Teen Frankenstein (10 page)

I peered down at the dusty workman's boots of Old Man McCardle, the school's janitor, now pointed directly underneath our stall. He rattled the door. “Open up.” He pounded his fist. “Who's in there?”

Seeing no way out, I piped up. “It's me,” I tried.

The door stopped rattling. “I heard a boy's voice. There's someone else in there with you. Don't play me for stupid, young lady. I'll call the principal if you don't open this door right now.”

My thoughts switched quickly to Adam's tenuous acceptance into Hollow Pines High, and my mind formed a snapshot of the walkie-talkie strapped to Old Man McCardle's uniform. I stifled a curse word and hopped off the toilet seat. Holding my breath, I slid the lock free. I was met with a view of the janitor's dingy brown uniform. Kids liked to say that Old Man McCardle was crazy because he yelled Bible verses at students who drew male genitalia on the lockers and didn't bother to make sure their empty bottles wound up in the trash cans, but really, it was just the fact that he was a janitor and smelled vaguely of gasoline and pickled eggs. My eyes traveled up to his cragged face. He blinked and took a step back when our eyes met.

“It's fine, really,” I said, opening the door wider. “My friend here just bumped his head, and I was helping to clean him up. I'm sorry. It was just the easiest place to do it and, if we're being honest, aren't fixed gender identifications becoming a little passé anyhow?” McCardle looked from me to Adam, back to me again, then to Adam. His gaze lingered. I rolled my eyes. “Look, I promise, if I want to engage in any funny business, I will keep it to normal teenage locales. Back of cars. Movie theaters. Under the bleachers. That sort of thing.”

Then, like a windup toy, Adam started his monologue. “Hello. I'm Adam Smith from Elgin, Illinois. I am sixteen years old.”

McCardle's gummy lips worked without forming any words. He backed up several paces, and before I could say another word, he had turned with only one last swift glance over his shoulder and was gone.

I grabbed my bag from the floor. “I would say that was weird, but, well, he's weird. We should go, though,” I said. “He could be heading for reinforcements.” I rummaged around the front pocket of my bag until I found a Band-Aid. When I pulled it out, I saw that the pattern on the bandage was of tiny green Yodas, which I recognized from a pack that Owen had received from his mom as a stocking stuffer last Christmas. “This will have to do.” I motioned for him to bend down and then flattened the sticky parts to his forehead. I stood back to admire. Adam Smith was now tall, dead, and held together by a Star Wars–themed Band-Aid. And it was only 8:00
AM.

 

ELEVEN

A congenital insensitivity to pain may be caused by increased production of endorphins in the brain, a problem in the voltage-gated sodium channel SCN9A, or lack of certain neuropathies. Children with insensitivity to pain experience various problems, such as biting off the tip of their tongue, untreated fractures, and damage to the eyes. While the subject's pain insensitivity is likely not congenital, I've marked the causes for further study.

*   *   *

“You're late, Ms. Frankenstein.” Dr. Lamb's hand hovered over the whiteboard, gripping a green dry erase marker. Turning, she peered over her glasses at me.

Twenty heads swiveled in my direction. I found Owen seated on the far side of the classroom in a middle row. Our eyes met, and he shrugged, mouthed an apology, and scratched the back of his neck with his pencil before staring down at the notebook in front of him.

I dropped into an empty seat in the front row. “Am I really, though?” I asked. Dr. Lamb was too New Age for seating arrangements, and the back of the classroom always filled up first like the students were literally allergic to the possibility of learning. “I mean, according to Albert Einstein, isn't all time relative, anyway?”

Dr. Lamb quirked an eyebrow. With her hair pulled tightly into a bun, her needle-thin frame gave my physics teacher an uncanny resemblance to a pin. “Time,” she said, returning her attention to the whiteboard, “can be relative another day. Today we're looking at the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” She underlined each of the three capitalized words where she'd scribbled them in green marker.

“Who can tell me what that means?” Dr. Lamb glanced around the room, stashing the marker in the pocket of her white lab coat. As usual, she was met with crickets. I rested my chin in one palm and raised my other hand.

“Ms. Frankenstein?” Dr. Lamb crossed her arms and waited.

“According to Heisenberg's theory,” I began, “there's a limit to the amount of precision that can be achieved when measuring the state of a system. The more precisely you measure the motion of a particle, the less precise your measurement of its position, for instance.”

An exaggerated groan came from the back of the classroom.

“Very good.” She pivoted back to the board and began drawing an axis for a graph.

I squirmed in my seat, my thoughts turning right back to Adam. Maybe Heisenberg's theory was true on a larger-scale system, too. Maybe, while I'd been able to measure the input—the electricity, the conductor, the positioning—to a high degree of precision, I'd let my finger slip on the output and that was where the uncertainty had slipped into the equation. I had no way now to measure what Adam had lost except to say that he seemed to have lost close to everything.

I glanced at the clock. Only ten minutes had passed. Dr. Lamb had sunk into the meat of her lecture, and instead of taking notes, I was worrying about Adam. Suddenly fifty unsupervised minutes felt like an eternity. I chanced a glance at Owen, but he was scribbling in his notebook, tongue pinched between his teeth.

A dead body was enrolled in my high school. There were approximately ten thousand things that could go wrong. I tried to concentrate on Dr. Lamb but could only grasp the movement of her lips without being able to assign any meaning to the words that were forming there, so, instead, I pulled out my black-and-white composition book and began scribbling notes from the last day and a half.

I was detailing my second line of observation when there was a jab at my back and my hand slipped, causing me to leave a long pen mark across the top of the page. I spun around in my chair. Behind me, Knox Hoyle was pretending to listen intently to Dr. Lamb's lecture. I grimaced. Knox had beady, foxlike eyes and a thin face partially obscured by a fringe of shaggy hair smashed underneath the brim of a ragged old ball cap. He was the punter on the football team and Paisley's on-again, off-again boyfriend. Together, they were the closest thing we had to a William and Kate. The secret to Knox's popularity wasn't that he was a good football player—he wasn't, he was terrible—but that he was the guy who knew how to get anything. Fake IDs, alcohol, hall passes. He was the favor guy, and everyone at school knew him because of it.

I turned back around, but no sooner had I done that than Knox's tennis shoe jabbed me in the spine again. My back stiffened. The rational part of me felt sorry for Knox that he had nothing better to do with his mind than formulate ways to mess with me, a girl who registered as a
point-nothing
on the social Richter scale. The more primal part wished I could dislodge his shoe and shove it in his mouth.

He had no idea who he was pestering. I had created life during the last few days alone, and he probably hadn't even finished last week's math homework. Come to think of it, I could be one of the most famous scientists in centuries already. Right up there with Darwin, Edison, and Faraday. I glared at the page in front of me and squeezed my hand into a fist.
Stage Two
, I reminded myself. We were only entering Stage Two. I had to bide my time, which meant for now, there was the eleventh grade.

When Knox rammed me in the back once more, I whipped around so hard I nearly pulled a muscle. “What is your problem, Hoyle?”

His eyebrows shot up in a look of faux-surprise.
“What?”

“
What?
” I shot back. “Really?”
That weasel.

“Ms. Frankenstein!” Dr. Lamb's face became pointy with annoyance. “Outbursts belong
out
side.” She nodded toward the door. “No one here is above the rules, and that's twice that you've interrupted class today.”

“But—”

She pointed the open end of her marker.
“Now.”

I ground my teeth together and clamped down on the monologue brewing inside me about how cosmically screwed up the high school universe was for
me
to be the one getting kicked out of class.

“Fine,” I said, sliding my notebook underneath my arm and leaving behind a snickering Knox. It would be better for all humanity if we didn't have to breathe the same air, anyway.

I let the door close behind me too hard. The corridor was empty and hushed. The noise of the air conditioner through the vents thrummed behind the walls. I stood planted outside of Dr. Lamb's classroom for a moment while my chest rose and fell in rapid succession. Now that I had time to spare, it was a matter of determining how best to kill it. Right, well, I certainly had some experience in killing things, it seemed, so perhaps I should go check on that.

I adjusted my strap and took fast steps down the hall toward the history department. I'd taken US History with Mrs. Landers last year, and I recognized the door with the small, slender window carved into it and the blue cutout of North America. I slowed my pace as I approached and watched as my shadow crossed the seam of the wall and doorway. Adam was inside. A peek wouldn't hurt. One peek just to make sure he's all right.

I chewed on my lip and leaned over my toes to get a view through the narrow window. Mrs. Landers was writing something on the whiteboard. I scanned the students. At first, I didn't see Adam, and my heart skipped. The students were pulling out notebooks and pencils. Then, in the fourth row near the center, I spotted his hunched-over figure. He was curled over his book bag, one of Owen's old ones from last year. I held my breath as I watched him pull out a notebook and set it on his desk just like the other kids in the classroom. His eyebrows scrunched together. A sigh of relief morphed into a muffled gasp when he bent back over, pinched the bottom ends of his book bag, and turned it upside down to shake out the contents.

Several heads turned, including Mrs. Landers's. I ducked so as not to be caught spying.
Adam
, I mouthed to myself.
What are you doing?
I ventured back to the glass and craned to see. The students had settled. Adam's belongings were still strewn across the floor around him, but he'd found a pencil, which he now held poised over his open notebook. One eyebrow crawled higher on his forehead than the other, and it looked as though he'd stuffed his tongue into the pocket of his cheek so that it protruded in concentration. He returned his gaze from the whiteboard to the page when—
pop!
—the pencil snapped in two. The eraser end tumbled to his desk. I smacked my forehead and groaned audibly. Adam's eyes snapped to attention.

Victoria?
I couldn't hear from the other side of the glass, but from the dozen heads that turned in my direction, I was sure he'd said it out loud. “Victoria!” This time he waved. Mrs. Landers, who, to be honest, had never really liked me, stared directly at me, her pillowy cheeks reddening. “Victoria!” Adam's smile took over his face, and he exclaimed loudly enough for me to hear. I felt my eyes widen. He stood up and the desk got caught at his thighs. “Hi, Victoria! That's Victoria! Come inside!” He beckoned me in with the hand still clutching his broken pencil.

I flattened my back behind me and slid to the ground, sinking my forehead into my hands.
Bad idea. Such a bad idea
. I didn't know how long I waited, but the commotion on the other side of the door seemed to die down and, in any event, Mrs. Landers must have been in a more lenient mood with the new kid than Dr. Lamb had been with me.

At this rate, Adam would cause as much disruption in the school day as a small tornado. He was big, enthusiastic, and, unlike any real high schooler I'd ever known, completely unselfconscious. Whoever he was, he was all Adam and he was all my problem.

The bell for the end of first period jarred me from my thoughts. A swarm of students funneled out into the hallway, and, from my vantage point on the ground, I could sense how Adam felt this morning. The crush of bodies, the explosion of voices, the slamming locker doors that rang out like gunshots, it was all a bit shattering.

I felt the weight of eyes on me and peered up. “Victoria.” Adam cocked his head. “Why are you on the ground?”

I sighed and stretched my hand out to him, which he took. “I'm … hiding.”

Adam looked around, nearly knocking over a ninth grader with his book bag. “From what?”

I dusted off the grime from my palms. “From reality.” I shrugged. “Come on. We're only one-seventh of the way through.”

I spent the rest of the morning escorting Adam from class to class. With each hour, I added more rules for Adam to live by.
Keep your shoes on your feet
.
Don't stick your head in the water fountain
.
Watch out for open locker doors, janitorial buckets, and people that are shorter than you.

By lunchtime, I was exhausted. The cafeteria doors felt heavy as I tugged one open. We passed a tenth grader with frizzy red hair that stuck out six inches from his scalp.

“Adam, no!” I snatched his wrist as he was tugging at one of the tight curls, leaning in close to examine the unconventional hairstyle. I gave an apologetic wave to the boy and dragged Adam closer to the growing lunch line.

The corners of Adam's mouth drooped, and he nestled his offending hand close to his chest. “But he has hair like yours, Victoria.” He ventured a sheepish grin. “It's pretty.”