Teen Frankenstein (21 page)

“No.” As usual, he didn't get the joke. Spending time with Adam was like bombing a stand-up routine in a comedy club night after night.

I closed my eyes and counted to three. “You coming?” I asked Owen.

He raised one eyebrow. “I think I'd prefer to see about that root canal. You go.”

I scowled but followed Adam to the other table, one that was nowhere near the trash cans.

He pulled out my chair for me to sit. Paisley stopped and set her fork down in the Tupperware salad bowl she'd brought from home. She gawked at Adam. “Well, isn't that refreshing.” She turned and smacked Knox in the shoulder. “When was the last time you did
that
for me, jackwad?”

Knox stuck his arms up in a cross, shielding himself. “Relax, woman. This isn't the fifties.” He tossed his head, and his shaggy hair swooped to the side.

She stabbed her fork into a pile of leafy greens. It was always difficult to tell whether Knox and Paisley loved or hated each other. They'd been dating since the eighth grade and were known for loud fights in the hallway that featured slamming locker doors and a thesaurus full of synonyms for male and female genitalia. Afterward, Paisley would brag about the expensive makeup gifts Knox bought for her. A gold ring. A new phone cover. A steak dinner.

I scooted in my chair. The screeching it made sounded dangerously close to passing gas. I flattened my butt against the seat, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. But Cassidy was busy eyeing my pizza.

I glanced at her and then the pizza. “Uh, do you want some?” I asked, pushing the plate in her direction.

Cassidy jolted to attention. She licked her lips. “No, sorry, I brought lunch.” She pushed the plate back in front of me and pulled out hummus and a ziplock baggie full of carrots.

“Really? Because world hunger is an issue very near and dear to my heart.” I pressed my palm to my chest.

Catching our conversation, Paisley smirked.

Cassidy snapped off a bite of carrot. “World hunger, huh? You sound like a Miss America contestant. I guess there's a pageant girl in all of us.” When I looked blankly at her, she continued. “Former Little Miss Atascosa County at your service.” She sat up razor straight and interlocked her hands on the table. “If I had one wish,” she recited, “it would be for world peace and to end hunger for little girls and boys everywhere.”

“That's two wishes,” I said.

She relaxed her posture and waved a hand. “Please, at eight years old, I was better at math than all the judges combined. I wouldn't have done pageants at all, but the winners get scholarships that my mom put into my college fund.” She shrugged. “Hard to pass up.”

I pinched cheese off the end of my slice and popped it into my mouth. I hadn't realized there were things like scholarships for twirling and wearing bikinis in public.

“Billy was telling us that his dad said we must have just missed the killer,” said Paisley. “Because that body was fresh or else we would have smelled it. Can you believe that?” She leaned into Knox's shoulder. “Could have been any one of us.”

I stared at my hands, trying to keep my mouth good and zipped, but as usual I couldn't. “That's not true. Well, not necessarily, anyway.”

Paisley sat up, eagle-eyed. “And how would you know?”

I scratched behind my ear. “Because bodies don't start stinking until three or four days after they're dead.” I looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Whoever killed that boy could have done it days ago, in which case the killer would have been long gone. It's unlikely that any of us came close to being a murder victim.” Everyone was staring at me, and I knew I was about to do that thing where I let my mouth run away just to quit from feeling awkward. “Bodies smell on account of the gas,” I said. A few boys snickered. “It's true. A few days after someone dies, these bacteria in the body start to break it down. The pancreas is so full of bacteria that it basically digests itself.”

“Sick,” said Knox, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, then leaning forward to listen.

“The bacteria creates this really rank-smelling gas that causes the whole body to bloat. The eyeballs pop out of the sockets and the tongue gets all swollen.” I puffed my cheeks and stuck my tongue out. “If a woman is pregnant when she dies, the bacteria produces so much gas that the baby will blow right out of her. It's called a coffin birth.”

Cassidy covered her nose and her mouth.

“Jesus Christ.” William thumped the table with his fist excitedly. “How do you know all this stuff, Victoria?”

Victoria?
I blinked, remembering who I was with and what I was doing. I registered the strangeness of being called “Victoria” and felt the stillness of Adam behind me. The realization that I'd been going on and on about death and dying and corpses decomposing while one was sitting right beside me. “It's just science,” I said, then fell silent.

Adam wasn't going to bloat and expel eyeballs out of his sockets, was he? His organs wouldn't liquefy. His skin wouldn't blister when I touched it in a week, a month, a year, would it? I thought of Adam's discoloration just before another shock set his organs back in motion. The green and blue-black bruising that surfaced under frosty skin. Sure signs of death.

“Sorry,” I said to Adam when the conversation had picked up again. “That's … that's not you. I didn't mean—”

He moved his hand and placed it on my shoulder, his expression as still as a grave. “Just do me one favor,” he said.

A rush of maternal instinct hit me squarely in the chest. “Anything,” I said.

“Let me know if I start to smell.”

“Adam!” I wanted to clap but kept my voice at a whisper. “Was that your first joke?”

He dropped his hand from my shoulder. The line of his brow curved down. “No,” he said, and I realized that he hadn't been kidding at all. His takeaway from my conversation was that he actually did want me to tell him when he started to stink. So much for progress.

The table's conversation had turned to spray-on tans and shampoo brands. I pushed my chair back. Cassidy looked up. “Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom.” I drew out my words and hiked my thumb over my shoulder. “Is that okay?” I said when she stared at me as though I should have requested a hall pass.

“Oh.” She shoved the hummus and carrots aside. “I'll go with you.”

“That's okay. Really.” I moved to leave without her. Call me crazy, but I'd been peeing alone since I was five. Cassidy, however, had the quickness of a wild antelope. It must have been all those hours on the elliptical. They'd left her backside both perky and deceptively functional, and I had no problem hating her for it.

She was on my tail before I could take a single step. She trotted along beside me. “This is good, I needed to stretch.” She put her arms up in the air and arced sideways. The bottom of her shirt lifted, leaving a space of skin above her jeans that didn't lump over the waistband like it did for everyone else. “Coach made us do squats for a half an hour straight on Friday because Ashley was late for practice.”

“She does know torture is an international crime, right?” I swung open the door for the ladies' room and made a beeline for the nearest stall.

Cassidy didn't enter a stall of her own. In fact, when I sat down, I could see the toes of her shoes pointed in my direction just, I didn't know, standing there, I guessed. Was she seriously going to wait and listen to my urine stream? Was this normal?

“So,” Cassidy began the moment I'd committed to start peeing. “It's … well, I guess we've never really gotten to hang out before.”

“No time like the present, apparently.” My eyes flitted up to the tiled ceiling, where there was a smattering of chewed-up gum. I twisted my head. How on earth did people get it up there?

“It's weird. Our paths just, like, never crossed until now.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to tune her out. “Ninth grade,” I said through gritted teeth.
Idiot
. I regretted saying anything the instant it came out of my mouth.

“Huh?”

I sighed, unfurling sheets of toilet paper. “You put fliers up at the football games. A superunflattering picture with my number and the caption:
Call for a good time
. Effective, but zero points for originality.” One of the Oilerettes had caught me picking a wedgie in my PE uniform and snapped a photograph. Three days of prank calls and I was convinced I'd have to get a new phone number. Finally, I just stopped checking voice mail altogether, a habit that had stuck.

“Oh.” Her toes disappeared from my line of vision. “Right. It wasn't just you, though.”

I wanted to say something to this, but I wanted to pee even more, so I did and then kicked the handle to flush.

“I'm really sorry about that.” Cassidy followed me to the sink. In the mirror's reflection, I saw her bite her lip. “It wasn't me. I swear. Paisley has a tendency to take things a little too far.” I stared at her through the mirror. “Okay, a lot too far.”

I wiped my hands on the back of my jeans. Something in the way Cassidy said this felt sincere. “It's no big deal.”

She lit up with the kind of smile you'd see on the “after” pics of an acne commercial. “So, how long have you and Adam been hooking up, anyway?” she asked all nonchalant. She even turned her nails over to examine them up close.

I wanted to leave, but Cassidy was standing directly and strategically between me and the door. “What does hooking up mean, anyway? People always say that—hooking up—what
is
that? Does it mean dating? Making out? Boning? These seem like pretty important distinctions except that no one ever knows what anyone else is talking about. I move for the uniformity of the phrase ‘hooking up.' Who's with me?” I put my hand out, team-huddle-style.

Cassidy had a Tinker Bell laugh. “You're funny.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “But seriously, how long have you and Adam been hooking up?”

I rolled my eyes. “We're not.” I determined that at least in the Victoria Frankenstein dictionary, planting a surprise kiss during a carnival ride didn't meet the hookup threshold.

Her eyelashes fluttered over her cheeks. “Not?”

“No way.” My neck felt sweaty and gross. “We're, I don't know, like brother and sister or something.”

“Not hooking up,” she repeated under her breath, now turning to fluff her hair in the mirror.

“That's what I said.” I rocked back on my heels.

She pulled a canister of lip gloss out of her pocket and glided the wand over her mouth from corner to corner. “So you wouldn't mind, then, if I did.” I could tell by the drop in her intonation that Cassidy wasn't asking a question. She smacked her lips together and stepped back to admire her reflection.

In that moment, I'd suddenly forgotten what to do with my hands, and my throat felt like someone had poured a bottle of Elmer's glue down it and the only thing that I could gurgle out was a weird strangled version of, “Of course not.”

Of course not
. I really was getting used to this lying thing.

 

TWENTY-ONE

The experiment results are unprecedented. The subject displays keen athletic ability, a pleasant demeanor in social settings, and the ability to interact with peers. A once-dead body has been absorbed by a high school. Adam is a near-perfect specimen. I'm reminded of the great scientist Ian Wilmut, who could find not one fault in his cloned sheep Dolly. I must be vigilant, though, if the story of Dolly is to be recalled, since that sheep had only half the life span of other sheep of her breed, so Wilmut must have been missing something.

*   *   *

“In ten thousand years, creatures like you and me will be completely phased out, and the world will be overrun by Cassidy Hydes.” I'd made the mistake of telling Owen about my lunchtime adventures, and this was his response. “And then someday a kindly old scientist will come extract our DNA from a preserved sample of fossilized amber and they'll create a whole park filled with misfits and rejects, and people will come from far and wide to gawk at the hideous creatures that once roamed the earth.” Owen performed a dramatic sweep of his arm. “And that's when we'll go all crazy-eyed and try to rip their hearts out, and they'll try to Tase us or something but will ultimately decide that they should have never re-created us in the first place and leave us to be weirdo misfits all alone together on an island where there will hopefully be mai tais with those little umbrella straws.”

“You have issues.” I fitted my lab goggles over the bridge of my nose. “You know that, don't you? Real problems. You should see a psychiatrist.”

Owen slid the lab sheet off the table and skimmed through the instructions. “Not this one again. Didn't we do this foam experiment in class last year?”

Students were busy carting buckets of supplies over to the four-top lab tables.

“No, year before that.” I grabbed a Bunsen burner from the back counter. “Cassidy's not
that
good-looking.”

Owen crumpled up the instructions and tossed them toward the trash can. He missed. Of course. “You can't ignore the facts, Tor. Process of natural selection. Girls like Cassidy Hyde are genetically superior to the rest of us.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, lighting the burner. “I'm not exactly a troll, Owen.”

He did a once-over. “It's hard to tell,” he said matter-of-factly. “Because you dress like a boy half the time.”

“I do not!” I looked down, pouting. “I dress, I don't know, boho … chic. That's a thing, right?” I tugged at the frayed edge of my oversized tee, trying to recall the last time I went shopping.

Owen measured out a half cup of 6 percent hydrogen peroxide. Our teacher insisted that we do the experiments with the rest of the class, but we were allowed to work on our own projects afterward. “Why are you getting your granny panties all in a wad? Who cares? I would take you over a Cassidy any day.” He smirked. “They're a dime a dozen, which”—he scratched his chin—“observationally really serves to further my hypothesis on the increased prevalence of physically gifted human specimens, but that's beside the point.”