Deconstructing Dylan (7 page)

I was hoping Robyn wasn't going to ask but she did. “What kind of work were you doing?”

My mother looked at her fingernails. “Research.”

“In what?” Robyn asked, probably just trying to be polite.

“Genetic engineering,” my mom answered. “That was how I met Dylan's father.”

Robyn studied her toast. “Oh.”

I didn't really understand what my father did at his company and I knew very little about my mother's research before she quit working. I knew she was highly regarded. I even remembered her telling me a bit about genetics — at least as it related to bugs. She'd been able to explain to me all about Gregor Mendel's experiments and what they meant when I was still quite young. I was kind of shocked to learn that other kids' mothers didn't fill them in about genetics at that age.

More interesting to me than Mendel, however, was hearing the story of one of my early heroes, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and his research, using fruit flies, into the relationship between chromosomes and heredity. I remember giving an oral report on the subject in school
when I was ten, and the teacher wrote on her evaluation, “Dylan showed much enthusiasm for his subject.” My talk began something like this: “Chromosomes are really cool.”

“So where do you live, Robyn?”

“Emerson,” she said.

“And you go to Brevard High?”

“I transferred here.”

“She was picked on,” I said. “It was in her best interest.”

My mother was about to ask for the story and I didn't want to go there. “We gotta leave now or we'll be late.”

“Sure,” my mom said, letting us both off the hook.

I couldn't believe Robyn's skid. A two-door electric with retractable roof and full-solar hood. She started it up and it made no sound at all, much quieter than my dad's dual-fuel Honda, which was an older combo — diesel-electric — and a real guzzler.

“She's hiding something,” Robyn said.

“No, she was just trying to avoid talking to you about GM food and a few other things that she figured you'd be offended by.”

“No, it's not that. I watched her face. Women can tell when other women are lying.”

“Lying? You're talking about my mother.”

“You think parents don't lie?”

I didn't want to hear Robyn trash my mother. I didn't know why she was doing this but I figured I'd let it go. “Let's just change the subject, okay?”

“Sure. Did you see that conceited jerk on the news who claimed there is no Loch Ness monster?” Robyn asked. She knew of my interest in Nessie.

“Yeah. What a party-pooper.”

“Do you think he's right?”

“I know he's not right. I swam in Loch Ness. I could feel the presence of something there. I know.”

“You swam in Loch Ness?”

“My parents took me to Scotland a few years back. I loved it.”

“Weren't you afraid?” “Trust me, the Loch Ness monster is a vegetarian. Maybe he eats fish sometimes but not meat.”

She stopped for a light and stretched her arms up through the open roof. She smiled and transformed the world once again into a wonderful place to be alive. “That's really cool that he's a vegetarian. I'd like to meet him sometime. Would you introduce me?”

“Sure,” I said. “On our way to Tibet. We'll fly to Glasgow and I'll take you there. Just don't try to explain to my friend that most people don't believe he exists.”

“If you believe he's real, then I believe he's real,” she said.

“Oh, he's real all right.”

That day I again watched Robyn weather the harassment from kids at school. “The trick,” she said, “is to just not let them get to you. If you don't react, if you don't get angry, they have no power over you.”

The girls were much harder on her than the guys. Miles may have gotten the ball rolling, but Robyn didn't react, and as she'd predicted he moved on to pick on some other poor soul. Miles didn't care who his victim was as long as he had a victim that he could make squirm. Robyn wasn't a squirmer. I was going to let her teach me some good life skills. It was quite an education.

At lunch, we sat outside on the grass and she told me to sit very still and look into her eyes. I followed her instructions. Her eyes were dark, like deep, deep pools of liquid. Caroline and her friend Clare stood not far
away staring at us. I could hear Caroline ask, “What are they doing?” Clare answered, “I think it's some kind of weird mind control. Maybe it's voodoo.”

Maybe it
was
voodoo. As I continued to look into Robyn's eyes, I felt myself drifting out of my body. I started to say something but she shushed me. “Just be quiet. Do you trust me?”

I nodded yes.

Then she leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. I was already flying through some alternate plane of existence. The kiss reconnected me to my body and my body was hurled up into this exotic other place. Next I felt her kiss my lips. Her tongue slid into my mouth and it was warm and wonderful.

Caroline said, loud enough so that anyone could hear her, “Oh God, that's disgusting.”

It was anything but. Robyn knew how to kiss. When she stopped I was out of breath and still floating.

“Do it again,” I said.

She put up her hand and smiled, looked almost embarrassed, almost shy. “I just wanted to see if you were willing to trust me or if you'd be freaked.”

“I trust you. Totally. Do it again.”

“Not now.”

“Where did we just go?”

“We didn't go anywhere. We were right here.”

“No, I felt like we were somewhere else.”

“I surrounded you with my energy field.”

I didn't know whether to laugh or take her seriously. “Surround me again.”

“I can't. Not here. Not now. I need to recharge my batteries.”

“Like your skid, right? You have your own personal solar panels, I bet.”

“We're all solar cells. You soak up the energy and then it's up to you whether you put it to good use or just piss it away. Most people just piss it away.”

I kind of wish she'd stopped right there but she hadn't. “I hate to bring this up but there's something about your mom that isn't right.”

“She's just a little paranoid. She probably thinks you're going to corrupt me, being older and all that.”

“I know she doesn't trust me. I'm used to people judging me by the way I look or what they think I am but this is something different. She's carrying around a lot of pain and with it some kind of secret, I think.”

“We all have secrets. What's the big deal?”

“The big deal is the secret has something to do with you. I saw it in her face when you were asking her a question.”

Now, this lovely, strange girl was making me mad. What right did she have to go analyzing my mother and making accusations? “Look, my mom is going through this rough thing. I think it has to do with menopause
or maybe depression but it doesn't have to do with me. She probably just worries about me, that's all.”

“She's trying to protect you from something.”

“Sure, why not? I'm old enough to take care of myself but she still thinks I'm a little kid. Both my parents were overly protective of me. It's hard for her to let it go.”

Robyn knew when to stop. “Sorry. I was just telling you what I felt. I was being unfair.”

“Time for class,” I said.

I don't know exactly what triggered the sudden daydream but it was so entirely weird. It might have been something to do with the news story and the vid images of the loch, of Scotland. It had something to do with my dream, something to do with that photo my mom had. And Robyn. Robyn had said my mother was lying about something. She said it as if it were unquestionable, as if it were a fact.

I was sitting in math class. Mr. Kempton was on a roll. He sat at his projection console and worked through this enormous equation that was displayed on the big screen at the front of the room. Mr. PowerPoint. He had a flair for making the dullest math subject come alive with colour, motion, and video clips that popped in and out and actually helped to illuminate the subject. He
had always gone the extra distance to try to make teaching fun. So it was weird that this was the time I was drifting. When I drifted, I always stared at the upper-right-hand corner of the room. I guess I didn't even realize it was happening at first.

I was eight years old. We were driving through some mountains in Scotland. Outside it looked &hellips; well, prehistoric. Stark, treeless hills above the valley floor. I was in the backseat of a very small car, an old car. Real old, like something I'd seen in those old
Mr. Bean
TV shows. In the front seat sat a man and woman — quite young. At first, I don't think I understood that they were my parents, but a young version of my parents. I was studying a fly crawling on the backseat window. There was music playing — a radio, I guess, because the music was interrupted by a fast-talking Englishman. He talked so rapidly and with such a strong accent that I could hardly make out what he said. But I did catch the phrase “Spice Girls” and wondered what that meant. I wondered who they were, these girls made out of spices. Then more music. A fast beat. I must have liked it. The two adults in the front seat must have liked it. The man, the young version of my father, was tapping his hand to it on the steering wheel.

The sun was out and the sky was blue. I leaned towards the fly to look up at the top of the mountain on one side of valley. That's when it happened.

I heard it before I saw it. A loud thunk and then the windshield of the old car shattered. I doubled over forward and felt the seatbelt dig deep into my gut. A deer had jumped in front of the car and landed on the hood, then crashed through the glass. It cracked into a thousand pieces but remained intact, a kind of shattered glass blanket falling in on the adults in the front seat. I was screaming now, crying, confused and frightened in a way I had never experienced.

The car skidded to a stop and I wailed louder. I was panicked by what I saw: my young mother and father before me buried by what was left of the windshield and a large animal, a deer that must have been killed by the impact. I knew that my stomach hurt and my head had hit the back of the seat in front of me. The engine was off now and it was suddenly quiet except for my father saying “Oh my God” over and over and my mother kind of whimpering. Then she shouted something out, a name. Not mine. “Kyle! Kyle, are you all right?” She was trying to push the glass and animal off of her but she was pinned down. There was blood pooling on the shattered glass.

And then my father heaved himself up and out of the car. He looked back at me and saw my fear. “You'll be okay,” he said. “It will be all right, Kyle.”

I heard another car stop behind and people were running towards us, shouting. The door opened on my mother's side and my father and another man were struggling to lift her out from beneath the broken glass and the deer carcass. I wailed louder.

A big woman opened the back door and touched both my arms. “Poor laddie,” she said. “We'll have you out in a jiff.” And she did. She undid the seat belt and lifted me out of the car and carried me away. I remember her big thick arms and the way she held me to her as if I was a little baby.

A couple of men were lifting the dead deer out of the car now and wrestling the shattered sheet of glass off my mother. My father then unharnessed her and lifted her out and sat her down by the side of the road. Then she yelled out, “Where's my little boy?”

I tried to speak but was unable to because I was still sobbing, so the thick-armed woman shouted, “He's here, ma'am, and he's just fine.” She carried me to my mother and put me in her arms. I felt her hot tears falling on my face as she said that name again. “Kyle.”

When I drifted back to math class, I had an odd sensation as if I was lowering myself back into my seat, pulling myself back from an actual physical space up there in the upper-right-hand corner of the room. Although I had
believed this strange experience to be something very real to me while I was envisioning it, I also immediately understood that it was not anything that had ever happened to me. Those two adults
seemed
like my parents but they were far too young. The car was from another time and place. But I was sure I recognized the location. I had been there once — the valley of Glencoe, site of the famous massacre in 1692. The Campbells had murdered the MacDonalds: men, women, and children. I remembered the story, the history. But what was it that had just happened to me, and who was this little boy, Kyle?

A sense of disorientation stayed with me for the rest of the day. I decided not to seek out Robyn. I was still annoyed at her for saying those things about my mother. She had no right to do that. Maybe it was her crazy head trip on me that afternoon that had triggered the bizarre daydream.

At home, my mom grilled me some more about Robyn until I insisted she give it up. There was definitely some kind of bad vibe going on there between two women who had met only briefly. I wondered what that was all about.

I felt halfway relieved when I saw my father's old Honda pull up in the driveway. “Dad's home,” I announced.

He came in the door and gave my mom a hug. He came over and rubbed his hand over the top of my head as if I was a little kid. My hair was still trying to grow back. All I had was a kind of short spiky crop of hair. “It's like sandpaper,” he said affectionately. “I could sand a two-by-four with that head.”

We had dinner and my father told us both how much his job sucked. “We spent two days creating the new project and two days destroying it. That's how a committee works. In the end, we decided to do nothing. All the tests on the new stem cell stimulants were positive but the PR people think the climate isn't right. We're going to end up holding back on making the drug available, one that could improve the lives of thousands of people.”