Teen Frankenstein (27 page)

I searched the field for Adam's face as Coach Carlson took the team through warm-up drills. A familiar rush of panic crowded my lungs when I couldn't immediately find him underneath the matching helmets and hulking football pads. The panic settled without fully disappearing once I spotted his uniform, number 88, and could just make out the swatches of dark hair and deep-set eyes hidden behind the bars that covered his mouth, chin, and nose.

In the background, a wide border of yellow crime scene tape marked off the outside of the boys' locker room. A lone news van lingered a few feet off, and the occasional black-coated official ducked under the tape and jotted things down in a notebook.

The body was gone. But the image of the missing eyes still haunted me, so much so that I startled at the sound of another pair of feet clomping down the bleacher aisle toward me.

“Boo,” Owen said with a smirk, catching my jolt to attention.

“You shouldn't sneak up on people like that.” I let go of my knees and crossed my legs underneath me.

“That would hardly qualify as sneaking. I literally walked right in front of you.” He swung his backpack onto his hip and unzipped it. “Anyway, I wanted to show you something.”

I glanced back to where Adam had just flattened a teammate on the field. I felt the curve of a small smile on my lips. He was really
good
. “What?” I asked.

Owen flipped open a spiral notebook and took a seat beside me. “This,” he said, pointing.

I held back strands of my hair and leaned over to see. “It looks like a map.”

“Exactly. This”—he turned the notebook horizontally and moved his finger to the upper left-hand corner of the page, where he'd drawn a squiggly blob—“is Lake Crook. And these two lines over here…” He traced what looked like a river with a winding turn that crossed the page. “This is State Highway Twenty-Four. I figured right around here is where you … well, where you found Adam.” My back tensed. “It's about a fifteen-minute drive. A longer walk but doable.”

I looked up from the page, stared hard at Owen, who I knew better than anyone else on the whole planet, who understood me better than anyone else except for maybe my dad, and he was gone. “Stop, Owen,” I said.

But Owen didn't stop. The twitch was already in his fingers, the way it was when he was working on a tricky bit of machinery. He was fiddling, testing, probing, the cogs were turning. “Here's the field. I've marked the time the body was found approximately based on what you've told me. Adam was there, too.”

“Owen…” The wind picked up again, fluttering the page. He ignored that, too, and I felt my throat get all tight and narrow like I'd been stung by a thousand bees. Suddenly I felt too exposed out here in the stadium, in the open air where any bird could simply fly over.

“Finally, we know we found Adam at the locker room,” he continued, “the night before a boy winds up dead at our school, outside of that
same
locker room.” To Owen's credit, his tone was grim. There wasn't an
I told you so
in sight. Just the bare-bones facts, exactly how I liked them.

My joints were stiff. “Let me see that.” I leaned over, then, as Owen was handing it to me, I snatched the notebook, tore out the page, and crumpled it into a ball.

“Hey, that took effort!” I hated it when he whined.

On the field, Coach Carlson blew the whistle, and the team huddled together. I kept switching my attention back to Adam after short intervals.

“Yeah? Well, then it was a waste,” I said, tossing the crumpled paper out of Owen's reach and shoving the rest of the notebook back into his hands. “These are coincidences, Owen. I thought you'd know the difference. I was on Highway Twenty-Four that night, too, remember? I was at the field where the body was found, and I was also with Adam and
you
at the boys' locker room last night. Does that make me a killer?”

Owen looked down at his untied laces propped up on the bleacher below. “No.”

“And who are you looking out for, anyway? We're supposed to be looking out for Adam, not piecing together his prosecution.” I was on my feet without realizing it. “I suppose he's just storing his spare eyeballs and legs in, what, his locker?”

“I don't know, Tor. He's dead. I think we should at least think through the possibility. Before somebody else does. And FYI, the person I'm looking out for is you. You don't know what you've gotten yourself into.”

“See, that's where you're wrong.” I pulled the strap of my bag over my shoulder and collected my things. “I'll see you later, Owen,” I said, despising the niggling worm of doubt that squirmed inside me. “Find me when you remember who your friends are.” After that, I didn't look back.

The bleachers shook underneath my clomping feet as I stormed down the stadium rows and out into the parking lot. The cool breeze wrapped itself around my neck and throat again, making me walk faster. Adam was mine. Owen would never have had the guts to create him. He would have never even tried. Owen's fear of Adam was that he was different. He had questioned Adam's existence since before he'd taken his first breath. Now he was looking for an excuse to be right.

I fished my keys from a front pocket of my bag, unlocked Bert, and slumped onto the fake leather seat. The cabin smelled moldy from where the moisture had seeped in through the crack in the windshield.

What I needed was to find a way to make sure last night didn't repeat itself, to make sure that I didn't find Adam on the brink of dying again—or worse—beyond saving.

I bit the nail on my pinkie finger down to the quick. The only way to do that was to find energy that would last.

On the opposite side of the parking lot, I watched Owen lope across the gravel, chin down and shoulders hunched. For a brief moment, he lifted his head and stared right at Bert. I wasn't sure whether he could see me or if he could only see the fractured mess of my car that would remind him of that night. Whatever the case, he must have decided something, because he walked the rest of the distance to his Jeep. Soon his taillights were glowing red, and he was backing out of his spot.

The band of skin where I'd chewed away the nail was pink with blood, and I squeezed it in my fist. Maybe I was too hard on Owen. Maybe—

A shadow crossed behind my car, and the light was blocked momentarily through the back windshield. I jolted upright, gripping my hands tightly around the base of the steering wheel. What was that? My brain conjured the first words that came to mind:
the Hunter
. Only a few cars were left in the lot. I glanced around. I was being stupid. The place had been swarming with cops only hours earlier. This was probably the safest place in town now. Footsteps crunched in the gravel directly next to Bert's passenger side, and, despite my internal monologue, the hairs on the backs of my arms stood on end.

But it was only Old Man McCardle. I tilted my chin up to the ceiling and shook my head. He appeared carrying a stick with a sharp point. He'd speared an aluminum Coke can and was now depositing it into his trash bag, which was exactly the sort of thing a school janitor should do. Not the Hunter of Hollow Pines. I exhaled. Apparently, the murders were getting to me, too. I slouched into my seat as the janitor crossed in front of the hood of my car, bending down to pick up a piece of garbage. Still, I had to admit, McCardle gave me his own brand of the creeps ever since he'd driven to school with a dead deer in the back of his truck last year and Principal Wiggins had insisted he return home.

I turned the key in the ignition and the headlights flared. He stood up, shielding his eyes. He stared at me with his watery blue eyes through the glass.
Sorry
, I mouthed without feeling all that sorry. I was eager to get away without having to talk to him. Even though I hated seeing the other students play stupid tricks on the old man, I couldn't help having the same instinctual response to want to distance myself from him. The truth was, Old Man McCardle wasn't even such an old man. Sun had been hard on his skin, thinning and wrinkling it like animal hide left to dry, and his hair was a silvery white with patches of a sun-spotted scalp peeking through. But he couldn't have been much older than Mom.

The gear still in park, I gently pressed my foot on the accelerator, and the engine revved. His lips worked without making any noise that I could hear, and at last, he dropped his hand and shuffled out of the way, trash bag in tow.

Relieved, I eased Bert out of the back row and left McCardle behind without sparing another thought, just as the players began to trickle out of practice and climb into the remaining cars.

I made a wide arc with the wheels and pulled up next to the sidewalk.

“Nice ride, Torantula.” Knox shook his sweaty hair and flashed me a grin. Right as he was crossing in front of the hood, I laid my heel into the horn and let it blare in his ears. He jumped in surprise.

I smiled sweetly and folded my hands into my lap. Adam's face showed up at the window. He knocked and I unlocked the door for him to come inside.

“You're loud, Victoria,” he said, folding his legs like a lawn chair to fit in the seat. “Why are you making the car yell?”

I let the foot off the brake. “Sorry. Thought I saw a rodent.” I shrugged. “My bad. So how was practice?”

“You never ask how practice is,” he said, no hint of accusation in his voice. He buckled his seat belt.

“You're awfully observant today, aren't you?”

“Yes.” Adam smelled like mud and grass stains. I wrinkled my nose. I liked him better when he smelled clean, like rainwater.

I sighed and turned at the stop sign. The stadium faded from view. I hadn't realized how good it'd feel to get away from the school and to distance myself from the lingering image of the boy with the missing eyes. When I asked Owen whether Adam was storing a set of legs and eyeballs in his locker, I'd meant it to be rhetorical, but what had he meant when he'd responded that he didn't know? That Adam was dead.

I glanced sidelong at Adam. His face was serene. He seemed utterly incapable of harming anyone. But then there had been the mirror in the dressing room and the times just after his recharges that I could hardly recognize him. This, I realized, was further evidence of the need for a more permanent solution, something that didn't change Adam into … something else. Something darker.

“So no one asked you anything today? No police officers, I mean. They didn't come to talk to you?” I ventured while at a red light.

“No, no police officers. Was I supposed to talk to the policemen?”

“No,” I answered too fast. “I was just curious.” I slid my hands down to the bottom of the steering wheel and let my foot off the brake. If the Lie Detector's forum kept finding an audience, it was only a matter of time until the authorities would want to speak to him. The question was, how much time?

We drove through the small town center of Hollow Pines, past the two-theater cinema and Walton's Drugstore. The red cobblestone made the wheel axles rattle, and we bounced down Main Street until we got to Grimwood Drive and took a right where the cobblestone changed into dusty road and the buildings faded into miles of landscape that was no more hilly than a sheet of cardboard.

“Home, sweet home,” I said when, after ten minutes, we pulled up to my house. The weather vane screeched and howled in the breeze. I glanced up to see it pirouetting on the spot. Nails on a chalkboard. The wind blew an empty pail across the yard.

Adam put his hand to his stomach. “Can we have the tater tots?”

I laughed.
This
was the guy I was scared might be a monster? “I'll see if we have some in the freezer.” I had already learned that Adam could consume an entire bag all by himself.

I was stepping out of the car when I noticed something different about the hatch. “No.” My eyes got big. I left the car door hanging wide open. “No, no, no, no, no.” I jogged over to the door of my laboratory. It was boarded shut. Plywood lay across the length of it, with bent nails sticking halfway out. “What?” I tugged on my hair. “No!” Everything was in there. All that I needed for a recharge. All my data. All my texts. What was it doing boarded up?

I spun back to Adam and held out my palm. “Stay inside,” I said. “Stay down.” He dropped back into his seat, and then when I motioned to him again, he lay down, disappearing from view but for the barely visible curve of his back. I looked back one more time at the spot where Adam was hiding and then at my laboratory. Einstein let out high-pitched barks from behind the screen door.

“Mom!” I yelled, stomping into the main house. “Mom!” I repeated. “Did you see someone boarding up my lab—the cellar? It's all blocked. I can't get in. Mom!” I tore through the kitchen, passing the piles of dishes and pushing a wicker chair out of my way.

I didn't have to look far, because I found her waiting for me in the living room, twirling a glass of red Merlot like she was at a fancy dinner party instead of in the middle of our crummy living room.

“Mom!” I shouted again. “Somebody nailed boards to the cellar.” I pointed outside.

“I know,” she said, and took a long slurp from her wineglass. “Because it was me.” She grinned. The wine made her mouth look toothy.

“You?” The rest of the words lost their sound the moment they tried to leave my mouth. I stood dumbstruck. The fact that my mother conceived of this scheme and then succeeded in actually carrying it out was almost too much to comprehend. “What are you talking about? You can't do that,” I shouted, panic climbing up my throat. “That was Dad's cellar. He wanted
me
to have it. What were you thinking? All my equipment is down there. I'm doing my best work. Why would you do that?”

She pointed her finger at the ceiling, where, through the roof shingles, we could hear the metallic squeal of the weather vane. “I've been telling you to fix that racket, Victoria Frankenstein. I've been telling you more times than I have fingers or toes. But all you care about is your
laboratory
. And your
cellar
. And your
science
.” She said these words like a playground taunt, and I felt the skin around my neck flame. “You're just like your father.”