Tentacle and Wing

by Sarah Porter

  He turns away, walks to the door without glancing at me again, and slams it behind him.

  I put my head on the desk and picture myself falling down into the spiraling ribbon of my own DNA. The closer I get to it, the bigger it looks, a double strand of glowing beads, until I slip through a door in the side of an atom and into a huge ballroom. Thousands of blade-sharp crystals hang like stalactites from the ceiling. The floor is crowded with kimes, hideous ones, dancing and spinning and keeping time to the music by clacking the enormous crab claws at the ends of their furry arms, twitching ratlike whiskers, snapping their long fangs.

  Where I’m going, I’ll be surrounded by monsters, eating and sleeping in the same rooms with them. And everything my mom and Mr. Collins said about it being temporary was a lie, I know that. My new friends will drool and sniff and paw me with cockroachy feelers, and that’s how it will be for the rest of my life.

  Chapter Three

  THE DOOR swings open and I jump. “Dad?”

  But it’s not him. Mr. Collins’s globular pink face lunges at me, and he yanks on my arm so viciously that I stagger to my feet.

  “I expect your father’s thought better of coming near you again. It’s time we were going, Miss Lahey.”

  My dad wouldn’t just abandon me without saying goodbye. “You told him we would wait!”

  “And so we have. For twenty minutes. Come along now.”

  I try to pull away, but he’s too strong. He grabs me with his thick red hands and hoists me into the air. I kick at him and scream, but it’s after four o’clock, and there’s no one around to hear me. Or if they do hear, they’ll never help; instead they’ll mash their lips together and look down and wait for it to be over. Even while I’m screaming, I know in my heart that it’s pointless.

  He lugs me out of the office and through the hallways with their green-white lights and green-gray lockers. Some janitor will clean out my locker and throw everything away, like the drawing my best friend, Nina, made for me, of the two of us riding on a rainbow-dotted elephant. I should have thought about that sooner, but he’ll never let me get that drawing now. How is Nina going to feel when she hears about me?

  My cell phone is in my locker too. We’re not allowed to bring them to class.

  He turns backwards to shove open the double doors to the parking lot, and I get my last look at my old life: a mirage of everything I’ll miss. Nina and Harper leap in midair like ghosts made of blue glass, and I’m there too, floating and playing my violin: the song I wrote for Nina’s dance in our talent show this Friday. Now no one will be there onstage with her.

  Then we’re outside. Red heat drips from the sky like a shining glaze.

  I’ve stopped fighting, but Mr. Collins doesn’t put me down until we reach the back of a silver van. Then he has to drop me to unlock the back. For a moment his attention is off me—​and I know I have to let go of my home and everything here that I care about. I’m doing my best to accept it. But not before my dad has a chance to say goodbye.

  I slip out from under his fat, meaty arm and take off running across the parking lot, weaving around the parked cars as fast as I can go. My sandals flap on the bubbling asphalt, and Mr. Collins hollers and charges after me. He’s strong but lumbering, and I’m small for my age, light and fast. I swerve away from him, doubling back. He can’t change direction quickly enough. I hear him thud into the side of a car. He grunts in pain, and I feel so free.

  As free as a girl with somewhere to go. With people waiting to welcome her and keep her safe and not care about details like not-so-human genes.

  Then his hands crush my ribs and I lift into the air, shrieking and flailing. And that’s when we both see the blue car turning at the lot’s entrance.

  I knew he would come. The car swings right at us, and Mr. Collins smacks me back onto the ground like he’s embarrassed. My dad slaps open his door while the car jerks to a halt, and he’s already shouting.

  “Mr. Collins! What do you think you’re doing? You will keep your hands off my daughter, do you hear me? I don’t care what you think of her. She’s a little girl, not some, some creature that you can simply manhandle. You . . .”

  Then he falls silent, because he’s staring at me too hard to keep going.

  I run over and hug him, partly because I want to and partly because that way I don’t have to look at his face.

  “You brought some things for Ada to take with her, Dr. Lahey?” Mr. Collins says. Cold and snotty. It’s like he can tell that my dad kept my secret. It’s like he thinks my dad is despicable, almost as much of a monster as I am.

  Sunlight stabs off the windshields like iridescent knives. I listen to my dad gasping for breath. When he finally talks again his voice is flat and quiet.

  “Yes. Her violin. And a few other things that I know are very significant to her. Private mementos. Ada, you’ll look through the duffle when you have a moment alone, all right? They’re in the trunk.” He sort of flinches in that direction, then stops and strokes my hair.

  “I’d suggest you hurry up and get them, then. We’re leaving now.”

  So he lets me go and trudges to the back of the car. He pulls out my violin case and a green duffle bag, but he can’t meet my eyes anymore. I shouldn’t be, but part of me is glad that he’s ashamed to send me away—​unless what he’s ashamed of is me. “I love you very, very much. Ada, we’ll—​I’ll try to get you out of there, I promise. As soon as I can.”

  “I love you too,” I tell him. “I’ll be okay. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  So that’s how it ends, with both of us saying things that can’t be true. It reminds me of how carefully he taught me to lie. It’s like we’ve been practicing for just this moment.

  Then I walk to the silver van and climb in the back with my things, and Mr. Collins slams the door.

  A stink of musty rubber hits me. There are fold-down seats along both sides of the van’s interior. Two shafts of light fall from the small windows in the doors, but it’s pretty dark. It’s air-conditioned, so I see the two kids by their body heat before I can make out their other colors. An auburn-haired girl maybe a year older than me and a little boy who can’t be much more than four. He’s curled up in a ball, probably crying silently.

  Of course, they look totally human, just like I do. Otherwise they would have been caught ages ago.

  She looks me over. Checking for fins or something else obviously horrible. When she doesn’t find anything, her eyebrows shoot up.

  “You see? You’re normal, too! There’s nothing wrong with any of us! I swear, this is the stupidest, most ridiculous thing that’s ever happened!”

  The van lurches, and I hurry to get a seat before I go flying. I slump across from her and buckle myself in. “It doesn’t matter what we look like. We could all look like Miss America. They can prove what we are anyway.”

  The girl pouts. “Except that we’re not! It’s just a lame mistake. And now they’re going to lock us up with a bunch of disgusting kimes. They’ll probably chew our toes off when we’re sleeping, or, like, try to scoop out our eyes because they just have bug eyes or something.”

  The little boy sobs, so I kick her and glance sharply at him. She should know better. I think about going over and trying to comfort him, but the way he’s clutching himself makes me think he’d rather be left alone.

  “That’s just paranoid. They’re—​even if they look strange, they’re still going to be kids like us.” I don’t know if that’s actually right, but I want the boy to hear me. The truth is that I’m not super excited about meeting a bunch of kimes, either. In the pictures I’ve seen, they’re mostly so grotesque that it’s going to be really hard to act natural around them. “This is no worse than going to camp or something.”

  Still lying. I’m in the habit, I guess.

  We’re rumbling along fast now. We must be on the freeway already.

  She hasn’t quit staring at me. “What are you, anyway?”

  “What are
you talking about?” I ask. If she’s made up her mind that I’m not a kime, then obviously I must be human. What else is there?

  Then I realize that’s not what she means. I already thought she was pretty clueless, but now that she’s asking my least favorite question, I’m sure of it. And I am utterly not in the mood.

  “I mean, you’re not white, right?”

  “Okay,” I say. With my black, thick, wavy hair, and golden-brown skin, and green-gold eyes two shades lighter than my face, I’ve been asked this so many times that I wish I could puke on everyone who brings it up. Just because it’s an uncommon combination, why would anyone think I owe them an explanation? It’s not like anybody wants to hear the whole list, anyway.

  “But you don’t really look black or Spanish, either.”

  “I’m a person,” I tell her. “A girl, if you want to be picky. My name is Ada Halcyon Lahey, and I’m twelve.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” She doesn’t know when to quit.

  “And I’m a pretty serious violinist. I like reading and swimming. I want to be a scientist when I grow up.”

  She starts sulking. “You know that is not what I meant! Why don’t you just answer the question?”

  I open my mouth to say what I always say: Because it’s a dumb question. I’m a human being!

  Then I realize I can’t say that ever again. I forget about talking any more and turn as far as I can toward the wall.

  Chapter Four

  SAG HARBOR is only an hour or so away. That poor little boy drifts off to sleep, and I pretend to sleep too, so I won’t have to answer any more questions.

  I can hear the auburn-haired girl shifting around impatiently, and after a while she climbs out of her seat and nudges me. “Ada! Hey, Ada, wake up! We have to plan what we’re going to do!”

  She probably won’t believe I’m sleeping through this, and anyway making plans might even be interesting. What is there to plan about being locked up?

  “What?” I ask her. When my eyes flutter open, I see clouds rolling fast in those two tiny windows. My dad tells me clouds are supposed to be white, just plain white, except at sunset, but for me they have complicated neon ruffles, violet and aqua, tying them up like shoelaces. The red juice of heat still runs across the sky.

  The girl is kneeling right next to me, her curls bouncing as the van hits a bump. She looks relieved. “I never got to tell you my name. I’m Marley. I have an idea, I mean, about what we can do.”

  “Are you thinking about trying to escape?” If we did, where would we go?

  “No! About what we can do when we’re there! See, they can force us to live in the same building with kimes, right? But they can’t make us talk to them! We’re both normal, so I just think we should stick together. Team Normal!” She tries to fist-bump me, but I keep my hands in my lap.

  “We’re going to be living with them for years. Never talking to anyone—​that sounds way too awkward.”

  It also sounds mean. It’s not like any of us asked to have some bizarre genes go wriggling their way into our DNA. It was all the fault of the scientists at Novasphere. It happened because of some mistake the genetic engineers there made, something they accidentally released into the environment that caused a lot of kids to be born as chimeras. Mobs burned Novasphere’s laboratories to the ground the day before I was born, and the scientists were dragged out and shot dead, right in their own parking lot. My mom said they saw the smoke on their way to the hospital.

  “Okay, so maybe we can talk to them. I’m just saying, they’re kimes and we’re normal humans. Right? And as long as we keep reminding each other that we don’t belong there, then we can get through this together. We’ve got to help each other stay strong!”

  She’s putting on this megaconfident cheerleader voice, but her eyes are wide and desperate. I start to feel sorry for her. “They have our DNA, Marley. If we were normal, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Some little thing in our spit? That shouldn’t matter! What matters is what we look like. Come on, Ada. Don’t let them fool you into thinking you’re a weirdo! You’ve got to stay strong, girl!”

  She seriously has no idea, and it makes me envious. I wish I could believe that just saying how normal I am would make it true. But the truth is going to hit her sometime, and it’ll be terrible for her when it does. I finally give in and fist-bump her. “Sure, Marley. We’ll stay strong.”

  The van makes a huge, swaying turn, then jars up and down as it stops, and Marley falls over sideways and squeals. It’s funny until I realize what it means.

  We’re here.

  There are a few more minutes when it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. I can’t see anything through those tiny windows besides clouds, but I hear a long creaking sound that might be a gate getting rolled back. The van jumps forward, then growls along what sounds like gravel.

  Then I hear the creak again, and this time I see a huge gate with massive steel bars rolling across the windows. There are hoops of razor wire along the top. Great. It shuts behind us with a clang. We swing around again, and the windows fill with a high stone wall. Then there are tree branches, spangled all over with late-afternoon gold.

  Another minute goes by before Mr. Collins opens the doors. “Get out.”

  Marley sits there petrified, and the little boy is still half asleep, so I grab my things and clamber out first. It’s cooler here; some red heat lingers in the sky, but blue scrolls of wind push through it. I keep my head up and don’t glance at Mr. Collins, stomping past him through lush grass up to my knees. Doesn’t anyone here mow? There are daisies so brilliantly white that they look like they’re floating. A long, low building made of silver wood waits at the top of a meadowy slope, and over it all is the sound of the sea.

  I don’t know what I expected, but I never imagined anything like this. Under the trees is a thicket of what might be blackberry bushes in flower. I smell salt and roses on the wind.

  And there’s a boy standing twenty feet away, with blue leaf shadows sliding over his face. I can hear Marley coming up behind me, and she gives a little gasp when she sees him.

  Because he isn’t just human-looking. He’s gorgeous. About our age, tall and slender, with hair even blacker than mine. The only thing that might be a little off about him is that he’s incredibly pale, and maybe a touch bluish. Sun gleams all over his hair. Wasn’t he covered in shadows a second ago?

  He couldn’t have been. The shadow of the nearest tree stops a yard away from his feet, darkness pitching on the long grass. Before I can figure it out, he pulls out a walkie-talkie and turns it on with a blurt of static.

  “Ms. Stuart? Ms. Stuart, they’re here!” He clicks it off and slips it back in his pocket, looking us up and down in a way that doesn’t seem too friendly.

  Marley must be over her surprise already, because she runs straight for him. “Oh, thank God! I was so worried that we were going to be the only normal ones here, like everyone was going to be dripping with slime or something. I guess they make mistakes a lot, though, because you’re obviously not some freak. I mean, you look—”

  At first I think it’s just my crazy vision, but Marley is gaping at him with such shock that I realize she must see it too. He’s changing. A cloud of reddish-purple is billowing through his skin, starting at one side of his forehead and pouring across his face like paint dripped in water. His features don’t change, just his colors. The fuchsia eddies and spreads until it takes over his whole face and glows through his gray T-shirt, then streams down both arms all the way to his clenched fists. A wave of inky blue-black pours after it. His mouth is open but no sound comes out, and after a moment I realize that it’s because he’s too angry to talk.

  Then he finds his voice and starts snarling at her. Marley jumps back, then stumbles three more paces and falls on her butt.

  “Oh, so you think normal is something to be proud of? Because you know what you look like to me? You look like those mobs of normals who come slamming on our gates and s
hrieking about how they’re going to burn us alive!”

  His skin is going wild now, a million colors skidding around in zigzags like a broken TV. An older woman in a tan sack dress is hurrying our way down the hill, but the boy has his back to her, and he’s still yelling when she gets close.

  “You think we’re disgusting animals, but you normals are the beasts, and you should be ashamed of what you are. You hate us for nothing, and you’d kill us for nothing, you slavering, vicious little—”

  “Gabriel,” the woman says. She looks sloppy and dull, with small piggy eyes and cropped mud-colored hair and that ugly, sagging dress, but her voice is calm and powerful. He shuts up at once and even fidgets a little from embarrassment. “You can tell me what you think of me to my face.”

  A few seconds ago, I never would have believed a boy this arrogant could look so crushed. His colors stop racing, and he turns an even light blue.

  “I wasn’t talking about you, Ms. Stuart.”

  “And what am I, Gabriel? Forty-six, forty-six. As normal as they come.”

  “You’re different.” I guess it doesn’t count as blushing on him, but he’s starting to get kind of pink. She puts her hands on his shoulders, and I notice that she has to look up at him. She hasn’t even glanced at us.

  “Am I? That’s not what my chromosomes tell us. Forty-six, forty-six. Impeccably human.”

  Marley is up on her feet, taking advantage of their conversation to back away from them, though I don’t know where she thinks she can go. The little boy from the van is sitting cross-legged off to my right with his eyes popping.

  “You gave up your whole life to take care of us!”

  “So I did. And all I ask in return is that you do me the courtesy of saying what you know to be true. Gabriel, what am I?”

  It’s funny, but I can tell the exact moment when he stops trying to get out of it. He straightens up and fires a proud gaze back at her. “You’re a regular human being, Ms. Stuart. Forty-six, forty-six.”