by David Lubar
“We put it in your chest and run the tubes through your arms to your wrist. Just like that, you have a heartbeat and pulse.” He tapped something on the right side of the drawing. “We’ll run this wire up your throat to your mouth, and you have a temperature.”
“You put it in my chest?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
He made a cutting motion with his right hand. “Surgery.”
“Are you crazy?” I stepped away. “Nobody is cutting me open.”
“Oh stop whining, Nathan. You don’t feel pain. And we’ll take it right out after the appointment, if you want. Though I suspect it could have other uses if we left it in. Really, this opens up all sorts of possibilities.” He paused to giggle, then said, “Opens up . . . that’s sort of funny, when you think about it.”
“Forget it.” I could just imagine the fake heart exploding after they’d sewed it into my chest. That would definitely get Dr. Scrivella’s attention.
“Consider the alternative,” Mr. Murphy said. “Discovery. Exposure.”
“That’s all I’ve been thinking about.” I spent half my time hiding who I was and what I’d become. But there was no way I was going to let anyone cut me open and stick stuff inside me. I wasn’t a piece of dead meat, and nobody was going to treat me like one.
8
Pulse Fiction
Once again, I headed home after failing my training. It looked like I’d be about as good a spy as I would be a linebacker, or a sumo wrestler. I couldn’t do anything real spies did. All I could do was stupid dead-guy stuff. I stared down at my feet as I walked.
Watch your step.
That’s what I was always saying to Mookie. Maybe I just needed to take my own advice. I stared at my feet as I walked, being careful how I stepped.
It seemed to work. I walked two blocks without scrapes, scuffs, or accidental sounds. Maybe I could actually follow people. I started to go a third block.
“Ooof!”
I’d walked right into a low tree branch. Okay—that was a problem. If I watched my step, I wouldn’t make any sounds, but I’d walk into stuff, and I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on whomever I was following.
An eye . . . That’s one eye. I needed to keep one eye on my feet, and one eye on my target. I wondered if I could do both.
I tried looking down with one eye, and ahead with the other. That’s when the weirdest thing happened.
Whoa . . .
I could see my feet, and also look ahead. It was like each of my eyes could move by itself, and I could see more at once. Next, I looked toward both sides at the same time, moving my left eye as far left as I could and my right eye as far right. Wow. It was like I could see halfway around me.
Maybe my dead eye muscles worked differently from regular eye muscles. I guess there’s something in a living brain that makes both eyes move in the same direction. Whatever the reason, this meant I should be able to follow people. I might still stink at picking locks or breaking codes, but at least I wasn’t a total failure.
There wasn’t anyone around I could practice on, so I headed home. But when I walked to school the next morning, I managed to follow an older kid for a couple blocks. He finally turned off toward the middle school, but he never noticed me. I’d done it. I felt a lot better as I walked the rest of the way to school.
“Sixty-six point six!” Abigail shouted when I got there.
Instead of saying, Huh? I just waited for her to continue.
“Your problem is two-thirds solved,” she said. “That’s sixty-six point six percent. Actually, point seven if you round up.”
“Round ’em up,” Mookie said. He swirled his hand over his head like he was twirling a lasso, and went running after imaginary cattle.
I was good enough with fractions to understand what Abigail meant. We had three things to figure out. She’d already solved the temperature problem. So she must have figured out one of the others. “What’d you come up with?”
“This is just incredibly easy,” Abigail said. “After you left, I went to the library and did physiology research all evening.”
“Fizzy what?” I asked.
“Fizzy!” Mookie yelled as he ran past us. “I love fizzy drinks.”
“Not fizzy. Physiology,” Abigail told me. “The study of the body. I was looking at the circulatory system—you know, the bloodstream and heart—when it hit me.” She held up a small rubber ball, like the kind you buy from gum machines.
“Do you get all your ideas from gum machines?” I asked.
“Well, they are all over the place,” she said. “And that’s actually where I found this. Right inside the library, next to a machine selling fake tattoos of Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Your pulse,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Put it under your arm,” she told me.
Mookie trotted back over to us, panting from his cattle chase. “Ick. That’s something Dilby the Digger would do.”
“It’s something Nathan’s going to do if he wants to pass his doctor’s exam,” Abigail said. She handed me the ball.
I put it under my right arm. Compared with some of the things Abigail had gotten me to do, this was pretty simple. At least I wouldn’t end up soaking wet, standing in my underwear, like that time at the aquarium.
“Now what?”
“Press it,” she said. “There’s a major artery under your armpit. When you squeeze the ball against it, you’ll make the blood move. You just need to press and release, and keep doing it while the doctor takes your pulse.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She grabbed my wrist with two fingers on the top and her thumb underneath—like the way Dr. Scrivella does when he checks my pulse. “Try it. Just do it once. Press and release.”
I pressed down on the ball, then let go. “Feel anything?”
She nodded. “Yup. Definite pulse.”
That was great. “So, how fast do I do it?”
“Sixty times a minute would be a good rate,” she said. “And a convenient one. Use your watch.”
I looked at my watch and squeezed the ball in my armpit each time the second hand moved. After a moment, Abigail said, “Perfect. You’ve got a pulse.”
“Thanks. I wish it was that easy to get a real pulse.”
Abigail wrapped the rest of her fingers around my wrist. “You will, Nathan. I really believe the process is reversible. Someday, you’ll have a pulse and a heartbeat and everything. Somehow. Some way.”
“And a sense of smell,” Mookie said, flashing me a grin.
“You didn’t . . . ,” I said.
“Oh no, he did.” Abigail pinched her nose and stepped away from Mookie. “Thank goodness we aren’t inside.”
I didn’t care what Mookie did. I was happy I’d have a pulse for my doctor’s appointment. “So I have a temperature and a pulse. Now, all I need is a heartbeat.”
“Don’t worry,” Abigail said. “I’ll figure that out.”
“I hope so. We’re pretty much out of time. My appointment is right after school.”
“I still say you should just get sick,” Mookie told me.
“To get out of a doctor’s appointment?” I asked. “You want me to tell my mom I can’t go to the doctor because I’m sick?” I waited for him to realize the problem with that suggestion, but he just nodded and grinned like he’d invented a way to turn broccoli into ice cream.
He lost his grin at the beginning of lunch. I wasn’t eating, of course, but everyone else was diving into their food. Mookie was just about to gulp down his first spoonful of beef barley soup—it’s so lumpy, we all called it “barf beefly”—when Abigail grabbed his wrist.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to his spoon as it hovered a quarter inch from his mouth.
Mookie frowned and moved the spoon far enough away from his face so he could see it. “What’s what?”
“That thing,�
�� Abigail said.
I saw what she meant. There was a slimy glob of dark green goop sitting in the middle of his spoon.
“Meatball?” Mookie guessed.
“It’s not meatball soup,” Abigail said. “That looks nasty. I don’t think you should eat it.”
“It won’t hurt me,” Mookie said. But, instead of eating it, he took a sniff. “Oh man, maybe you’re right. Nothing should smell like that until after it’s been eaten. Long after.” He dropped the spoon back in his soup and picked up his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand and his burger in the other. “Good thing I bought enough lunch. Where to start?”
“You all better check your soup,” Abigail said.
Denali, Ferdinand, and Snail Girl had soup. They fished around with their spoons.
“Mine’s fine,” Denali said. Even so, she pushed it away.
Snail Girl nodded. I guess hers was fine, too. Ferdinand lifted his spoon, stared at the quivering glob of goop, screamed, flung the spoon away like it was made of hornets, and toppled backwards off his chair.
Naturally, I was sitting right in the path of the spoon and the goop. I got splattered in the face.
“Goop soup,” Denali said.
“Super goop soup,” Adam Kessler said.
“Hold the slime,” Mookie said.
“I can’t,” Denali said. “It’s too slippery.”
Around the cafeteria, I could see people at other tables discovering the extra ingredient in their soup. I went to the bathroom to wash my face. When I turned on the water, I halfway expected goop to flow out. But it was just water.
After I’d cleaned up, I went back to my seat and waited for lunch to end. As we were getting up to leave, Abigail grabbed a plastic spoon and scooped up the goop from Mookie’s tray. Mookie was usually the last kid to take back his tray, because he had a lot of food to get through. He was always telling the principal that lunch should be ninety minutes. The principal didn’t agree.
“Help yourself,” Mookie said. “I’m full.”
I watched as Abigail pulled a small test tube out of her purse and dropped the goop in there.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I want to analyze the sample,” she said. She glanced around to make sure the rest of the kids had left. Abigail didn’t want anyone in our class to know she was a scientific genius. Girl geniuses get kidded a lot.
“Do you always carry around test tubes?”
“Of course. How else could I gather samples?”
I guess she had a point. “Let me know what you find out.”
Mookie and I headed for gym. I was actually happy to go. My mean gym teacher, Mr. Lomux, was still out. Like Rodney, he’d suffered pretty badly during the wrestling disaster. He’d also taken a pretty hard hit to his ego. And since his ego was the largest part of his body, it must have hurt.
The substitute gym teacher showed us how to play shuffleboard. It was pretty cool. You used a stick to slide this puck across the floor. I was actually pretty good at it. But that’s not surprising, since my hands are totally steady.
At the end of the day, I checked for one last time with Abigail. She hadn’t come up with a solution. I still didn’t have a way to fake a heartbeat.
“Thanks for trying,” I told her as we walked out of the school.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” she said.
“Hey, you did great. You figured out a pulse and temperature. Nobody else could have done that.”
“I wish I had a couple more days,” she said. “I know I could solve it.”
“I know you could, too.” But I was out of time. And my secret was about to end up out in the world. Eek, zombie! Run! People were going to hate me. This was really going to stink—even worse than the goop in the water.
Mom was waiting for me when I got home from school. She’d taken off early from work to drive me to my appointment.
“I can walk there,” I said.
“I like taking you.” She handed me another chocolate bar. “What’s the matter—is my little man getting too big to go places with his mother?”
“No. It’s fine.” I was totally out of ideas and excuses. As I followed Mom to the car, I tried to imagine how Dr. Scrivella would react. Maybe he’d be so shocked, he’d pass out. I guess that wouldn’t help all that much. Unless he fell, hit his head, and lost his memory.
“Where am I. What happened?” There’d be stars circling his head.
“You just finished examining me. Everything is normal. Here, let me help you fill out my records.”
Now I was just being crazy. Nothing was going to save me.
9
Road Work
I slid into the front seat and buckled up. I really hated the idea that Mom was about to find out her son was dead. Compared with a rusty nail, this was the atom bomb of bad news.
She pulled out of the driveway and drove down our street. Normally, she would have turned left at the corner, but there was an enormous moving van blocking the road to the highway.
“Guess I’ll take the river road,” she said. “It’s longer, but we have plenty of time.”
We headed down that way. If I hadn’t been so worried about my doctor’s appointment, I would have enjoyed the ride. The road follows the Delaware River, winding and snaking along. The houses are mostly up on the hillside because the river floods once in a while. It’s a pretty narrow road, so it’s like being in one of those video games where you race along and try to force other cars to crash.
Mom doesn’t drive like she’s playing a video game, of course. She’s pretty careful. But she did hit the brakes hard when we came around a curve and saw the guy holding a stop sign. There were a bunch of orange cones along the right side of the road. I could see a bulldozer past them. It was just sitting there.
Mom sighed. I saw her look at the clock on the dashboard, and then over her shoulder, back the way we’d come. “We’ll be fine,” she said. “We still have half an hour. This won’t take long.”
I settled back in my seat and put my hand against my chest. Start beating. Come on. Just for a little while. You can do it. My heart paid no attention to me. Then I saw something that told me Mom was wrong. A half hour wouldn’t be enough. The guy with the sign smiled at me.
I took a closer look at him. He had a fuzzy black beard covering most of his face, and stringy hair hanging out from under his hard hat. But I knew those eyes. And those big ears.
It was Mr. Murphy!
“Looks like we aren’t going to make it,” I said fifteen minutes later. I pulled off my shoe and sock. “It doesn’t matter. I’m totally healed. See—no scratch.”
“Maybe I should turn around,” Mom said. She didn’t even glance at my foot. “We could still make it.”
There was a line of cars behind us. I couldn’t see past the curve. But I could hear a honking horn once in a while. The road was too narrow for anyone to safely turn around.
Ten minutes later, Mom got her phone out of her purse and called the doctor’s office.
“This is Mrs. Abercrombie. We’re stuck in traffic. I’m afraid we’ll have to reschedule Nathan’s appointment.”
No openings, no openings. Come on, give me a break. I tried to force the world to turn my way.
Mom listened and nodded, then said, “That soon? Great. Thank you.”
She put the phone back in her purse.
“We’re in luck,” she said. “They can fit us in tomorrow. Isn’t that nice of them?”
“Wonderful.”
Up ahead, Mr. Murphy turned the sign around, so it went from stop to slow, and waved us toward the left lane. We moved along. I hadn’t really been saved. All I’d gotten was a bit more time. But I was happy BUM cared enough about my problems to try to do something. Of course, I’m pretty sure all the people who’d been stuck waiting for the traffic to move would feel differently.
The good news was that Abigail had an extra day to figure out the problem. I called her as soon as I got home.
“BUM kept my mom from getting me to my appointment,” I told her.
“What did they do, blow up the doctor’s office?”
“No. They stopped a whole bunch of traffic. I think they dug some holes in the river road, too. But no explosions. Do you think this will give you enough time to get me a heartbeat?”
“I hope so. I tried a couple ideas, but they didn’t work.”
“They didn’t involve cutting me open, did they?”
“Nope. But thanks for the suggestion. I’ll add it to the list.”
“Add it at the bottom. Okay?” I knew she was kidding, but the idea still creeped me out.
“Nathan, try not to worry. Things will work out. I know they will. By the way, I took that goop sample over to the college and ran some tests on it.”
“What did you find out?”
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “It has all the properties of a by-product of the fungal life process.”
“Uh, I might find that more fascinating if I knew what it meant,” I told her.
“Sorry. Think of it this way. Every life-form creates waste products.”
“Especially Mookie,” I said.
“Especially. Anyhow, we go to the bathroom. We shed skin cells. We exhale carbon dioxide. Fungi have waste products, too.”
“So the goop is mushroom poop?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not quite as crude as that, but I guess you could put it that way. The weird thing is, it doesn’t seem to be the product of any specific fungus I’m familiar with.”
We talked a bit more. I learned some other things about fungi. But nothing as amazing as the idea of mushroom poop. I couldn’t get the image of a mushroom sitting on a tiny mushroom toilet out of my mind. I didn’t share the image with Abigail.
After we finished, I got out the rubber ball, stuck it in my armpit, and practiced my timing for a while. By then, dinner was ready. Mom had decided to make macaroni and cheese. She’s the only person I know who makes it crunchy. Not just the top. The whole thing. When Dad called from work, she told him what she was making. Dad decided to work late. I guess he’d rather crunch numbers than macaroni.
