Deadly Design (9780698173613) (9 page)

“Sure.” I smile, or do my best imitation of one.

Emma tries to smile back, and I watch her walk toward her car, expecting that, any second, she'll turn to glance at me. But she doesn't. She just drives away.

I
t's only a few blocks to Emma's house. In a small town, every place is basically a few blocks away. I roll down the window and take in the smell of cut grass and the early morning dampness that skirts the front porches of old houses. Emma's parents are talking and glancing at their watches as I pull up behind her father's SUV. I take one last glance around the Jeep, and then grab the title out of the glove compartment. Emma is sitting on their front porch, holding a yellow tabby in her arms, telling him good-bye. She hugs the cat, kisses it on the head, opens the front door, and lets the cat tumble into the house.

She's smiling as she walks toward me in her comfortable traveling clothes—cutoff sweat pants and a T-shirt. Her eyes are puffy and red. She looks at her parents and nods toward the house. Her dad points at his watch, then follows his wife through the front door.

“Up bright and early,” Emma says.

“I thought Cami would be here,” I say, swallowing my emotions deep down into the pit of my stomach. Be strong. Be strong, but it's hard.

“Cami was over last night. We said our good-byes then. And it's not like I'm falling off the planet. I still have a phone and Facebook. No way you guys are totally getting rid of me.”

I can smell the sweet scent of Emma's shampoo. God, I want so much to place a hand under her chin and lift her face to mine. I want to kiss her hello, not good-bye.

I hand Emma the title to Connor's Jeep along with a notarized bill of sale saying that my dad sold her the Jeep for a dollar.

She opens the piece of paper. “What's this?” she asks. She lifts her hands questioningly, so I drop the key into her outstretched palm.

“It's yours now. You just take that to the DMV in Minnesota, and they'll give you a new title. But that's legal, so if you get stopped for speeding, you can prove you own the car. And you might get stopped, because the Jeep goes more than thirty miles an hour.”

“My car goes more than thirty. I'm not taking Connor's Jeep. Your Jeep.” She tries to hand the keys and title back to me.

“This is what Connor would want. There's no way in hell he'd let you drive that . . . car . . . all the way to Minnesota, let alone drive it around
in
Minnesota. The average snow drift is three times as tall as that car. I doubt it could get through two inches of snow, let alone two feet.”

“They have snow plows. They salt the streets. They know how to handle winter up north.”

“And everybody owns a four-wheel-drive pickup. I mean, could you imagine trying to strap a deer onto that?” I motion toward the Smart car. “Connor would want you to be safe. That's all he'd care about, and you know it. This is what he would want. So, let me do this—for him.” I say the words that will convince her, because even though I'd do anything for her, first and foremost, I owe it to Connor. I owe it to him to look after her.

“But what about you? What are you supposed to drive?”

I walk toward the Smart car and pretend to wipe a smudge off the hood. “While you're polluting the ozone, me and my superhero vehicle will be doing our part to save the planet.”

“And what if there's a blizzard in Kansas?” she asks.

“First off,” I point out, “if there's three inches of snow, school will get cancelled. And even if it isn't, I can walk. If I think there's any chance the snow will melt during the day, which it usually does, I'll just throw . . . Betsy here,” I pat the hood, “into my backpack before I leave for school, then take her out and drive her home afterward.”

“You hate that car. I can't trade with you.”

I put my hands on her shoulders. “I don't hate the car. I love it. Really, really, love it. Every time I get behind the wheel, I'll know you're safe in the Jeep. So I'll help you unload the two shoe boxes you managed to fit into your old car and help you load up the Jeep.”

Emma laughs and sobs at the same time. She wraps her arms around me, and I wrap mine around her. I hug her tightly because I don't want to let go of the girl who always looks back and smiles at me. She's so beautiful everyone notices her, but she notices me. Even being Connor's girlfriend, her eyes still kind of lit whenever she was around me, like I mattered. But they blazed when she was with Connor. I tighten my arms even more for Connor, because he can't hold her. His arms are pressed against his sides, or maybe they're crossed over his chest. I don't know because I never saw him in the coffin.

I feel her body trembling, and then she lifts her tear-streaked face and rises onto her tiptoes. I know what's coming, and I close my eyes. Her lips are soft. At first, they barely touch mine, but then she starts to press her mouth hard against mine. My lips give way to hers, and she tastes like mint toothpaste and salt. I want to let her kiss me, to let her pretend she's kissing Connor good-bye. After all, she is kissing his DNA, but the taste of tears is too much, and I pull away. She doesn't look at me as she wipes her face against her sleeve.

Her parents emerge from the garage, where I'm pretty sure they've been eavesdropping.

Her dad slaps his hands together and smiles like she's heading off to college instead of running away. “We've got a tight schedule,” he says.

Together, Emma and I move boxes from one car to the other. Then I leave. I don't want to see her driving away.

D
on's Diner has one specialty on the menu: grease. Breakfast is probably the worst. Greasy eggs, greasy bacon, greasy hash browns. Plates glisten with the stuff, and I'm pretty sure that the bottoms of the tables have drips of solidified grease growing like stalactites on cave ceilings. It's heaven.

Mom doesn't want me eating unhealthy shit. It's all vegetables and fiber and fish rich in omega-3's at home. But what else am I supposed to do? It's 7:48
A.M.
The girl of my dreams is getting farther away by the minute. No bar is open, and they wouldn't serve me if they were. In two days, I'm going to be in Dallas eating nothing but cholesterol-free powdered eggs, and I still haven't gotten a friend request from James M.

If I can't drown my sorrows in bourbon, I'll drown them in bacon. And it's damn good too.

Mom will smell it on me, and the smell of grease will rile her up more than a shirt reeking of marijuana smoke would. I could lie, tell her I stopped at Don's for an unbuttered slice of whole wheat toast, but I won't do that. I won't lie to her.

It's just that I've come to the conclusion that what I eat probably doesn't matter. Connor was a health freak. He ate flaxseed and tofu, and he died anyway. If by some chance my DNA is messed up and I'm going to die, I might as well eat what I want. I need something, something bad for me. Something to fill the hole in my soul, the hole that's growing wider and deeper with every passing minute.

I stab the center of an over-easy egg and watch the orange slime spread like lava over the glistening whites. I'm about to dip my buttered white toast into it when the door opens, and Cami walks in. She scans the tables and booths, a hopeful smile on her face that slowly turns to disappointment.

I take a drink of orange juice and wave her over.

“Have you seen Emma?” Cami asks. “She was supposed to leave this morning, but her car's right there.” She points to the metallic green car that looks like a bloated package of spearmint gum.

“My car,” I correct her. “We traded this morning. She definitely got the better deal.”

“You gave her Connor's Jeep?”

“My Jeep.” I say the words, but I don't believe them. It was never mine. It was always Connor and Emma's, and now it's just Emma's.

Cami sits on the other side of the table and stares at me. “You hate that car.”

“I hated Emma driving it. It's not that bad, as long as I remember to feed the hamster that runs on that little wheel in the engine.”

“Did you tell her about—”

“Hell no.” My voice is casual, like we're talking about something trivial, something normal.

I offer her a slice of toast, and she takes it. She tears off a small piece but doesn't put it in her mouth. “It would have never worked with you and her. You've got to know that.”

There is still a small mound of grease-glistening hash browns on my plate, but my stomach has put out the
NO ENTRY
sign. “Why? You didn't care that I had a crush on her when Connor was alive. So now that he's . . . gone, I'm just supposed to turn my feelings off? We could work. I mean, besides the whole ‘your heart may have an expiration date stamped on it' thing. What did Connor have that I can't get?”

“Emma,” she says, putting the toast down like she's lost her appetite too. “You'd never know if she was with you because of you or because you remind her of Connor. Every time she kissed you, you'd be wondering who she was thinking about. Every time she told you she loved you, you wouldn't know if she really meant you, or if she thought in some weird way, Connor's spirit could share your body.”

I think back to this morning, to less than an hour ago, when she'd kissed me. “Sometimes you have to take what you can get.”

Cami scoffs. “Do you know why I used to call you Connor?”

“To piss me off.”

“No, but that's not a bad reason. I did it because every time you flipped me off, you'd smile. Not a big one. Barely noticeable, as a matter of fact, but still there. You never smile. It's like you're always beating yourself up because you don't measure up to Connor, but you're not Connor. The world never needed two Connors. It needed one Connor and one Kyle.”

The waitress comes with the ticket. I reach for it, but Cami snatches it up. She shakes her head, her soft brown curls shifting against her forehead. “This one's on me,” she says, digging in her purse for her wallet.

“Give that back.” I reach again, but she stands and holds the ticket close to her chest.

“You're unemployed, remember. Besides, what you did for Emma, giving her the Jeep . . . And now you're driving that.” She motions toward the car that only takes up half of a parking space. “That was an awesome thing to do. You're . . .” She looks away, concentrating on counting out the right number of bills. “Connor would be proud.” Cami tucks an s-shaped curl behind her ear. “Feel free to flip me off whenever you want.”

I don't feel like flipping her off. “Thanks. You ever run out of gas money for your truck and need a ride to work, let me know,” I offer.

She leaves the money with the cashier and comes back to the table. “You know, I heard that boys who drive big cars are compensating for small penises. I wonder what that says about a guy who drives a tiny car.”

I can't help but smile, and she gives me a “gotcha” look, like getting me to smile is her mission in life.

“So . . . I get off at eight,” Cami says. “How about I come over after that? I know something we can do to get your mind off of things.”

“I may be vulnerable, but I do have some self-respect.”

“You wish,” she says.

I start to say something, but then I see a man sitting at a corner table. He's drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.

Cami follows my gaze. “Who's he?”

“I don't know, but I saw him at Connor's track meet. He was taking pictures of Connor right before Connor jumped. I figured he was a scout from a university. But why would he be here now?”

“I've seen him at the Sak & Save a few times. Never buys much. Gum mostly. Occasionally milk.”

“So he's from around here?” I stare at his down-turned face, at the dark hair that hangs over his forehead. His phone is sitting next to a plate of half-eaten pancakes.

“He must be. Why so interested?”

“I don't know,” I say, wishing he'd look up from his paper and meet my eyes. There was something about how he'd looked at me that day.

“Maybe he works for the
Gazette.
You know how much they loved running stories about Connor. Or he could have been a fan wanting to remember Connor's last meet.”

She's right. I know she is, but I keep thinking about Dr. Mueller—about how, if he is alive, he'd want to know if his genetic manipulations were a success. But there were so many people at the track meet. So many people were always watching Connor. And I wonder how many people went to watch Alexis Warren's soccer games or her performance in her school's production of
Godspell.
I wonder how many people went to hear Triagon play the piano or to see Hannah Welch dance.

“So I'll see you around eight?” Cami asks.

I nod, but I can't take my eyes off the man who doesn't lift his head to look at me.

I
've spent the last three hours scanning websites for anyone at fertility or genetics conferences who resembles Dr. Mueller. He's probably dead. He was already middle-aged when he created Connor and me. But he might be alive. He might be out there somewhere, lecturing at conferences all over the world about genetics and what can go wrong if you try to tweak too many genes at once.

Between looking at sites for Dr. Mueller, I go back and forth to Facebook, hoping desperately the little person icon will have a tiny 1 over it. Then I check Triagon's blog. I look at his picture, then at Alexis Warren's profile picture, then Hannah's.

Hannah Welch was a beautiful girl. Of course she was. Dr. Mueller would have designed her that way. I can't tell from her profile picture if her eyes are blue or not, but I bet they are. She's sitting on a stage in a sleek black costume. One leg is crossed over the other and her arms are wrapped around her bent knee. Her pink-tinted hair is cut short. There is a diamond stud in her right nostril, and I can just make out a tattoo on her wrist: a small red rosebud.

I wish I could get past her profile picture, but there's no sense in sending her a friend request. I wish they had Facebook in heaven. I could message Connor, tell him I might be coming to see him before too long. He could tell me about the place, things that everyone wants to know, like do people eat in heaven, and if so, what's the food like? Are we required to spend a certain number of hours a day singing God's praises with the angels, or is God more laid-back? What is He like, anyway? Does He intervene in our lives? Does He give a shit? Does He just sit back and watch us like we're ants in an ant farm?

“She's pretty,” Cami says, scaring the shit out of me.

“Fuck eighteen,” I say, grasping my chest. “You're gonna kill me now. Ever hear of knocking?”

“Your bedroom door was open,” she says, sitting down on the edge of my bed. “Is that Hannah?”

I nod and click to close the tab, but the obituary I'd been reading pops up. I move the mouse to close that tab, but Cami grabs my hand.

She leans forward and starts reading. “She had a scholarship to study at Juilliard. She danced in Paris last year. In Italy the year before that. Think what her life was going to be like. What all their lives . . .” She stops herself and forces a smile. “So, are you ready for a distraction?”

I close the Internet page. “Hell yeah.”

• • •

I look through the window into the bed of Cami's small pickup truck. She's raided her uncle's firework stash, and I can't imagine there's much she didn't take.

“There must be two hundred dollars' worth of stuff back there,” I say. “Is he going to be pissed that you took all that?”

“No,” she says, pulling onto one of the roads that leads out of town. “Uncle Jimmy has tons more. He has connections, so he gets a great discount. And now that he's living with us, his disability check goes a lot further.”

“Disability?”

“He was injured in Afghanistan. He's a marine. He got hit by an IED. Shrapnel went into his head and one of his kidneys. He lost his kidney, but they managed to save most of his brain.”

“Most of it?”

Cami shrugs. “Okay, all of it, but he's a little different now. Sucks too, because the whole reason he went into the military was so they'd pay for his college. He didn't get the best grades in school. It wasn't until seventh grade that a teacher finally realized he was dyslexic. He got help, but by then it was hard to catch up. He wanted to be a teacher, one that wouldn't just assume somebody was dumb or lazy. He wanted to make a difference, but now . . . his mind kind of wanders, and he can be very animated when he's excited. Plus, he's got the standard PTSD.”

I look back at the cardboard box filled with Blackcat M80's and odd-shaped containers labeled
Neighbor-Hater
,
Night-Fire
, and
TNT.
“Why would somebody with PTSD want stuff like this? Don't noises freak him out?”

“Jimmy did one tour in Iraq and three in Afghanistan. Tomorrow night, when the sky starts to darken and everyone starts shooting off fireworks, Jimmy will be out here somewhere. He'll be setting off his own miniature explosions. That way he'll be in control of the noise.”

“You're sure he's not going to be pissed?”

“He's medicated now, so we don't have to worry. Besides, he hasn't killed anybody since that barroom brawl in Colorado last year.”

I stare at her, waiting for her to tell me that she's joking, but she drives on for almost a mile before she looks at me and smiles.

“He's living with you now?”

Cami turns down a dirt road. “Yeah. He's been in and out of the VA hospital. He tried living on his own for a while, but it didn't work out so well. He's my dad's little brother, so we're helping him out. It's going okay. We just have to keep an eye on him. He doesn't always take his meds, and sometimes when he does take them, he takes them with beer. And occasionally he goes outside and smokes a joint and thinks that we can't smell it when he comes back in. But he's family, so . . .” She shrugs and smiles again.

We keep driving. Evening is falling fast, but I don't want it to. I want the sun to hover a little longer, to dig its rays like claws into the approaching shades of night and stay a while. I want to be able to see Cami's face, the strength in her brown eyes and her unwavering smile. She's already been saddled with taking care of her little brother, and now she's got her uncle to worry about too. And she's babysitting me, distracting me from the countdown hanging over my head.

“This is the place,” Cami says, pulling the truck over onto the side of Tornado Road. They call it that because of the 1999 tornado that took out half of the nearest town and a couple of farms. It's creepy as hell. The tornado was an F4. The trees still haven't recovered. In the winter, they look like deformed skeletons with various bones snapped and hanging. In the dark, with their branches clothed in thick leaves, they look like slumped, aging giants.

We start with the little stuff: firecrackers, fountains, and Roman candles. I love holding the Roman candles in my hand and seeing the baby fireballs fly out. Cami was so right. This is exactly the distraction I need. We light some rockets, lame ones that shoot out parachutes we can't see in the dark and others that zoom away so fast we have no idea where the hell they've gone. We find a package of sparklers that he must have bought for Josh. We light them and run around in the dark like we're five. We even try to write our names in light across the black air, but by the time the last letters form, the first letters are gone.

Eventually, we run out of the little stuff. We set up the hard paper tubes and start lighting fuses. Cami keeps yelling for me to run every time I light a fuse, as if she's afraid I'm going to do something stupid like stick my head over the tube to make certain the fuse really lit. But I do what she wants. I light the fuse, then run, and together we wait for the initial heavy sound as the explosive ball rockets high into the sky. We hold our breath and wait for the second explosion, the one that sends showers of blue or red or silver cascading over the black canvas. And together, we gasp.

We save the best and the biggest for last. It's slightly larger than a shoebox, and on top of it, there's a picture of a blonde with big tits and tight red shorts. Her legs are straddling the fuse. I know this one will be amazing. It's probably the biggest explosive a person can buy without being reported to the CIA as a possible terrorist. It will blast explosive ball after explosive ball into the air, and the force from the explosions will make our stomachs vibrate.

“Be careful,” Cami says again as I bend over to light the fuse. It's a long fuse, to give the sucker lighting it plenty of time to back away.

The fuse ignites, and tiny, almost microscopic, sparks leap away from it. I run to the blanket Cami has spread out across the road and we lie down, our shoulders touching as we watch bursts of fire launch into the sky. It's so loud, but I don't care. We watch as brilliant lights spit and crackle against the darkness. They fall and melt away and are replaced by another barrage of sounds and lights.

Tomorrow is July Fourth. Connor loved fireworks and Dad's homemade ice cream and going to the park to watch the town's budget being blown into the sky to the sounds of Aaron Copeland music.

Dad won't make ice cream tomorrow. We won't go to the park for the fireworks show or comment on how much money the neighbors must have blown—literally—on fireworks. We'll pack our bags for our early morning flight to the cardiac hospital in Dallas and then try to sleep with our pillows pressed on top of our heads to block out the sounds of celebrations.

July Fourth will never be the same again. Neither will Thanksgiving or Christmas.

I stare at the black sky and the explosions of color, and suddenly every spark seems to represent a way our lives will be different, will be empty, because Connor's gone and he's never coming back.

My shoulder trembles against Cami's because I want Connor to be here. My chest aches, it burns like the tears in my eyes because I want him back. I want to see him and hear his voice. I want to let him drag me to the fireworks show with our parents because it's a tradition.

Flecks of sparkling gold fill the night sky and for a second, I think I can almost see his face. My shoulders tremble even more.

Cami doesn't say anything. She just slips her hand into mine, and we watch until the sounds and the colors stop.