s wedding.” He added the last bit rather proudly. “This isn’t a meth lab, rich boy.”

  Thomas sighed. He was about to lose all patience, but John was the only person he could trust who actually had the equipment and brains to help him. “Please,” said Thomas, hating that he had to beg the nerdling for anything. “John, if you help me and don’t ask questions, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  John looked interested. “Like . . . what?”

  “Anything you can think of . . . within reason.”

  “Twenty wall posts,” said John. “And not links or tags that make fun of me. Real friend stuff.”

  “Five,” sighed Thomas. “I don’t even do Facebook that much anymore.”

  “Twenty,” said John, his voice high with excitement. “You said anything.”

  “Fine,” said Thomas. He tapped a pill onto his palm and started to hand it to John.

  “Not all in one day,” said John, tapping his foot, arms still crossed.

  “OK, fine,” sighed Thomas.

  “And you have to do the first one now. Go ahead. . . .” John held his phone out to Thomas, who, fighting the urge not to crush it in his swollen fist, logged into his own account and wrote, Hey, John. Nice profile pic.

  Peering over his shoulder, John beamed. He took the pill and held it up to the yellow artificial light from the single bulb over the lab equipment. Then he set the pill on the wooden table that held all the microscopes and most of the beakers and made a big, long show of popping on his gloves, adjusting his goggles, and situating himself on his rolling stool. Thomas tried not to lose his temper, but it was getting difficult.

  John stared at the pill under a microscope. “Huh,” he said after a long time.

  “What is it?” said Thomas. It was hard watching the pill in John’s hands. He wanted it back in his pocket, safely in the jar with the others. He hated having it out of his control. “If you can’t tell, just give it back.”

  John held up a hand as if he were about to find the cure for cancer and Thomas was breaking his concentration.

  “Well,” said John, never looking up from the microscope lens, “judging from the texture” — he sighed deeply — “the striations, and the molecular composition . . . I would say . . . that . . .” He waited another thirty seconds, adjusting the settings on the microscope a few times, before he finished. “It may as well be a breath mint. We need to break it down chemically.”

  That was the last straw. Thomas had now put up with this jackass for twenty minutes, and he was in no mood to play. He lunged at John, thinking only of getting back his precious tablet. John took a step back, then abruptly reached for the microscope as if to save it from Thomas.

  John made his grab just as Thomas was reaching for the W. The two of them struggled over the microscope.

  “Let go, you goon!” John shouted. “You’ll wreck it!”

  But Thomas wasn’t listening. He saw John’s hand over the W and he was livid. All he could think of was this weaselly kid trying to take it from him. What if he popped it in his mouth right now? What if he took the pill to Principal Stevenson and the cops?

  He tried to push John’s hand away from the microscope. He didn’t mean to hurt him. He heard a loud grunt coming from somewhere — was it coming from his own mouth? He grabbed John’s arm. As John tried to pull away, Thomas’s nails dug into his flesh. John yanked hard, and as he did so, Thomas scratched his arm all the way down to the palm of his hand. John screamed.

  Blood trickled over the microscope and onto the table.

  Thomas stepped back, frightened at what he had done.

  John was clutching the W in his palm.

  “Give it back!” said Thomas.

  But John wasn’t paying attention anymore. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” he whispered, looking down at his palm.

  “What is it?” said Thomas. “What are you babbling about? Give me my pill!”

  John didn’t look up. He clutched his bloody arm with his other hand. The W was soaked in blood, but it rested there, unharmed. Thomas could see it now. Slowly, the blood was disappearing.

  The scratch on John’s hand was healing, all the way up his arm.

  “What’s going on?” said Thomas.

  John’s face had gone completely white. “I know what’s in the pill!”

  Fifteen minutes later, the two boys sat on the floor in a corner of the basement, trying to calm down. Thomas had explained to John where he had gotten the pills. In return, John was telling some crazy story about something called bonedust.

  “It feels so familiar,” John kept saying. “It feels almost exactly the same.” He kept looking at the scar on his hand, where the scratch hadn’t completely healed. He touched his palm and opened and closed his fist. “It can’t be a hundred-percent pure bonedust, because that healed a giant gash in my arm. And this . . . you can still see the scar. Plus, with bonedust, if you took it like you’ve been doing with the pills, you’d become immortal.”

  “Um . . .” Thomas couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Remember all the weird stuff that happened at school earlier in the fall?” said John. Thomas nodded. “Well, it wasn’t mold or bugs. The school was sort of . . . Promise you’ll believe me?” Thomas nodded again. “The school was possessed.”

  Thomas laughed.

  “Fine, don’t believe me.” John started to get up, but Thomas grabbed his arm.

  “Just finish, OK?”

  “My sister and I and that RA who got fired were looking for five mummies whose bones could make you immortal. It was called bonedust.”

  “The RA?” said Thomas. “That was the guy that stole Wendy from Connor.”

  “Yeah,” said John. “Hey, I liked Connor way better. But anyway, the guy had been searching out bonedust for years. He found it, too, but it was all destroyed. I don’t know how it’s possible for some of it to have ended up in your pills. Unless —”

  “Unless what?”

  “Remember the missing school nurse?”

  “Yeah,” said Thomas. The school nurse had disappeared a month or two before, without notice, without a word. She just left, and no matter how much the school administration searched for her, no one ever found out where she was.

  “She was the one trying to keep us from getting the bonedust,” said John. “Maybe she had a little left. Maybe she’s the one who put some of it in your pills.”

  Thomas rested his head against the wall. So no
w it was the school nurse. Where would he find her? Did she have something to do with Nikki? He was mulling everything over when John said, “I don’t know why she’d give you bonedust for free, though. Like I said, that stuff is the fountain of youth.”

  “Fountain of youth . . .” Thomas repeated. What did it have to do with him, with his pills, with Nikki, and his stepmother? As he was considering all the possibilities, he noticed that John was back on his iPhone. Thomas was about to say something, to warn him that he should keep the W absolutely secret, when John jumped up.

  “Dude, this hate crime thing is getting scary,” he said as he typed something into one of his social networking sites.

  “What are you talking about?” Thomas groaned. His head was hurting again. He had woken up only a few hours ago, and here he was, ready to go back to sleep.

  “People are saying that the police are coming back tomorrow,” said John. His voice was part excited, part terrified. “Marla the goth chick disappeared a few hours ago. Snatched right from her bedroom!”

  Journal entry #22

  My psychologist wants me to call her Dr. Alma, even though I asked if she could perform a tracheotomy and she goes, “I’m not that kind of doctor, Thomas,” and I said, “Well, if we’re stuck on a train and some fat tourist chokes on his pretzel, and the conductor shouts, ‘Help, we need a doctor!’ and you can’t help the dying obese guy any more than the useless fine-arts student next to you, then YOU ARE NOT A DOCTOR.”

  And she purses her lips, looks at her watch, and says, “Time’s up.”

  Meanwhile, she runs her hand through her sandy hair, rubbing her cheekbones like someone I used to know.

  Anyway, I’m sorry, Dr. Alma. Of course you’re really a doctor. I don’t even know what got into me. I get this feeling lately — like I can’t control my own emotions — like I’m watching myself have a total meltdown. I swear I didn’t have anger issues as a kid. I’m very sorry.

  And I shouldn’t have thrown the vase like that.

  Or grabbed you and kissed you. . . .

  It’s just that you look so familiar sometimes . . . and other times, I don’t know why, I get mad when you call me Thomas.

  Commissioner Paulie stood in the Marlowe hallway with his arms crossed, gnawing on a straw he’d used to stir his coffee. Principal Stevenson stood to the side, chewing his nails and tapping his foot on the marble floor. Detective Mancuso had sweat stains on his NYPD standard-issue blues as he rifled through the locker marked 1385.

  Thomas was watching and listening from inside an empty biology classroom.

  “Believe me, Stevenson, I know how annoying these parents can be,” said the commissioner. “They’ve been calling Police Plaza all week.” Principal Stevenson nodded as he ate what was left of his cuticles. The commissioner went on, “But I swear, if I have to personally come down to this ritzy little day care one more time . . .”

  Principal Stevenson nodded. “I know, I know. Our students have never been targeted like this before. I can’t make sense of it.”

  Commissioner Paulie squinted at Principal Stevenson. “Do you have any idea why Marlowe would be the focus of a crime spree now? I mean, has anything controversial happened here? Any disagreements or worse-than-usual rivalries, or just the same old crap?”

  It seemed to Thomas that Paulie was harboring a grudge against the entire New York upper class for what had happened to him at the Goodman-Brown wedding. Thomas checked his watch. Just five minutes until the period bell, when students would file out of the classrooms and into the hallway. Then he could get a closer look at the locker.

  “Nothing comes to mind,” said Principal Stevenson. “Marla Harker has always been a bit of trouble. She’s run away from home before.”

  “Don’t blame the victim, Stevenson,” said the commissioner. “Poor girl could be dead in a ditch somewhere. You’ve got a serial criminal on your hands. Now, what have you found, Mancuso?”

  Detective Mancuso turned from the locker and showed his palms, covered in latex gloves. “Nothing, sir. No sign of correspondence with a boy or girlfriend. Her textbooks are untouched. A few ticket stubs for the Samson Diablo tour . . .”

  “Anything else? Anything relevant?” said the commissioner.

  Mancuso shook his head. “I did find a few pages from her journal. . . . Pretty disturbed cookie.”

  “Rich kids,” said Commissioner Paulie with a slight shake of the head. “Lock this place down, would you? Search the lockers around hers, plus all her friends’. No one gets into their locker before we’re done.”

  The bell rang. Students poured into the hallway from all directions. Thomas pushed open the door and collided with the biology teacher. “Oomph!” said the teacher, taking the majority of the blow in his sternum.

  “Sorry!” said Thomas as he ran past. “I was just getting an . . . um, my textbook.”

  The teacher was still doubled over and didn’t bother to pursue him. Thomas was tall enough to see the principal directing kids around the pile of books on the floor in front of Marla’s locker as Detective Mancuso hurried to shove everything back in. Thomas weaved through the crowd, avoiding eye contact with anyone who might want to stop and talk to him. As he approached Marla’s locker, he heard Commissioner Paulie say, “Hurry up, Mancuso!”

  Mancuso shoved the rest of the books into the locker and slammed it shut. A few sheets of paper escaped and fluttered to the ground. Thomas loitered nearby, waiting for the three men to clear out. Scary, he thought, that if he became a lawyer, he would be part of the same legal system as these guys.

  “What are you doing here?” said a voice over Thomas’s shoulder. Thomas whipped around, hoping the motion didn’t catch anyone’s attention. It was Annie. Not so long ago, the two of them texted so much that Thomas knew exactly where she was at any given time. But a lot had happened since then. Now she was the last person Thomas wanted to see.

  “Hey, Annie. What are you doing here?”

  “That’s what I just asked you,” said Annie. She attempted a smile, as though they were having a silly conversation, but to Thomas, it was all a ton of awkward.

  “Oh, right. I was just seeing if the investigators came up with anything. You know, ’cause I want to be a lawyer . . . ’cause investigators are like lawyers. . . .”

  Thomas tried to stem the flow of stupid words. Annie looked at the three men as they marched down the hall. The tide of students filled the open space in front of Marla’s locker, and everything was back to normal. Sort of.

  “Do they think it’s related to Roger?”

  “Yeah, I think I heard them say it was the same criminal,” said Thomas. He was intending to investigate on his own, but obviously, he had to deal with Annie first. “Listen, Annie, thanks for finding me. I missed you yesterday.”

  Annie leaned past Thomas to look at the locker. “What do you mean, ‘yesterday’?” she said. “And how could they possibly know if it was the same criminal?”

  “We didn’t hang out yesterday. I was just saying I missed you.”

  “Thomas, we haven’t hung out all week. You’ve been avoiding me. Did those papers fall out of Marla’s locker?”

  Thomas took a sideways step to block Annie’s path. Then he realized how guilty that made him look. Annie stepped around and picked up a crumpled piece of paper. It had been ripped out of a notebook. When she smoothed it out and got a glimpse of the writing, she gasped.

  “What?” said Thomas, grabbing the paper. Thomas immediately recognized his own handwriting. It was a page from his journal, a recent page, covered in his own semi-incoherent ramblings. It was a stream of curse words directed at therapists in general, escape plans from New York, and claims that “witches and demons” were out to get him. He had scrawled diagonally across the horizontal text, Hyde is sick.

  It didn’t make any sense. Then again, most of his thoughts didn’t make sense anymore. He looked up from the paper, thinking, It doesn’t prove anything. There weren’t any obvious links to him.
Only someone who had seen his journal, or his handwriting, could possibly guess. Someone like Annie.

  Annie just stared at him. The hallway was starting to clear out as students shuffled into class. Annie still hadn’t said anything. Thomas was frozen, trying to read suspicion in her face. If he started to act weird now, she might suspect him — whether or not she recognized the page. He had to act normal. What’s the normal way to act in this situation?

  “Oh, hey, look at that,” he said. “The writer calls himself Edward a couple times.”

  “What?” said Annie, peering at the jagged scrawl.

  “Yeah, right here,” said Thomas. “I guess Marla was working on a persona poem, or maybe it’s some townie she’s dating.”

  “What’s a townie?” said Annie.

  “You know, people who don’t go to Marlowe. They just live in town.”

  “You mean New York City?”

  “Yeah,” said Thomas, sweating. “Listen, I gotta go. But do you want me to drive you to the hospital after school, to visit Roger?”

  Annie adjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder. “No,” she said. “You never liked Roger anyway. No reason to pose now.”

  “What do mean?” said Thomas, burping out a few awkward laughs. “I liked the guy just fine. I mean, I never disliked him. Besides, I wanted to hang with you.”

  “Whatever, Thomas,” said Annie. “Let’s just not worry about hanging out till all this is over. I’ve got Roger, and film club, and finals. And you haven’t even mentioned the debate tournament.”

  “Oh, right,” said Thomas.

  The truth was that he hadn’t even thought of debate recently. And what was more, it sounded like Annie was dumping him. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Take care of yourself. You’re sort of coming apart.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?” said Thomas.

  Annie tried a half smile, but it didn’t take. “I think you’ve been breaking up with me for weeks now. I’m just going along with it.”