Bad Hair Day (10 page)

Jonah’s moves weren’t that bad; he actually managed a halfway decent spin kick as I came into the room. But I still had to suppress a snort. What could I say? Elf ears, frilly tunics, and bright orange leggings cracked me up.

The three geek girls sitting against the wall didn’t seem to mind, though. Beneath their ridiculous face paint and stupid costumes, they watched him with expressions of total adoration.
I had to concede one thing to Jonah; he’d always claimed magic was possible. After witnessing his newfound popularity with the ladies, I couldn’t argue with him anymore.

When he saw the samples in my hands and the bloodstains on my clothes, he stopped midspin and nearly chopped his own head off. Or he would have, if decapitation by pseudosword had been possible. The geek girls didn’t seem to notice. They ooohed appreciatively.

“Is it the zombies again?” Jonah’s voice contained much more eagerness than the question really deserved.

“Nope.” I pushed past him en route to my lab. His groupies shrank back from me with reverence. If my friend hadn’t just been mauled, I might have felt pretty flattered.

“Something new?” he said. “Is it vampires? Staking vampires would be so awesome!”

He tugged repeatedly on my shoulder. If I didn’t tell him something, he’d bring his whole PVC-infested crew into my lab. My lab was not PVC compatible. My mental health wasn’t either; at least not today.

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

As far as answers go, this one was about as generic as they came, and it had completely unexpected results. Jonah started barking out orders like a drill sergeant; he sounded pretty impressive except for the part where his voice kept cracking.

“You heard her, girls!” he barked. The girls leapt to their feet, teeth bared and mock swords held in white-knuckled hands.
They didn’t look intimidating; they looked terrified. “Plan Alpha. Starfire, call the troops and put them on high alert. Europa and Calamity, establish a perimeter around the house. Kate, what’s our target?”

“Target?” I blinked. He was kind of freaking me out right now. And I was trying to figure out which one of these washrag-looking girls thought Calamity was a good choice for a nickname. Because I thought someone should tell her she was delusional.

“Target. As in what kind of creature are we defending you from?”

“Oh. Um … it’s something really hairy. And strong. Possibly with claws. I don’t know if we’re talking animal or human yet.”

“Hairy?” He was so excited that he practically vibrated. “Do you realize what this means?
Werewolf awesomeness
!”

The girls all started squealing. I realized at that moment that I would never understand people at all. Although this was probably not a representative sample.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I scoffed. “There are plenty of other potential explanations.”

“Like what?”

“Um … well.” I couldn’t come up with any other explanations, damn it. “Well, maybe it’s a really strong guy with long fingernails and a severe case of hypertrichosis.”

“Hyper-whatsis?”

“Excessive body hair.”

He snorted at me. The gall.

“It’s better than the werewolf theory,” I snapped. “I’d probably be able to come up with a better explanation if you’d let me get into my damned lab!”

He backed out of my way but didn’t look apologetic. And when I stomped into my lab, he followed me. At least the geeketeers didn’t come too. They shouldered their PVC and scrambled off to their battle stations.

I went into the bathroom and washed my hands with the speed of a Marvel superhero. I didn’t want to give Jonah enough unsupervised time to break anything. When I came back out, he was squinting at the specimen vials, trying to figure out what was inside. He took one look at me and dropped them on the floor in an attempt to look innocent.

“You dork,” I said, but it didn’t have much heat to it. If I’d been left alone in a room with some mystery samples, I would have checked them out too.

“Sorry.”

He shouldered his sword and moved out of my way. I ignored him as best I could, pulling out a box full of slide-related paraphernalia. Rocky had a secret stash of chocolate. Jonah had some very embarrassing magazines that I found under his bed the one time he stole my glasses and refused to give them back. And then there was me. I hoarded boxes of slides, because I was twenty different kinds of pitiful.

I wormed my hands into a pair of gloves and started assembling the slides. I was just preparing a piece of wet-mounted perfection when the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Someone
was watching me. I looked up, half expecting to see a huge, hairy serial crusher, but it was only my brother. It was nice to have a personal guard and all, but something told me his technique of staring at me gape-mouthed wasn’t really going to dissuade any potential intruders.

The distraction made me place the cover slip crooked. Now my slide was smeared. In my lab, a smeary slide pretty much signifies that the apocalypse is coming. It just isn’t done.

“Jonah,” I said. “If you don’t stop hanging over my shoulder, I will infect you with elephantiasis.”

“Not possible.” He shuffled from foot to foot, thinking it through. “Is it?”

“It’s a parasite; of course it’s possible. You’ll be lugging your testicles around in a wheelbarrow if you don’t leave me alone.”

“Gross,” he said, with an admiring nod. He managed to stay quiet for about fifteen seconds. “Can’t I do something to help?”

“You are helping,” I muttered, trying to keep my arm steady as I administered just the right amount of pressure to my saline dropper. “You and your girlfriends are protecting me from whatever-this-is.”

“Look, we both know that’s utter bull. It’s just a good way to keep the girls from messing with your lab. I know how much you hate that.”

“Thanks.”

This time, the cover slip slid into position without a single jiggle. Not an air bubble in sight.

When I turned around, Jonah’s face smacked into my
shoulder. I was so glad he wasn’t about a half a foot shorter, because then he would have hit my chest, and that would have been made of awkward.

“Would you back off?” I snarled.

I had to get him off my back before we had another murder on our hands. Because really, he was about an inch away from death by pipette.

“So have you learned anything about Holly?” I asked. “Or do you know anybody you can ask? I need to know if she has a brother. I think he might be in my morgue.”

He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “I can ask around. Most people don’t give out identifying info online, but I bet somebody would know. Calamity was saying that she thought Holly’s boyfriend also played
Dragons of Roargan Kross
. Maybe I could hunt him down.”

“Do it. I’ll take any info you can get on her. Or the boyfriend. And leave me alone before I infect you with elephantiasis.”

“You have elephantiasis on the brain.”

“But not elephantiasis of the brain.”

He grinned at me before going out to boot up his computer. I was alone in my lab again. It made me so happy I could have squeed.

T
he lab work was easy, but my results didn’t make sense. And we’re not talking Nobel-level science here. There’s a simple rhythm to making a wet-mount slide. Pick a blank slide. Apply the saline. Scrape some sample from the pellet. Apply the sample to the slide. I had no idea how I could have messed it up, but stranger things had happened. I’d witnessed a lot of them.

I’d just have to start all over. I began pulling out the necessary equipment a little more aggressively than I probably should have, but I was ticked. A box of slides fell to the floor with a clatter and the tinkle of broken glass. I said a very bad word. Twice. Loudly, even.

As I stood there surveying the mess, my cell beeped. I was tempted to ignore it, but I couldn’t, not under the circumstances. I thought it might be Rocky, but wrong again. It was Aaron.

Not too late to come over, is it
?

It took me forever to type a reply. I was über-paranoid about sounding like the desperate girlfriend. After about three tries at political correctness, I just gave up and typed what I was thinking.

Dad’s downstairs, and it’s after curfew. Maybe I can sneak outside
?

His reply came within seconds:
Meet me on your roof
.

I had to read it twice. Evidently, my boyfriend had hidden reservoirs of insanity, because my roof wasn’t tops on my list of places to hang out. Yes, my dormer window opened right onto the shingles, and yes, Aaron had helped us clean out the gutters a little over a month ago. And yes, he’d made some comment about meeting up there sometime to stargaze, but I hadn’t taken it seriously. Apparently, I’d been wrong.

Well, I wasn’t about to argue, particularly since he’d just spent a long time in the car with Elle. I didn’t realize how long until I glanced up at the clock midway through washing my hands. He’d been gone for two hours. I’d lost track of the time in the lab. And the shower. During my brief bathroom break, I’d used up enough hot water to melt the Arctic Circle.

It didn’t take a math whiz to figure out something didn’t add up. A half hour to Ottawa Pointe. Five minutes to drop Elle off, assuming he didn’t just slow down and shove her out the window, which was what I would have done. A half hour back. Even if he’d gone five miles under the speed limit, even if he’d stopped to go to the bathroom, there was no reason it should have taken two freaking hours to drop her off.

I threw on a hoodie and stomped up the stairs, fully intending
to catapult my boyfriend off the top of the house. When I climbed out the window, my socks caught on the rough surface of the shingles. The fact that I’d forgotten to put shoes on only made me angrier. All I’d wanted was to be in the Future Doctors of America program. I’d been looking forward to it for months. And now where was I? FDA mentor accused of murder. Friend in the hospital. Boyfriend developing crappy tendencies. And nothing to show for all my lab work but a pile of broken glass.

So when Aaron climbed up the trellis, I let him have it.

“Why weren’t you back sooner?” I demanded, practically spitting the words in his face.

He completely ignored me. Instead, he hoisted himself up onto the roof one-handed and gave me my second giant to-go cup of the night, hot to the touch. Then he reached into his shirt and pulled out a white paper bag.

“Lucky I didn’t spill it on the way up,” he said. “I asked them to brew you a fresh cup, because the first one they gave me tasted like something died in it. And then on the way out of the Grabbit Quik, I ran into my neighbor, and she wouldn’t stop talking about her new Pomeranian.”

I felt instantly, terribly guilty. I tried to stammer out an apology, but he rode right over me. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t notice my wenchiness, or he was just kindly giving me a way to extract my foot from my mouth with some semblance of grace.

“There’s a muffin in there too, if you’re hungry,” he said.

The muffin was almost too much to take. I settled myself precariously on the slanted roof, sipped my coffee, and debated
trying to kick myself in the butt. I wasn’t sure it was possible to get a good quality self-butt-kick, and I really didn’t think I should try it two stories off the ground. Not with Aaron here to watch me fall. I didn’t have much of a chance of keeping him as it was, not with my amazing twin powers of idiocy and jealousy.

Maybe I should call it jidiocy.

All this ran through my head while I drank my coffee and Aaron played with the end of my braid. I knew I should say something witty and alluring, or throw myself into his lap and make him forget all about Elle. But I’d had way too much to process today. Too much death, even for a med geek like me.

“You okay?” he asked. “No offense, but you’re acting kind of strange.”

It would have been too easy to take offense, but I was tired of being a drama queen. So I told him everything. I tried to stick to the facts, but I still got a little emotional. In retrospect, so many things could have gone wrong, and that above everything else scared the bleep out of me.

“Wow,” he said when I was done. “So what now?”

“Well, I came home to analyze the hair and blood, right? I’m not set up to sequence DNA, and I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to anyway, so I know I can’t ID the culprit, but at least I could give us something to go on. Knowing the attacker is a Caucasian male is better than nothing, right?”

“Makes sense to me.”

“But I can’t even prove that.” My words came out clipped and whiny. I was a genius, right? I should have at least been able
to generate data that made sense. “I’ve got to do the analysis all over again.”

“Why?”

“Well, unless you know somebody with mutant hair, freakish strength, and magnetic blood, I think I got something wrong.”

“Mutant—what?” He ran his hands through his hair the way he did when he was thinking hard. I barely restrained myself from stripping down to my underwear right there; it was just that sexy. But I was wearing my
Sci
FIVE! underwear. Sci five: like a high five, only geekier. Because sure, I was a reformed geek on the outside, but inside? I really hadn’t changed, and I had no intention of doing so. This plan sat pretty well with me except at times like now when I realized that geekdom and sex appeal don’t exactly go well together.