Teen Frankenstein (11 page)

“Adam, I don't have hair like that.” I self-consciously fingered my ends. “Mine's darker. Auburn. I don't know.” I tried to cover the horror I felt at being compared to a boy whose head resembled a clown wig. “Anyway, that's not the point. You can't go around touching other people's hair, okay? It's not polite.”

His chin lowered. “I'm sorry, Victoria.”

I exhaled. “It's okay. Let's just find Owen and get some food. I'm starving.”

I led Adam through the maze of lunch tables, where we found Owen and tried sneaking inconspicuously in front of him in line, but as had been the case all day, there was no sneaking Adam anywhere. He towered over everyone, and we were taunted until we were all forced to the back of the line.

“And the perks just keep on coming,” Owen said.

“So there's a small learning curve.” I moved up in the line and handed Adam a tray. Yesterday I'd been nervous to feed Adam. I could think of no way to test whether his body was fit to consume food without him actually consuming the food. I hypothesized that once his vital organs had been restarted, all systems, including the digestive, should operate as normal. I held my breath as he consumed one bite of a Whataburger Owen had picked up, then two, and before I knew it, he'd eaten both my burger and his along with the entire large fries. To my relief, he didn't short-circuit.

As we moved closer to the front of the line, I heard a thundering rumble from deep in Adam's belly. Owen's shoulders shook with laughter. I slid my tray onto the metal shelves. “Okay, Adam,” I began. “You just tell the lady what you want, and she'll put it on a plate and hand it over to you.”

He nodded while another rumble sounded from the pit of his stomach. I ordered the only thing on the menu that didn't look like prison food, a slice of pizza and a side of tater tots. I watched out of the corner of my eye while Adam pointed through the glass. I slid farther down the row and picked up two Cokes.

“Adam, I got you a—” But when he joined me at the cashier, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head. He grinned. His plate was a mountain of food. Mashed potatoes piled on spaghetti with gravy running into a puddle on the side of his plate. Pizza with tater tots half covered in a mushy spinach dish. I fought my gag reflex and forked over an extra five dollars to cover Adam's cafeteria feast.

“Are you sure that's what you want?” I squinted at his plate as we staked out a table near a row of trash cans.

“I don't know,” Adam said.

Owen plopped a tray with pizza and tater tots down on the other side of Adam. “So I see we're still calibrating his taste palate.” Adam's forehead wrinkled. He stared up quizzically at Owen. “Interesting tastes, my man.” Owen patted him on the back. “March to the beat of your own drum. More power to you.”

At this Adam grinned and eyed his plate greedily. He sank down into a chair and gripped the sides of his tray.

“Shoot, we forgot utensils for you,” I said. “One sec.”

But before I could return to the end of the lunch line, Adam had pawed a heap of mashed potatoes and spaghetti into his mouth and was slurping down a noodle. Brown gravy dribbled down his fingers. I hesitated, then lowered myself back into my seat. “Or … not.”

He was already going in for another. This time he scooped up some of the spinach mixture and licked it happily from his hand. I pulled out my seat, shaking my head slowly as I watched Adam devour fistfuls of his food. Fatigue and hunger dragged at me as I rested my elbows on the table.

“Shouldn't we teach him about
silverware
?” Owen asked, curling the left side of his lip up and scooting a couple inches farther from Adam.

I blew bangs out of my face and stuffed the end of my pizza in my mouth.

Don't eat with your hands
, I should have added to our list. But, instead, I just sighed, picked up a tater tot, and said, “Tomorrow…”

 

TWELVE

The closest comparison to the subject's experience of the world is that of a toddler. While he has retained motor skills and clearly some muscle memory, he is learning about how his surroundings work each moment. So far it seems the maturity of his brain and its size are resulting in a faster learning curve than a toddler despite following the same processes.

*   *   *

By the time I crawled into bed on the night of Adam's first day, fatigue had reached into the cavities of my bones and clogged them up like lead fillings. An hour ago, I'd carried a plate of brisket down to the cellar and put Adam to bed on his makeshift pallet, or at least I turned off the light, seeing as how you can't exactly tuck in a hulking teenage boy, regardless of whether he's alive or not.

I smiled faintly to myself as I switched on the bedside lamp. When we got home, Adam had tugged at the hatch door, clamoring to get in. As soon as he did, I could see the muscles in his jaw loosen and his hands unclench.

He was home. This was his lair. Maybe he'd be more like a superhero than Owen had thought.

Yawning, I jiggered open the nightstand drawer and pulled out one of my black-and-white-speckled composition books. Even as sleep dragged on me, I forced myself, in scrawling letters, to write down everything I could remember about the past two days.

I scribbled a reminder at the top and underlined it with blue pen.
Rule Number One: Catalog Everything
.

I didn't know when I fell asleep, only that once I did, it was restless, with dreams of splintering glass, and that sometime later I woke to pitch-darkness and the sound of rain pattering against the roof. Eyes unfocused, I felt around my bedspread until my hand found the lumpy outline of Einstein. She groaned and nestled deeper into the space beneath the small of my back.

A flash of lightning burst through the blinds. I let out a hoarse scream. A glimpse of a face hovered inches above mine, lit up and then disappeared into the night. I could just make out the fuzzy edges of a figure bent over the bed. I scrambled upright, tugging the sheets around my waist. A pair of eyes shone at me in the darkness, the rest of the outline stock-still.

I pressed my back to the cool wall behind my bed and twisted my fists around the cotton bedding. Einstein let out a soft woof but didn't stir.

“Victoria?” Adam's voice was deep and baritone.

I felt my tendons tighten into guitar strings at the base of my neck. I tried to swallow and wound up nearly choking. “Adam? God, Adam, you scared me.” My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dim light.

“Did I wake you?” He touched my knee gently over the blanket.

I pulled the neck straight on a threadbare shirt I'd stolen from Owen. “It's the middle of the night,” I whispered. “So yeah.”

“Sorry.” The pressure from his hand lifted and his silhouette retreated a few inches farther. The tracing of his body blurred.

“What are you doing here?” I was suddenly conscious of all the embarrassing items scattered around my room. A dirty bra hanging from the back of a chair. Yesterday's clothes still lying in a pile. A stuffed unicorn. The open notebook in which I'd been cataloging Adam's progress. I reached for that first, shut the book, and shoved it into my nightstand drawer.

“Victoria.” The way he stood stiffly at the side of my bed was unnerving. “I'm scared.”

I rubbed my eyelids, thick with sleep. “Of what?”

He pointed outside. I crawled to the end of my bed and peeled back the curtain, but there was nothing out there. Fat rain droplets plummeted past the window, splashing onto the lawn below.

I glanced back at him. “Of the rain?”

“I don't like it.” I caught the tremor in his voice.

“I—” I started to tell him that was silly but stopped short. Instead, I crawled back to the head of my mattress, but this time scooted over. Adam hesitated and then sat down on the empty spot. There, he tucked his hands into his armpits and rocked slowly back and forth.

“When will it stop?” he asked.

I slid closer and put my hand on his back. The ridges of his spine pressed into my palm. I marveled at the way his rib cage expanded and shrank beneath it. So alive. “I don't know. Soon probably.” My vision adjusted to the light. I peered intensely at his profile. The slight bump at the bridge of his nose like it might have been broken once made him seem all the more real.

He was real, I reminded myself. He was real because I made him that way.

I shouldn't have left him alone in the laboratory tonight. It was the accident. He must be having an adverse reaction to the thunderstorm because of the storm on the night he died. A fist squeezed around my heart. Which meant his memories were there, somewhere, waiting.

I decided to test the waters gently. “Is there a reason you don't like the rain?” I suspected that if he knew the reason, he wouldn't be coming to me for support, but if he'd uncovered the truth, I might as well know now. I studied the pronounced seam of his brow. So many answers locked away in that single head.

He shrugged, a very human gesture. He must have picked it up from Owen. Then he shook his head. His back curved into a C and his chin jutted over his waist. He turned his head. His dark eyes reflected tiny glints of light. “Can I stay here with you?”

I glanced at the door. The thunder drowned out the sound of Mom's wine-fueled snores. I pressed my lips together. “Okay. Fine.” I let out a long breath. “But you have to be quiet. And leave before it gets light out, deal?”

“Deal.”

I flipped off the covers and let him shimmy in next to me, where he pulled the sheets up to his chin. This time, Einstein lifted her head. The tags around her neck jangled, and her throat emitted a rough, uneven growl. She pawed her way closer to me, stuffed a cold nose beneath my arm, and whined.

Adam folded his hands one over the other across his chest. I wormed my way back horizontal, wedged in between him and the dog. The space between the sheets instantly grew warmer. Einstein's breaths quickly evened out into soft puffs on my skin. It was hardly like having a dead body in my bed at all. Adam smelled clean—like rainwater. The indentation made in the mattress by his form rolled me into him. I turned on my side and tugged the comforter underneath my armpit and tried to close my eyes and breathe normally.

I'd never slept in a bed with a boy, but it wasn't as if I was a total prude, either. Last year at the State Youth Science Summit, I'd made out with Daniel Berkovich, a senior from Southlake with an astrophysics project that didn't place. I let him feel under my bra and take down my e-mail address, even though I never returned either of his messages, mainly because I didn't see a point.

Adam was different, though. Adam was mine.

“Are you asleep?” I asked, low enough so that if he was I wouldn't wake him.

“No.”

I twisted my chin over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

There was a pause. “Thinking.”

“About…?”

“I don't like the rain.”

I couldn't help it, I laughed, then tried to cover it up with the pillow. “Yes, I think we've established that.”

“But I do like pizza,” he continued, which was the least disgusting item he'd devoured off his lunch tray today.

I nudged Einstein away and turned over to face him. Our heads were on the pillows, my hands tucked beneath my cheek.

“I don't want to be blank, Victoria.”

“You're not blank,” I said. “You like pizza and … have full functionality of your motor skills. It's actually a huge stride forward in the human condition.” Sometimes when I said things like that, I had a little voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Owen and it warned me that not everything was an experiment. I hated that voice.

“I like the color orange, too, because it's the color of your hair. I like your hair.”

I grabbed a handful and held it out from my head. “Again! My hair's not orange! It's—I don't know—amber or something.”

“Then my favorite color is amber.” He had the air of a schoolboy who'd just answered a very difficult question correctly.

I relaxed into the mattress and we lulled into silence. The invisible weight of sleep began to tug me under like an ocean tide. “You're not the only one who doesn't like storms,” I said. “Sometimes, anyway.” I wasn't even sure whether I'd said this out loud.

Half dreaming, I pictured my father wearing his yellow galoshes and yellow rain slicker while I watched from inside his pickup truck. He stared up at the sky holding an anemometer kit over his head. The gold cups spun like spokes on a wheel, measuring the wind.
Soon, Victoria, soon
, he'd said. But soon never came.

My eyelashes fluttered. I tried to focus on his face, but my eyelids fell shut. “Don't be afraid,” I said. “Okay? Just don't. Because the truth is … well … we … shouldn't fear what…” And here sleep tried to tow me under to where my father waited in his yellow galoshes. “What we don't understand, Adam. That's what my dad used to say.” I sighed.

I couldn't keep track of how many moments passed as my thoughts drifted into that tiny crawl space between dozing and waking. Only that it was enough for the sensation of falling to set in. I found my father again, gazing up at the clouds, watching lightning crack open the heavens like he was watching fireworks.

“Why doesn't he say it anymore?” Adam asked. The sound of his voice pulled me back.

“Because he doesn't say anything,” I whispered. “Because he's dead.”

“Then you should bring him back.” Adam mimicked the quiet tenor of my voice.

I bunched the pillow tighter underneath my head. “It's too late for that,” I said, and, unbidden, dredged up the image of my father once more, only this time his boots lay flat on the ground with the rest of him. The lightning generators that he'd invented loomed up into the angry sky above him. He'd been trying to harness atmospheric energy to disintegrate the atom and therefore, in turn, discover a superenergy source. Only he never managed it. A bolt of electricity had struck him in the heart, leaving red tree-branch scars across his chest and neck. He was dead and his experiment died along with him. After that night, I walked away from that forest and never returned.