Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167)

by Schreiber, Joe; Smith, Matt (ILT)

  For some reason, I started thinking about the virus that I’d asked Lenny to come up with for the play. He’d never gotten back to me about it. In fact, I hadn’t seen him at all today, which was unusual, because I always kind of had the feeling that he was watching me. Not in a creepy way...Well, no more than usual.

  I was playing it back in my head, stepping off the sidewalk and down the over the curb, when I saw the Prius speeding right toward me, blasting its horn.

  I jumped to the right and the car swerved past me, tires squealing, slipping on the new-fallen snow, then stopping and backing up. I saw a man and woman inside, the man behind the wheel, powering down his window.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I stopped, crossing my arms again to hide the chili stain down the front of my shirt, and looked over at him. He was bald with a long, serious face that I recognized from somewhere. The woman in the passenger seat was holding a crumpled Kleenex in her hands, coddling it between her knees like a cracked egg. I knew I’d seen them before, and then I remembered where—back inside the school, by the gym.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  “You go to school here, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m wondering if you know our son,” the man said. “Lenny Cyrus?”

  I looked back at them again, and that’s when I saw the resemblance—the softness of his mom’s face combined with his dad’s hard eyes and nose. “You’re his parents?”

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “And Lenny, he’s...” She flicked her eyes at her husband. “Something’s happened to him. He’s...well, he’s—”

  “He’s made a poor choice,” Lenny’s dad finished for her. “A series of them, actually.”

  “I heard he went home.”

  “He’s not home,” his dad said. “At the moment, we’re not sure where he is.”

  “Did you ask Harlan Williams? He’s Lenny’s best friend.”

  “Yes, we know Harlan.” Lenny’s dad got a sour expression on his face. “He was...less than helpful. What’s your name?”

  “Zooey. Zooey Andrews.”

  “Zooey...” His parents exchanged a look, and Lenny’s dad shrugged. “I think Lenny might have mentioned you before. Do you mind if I ask where you’re going?”

  “Home,” I said, and realized they were both staring at me. “I had to leave class. I had an accident at lunch.”

  “I thought I smelled chili,” Lenny’s dad said, looking at the stain on my shirt and then trying not to look at it. All things considered, he was about as subtle as his son, which shouldn’t have surprised me.

  “I’m not feeling the best, and I have to go home and change my clothes.”

  “Well, then, you certainly shouldn’t be out without a jacket,” Lenny’s mom said. “Get in—at least let us give you a ride.”

  I opened the back door of the car. The back seat of the Prius was buried under heaps of hardcover textbooks and magazines with titles like the American Journal of Microbiology. Any remaining doubt that these two people weren’t Lenny’s parents went right out the window.

  “Just push those aside,” Lenny’s mother said, reaching around to shove them to the floor. I climbed in and pulled the door shut, fastening my seat belt as I stared out the window at the snowflakes skirling past. As we drove off, I realized that my toes were twitching, my fingertips tapping—even my eyes didn’t seem to be able to hold still. Apparently the newest incarnation of Psycho Zooey was due to arrive any second now.

  “...where you live?” Lenny’s dad was asking from the front seat.

  “What?”

  “Your address.” He sounded impatient, as if now that I couldn’t help him find Lenny, he just wanted to get rid of me. “Where do you live?”

  “Oh, it’s...down that way. Take a right.” I pointed up to the next intersection and saw his eyes watching me from the rearview. “So, how long have you been trying to find Lenny?”

  “Since this morning.” His dad shook his head. “I’m sure he’s fine,” he said. “This is his idea of a joke, but it isn’t very funny.”

  Once we reached my street, I showed him where my house was, and I was about to get out when I had one last thought.

  “Did you try his cell phone?”

  “At least a dozen times,” his mother said, and drew in a shaky breath. The damp, wadded Kleenex in her hand was now the size of a marble. “Wherever he is, I just hope he’s not in trouble.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT: LENNY

  “Dude,” Astro shouted, “we’re so dead!”

  When the natural killer cells burst into the renal cyst, I knew right away it was going to be a massacre. I heard screaming, and a loud, horribly juicy noise erupted from somewhere in the darkness off to my right with a sudden SPLAT, spraying me like the world’s biggest water balloon. I glanced back to see a rhinovirus deflating in a stringy puddle of goo. Astro lunged away in the opposite direction like he thought there might be an exit for him, but I could have told him it was a dead end. I could see the whole room from here.

  It’s not a renal cyst, I thought. It’s a death chamber.

  The NKs came in swarms, cutting down through the inside of the chamber like a giant school of flying piranha. I’d seen them in textbooks and under the microscope, but up close these things were butt-ugly, a dull shade of grayish-green, faceless and featureless except for the gaping holes—what I first took to be their mouths—at the front of their blunt, squashed-looking faces. Unlike the leukocytes, which at least seemed to think individually, these things were stupid, vicious, and hungry. It was middle school all over again.

  The viruses never stood a chance. Everywhere I looked, they were screaming, clawing the walls and trying to escape. I heard one of them backing away, trying to hold its nucleic acids inside its capsid, but it was hopeless. A pack of NKs closed in on the rotavirus that had just been talking to us a second earlier, and that was when I realized that openings in the front of the NKs weren’t mouths. They ejected a thick stream of granulated fluid on the rotavirus, and its whole body instantly started to shrivel and melt, membranes collapsing while it screamed, reduced to streaks of gelid proteins that wafted away into nothingness.

  Viruses were dropping right and left. Astro and I had nowhere to go, which he made even more obvious when he jumped behind me to hide.

  “Wait,” I shouted at the NKs. “I’m not a virus! I’m just a kid!”

  They didn’t seem to hear me, and if they did, they didn’t care. All around me, the packs of them thickened, and I realized that Astro and I were the only ones left. It had taken them five seconds to kill almost every virus in the place, and now it was our turn. The holes in the fronts of their faces opened up, and I could actually see the protease that was going to melt our faces—my face, right off my skull.

  I realized that, to these guys, it didn’t matter what I was.

  I may have lived like a human being, but I was going to die like a virus.

  When the NKs started exploding around us, I didn’t realize what was happening. At first, I just saw big chunks of protease flying off in every direction, a split second before it would have killed me and Astro. Then another NK blew up, and a dozen more after it, smashing against the walls on either side and then falling to the floor, broken and twitching, oozing clouds of granular goo from the openings in their flattened heads.

  “Let’s go!” a familiar voice shouted, swooping down through the room and coming in close. “Let’s move, people! Get in there and get dirty!”

  Astro shrank back, and then his whole chubby face relaxed into a big relieved smile. “Whoa,” he said, in a voice that was even more dazed than usual, “I don’t believe it.”

  “Who—?” I said, and the words broke off as I understood what was happening.

  “Are you two reprobates ready to evacuate the premises?” Lug asked, swimming up in front of us. “Or did you plan on loitering out here indefinitely?”

  I stared at him in near disb
elief. Since I’d turned him into a caffeine molecule, Lug’s vocabulary had improved, but he’d also grown somehow even bigger—his molecular muscles had muscles on top of them, as if hed spent the intervening time doing pushups and squat-thrusts while memorizing a thesaurus. The squadron of steroids that he’d brought with him circled the renal cyst, wiping the floor with the last of the NK cells, who still didn’t seem to understand exactly how things had turned on them so suddenly. They scrambled out through the hole that Lug’s pals had created on their way in.

  “Well, what do you say? Ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “absolutely.”

  “Outstanding,” Lug said. “Let’s move. I’ve got a proposition for you that I think you’ll find extremely provocative.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I know a joint not far from here,” he said. “Follow me.”

  The joint in question was in Zooey’s neck—Lug and his crew led us up the subclavian and detoured through a capillary bed. The whole place was a boardwalk of junk DNA along the shores of a lymph node that seemed to stretch out forever.

  “It’s a safe rendezvous,” he explained as we slipped between the endothelial cells. “Close enough proximity to the BBB, but far enough off the beaten path that not anybody would come poking around.”

  I looked around the long, desolate expanse of membrane stretching out in front of us with lymphocytes rolling up the shoreline, full of molecules I didn’t recognize, crippled viruses and fringe-dwellers. Some of them were bacteria who’d tried to get across the blood-brain barrier and never made it, or just gotten lost along the way. It was a boulevard of broken bugs, microbes that Zooey’s body didn’t know she had, but weren’t worth destroying.

  “Dude, thanks for the assist back there,” Astro said. “That was extremely cool of you.”

  “Not a problem.” Lug and his small army—twenty or thirty steroids at least—relaxed into their corner of the epithelium. “We heard rumors about NK activity in One Kidney and figured you boys could use some backup.”

  “So what’s this proposition you mentioned?” I asked.

  Lug smiled. “Straight to business, huh?” He nodded. “I like that.” He settled back and pointed at me. “It’s Lenny, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe you don’t know it, but you’re stirring up a lot of interest down here right now. Everybody’s talking about this mysterious new arrival. Nobody’s quite sure what he is.” He smiled again, but this time the smile was different—self-aware, almost sly. “All I know is, ever since you worked your magic on me? I feel amazing.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was just simple chemistry.”

  “Humility, huh? I like that. Nice touch, but don’t sell yourself short. You’re an artist.” Lug gestured to the steroids gathered around him. “I want you to do it for all my crew.”

  I blinked, not sure I was hearing him right. “You want me to turn all of you into caffeine molecules?”

  “You do that for us, we’ll get you through the blood-brain barrier so fast that the neurons won’t know what hit them.” Lug stepped back, seeing the expression on my face. “I mean, you can do that, right?”

  “Yeah, I could, but—”

  “So it’s no problem?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then it’s settled. You can get started right now.”

  I saw the steroids already lining up, peeling open their membranes so I could rearrange their atomic structure. I didn’t know what it would do to Zooey to have the steroids in her body converted to caffeine molecules, but it couldn’t be any worse than all the Diet Coke she drank for breakfast, could it? And getting across the BBB was all that mattered, right?

  I nodded and started rolling up my sleeves. “Let’s get to work.”

  TWENTY-NINE: HARLAN

  “I know what’s really going on,” Aria said. “With Zooey.”

  “No offense, but I’m pretty sure you don’t.” We were standing between the vending machines outside the cafeteria, far enough away from the doors so that she didn’t have to lower her voice, but I still wanted to shush her. Every PA speaker in the school was two-way, and if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that there were ears everywhere.

  “Just listen, okay?” Aria asked. “Zooey’s sick.” She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “I think maybe she’s on something.”

  “On something?”

  Aria nodded. “I haven’t actually seen her doing anything, but—”

  “Trust me: Zooey’s not on drugs.”

  “You don’t know her like I do.” Aria bit her lip. “I’m really worried about her, you know?”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t seem too concerned a second ago,” I said. “Back when she was falling apart back in the lunchroom.”

  Aria stared at me, looking seriously offended by the accusation. “When I tried to talk to her in the locker room, she went nuclear. Just totally blew up on me in a very messy way. Kind of like she did with you back there, but about a hundred times worse. I learned my lesson.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation for it.”

  “No,” Aria said, “it’s just Zooey. She thinks she can fix everything herself, like she doesn’t need anybody else.” She gave a little shrug. “If you didn’t know that about her, you don’t know much.”

  “Is there some way we can help her?”

  “First things first. We’ve got a show in less than three hours. At this point I think we have to assume that Zooey’s not functioning the way that she’s supposed to. We’re on our own. Do you understand what I’m saying? The show must go on.”

  She just stared at me, waiting for a response. There was something that I didn’t trust in her eyes. How well did she really know Zooey?

  There was only one way to find out for sure.

  I turned and started heading for the doors.

  “Wait,” she said. “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t look back.

  “I’m going to find Zooey,” I said.

  THIRTY: ZOOEY

  Rule #7: Never be afraid to take a step back.

  It felt weird being back at my house in the middle of a weekday, with nobody else around. Walking through the living room, glancing at the framed pictures on the piano and the ones hanging on the walls, my mind started racing. Memories began flashing through my mind. It wasn’t as if I was even trying to remember, it was like all these past childhood experiences were just bubbling up, rising to the surface on their own, events that I hadn’t thought about in ten years or more.

  I realized that I could remember the day we’d moved in, back when I was six and there were moving boxes everywhere. I remembered my first bike, taking the training wheels off, going out in the backyard with my dad to spray-paint it pink, with stenciled lightning bolts on the side. I remembered Mom and Dad arguing about her weekend schedule, and the two of them making up afterward, and how we’d all gone out to dinner at Red Robin. It had been a Saturday afternoon, and I’d ordered macaroni and cheese and a chocolate-covered brownie bites for dessert, and they said it was okay even though I’d already had a large Pepsi with my meal, and our waitress was a blond woman and she was pregnant and she a red vest on, and I—

  I was six years old.

  That was eight years ago.

  I could still remember what both my parents had been wearing. It was like they were standing right in front of me. The memory was crystal clear. They all were.

  And there were more where that came from. Thousands more. I could hear my parents’ voices talking in the front seat when they thought I was asleep, and taste my dad’s barbecue sauce, and hear the clink and rattle of him tinkering with the engine of the old Impala that he used to drive to the office. I felt the texture of my mom’s red apron, the way it felt different when there was flour spilled on it. I could hear her leaning over my crib when I was too young to even talk, her happy voice in my ear singing that corny old Elton John tune “Your Song.�
�� No matter how far back I looked, the memories just kept going, like stones leading across the water, going all the way back to...where? Infancy? Birth? Even before that?

  Next stop, Crazy Town.

  It was almost one o’clock.

  I poured myself a glass of Diet Coke and took it up to my bedroom. I switched on the light and stared down at my desk.

  I had work to do.

  THIRTY-ONE: LENNY

  “Hey, kid.”

  “Hold on a second.”

  “Lenny—”

  “What?”

  “You can stop now.”

  I glanced up. “Sorry?” I was still busy switching the steroids into caffeine molecules, with the rest of the line stretching all the way up the capillary bed. For the last twenty minutes I’d been yanking off the atoms of Lug’s crew and rearranging them on the nitrogen bindings, and the joints in my fingers were starting to ache, the way they sometimes did when I spent too long at the keyboard. I took a step back to shake off my hands when I realized the line had disappeared.

  “Looks like they figured it out for themselves,” Lug said, beaming like a proud general over his troops. “Viral learning.”

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Astro said.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “The steroids have started converting themselves into caffeine molecules?”

  “Why not? Is that a problem?”

  “Well, theoretically, yes. I mean, if every steroid in Zooey’s system spontaneously changes into a caffeine molecule...?”

  “She’ll save a fortune on Diet Coke.” Lug shrugged. “Anyway, we’ve got more pressing matters to discuss.” He gestured, waving me underneath the archway of a vessel wall, and pulled out a big sheet of paper, scrolling it out to reveal a detailed diagram of Zooey’s brain with different parts labeled. “How much time do you have left?”