“So listen,” I said. “I started thinking about what you were saying about changing Zooey’s mind about me, and it occurred to me: What if I could?”
“Could what?” Harlan asked.
“What if I could literally change her mind?”
“What if I literally have no idea what you’re talking about?”
“Harlan, listen to me.” I took in a deep breath. It was vital that he understand exactly how important this was. “We’re best friends, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you know how I feel about Zooey.”
“Uh, yeah,” he said, “pretty clear on that one, thanks.” I stood there next to the stage telling him my idea, and just saying it out loud got me more excited. I mean, this idea was more than beautiful. It was elegant. My dad always says that a truly elegant idea is one that solves multiple complex problems with one simple solution, so I knew he’d be proud of me for this one, even though I could never tell him about it. At least until afterward, when I won the Singer Prize and people started writing books about me, and then reporters and TV people would come to my house and interview my parents, and my dad would say, yes, he always knew that I was a genius, but he never dreamed that I would come up with something so completely incredible at age thirteen.
“Forget it, man,” Harlan said. “That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever had.”
I stared at him. “You’re joking, right?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“No,” I said, “you look like Santa’s evil twin.”
He tugged at the beard strapped to his face, but it wouldn’t come loose. “Seriously, Lenny, trust me. Don’t do this. It’s not just a terrible idea—it’s dangerous.”
What’s wrong with it?”
“Only about a million things. What if you hurt her? What if you hurt yourself? What if you can’t get back out again?”
“It’s one hundred percent scientifically viable. I know exactly what I’m doing. You saw the rats.”
“And look what happened to them,” he said. “I mean, have you even thought this through? What are you going to tell your parents?”
“That’s the beauty of it.” The details were popping into my head. “I have independent study for the whole day on Friday. I’ll be done by two thirty, three at the latest. It’ll be like nothing happened.”
“Wait a second,” Harlan said, and tried to stand up, but in his zombie Santa costume he couldn’t bend his knees to push himself upright, so he just settled for scuttling away on his butt, trying to put as much distance between us as possible. “Why are you involving me?”
“Why do you think I’m telling you any of this? I need your help.”
“No way.”
I sighed. Harlan can be extremely shortsighted sometimes, which is understandable in someone of limited intelligence, but I thought he knew me better than this. “I can’t do it without you.”
“Then I guess you’re not doing it.”
“Harlan,” Zooey said, “are you ready to go again?” Harlan and I both looked up and saw her standing over us. She had her hands on her hips and a little concerned wrinkle between her eyebrows. At this distance I could smell her. She smelled like vanilla and cinnamon and lip balm, and her hair looked licorice black, shiny, sweeping sideways across her forehead. Even her black glasses made me want to stand up and kiss the tip of her nose where the last three freckles sat like three tiny explorers at the end of the universe. All at once I tried to talk, but my tongue felt as if it had swelled up inside my mouth like a sponge.
“I was...we were...” Harlan glanced at me, then back up at her. “Forget it.”
“Lenny, did you think of anything yet?”
I blinked at her. “What?”
“The name of a virus that could turn Santa Claus into that.” She pointed at me. “Any ideas?”
I cleared my throat, realized that I was wringing my hands, and forced myself to stop. “Well.” My voice came out high and squeaky, and I tried again. “I mean, uh—you know, actually...there was an interesting article in last month’s Scientific American about a...neurological virus.”
“Oh really? What was it called?”
My mind went blank. I knew the name of the virus. I’d memorized it without even meaning to, because that’s what happens when you’ve got a photographic memory: your brain just accumulates this stuff like dust bunnies under the bed—the electrochemical properties of carbon nanotubes and classifications of dark matter. But at the moment all I could think of was that Zooey’s eyes looked like shiny black marbles, and how she had perfect skin, like the skin of a peach.
“Lenny?” she prompted. “Hello?”
“Sorry. I don’t...I mean...”
Zooey grunted and shook her head. “Keep at it, Genius Boy. Come on, Harlan, break’s over. Back to work.” She turned to Harlan, stupid Harlan in his stupid zombie Santa outfit, and took hold of his arm, actually holding his hand as they walked back to meet with the rest of the cast.
I jumped up on stage next to him, whispering in his ear.
“Harlan,” I said, quiet enough so Zooey couldn’t hear, “if you’ve ever believed in me about anything, believe in this. The idea will work.”
“Forget it. No way.”
“It’s a perfect idea! Nothing’s going to go wrong!”
He waved me off with one hand. “That’s what you said about the groundhogs in my uncle’s camper, and look what happened to them.”
“I’m doing this with or without you.”
He stopped. “Lenny—”
“You know I will. Help if you want to, but if you don’t, then just stay out of the way.” I locked eyes with him so he could see how serious I was. “I mean it, Harlan.”
He cocked his head, looking ridiculous in the Santa hat and beard. “You’re a lousy friend, you know that?”
“No, I’m not.” I poked him in his big stuffed belly. “I make your life interesting. Without me you’d just be another kid in an Angry Birds shirt, going to baseball games and eating pizza.”
“That sounds pretty good to me.”
“Hey,” I said, “anytime you want to get off the Lenny Express...”
“How about right now?”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it by myself.” I turned and started walking away. I got five steps before I heard him behind me.
“Lenny?”
I stopped, looking back. “What?”
“You’re seriously going through with this with or without me?”
“Absolutely.”
Harlan stood there in the zombie Santa suit. I could feel the frustration coming off of him in waves. “You’re a real jackwagon sometimes, you know that?”
“Does that mean you’re in?”
“What choice do I have?” Harlan asked. “Somebody has to keep you from killing yourself...” He glanced back in the direction where Zooey had gone. “Or her.”
EIGHT: HARLAN
On Friday morning I found Lenny in the science lab before first period, hovering over a big cardboard box of equipment.
“What took you so long?”
“Nice to see you too.” I dropped my backpack. My Escape Claus script was sticking out of the top. “It’s seven forty-five in the morning,” I said. “That’s when you told me to—”
“Whatever, let’s get started. Close the door. We don’t have much time.” He peeled off his T-shirt and started unbuckling his jeans, pushing them down over his hips.
“Whoa,” I said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting ready.” He kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks so that he was standing there in his tightie-whities, took out a beaker of some kind of sticky goo, and started smearing it all over his chest. It smelled like eucalyptus mixed with petroleum jelly.
“What is that stuff?”
“It’s the guanosine sheath.” He turned around, giving me a view of his scrawny shoulder blades. “Rub some on my back, will you?”
&
nbsp; “What’s in it?”
“It’s a superconductive purine nucleoside ointment comprising guanine attached to a—”
“Okay, sorry I asked.” I scooped out some of the guanine and started smearing it down his spine. “Ugh, it’s tingly. This stuff isn’t radioactive, is it?”
“No, it’s perfectly stable.”
“So why are you—”
“It’s going to protect me in case I get a hole in this.” Lenny turned, reached into the cardboard box by his feet, and pulled out a black neoprene wetsuit. He started slipping it on. “Hand me that oxygen tank, will you?”
I lifted the tank and helped him strap it over his shoulders. “How long will this last?”
“Sixty minutes. Which should be plenty of time.”
“Wait—I thought you were going to need six hours.”
“I’ve rigged the regulator to draw oxygen directly from the hemoglobin in the bloodstream. The tank is just a backup. I shouldn’t need it at all.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“It’s going to work, Harlan, okay? Do me a favor and at least try to be supportive for once, all right?”
I stood by while he put on the flippers and face mask, attaching the halogen headlamp and switching it on so that it threw an intense white glare across the lab. Then he reached up for a radio headset lying on the counter next to a flat slab of homemade electronics that I hadn’t noticed until now.
“What’s that thing?”
“This, my friend, is where the magic happens.” He gestured proudly at it. “Meet the nanodeck.”
It was a heavy-looking black rectangle about the size of a shoebox, bristling with dozens of exposed copper wires and vacuum tubes. A thick orange electrical cord snaked from the back and ended at the outlet next to the sink. Lenny switched it on and the whole thing began vibrating slightly. A red button on the top started blinking on and off.
“Okay, look.” He settled the headset over his ears. “I’ve patched myself in to your phone. If I call, it’s an emergency, which means you’d better answer. You need to keep your phone on. Don’t let it go straight to voice mail.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
“I mean it, Harlan. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in there.”
“Wait, I thought you told me—”
“Just make sure you pick up if I call you.”
A terrible possibility occurred to me. “What if I’m on stage? It’s opening night!”
“I’ll be done by two. The play doesn’t start until three thirty, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess, but—”
“Okay, listen,” Lenny said. “I came up with a code word—a way of letting you know when I’ve reached my final destination.” He handed me a slip of paper with a single word written on it.
“Chromoblastomycosis?” I stared at him. “Can’t it just be, like, safe?”
“No.” Lenny shook his head. “It has to be something you’d never hear otherwise, so you know it’s me saying it and not Zooey.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re going to be talking to me through her mouth?”
“I’m not sure how it’s going to work, Harlan. I’ve never done this before, okay?”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t exactly inspire a boatload of confidence.”
“Trust me.” He held out his hand. In his palm were two tiny halves of an empty gelatin capsule. I looked at them.
“What used to be in there?”
“Vitamin C. You know what to do, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Then I’ll see you in six hours.”
“Wait! How are you going to know when the time’s up?”
“I built a digital timer into the mask.”
“You never told me what happens after six hours.”
“What do you think?” He gave me an impatient glare. “The process wears off.”
“Wait, you didn’t tell me how—”
“Stand back, Harlan,” he said, and hit the switch.
A wave of red light burst out of the black machine, bathing the room in a flash and temporarily blinding me.
And Lenny disappeared.
I stared at the empty space on the floor of the lab where he’d been standing just a second earlier. I found myself looking around the room, as if I somehow expected him to pop up from behind one of the counters.
Then my phone rang, playing, “She Blinded Me with Science.” I fumbled it out of my backpack. “Hello?”
“Dude,” Lenny’s voice said, “hurry up with the empty capsule.”
I took another look in every direction, feeling totally stupid. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here in front of you,” he snapped. “But I’m still shrinking. Come on, let’s go, before I’m so small you can’t see me at all.”
“How small are you now?” I stared down at the floor, moving my head back and forth like a kid who’d lost a pocketful of change. “I can’t even see you now.”
“Get down on the floor. Carefully.”
I crouched down, fixing my eyes more closely on the gray squares of worn-out linoleum. “I still can’t—”
“Lower.”
I got down on my hands and knees and pressed my cheek to the floor until I could actually smell the disinfectant that they’d used the night before. “Where...?”
“Get the capsule,” Lenny’s voice barked in the phone, sounding full-size in my ear. Apparently shrinking down to the subatomic level hadn’t made him any less bossy. “Set it down on the floor next to me.”
I laid the two halves of the open capsule on the linoleum, hoping I’d at least gotten it close. There was dust under the radiator and pencils that kids had dropped, a nickel and some brown crumbs of something in the corner, but I couldn’t see him at all.
“Harlan?” a voice said behind me.
I jumped and turned around, scooping up the capsule. Zooey was walking into the science lab. She had her usual morning Diet Coke in one hand and the front page of the newspaper in the other.
She pushed her glasses up and gave me one of those little Zooey frowns, the kind that looked half puzzled and half amused. “What were you doing on the floor?”
“Oh, I just—I lost a contact lens.”
“I didn’t know you wore contacts.”
“Oh, yeah, I mean, I just started. It popped right out, and—”
“Here.” She put her books on the counter and started walking toward me. “I’ll help you look.”
“That’s okay.” I glanced down at the capsule in my hand, hoping that I’d given Lenny enough time to get inside, and slipped the two halves of it together. “What...I mean, how come you’re here so early?”
“It’s opening day—afternoon, whatever. Are you nervous?”
“Me?” I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”
“Good,” she said, “because I think this afternoon’s going to be great. I’ve got a few ideas for your entrance. Did you see the paper?”
She unfolded the front page and showed it to me. The headline read:
WRECK THE HALLS
CMS Students Plan Their “Escape”
in Holiday Horror Musical
Underneath was a long article with a big picture of me on stage in my zombie Santa suit, with Tej and Priscilla dressed as soldiers, and Aria in her Mrs. Claus costume, while Zooey stood by giving us direction.
“It’s online, too,” Zooey said. “With full-color photos. And supposedly there’s a TV crew from WCRW arriving sometime before lunch.”
“Wow.” I managed a smile. “You’re famous.”
“Don’t tell Aria that,” Zooey said, and rolled her eyes. “She already thinks she belongs on the A-list for life. Anyway”—she handed me the newspaper clipping—“I wanted you to have that one. My mom’s got a whole stack of them at home. She’s threatening to send out a new batch of Christmas cards just so she can put the article in there.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No
problem.” She took a step back and glanced around the lab. “No Lenny this morning?”
“He’s...ah...” I tried not to look down at the vitamin capsule getting warm in my palm. All at once the collar of my sweater felt extra tight and itchy. “Man, I’m really thirsty.” I glanced at her Diet Coke. “You mind?” When she frowned at me, I smiled. “I won’t backwash, I swear.”
“Sure, I guess.” She handed me the bottle and I took a sip, then casually dropped the tiny gelatin capsule into the bottle before I put the cap back on it.
“Thanks,” I said, “that hits the spot. I just get this weird craving for aspartame sometimes. Must be my ADD or something.”
She smiled. “How’s your stomach?”
“My stomach?”
“Where Mick punched you?”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m fine. I just got the wind knocked out of me, that’s all.”
“He’s such a jerk.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But that was great what Lenny did, wasn’t it? I mean, he really stood up for you.”
“Stood up for his microscope, you mean,” Zooey said. “That’s what really got him angry, when that thing got broken and ruined his experiment.”
“That’s not true,” I said, “he didn’t like the way Mick was treating you.”
“Whatever.” She took a drink of Diet Coke. “Well, I should get to class. I’ll see you for fourth period.”
I nodded. She and I both had gym fourth period, and we always walked over there together. It was just a casual kind of thing that always made Lenny jealous. Neither of us planned it, but he always complained that he never got a chance to get that close to her.
Well, he was close to her now, wasn’t he?
Zooey gathered her notebooks and started toward the door when my phone started playing “She Blinded Me with Science.” I looked down at the display and saw Lenny’s name on the screen and hit Talk. “Hello?”
“Harlan?”
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 4
