Teen Frankenstein (3 page)

With each thrust, his body plopped against the pavement. At last, I collapsed onto his chest, crying big, fat tears until they collected in the back of my mouth and threatened to drown me.

I didn't know how long I stayed like that, lying with my cheek flattened against a bloody T-shirt, but by the time I peeled myself away, I was numb. And not in the metaphorical way, either. My nail beds tingled. I couldn't feel my face. There was the feeling that my head had literally separated from my shoulders and was starting to float off.

My palms bit into the blacktop as I levered myself to my feet. I walked in a trance back to Bert. I should have asked his name. Why hadn't I asked his name?

I slammed the door. The cabin filled with silence even though outside the rain kept beating down. Water trickled through the cracked windshield onto the dash, reminding me of what had happened, just in case I tried to forget.

A blank pair of hazel eyes stared back at me in the rearview mirror. Smudged liner smeared down pale, pink skin, creating an inkblot test on my face. I played with the volume dial on the radio, but the engine was cut, so nothing happened.

I clutched my forearms, wrapping them around my stomach and hugging. “I … k-killed him.”

There, I said it.

My forehead fell to the steering wheel. I was at a point beyond tears. On the road to total ruin, there was anguish, hopelessness, misery, despair, and then there was me. My temples throbbed. A dreamlike quality still shrouded the recent chain of events, and it was that surreal-ness that kept me from crumpling in on myself like a paper bag. But before long my legs were restless and I couldn't sit still with my thoughts. I reached for the door handle once more and stepped out onto the shoulder of the road. The rain's initial fury had ebbed from a torrential downpour to a soggy mist. The asphalt took on the translucent sheen of wet oil reflecting a cloud-obscured moon.

I paced the length of the car, back and forth, shaking my head. I couldn't just
leave
him there while I went for help. I glanced over at the body-shaped heap down the road. Someone might think they'd come across a hit-and-run.

My phone. My stupid phone. Already I was imagining my picture plastered on a public service announcement that warned against texting and driving. My heart slipped lower.

What did Owen mean by
Eureka
when he texted, anyway?

Eureka
. I shook my head. That text had seemed so promising for a single moment.

More pacing. My shoes struck out at the pavement.

This was why we needed a breakthrough in the first place. If—

I stopped dead in my tracks. Owen had a breakthrough.

That was it. My heart beat faster. If we discovered how to make Mr. Bubbles come back to life, then I could save the boy. I could do better than any hospital or doctor. I could do what medicine couldn't.

What if what was wrong with our project wasn't the process but Mr. Bubbles himself? More mass. More watts. The blood in my veins buzzed as if charged with electric volts. I tried to shove the thought into a corner of my mind like a pile of dirty clothes pushed into the back of the closet. But the more I paced, the more the idea kept tumbling out and spreading.

The thing was, once I did this thing, there'd be no turning back. One door opens and every window in a thirty-mile radius slams shut. Except through the open door, the boy might live. He might
be
the breakthrough. It only takes one person brave enough to find out. That person could be me.

I felt my gait take on the grim weight of an executioner's march, even though the execution had already taken place. As I drew closer, the boy's glassy eyes became unavoidable. Hard and unseeing as marbles, he stared up at the night sky like he might be studying the constellations. What
had
he been doing walking across a country road in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm? And who was Meg?

A pang of guilt twisted through my side. Dogs started barking in the distance. I looked over. Every light was on in the closest farmhouse. The highway butted up against a fence connecting the cornfields, but the fields were huge. Surely nobody could hear the crash from here, let alone see it. I quickened my pace and the dogs barked even louder. A correlating relationship, not causal, I had to remind myself. If two events occur together, that didn't mean they had a cause-and-effect relationship. The dogs weren't barking because of me. They couldn't be. Could they?

I took a deep breath, then crouched and slid my wrists underneath his armpits. The heft of his torso pulled me down. My back strained against the mass of what felt like a six-foot-two linebacker.

I arched, hoisting him higher on my skinny frame. My thighs quivered as I shuffled backward, taking tiny steps in the direction of Bert. I really should have pulled the stupid car closer. I wrapped the body in a bear hug. My fingers barely touched across his chest and I caught a whiff of tropical-scented shampoo.

After a few feet, my biceps were screaming for mercy. I let his upper half collapse onto the road. Stretching, I wiped a hand across my forehead and felt a smear of wetness the texture of leftover jam. I jerked my hand away. My fingers were covered in a fresh coat of blood.

“Oh god.” I coughed, hocking over my shoulder.

I squeezed my eyes shut and lugged the boy back upright. His jeans skidded across the blacktop.

“Almost … there…” I huffed as if he were somehow invested in the journey. With a final heave, I leaned my unwilling passenger up against Bert's back tire. His chin slumped onto his chest and a chill ran through me.

I popped the trunk. I started with his upper body, digging my shoulder into the boy's belt buckle, and winched him over my shoulder so I could use the full force of my body to propel him up into Bert's spacious trunk. There was a clunk as his skull hit the trunk's fiberglass lid.

His legs hung out the rear end like a dead deer. I swung one limb over the side, where it landed on the black carpeting with a dull
ker-thunk
, then the other. Crystallized in time, this was the sort of life moment that'd be better left on the side of the road like discarded luggage, and, in truth, I never thought I'd be the girl to cart around emotional baggage. It was almost comical how wrong I'd been. Because I was clearly more the type of girl who took her mistakes, bundled them up in the back of her car, and drove.

 

FIVE

The Final Dissection of Mr. Bubbles Six:

I began by carefully removing the skin to expose the muscles below, using scissors and forceps. I began the incision at the top of the neck and continued toward the tail. The muscular structure, including the biceps brachii, the triceps brachii, and the latissimus dorsi were all still intact despite the effects of the higher electrostimulation, a fact which is promising. The lymph glands, however, appeared darker than on Bubbles Four or Five. Will preserve them along with the heart, lungs, and liver for the laboratory.

*   *   *

I cut quietly across the lawn to Owen's window on the rear side of a large brick house. Owen had one of those houses you could just tell had a real family inside. Trimmed shrubs, a pebbled walkway leading up to a cheery red door, and a wooden bench swing that hung from one of the trees. I stalked through the grass. We didn't hang out at Owen's house much. Mainly because we didn't like his housekeeper chasing us out of rooms or his mom constantly checking if we wanted cookies. Plus, his house didn't have a place where it was okay to store flammable liquids.

I looked both ways, then tapped the glass. “Owen,” I hissed. His light was off and my breath fogged up the glass as I smushed my nose to the windowpanes. “Owen! Owen Bloch, open this window right now!”

When I couldn't see movement in the shadows, I dug the tips of my fingers underneath the sill and tried to pry it open myself. I was making zero progress when the window slid open and Owen popped his head through. His hair stuck out at sharper angles than usual and he wasn't wearing his glasses. He squinted out into the night. “
Tor
, is that you?”

I was instantly annoyed. Owen had a breakthrough and now he was
sleeping
? “I'm sorry,” I said. “Do many other girls stop by your window in the middle of the night?”

He fumbled around inside and after a moment located his glasses. Spectacles in place, he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and yawned. “I'm going to guess there is a ninety-nine-point-five percent chance that whatever it is you're about to tell me could have waited until morning.”

Misty rain still drizzled from the sky, and the dull rumble of thunder sounded in the distance as if the clouds were hungry. I crossed my arms, impervious to the droplets that were turning my skin cold and slick. “Further proof that you're not very good at statistics.”

He scrunched his forehead, and it was as if his retinas snapped into focus and he was seeing me for the first time. “Is that
blood
?”

I swiped my hand across my brow where the blood was beginning to coagulate. “Don't worry, it's not mine.”

Owen disappeared from the window. I heard rummaging around, bedsprings squealing, sheets rustling, car keys jangling. “And that's supposed to make me feel better?”

His foot shot out the window, followed by a leg and then the rest of him.

“Well, it's definitely not supposed to make you feel worse.” It was only when we were halfway back to the car that I realized we'd left his window wide open. I didn't mention this to Owen, who was trying to keep up while at the same time hopping on one foot and attempting to wrestle on his second sneaker. The presence of another person made me feel more calm and in control. I took quick strides around the front of the car and dropped into the driver's seat. Time was of the essence.

Owen stood slack-jawed outside the passenger-side window. “Um, Tor…” He was seeing my car for the first time. Jagged cracks branched out from a crystalline puncture wound in my windshield, and my hood looked like the site of a meteorite crash. “Are you sure you're all right?”

“
I
am fine. Now can you please get in?” My mind spun with echoes of imagined sirens. As I closed the door and moved the sole of my foot to the gas pedal, I knew that the truth would color Owen's view of me. Maybe forever. He'd look back and remember that I'd been calm—
too
calm. But this had always been a problem for me. I'd never acted like people wanted me to. I didn't cry or get weepy when I was exhausted. I didn't wonder why I hadn't been invited to so-and-so's birthday party. I didn't doodle boys' names in my notebooks. Instead, I pulled the tails off lizards and observed them until they grew back, or pinned dead beetles to corkboards so I could label them with their proper scientific names. That was
my
thing.

Still, I knew the whole morbid tale would sound so much better when I told it to Owen if only I'd been trembling and sobbing from the moment I showed up. I thought about this as he made a show of clicking his seat belt into place and checking the tension in the strap across his chest. I swallowed hard. I was too focused on the end goal now to revert back to quivering girl in distress. He'd probably love a quivering girl in distress. All guys did. Even Owen, I bet.

A few houses down, I had to make a three-point turn to go back in the opposite direction. A single thud sounded from the trunk. Owen twisted to stare into the backseat. “What the hell was that?”

I flipped the windshield wipers on, but the blades got stuck on the fractured glass. I didn't reply.

Owen flattened his shoulder blades to the seat again. He raked his fingers through his hair and flicked on the cabin light. I felt his attention square on me. I set my jaw and drove faster down the glistening pavement. The neatly hedged community gave way to a long stretch of road where telephone poles stood like sentinels and thirsty grass unfurled over long stretches of flat land. The heat of the small cabin lamp warmed my forehead.

“Have you seen yourself?” Owen asked. I glanced sideways at him. His eyes pinched at the corners, betraying a look of genuine concern. “Because you look like you've just survived a bombing or something. Tor, I think you should pull over. I think you may be going into shock.” He reached his fingertip out, and I flinched when he dabbed at the streaks of blood caked at the edge of my hairline. “Did you hit a deer?” He sank back into his seat. “God, you could have died.”

Shock. That was a good one. Perhaps I could be going into shock. I tried that on for size, remembering the feeling of numbness that came over me when I'd … when he'd …
God
, maybe Owen was right.

“I didn't hit a deer,” I said. I snuck a glance in the rearview mirror. A knotted nest of hair formed a clump about an inch above my left ear. Then there was the blood. More blood than I'd remembered. It was much worse than the stains left from when I'd swiped my hand over my brow. I must have gotten more on me when I'd put my face to the boy's chest. Now, his blood smeared over my cheekbone like blush.

I reached up and clicked the light off, bathing the cabin in darkness. We were getting closer to home. The houses got smaller and squatter, though farther apart, and instead of trimmed bushes there were crooked mailboxes and sneakers dangling from the telephone wires.

“Owen,” I said, tightening my grip around the steering wheel. “Something bad happened.” I stated this in the same way a counselor might gently break bad news to a child. “There … was an accident.
I'm
okay, but…”

This took a moment for Owen to register. His cheeks drooped. His mouth fell open. He turned in his seat again and looked at the backseat as if he had X-ray vision. Then he shook his head. “You…”

“I hit someone.” The words came out totally wrong.