Teen Frankenstein (36 page)

I didn't turn back. I pounded up toward the hatch and shoved it open. I climbed out and dusted off my jeans. I pulled Owen out after me. We slammed the hatch door closed with an aluminum clang that rocketed through the night.

I looked around, suddenly grateful for the country dark. Red, blue, and white flashed on our front lawn. “Come on.” I held fast to Owen's hand, and we ran around the back of the house in a loop so that we were spit out on the other side. I had little to no plan when I saw the two cop cars parked in the dirt in front of my house.

From inside I could hear Einstein already hoarse with barking. Her nails scratched the door. “Quiet, Einstein,” I muttered too quietly for her to hear.

I arrived to greet them, panting. A middle-aged officer with a blond mustache and a holster strapped around his pregnant-looking belly got out. He rested his hand on his gun.

“Is that dog dangerous, miss?” He nodded toward the front door. She whined and scratched some more.

“Who, Einstein? Only if you're afraid of excessive amounts of drool.” Owen nudged me in the ribs. “Right, I mean, no, she's harmless.”

“We're looking for an Adam Smith. Heard he might know something about the murder up at the school. People told us to try here. That you two were close friends, and that he might have left the gymnasium with you.” He nodded at me.

The question knocked me off balance. Adam had left with me. What could I answer?

“What do you need Adam for, sir?” Owen stood up straight, stalling. He was good with adults. He had that nerdy charm that convinced them he was no trouble at all. I, on the other hand, seemed to lack that quality entirely.

“Just a few questions,” replied Officer McMustache. “That's all.” By now his partner had climbed out of the car and was looking out at the property. I felt the seconds ticking by.

“I…” I swallowed down what felt like a wasp stinging my throat on its way down the pipe. “He left me. After the gym, he took off,” I said, sticking with some version of the truth. I forced myself to quit talking, not to ramble, not to offer any details that could be used against me. People were always too quick to volunteer the details with which to hang themselves.

“Shoo, shoo,” I heard from behind me. On the porch, a door thwacked against the wood frame. Einstein resumed barking. “What's going on?” My mom's bare feet stepped onto the grass. She had managed to wrap a robe around her shoulders. “What are you people doing on my lawn?” Without makeup and with her red hair all askew from a few hours' sleep, it was easy to see how much she'd aged in the past few years. I could hear the empty wine bottle in her words.

Go back inside, Mom. Go back inside.
I made a silent wish.

“We're looking for Adam Smith, ma'am. Is he here?”

My mom's face screwed up in the headlights. She noticed me standing a short distance to the right, and then she noticed Owen. “That's Owen. Owen Bloch,” she said, and seemed so pleased with herself for remembering. In other circumstances, I would have been quite impressed myself.

“Has an Adam Smith been residing at your house the last few weeks, ma'am?” Officer McMustache widened his stance.

“Don't you think I'd know if a boy was living here in my house?” She said her consonants extraloud, like somebody was adjusting the volume on her remote control without her looking.

McMustache looked to his partner and then back at Mom. “Yes, ma'am, I suppose you would. But, all the same, would you mind if we had a look around?”

“Yes!” I pressed my lips together. Just once could she not—“Yes, I mind!” she shrieked. And that was when my mother's robe flew wide open, revealing only an oversized Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt with nothing on underneath but her bony, white-sheet legs.

McMustache's partner took off his hat and crossed it over his chest. Both of them averted their eyes to the ground. Owen scratched his temple and squinted one eye like he didn't know
what
to do.

With the sound of the sirens cut, I heard a distinct creak from the back of the house that made my armpits sticky.

“What was that?” The younger partner raised his hand to his holster.

“Probably just the dog,” I said quickly. “She's always knocking things over.” I looked over my shoulder. Every so often, I could hear Einstein's frantic puffs of breath underneath the threshold.

“Ma'am, maybe—” continued the officer while definitely, most certainly not looking up at Mom.

“Did you not hear me right?
I
didn't give you permission to be on my lawn,” Mom shouted. “I didn't give any of you permission. Get off!” The sleeve of her robe fluttered. “Get off! All of you! Scram!” She pointed back at the robe and took several more barefooted steps toward the police. “This is my property. Don't go telling me who is on my property like I don't know.”

I wanted to laugh and cry and hug my mother, open robe and all.

The officers exchanged looks again. McMustache cleared his throat and said, “We apologize, ma'am. You'll let us know if you hear anything, I'm sure.”

To that, she spat on the ground. Then she pulled the robe around her chest and marched back into the house. The younger partner raised his eyebrows. Then to Owen and me he nodded. “Y'all take care. We may be back around if we hear anything else.”

As the sirens faded and the lights disappeared, I felt the emptiness spread out over my house like the first day of winter, cold, bleak, and alone. The realization seeped into the pores of my skin. Owen wrapped his arm around me and tugged me into his side. I leaned into his chest and listened to his heart thud steadily against my cheek. The experiment was over. Adam was gone.

 

THIRTY-FIVE

I return to my father's favorite quote:

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

—Thomas A. Edison

*   *   *

I slid my textbook off my desk at the end of Dr. Lamb's class and stuffed it into my book bag. I wasn't sure if I'd dozed off those last few minutes or if I'd just turned off my brain. That seemed to be happening more and more these days. I had these long stretches of time where the outside world was filled with white noise and afterward I couldn't remember anything.

“Tor.” Dr. Lamb was peering at me over her glasses. Her chunky half-inch heels clacked over to her desk, where she took a seat in the rolling chair in front of a poster of a rocket launch. “Can you come here for a minute?” she asked.

I glanced around the room at the other students packing their bags and heading for the door and thought about pretending I hadn't heard her. But since I knew it'd only create twice the hassle tomorrow, I dragged my feet over to her workstation. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked. I had done so many things wrong in the last few weeks I wouldn't know where to begin.

She rested her pointy elbows on top of a pristine desk calendar. “Is everything okay, Tor? It's been a week since you last raised your hand in class, and I don't think you even bothered turning the pages of your text today. You're usually one of my brightest students”—I chafed at the phrase “one of”—“so I hesitate to say anything, but so much has been going on, and I want you to know we have resources here to help you process anything that might be upsetting you.”

“You mean about Knox?” I asked, relaxing my posture. “We weren't exactly friends.”

“Knox … and the other boys.”

“Right, them,” I said absently, kicking my shoe on the classroom floor. “I'm fine, but thanks. Was there anything else?”

She frowned. The corners of her eyes crinkled. “No, that was it, Victoria.”

*   *   *

SOMEHOW IT HAD
wound up Thursday. Or maybe it was Wednesday. I couldn't remember anymore.

“Watch it.” Billy Ray's arm caught me in the shoulder, and my books sprayed onto the floor. I kneeled down to collect them. A sneaker stepped right across the spine of my physics workbook. I pinched the cover and wriggled it back to safety.

For a moment I stayed near the ground, watching the pairs of legs pass by. Worn jeans, tights, boots, tennis shoes, wedges. Part of me wanted to give up, to stay there. What difference did it make, anyway? Knox was dead, and I was in some ways worse off than dead. I was invisible.

I crawled to my feet. No one offered to help. I passed by Cassidy's locker. She wasn't there, but I'd seen her yesterday collecting her assignments after math. No sign of Paisley yet.

I met Owen at the cafeteria entrance. “Want to go see that Stan Lee documentary at the cineplex after school? It'll be over before curfew.”

I yawned. “No, Owen, not really.” Only, I couldn't remember if I'd bothered to say that out loud.

*   *   *

WAS IT FRIDAY
already? God, how did that happen?

I stared out the window of the chemistry lab. Dark clouds were beginning to congregate over the school's campus and beyond the forested blanket of the Hollows. Below the windowsill, zebra grass bowed in the wind. The American flag beat wildly. It had been almost a week since I'd set foot in the cellar, but I imagined the mercury in my father's glass barometer plunging with the pressure. The Doppler radar, which I'd been studying so intently up to this point, would be electric now with orange and red beginning to spread toward Hollow Pines.

“Tor.” The voice felt far away. “Tor. Hello? Tor.”

I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. “What?” I snapped.

Owen jerked back. His face looked longer, leaner. It was impossible to miss the purple bruises under his eyes that gave away that he hadn't been getting much sleep. They reminded me of Adam. The amused smile always brimming just at the surface of Owen's eyes was gone. And that reminded me of Adam, too. “Are you going to help?”

There was nothing clever in Owen's delivery. He didn't try to make me laugh. He just pointed to the small lab prep of our would-be science fair project. Set up in the empty classroom was a test tube fitted with a rubber stopper, a piece of glass tubing, and a two-liter soda bottle.

I sighed and turned from the window, where the first droplet had splashed the pane. Owen and I had agreed to abandon Mr. Bubbles. The experiment had already failed. I'd played God and created a monster. Besides, the lower mass and muscle density with that level of voltage would probably never work, anyway.

My lip curled at the sight of our new project, an archaic production of sulfuric acid from sulfur and saltpeter. I dropped my elbows onto the table and looked over Owen's equations for balancing the reaction:

KNO
3
(s) + S(s) -----> K
2
S + N
2
(g) + SO
3
(g)

It was all painfully unoriginal. “Have you done the stoichiometry calculation yet?” I asked, my cheek pressed into my palm.

“Not yet,” he said, rinsing the walls of the soda bottle using the small sink in the center of the lab table and leaving them wet.

I sighed again. I was becoming a professional sigher. It was pathetic. Or maybe it was apathetic. God, weren't those basically the same thing? I picked up a pen. It felt like a lot of effort. And I quickly ran through the calculations to determine the number of grams of saltpeter needed to react with a gram of sulfur. When it came time for the fair, we'd translate the process in neat print onto a colorful poster board, hell, maybe we'd just tear out the page of my notebook and slap it onto the poster board. Honestly, who cared? This was nothing compared with what I'd accomplished. This was pointless. Kid stuff.

When I'd circled the answer, I returned to staring out the window. Adam was out there with Meg. I had to keep reminding myself that he had killed Knox, that maybe he'd killed other people, too, except I could never get my mind around the idea that Adam was the Hunter. Something didn't add up. He had a violent streak, but he wasn't sadistic. It was more that he was being driven mad by how different he was. The truth was, I didn't want him to be different. I wanted him to be perfect, and when he wasn't, I had to send him away. I had no other choice.

Did I?

Outside, I watched the sky darken. Even though the sun hadn't set, the looming storm made the use of lights inside mandatory. I glanced at the clock. It was after three in the afternoon. I chewed on the end of my pen and wondered for the millionth time this week what he was doing.

The first flickers of lightning lit the bellies of the clouds like camera flashes sparking behind a gray veil. I lifted my cheek from my palm. I thumbed the lightning charm dangling from my wrist and rubbed it between my fingers, making the gold metal warm to the touch. The little zigzags in the bolt dug into my skin when I pressed. The bulbs went off again. And suddenly, it was like the lightning had struck me. Maybe the experiment with Adam
wasn't
over. Maybe he still could be a perfect specimen. Before, I hadn't had the answer. The generators. But now …

The pen clattered to the table. Owen glanced up from fiddling with the fit of the glass tube. “What?” he asked.

“The storm's only going to be here overnight.” I grabbed my rain shell off a stool. “After that it might be too late.”

Owen gently set the glass tube down on the counter. “What do you mean ‘too late'? What are you talking about? Too late for what?”

“The experiment.”

“
This
is our experiment, Tor.”

I punched my arms through the sleeves of my coat and pulled the hood over my ears. “This is college sophomore science, Owen, and you know it. I'm talking about the generators.” I pointed out the window where the fog rolled over the tops of the woods. “I'm going to get Adam. This isn't over yet. I think I can fix this.”