The Fourteenth Goldfish (2 page)

Warm air drifts through my bedroom window. We live in the Bay Area, in the shadow of San Francisco, and late-September nights can be cool. But it’s hot tonight, like summer is refusing to leave.

I used to love how my bedroom was decorated, but lately I’m not so sure. The walls are covered with the painted handprints of me and my best friend, Brianna. We started doing them back in first grade and added more handprints every year. You can
see my little handprints grow bigger, like a time capsule of my life.

But we haven’t done any yet this school year, or even this summer, because Brianna found her passion: volleyball. She’s busy every second now with clinics and practices and weekend tournaments. The truth is, I’m not even sure if she’s still my best friend.

It’s late when the garage door finally grinds open. I hear my mother talking to Nicole in the front hall, and I go to them.

“Thanks for staying,” she tells Nicole.

My mom looks frazzled. Her mascara is smudged beneath her eyes, her red lipstick chewed away. Her natural hair color is dirty blond like mine, but she colors it. Right now, it’s purple.

“No problem,” Nicole replies. “Is your dad okay?”

An unreadable expression crosses my mom’s face. “Oh, he’s fine. Thanks for asking. Do you need a ride home?”

“I’m good!” Nicole says. “By the way, Lissa, I have some exciting news!”

“Yes?”

“I got a job at the mall! Isn’t that great?”

“I didn’t know you were looking,” my mom says, confused.

“Yeah, I didn’t think I’d get it. It’s such a big opportunity. The ear-piercing place at the mall!”

“When do you start?” my mom asks.

“That’s the hard part. They want me to start tomorrow afternoon. So I can’t watch Ellie anymore. I totally would have given you more notice, but …”

“I understand,” my mom says, and I can hear the strain in her voice.

Nicole turns to me. “I forgot to tell you. I get a discount! Isn’t that great? So come by anytime and shop.”

“Uh, okay,” I say.

“I better be going,” she says. “Good night!”

“Good night,” my mother echoes.

I stand in the doorway with my mother and watch her walk out into the night.

“Did she just quit?” I ask. I’m a little in shock.

My mother nods. “This is turning into a banner day.”

I stare out into the night to catch a last glimpse of my babysitter, but see someone else: a boy with long hair. He’s standing beneath the old, dying palm tree on our front lawn. It drops big brown fronds everywhere, and my mom says it needs to come down.

The boy is slender, wiry-looking. He looks thirteen, maybe fourteen? It’s hard to tell with boys sometimes.

“You need to put your trash out,” the boy calls to my mom. Tomorrow is trash day and our neighbors’ trash cans line the street.

“Would you please come inside already?” my mom tells the boy.

“And when’s the last time you fertilized the lawn?” he asks. “There’s crabgrass.”

“It’s late,” my mom says, holding the door open impatiently.

I wonder if he’s one of my mom’s students. Sometimes they help her haul stuff in and out of her big, battered cargo van.

“You have to maintain your house if you want it to maintain its value,” he says.

“Now!”

The boy reluctantly picks up a large duffel bag and walks into our house.

He doesn’t look like the typical theater-crew kid. They usually wear jeans and T-shirts, stuff that’s easy to work in. This kid’s wearing a rumpled pinstripe shirt, khaki polyester pants, a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and leather loafers. But it’s his socks that stand out the most: they’re black dress socks. You don’t see boys in middle school wearing those a lot. It’s like he’s on his way to a bar mitzvah.

He stares at me with piercing eyes.

“Did you make honor roll?”

I’m startled, but answer anyway.

“Uh, we haven’t gotten report cards yet.”

Something about the boy seems familiar. His hair is dark brown, on the shaggy side, and the ends are dyed gray. An actor from one of my mom’s shows, maybe?

“Who are you?” I ask him.

He ignores me.

“You need good grades if you’re going to get into a competitive PhD program.”

“PhD program? She’s eleven years old!” my mother says.

“You can’t start too early. Speaking of which,” he says, looking pointedly at my mother’s outfit, “is
that
what you wear to work?”

My mom likes to raid the theater wardrobe closet at school. This morning, she left the house in a floor-length black satin skirt and matching bolero jacket with a frilly white poet’s shirt.

“Maybe you should consider buying a nice pant-suit,” he suggests.

“Still stuck in the Stone Age, I see,” she shoots back.

Then he turns and looks at me, taking in my tank-top-and-boxer-shorts pajama set.

He says, “Why are your pajamas so short? Whatever happened to long nightgowns? Are you boy-crazy like your mother was?”

“All the girls her age wear pajamas like that,” my mom answers for me. “And I wasn’t boy-crazy!”

“You must’ve been boy-crazy to elope,” he says.

“I was in love,” she says through gritted teeth.

“A PhD lasts a lot longer than love,” he replies. “It’s not too late to go back to school. You could still get a real degree.”

Something about this whole exchange tickles at my memory. It’s like watching a movie I’ve already seen. I study the boy—the gray-tipped hair, the way he’s standing so comfortably in our hall, how his right hand opens and closes as if used to grasping something by habit. But it’s the heavy gold ring hanging loosely on his middle finger that draws my eye. It’s a school ring, like the kind you get in college, and it looks old and worn and has a red gem in the center.

“I’ve seen that ring before,” I say, and then I remember whose hand I saw it on.

I look at the boy.

“Grandpa?” I blurt out.

“Who were you expecting?” he asks. “The tooth fairy?”

He seems like a thirteen-year-old boy, but when I look really closely I can see hints of my grandfather. The watery blue eyes. The slightly snarky set of his mouth. The way his eyebrows meet in the middle.

“Is this some kind of magic?” I ask.

The boy curls his lips and looks at my mother. “You’re raising
my
granddaughter to believe in magic? This is what happens when you major in drama.” He says “drama” like it’s a bad word.

“Whatever, Dad,” my mom says, sounding like a bored teenager.

“This is science, plain and simple,” he says to me.

But I don’t see anything simple about it and just shake my head.

He gives an exasperated sigh. “It should be perfectly obvious. I engineered a way to reverse senescence through cellular regeneration.”

I stare at him.

“In layman’s terms: I discovered a cure for aging.” His voice shakes with excitement. “In effect, I have discovered the fountain of youth!”

I don’t know what to believe. On the one hand, he sounds just like my grandfather. I’m half-tempted to see if he has any soy sauce in the pockets of his jacket. On the other hand, I’m not totally sure I
believe any of it. Part of me wonders if this is just some weirdo who stole my grandfather’s ring and is tricking my mom. She’s a sucker for kids with sad stories.

I turn to her. “Are you sure it’s Grandpa?”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s him, all right.”

“Of course it’s me!” the boy says indignantly. He whips out an old man’s worn leather wallet and shows me his driver’s license. My grandfather’s cranky face stares back from the photo, and the look in his eyes is exactly the same as on the boy’s face.

“This is so cool,” I whisper.

“Cool? It’s historic! They’re going to give me a Nobel!” His voice gets louder. “Melvin Herbert Sagarsky will be a household name!”

My mom yawns. She’s clearly unimpressed. Or maybe just tired. It’s pretty late.

“I’m going to bed. Why don’t you bond with
your
granddaughter?” She gives my grandfather a look. “And don’t put anything strange in the refrigerator.”

My mom tells stories of how when she was little, my grandfather would keep experiments in the refrigerator. There would be stacks of petri dishes next to the cottage cheese and butter.

Then we’re alone in the kitchen. My grandfather’s stomach growls loudly.

“Got anything to eat in this place?” he demands. “I’m starving.”

“There’s pizza,” I tell him.

He stands at the counter and wolfs down the rest of the pizza.

“The lab assistants live on this stuff when they run experiments at night,” he says.

Then he goes to the fridge, takes out the milk, and pours himself a big glass. He drinks it and pours himself another.

He waves the carton of milk at me and burps. “Make sure you take your calcium. Everything they say about bone density is true. I lost two inches in the last ten years of my life.”

“You shrank?”

“The perils of old age,” he says.

“At least you got your hair back now,” I point out.

“I got back more than my hair!” His eyes glitter. “My eyes are twenty-twenty, my hearing is perfect, and my arthritis is gone!” He wiggles his fingers.

“What did you get picked up by the police for?” I ask.

“They said I was trespassing on private property,” he says. “I got let off with a warning.”

“Where?”

“My laboratory!” His voice trembles with outrage. “I practically built that place! I have credits on nineteen of their patents, you know. You’d think they’d have some respect.”

I nod even though I have no idea what a patent is.

“Ever since the company brought in those fasttalking investors, everything’s been different. It’s all maximizing-profits this and minimizing-risks that. They have no respect for science.”

Then he yawns. The energy seems to go out of
him in a rush, like a switch flicked off, and his shoulders slump. The illusion fades, and all at once he looks like any other tired thirteen-year-old boy who needs a haircut.

“Where am I sleeping?” he asks.

I’m always the first one up in the morning because I like to cook breakfast. My mom hates cooking and jokes that she doesn’t know if I’m really her kid. But I feel comfortable in the kitchen. There’s an order to it, and it’s fun to experiment.

Lately, I’ve been making what I call Crazy-Mixed-Up Pancakes. I use a basic pancake batter and add different ingredients. So far, I’ve made a s’mores version (chocolate, marshmallows, graham
cracker crumbles), a banana split version (bananas, chocolate bits, maraschino cherry), and a piña colada one (pineapples, coconut).

This morning, I make an old standby—peanut butter cup. I use peanut butter morsels and chocolate chips. I’m just plating up the pancakes when my grandfather walks into the kitchen. He’s wearing old-man pajamas, the button-up cotton kind, and his hair is tied back with one of my ponytail holders. He must have found it in the bathroom.

“Something’s wrong with the toilet,” he tells me. “I had to use the plunger.”

“That happens a lot. Want some pancakes?” I ask him.

“Thanks,” he says, and takes a plate.

He eats fast and then helps himself to seconds. Teenage boys really eat a lot, I guess.

He’s got a bad case of bed head, something I’m all too familiar with; my hair’s the exact same way. It’s frizzy and flyaway and I’ve always hated it. I wonder if I got it from him.

“I have a good spray that works on frizzies,” I tell him.

He waves his spoon at me. “I have more important things to worry about than hair. I need to get my
T. melvinus
out of the lab. It’s what helped me sort out the mechanism for reversing senescence.”

“What’s senescence?” It sounds like a terrible disease.

“Senescence is the process of aging.”

I was kind of right. “So what’s
T. melvinus
?”

“It stands for
Turritopsis melvinus
. It’s a species of jellyfish.”

“A jellyfish did this to you? Are you kidding me?”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Why is it so hard to believe? There have always been examples of regenerative abilities in nature.”