Harrison Squared (5 page)

Mrs. Velloc said, “This is Harrison Harrison. He's new.”

Dr. Herbert waved. This gesture was made a bit threatening due to the fact that he was holding a scalpel, and the sleeve of his coat was streaked with blood up to the elbow. His uncovered eye blinked wetly at me. “Have you taken biology?” the doctor asked.

“Freshman year,” I said.

“Oh,” the doctor said. He sounded disappointed. Suddenly he brightened. “Have you taken
crypto
biology?”

I grinned. “In my family, cryptobiology isn't a course, it's dinner conversation.”

“I
like
this boy!” Dr. Herbert said.

He was the first person at the school I felt like I understood. Cryptobiology—AKA cryptozoology—was the study of animals whose existence had not been proven. Think Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch.

He gestured me toward the tray. On it was a creature in the process of being dissected. The skin was peeled back and pinned, revealing muscle tissue and glistening internal organs. It might have been a salamander, except for the extra set of limbs.

“What is that?” I asked.

“I have no earthly idea,” he said. “Isn't it wonderful?”

The class change gong sounded. Mrs. Velloc said, “I leave Mr. Harrison in your hands, Doctor.”

“Wait,” I said. “I still don't have my schedule.”

“I don't know why you keep going on about that,” Mrs. Velloc said. “You're in grade eleven. You follow the grade eleven schedule. Wherever Lydia goes—”

“I go. Right. But everybody's not on the same schedule, are they? There's got to be electives.”

“This isn't a country club,” she said. “We concern ourselves with the fundamentals, and only the fundamentals.”

I thought, Cryptobiology is a fundamental?

*   *   *

Students entered the room, quiet as pallbearers. No one chatted or joked. Voluntary, it was clear, was no pep rally.

Dr. Herbert directed me to a high stool in the second row of lab tables, and the students silently took their seats. I recognized some of them from yesterday's Practical Skills class. If I understood Mrs. Velloc correctly, these thirty or so students made up the entire junior class. Which meant there were probably less than 150 students in the whole school. About that many had been in the auditorium during Voluntary.

Two epiphanies: Dunnsmouth Secondary was smaller than I'd thought; and everybody except me was part of their religion.

I felt a chill, as if everyone was staring at me. I was used to being one of the few public atheists in school. But an army of one against the One True Faith of Dunnsmouth? I didn't even know what religion it was. That morning service was like nothing I'd ever heard of.

I kept my face blank and didn't move my head as the students filled the high stools around me.

Lydia sat at the table directly in front of me, in the first row. She didn't look back at me. Two kids took a seat at my table: a short boy with a large nose and fan-like ears, and a girl with blunt bangs and bloodred lipstick. She was the only girl I'd seen in the school who wore makeup. Bat Ears and Goth Girl didn't introduce themselves, however. They barely looked at me—which made me decide that
I
sure wasn't going to say the first word.

Dr. Herbert told us to take out our projects, and my lab mates opened a drawer in the table and withdrew a metal tray much like the one the doctor had been working on. This one, I was relieved to see, contained a normal frog. I'd done frog dissections in my freshman bio class.

Then the girl with the red lipstick took out a large battery, a transformer with a dial, and a bundle of wires. She pushed the battery to me.

“What do we do with this?” I asked.

She opened a three-ring notebook and pointed at a diagram of a frog, decorated with plus and minus signs. “Just hook up the battery to the transformer and the transformer to the subject,” she said.

“We keep going till we get a twitch,” the big-eared boy said.

“Right…,” I said. “And then what? It hops up and dances?”

My lab partners stared at me.

“You know, like the cartoon? Michigan J. Frog. The frog grabs a top hat and cane and starts singing, ‘Hello ma baby, hello ma honey, hello ma ragtime…'”

The girl with the red lips turned on the transformer.

“‘… gal,'” I said quietly to myself.

The rest of the period proceeded in silence. Only Dr. Herbert spoke. He visited the tables, murmuring things like “Very nice, very nice” or “More juice!” When he came to my table he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don't give up hope, Harrison!”

“But it's dead, right?”

“Of course!” he said.

“For, like, a long time?”

“True! But there's no expiration date on the powers of galvanism!”

Beside me, the girl with the red lips rolled her eyes. It was the first sign of personality I'd seen in the class.

The boy filled out the lab report while I poked the corpse with wires. We never got our frog to quiver, much less dance. My lab partners, however, were doing their own twitching. While we were studying the diagram or waiting for the electricity to have some effect on our frog, they'd tap their fingers. First the girl, then the boy, as if they were playing two ends of an invisible piano. Then I noticed that Lydia was doing the same thing.

This was the problem with a small school in a small town. Not only did the students all look like each other, they'd all developed the same nervous tics. It made me wonder about inbreeding. Take off their shoes, and did they have webbed feet? Was the weird-looking fish boy who'd stolen my book just a relative on the more damaged branch of the family tree?

Only at the end of the class, when I signed the lab report, did I find out that my partners were named Garfield and Flora. “I think we've changed some lives today,” I said. That was what my friends and I used to say whenever we'd been forced to do busywork. In San Diego, this was hilarious. Dunnsmouth, however, seemed to be an irony-free zone. Flora rolled her eyes at me. It wasn't quite so liberating to be on the receiving end of that.

As we left the classroom I managed to sidle up next to Lydia. “Mrs. Velloc still says I should follow you.”

“That's going to be a problem,” she said.

“Why's that?”

She didn't answer. We went downstairs, turned right into a corridor that I may or may not have walked down before, then started down another staircase that I definitely hadn't gone down before.

The stairs went down and down. The lighting became more sporadic, and the stone walls gleamed with moisture. Tufts of gray-green moss furred the seams between the stones. If I hadn't been with Lydia and the rest of the junior class, I would never have guessed that there was a class down here.

The stairs emptied out in a big room. “Cave” may have been more accurate; the ceiling was unfinished stone. Loops of electrical cable connected a few yellow light globes. The steps of my classmates echoed strangely.

Opposite us were two rectangular doorways. Like the word “room,” the word “doors” was inaccurate. These were ragged holes, and from them wafted a strange metallic smell.

The girls went into the entrance on the left, the boys on the right. Symbols were carved into the rock above each hole, strange hieroglyphics that didn't look anything like the friendly owls and bulls of ancient Egypt. Just looking at them made me queasy.

“See you on the other side,” Lydia said.

4

Under the water it rumbled on,

Still louder and more dread.

Lydia had been right—following her was going to be a problem. But she couldn't know that following the boys was also going to be a problem for me. They went silently into the dark mouth of the other door, and I did
not
want to go in there.

Garfield passed me, and then looked back. “It's this way,” he said.

I took a breath and went through. The short passage made an abrupt turn, and then I entered a long narrow room. A single stone bench ran down the middle of the space like a spine. Boys were taking off their clothes and hanging them on hooks drilled into one rocky wall, and tucking backpacks into cubbyholes carved into the other wall. As they stripped off, each one seemed to be more pale than the last.

Oh no, I thought. Physical Education.

And then I realized it was even more horrible than that. The boys began to pull on swim trunks. This wasn't just PE; it was
swimming.

Some of the boys glanced at me. I stood there, holding my backpack, not moving. I was not about to get naked in front of these ignorami. I waited until one by one they made their way out the far exit. When there were just a handful of boys left in the changing room, I went out to the pool.

Again: Wrong word.

I'd stepped into a cavern. The high ceiling bristled with stalactites. The walls were ringed with stone benches, as in a Greek theater. Or a Roman arena. And below—below was an immense black pool.

The back of my neck went cold.

I took a breath, held it, trying to still my rabbity heartbeat. Yellow globes, Dunnsmouth Secondary's sole lighting idea, hung down on cables to hover over the water, making it gleam like oil. The terraces of benches, enough to seat several thousand people, rose up into the dark. The air was cold and damp.

I told myself it was going to be fine. Nothing but a little H
2
O, H2. Nothing to fear but millions of cubic gallons of fear itself.

Most of the boys were already down on the wide stone deck that surrounded the pool. The girls were slower to leave their locker room. They came out dressed in dark one-piece suits, some of them in black swim caps. They looked so similar to each other that I couldn't tell which one was Lydia. One of them glared at me, and I realized I'd been staring. Then I realized that glarer was Lydia.

I quickly looked away, and the heat rose in my face. I hoped the lighting was too bad to tell that I was blushing.

I walked down to the water. Goosebumps rose on my arms in the chill, and my leg—the one that wasn't there—ached with the same cold I'd felt this morning. None of the students, however, seemed to be shivering; they stood as still as they had in class. I sat down on one of the benches. No one spoke to me, or asked me why I hadn't changed clothes.

We waited, silently, for two minutes, three. Then a group of boys nearest me stepped back from the edge.

Something moved under the water.

I stood up and stifled a yelp. The pale shape coursed toward the edge of the pool at tremendous speed. At the last moment, the water broke, and the creature threw itself onto the deck. It slid a few feet, then threw out its arms and rose up on its belly like a walrus.

It was a man. A bald man, fat and white as a beluga. He smiled. “Who's ready for laps?”

Lydia and the rest of the students moved down to the end of the pool and formed two lines. They'd done this many times, I guessed. One by one they dove, slipping in with hardly a splash, and torpedoed under the water for dozens of yards. They broke the surface almost gently, pale limbs stroking the surface. They looked like an Olympic swim team. A silent, glum Olympic swim team.

The pale man had gotten to his feet. He saw me and walked heavily over, water dripping from his pale, hairless chest. He wore a tiny black Speedo that seemed to pinch the tops of his thighs. Hanging on a chain around his neck was a silver whistle.

“You're the new boy,” he said. His voice was deep, and his vowels warbled as if water had settled into his lungs. He held out a hand. “I'm Coach Shug.”

I hesitated, then shook. His hand was cold as raw steak.

“Why aren't you suited up?” he asked.

“I don't swim,” I said. I dried my palm on my pants.

His small black eyes narrowed farther. “Everybody swims.”

“I have a medical condition,” I said.

“Parasites? Heartworm? Shankies?”

“No,” I said. “This.” I lifted the leg of my pants and tapped the carbon-fiber shin.

“What happened?”

“I got bit by a dog,” I said.

“Must have been a hell of a dog.”

“I was three,” I said. “Snack size.”

He grunted. “Well, that's no reason not to get in the water. I know plenty of maimed and limbless people who swim just fine.”

Maimed and limbless?
I thought. Then:
Plenty?

“You can't let a peg leg slow you down,” Coach Shug continued. “Hell, aquatics may be one of the few sports where a few missing parts is no impediment. You can't be afraid of the water just because you haven't learned to swim with it.”

“I'm not
afraid
of the water,” I said. I'm pretty sure I kept my voice even. “I'm just not going
in
it.”

He blinked at me. “You're serious.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Huh.” He rubbed his belly. “You'll need a note.”

“To say that I don't have a leg?”

“To explain why your lack of a few parts should make a lick of difference. Medically speaking. Go to the nurse's office, then hurry back.” He turned toward the water and lifted his whistle.

“I don't know where that is,” I said.

“Behind the cafeteria,” he said without turning around. “Can't miss it.” The whistle shrieked, and the sound reverberated in the arena like a silver headache.

*   *   *

Okay, I'd lied to Coach Shug. But “a dog ate my leg” has been my standard answer for so long that it didn't feel like lying.

Besides, the answer was a little more complicated. My lower leg wasn't gone entirely. I had a phantom limb that I carried around with me. Weirdly, it was a lot shorter than my other leg. My doctor back in California told me that there was a part of my brain that still thought there should be a shin and a foot down there, even if it wasn't sure how big they were. Any random signal could be assigned to the missing limb. Some days it felt like I had a meat foot inside my fake one.