Teen Frankenstein (33 page)

He took the mug from me. “You know, you make it awfully hard to want to be hospitable.” He gestured to a pile of sofa pillows stacked near his desk. “I slept on the floor. Like a gentleman.”

I lowered my eyes, feeling a healthy surge of insta-guilt. “Sorry.”

“I broke curfew for you, you know,” he said.

“Bastard.” I bit my lip and wrinkled my nose.

Owen dropped onto his desk chair, leaving the cup of coffee with me. “Not quite the thank-you I was expecting,” he said, interlocking his fingers behind his head.

“Not you.” I breathed in the steam. I felt as though I'd been punched in the nose. “
Knox
. Knox Hoyle is a bastard of the highest order.”

“Is this just your standard Saturday fare or did He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named do something particularly heinous in the last twenty-four hours.”

The hot liquid scalded my tongue. “He slipped something in my drink.” Owen's hands separated and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I had sworn myself to carbonated beverages only. Knox got me a refill. Next thing I know, I can't see straight.”

“That explains the ‘Queen of the Sloppy Drunks' comment.”

“
Whose
comment?”

“Don't get mad.” Owen slid a Wolverine comic book from his desk and flipped through the pages without stopping to study any of the illustrations. “Cassidy called me. She … had some choice words to share about you.” He idly returned the comic book to its stack. “But, uh, she thought someone should come get you, so she tried me.”

Something snagged in my stomach. She
did
that? For me. My chest felt warm and melty right before the deep, sickening regret sank in.

“They saw his scars,” I said. “And … they think we hooked up.”

“What does ‘hooked up' mean, anyway?” Owen asked.

“I don't know, but whatever it is, it's not good.” I sighed and launched into the whole story. Or at least I tried to make it the whole story. I wasn't sure whether parts of it made sense. Bits of my memory were holes, like a rat had come and chewed through parts of the night. Now I knew how Adam felt. “I'm pretty sure Knox's arm is broken,” I finished. “His parents will destroy Adam.”

But then again, there wasn't really any Adam to destroy. Adam Smith was a thing we'd made up—invented—and once they punched through that facade, I worried that the person they'd find hiding behind it would be me.

*   *   *

ADAM WAS MISSING.
Again. Only this time he wasn't at school and he wasn't in the cellar and he wasn't in my car. He'd vanished. Owen and I had been searching for him for hours, ever since I woke up cursing Knox Hoyle's name in Owen's bed. I hadn't even brushed my hair, let alone my teeth, and this solitary stick of gum in my mouth was starting to have the consistency of wet cement.

“This is useless.” Owen drove slowly down the side roads while I hung my elbows out the open passenger-side window and scanned the blocks for a sign. “We should go home. You should take a shower.”

“We're not giving up. Either we find him first or Knox's parents do. Which of those sounds better to you?” Owen propped his elbow on the window and kept driving. “That's what I thought.”

I probably should have been more panicked than I was. I probably should have been freaking out. And I was, but it was a dull kind of freaking out. Like a blade that had been used too often. I was thinking about the shell-boy that I'd created and what would happen if that shell stopped being such a good hiding place. What would happen to me then?

But this could all be fixed. One tweak in the formula. One change in the variables and—presto—all would be well. The contents of my stomach felt swampy, and the drugs in my system wouldn't let go. I felt hot and listless. Beads of sweat gathered on my upper lip. I wiped them away.

“Does it look overcast to you?” I asked. A dingy blanket of clouds hovered over the cotton fields, absorbing the puffs of smoke from the city's factories.

“Yeah, why?” Owen kept licking his lips and leaning over the steering wheel to see better, I guessed.

I rested my chin on my arm and stared out. “The weather report said a storm was coming in five days,” I said. “Doesn't look like it'll hold that long to me.”

Owen drove us into town, and the landscape stretched into a curved pyramid in the side view mirror, where I knew the three lightning generators waited, hidden from view, coursing with a power so strong it could stand your hair on end.

Once in town, the wooden train tracks we'd been running beside disappeared between brick buildings. Owen drove around the deserted parking lot of the old red Movies 8 Theater with the black-and-white checkered ticket booth, then into a strip mall.

“Try the square,” I said. “Town's not that big.” Last I checked, there weren't even twenty-five thousand people in Hollow Pines. Sure, Adam was a needle, but the haystack wasn't all that large.

At a stoplight, Owen turned left onto Grand Avenue. Flat, front buildings with block-letter signs lined the street. A large clock on an iron lamppost marked the time as a quarter past six. It was already getting late.

My stomach growled. As we drove slowly past the streaked windows beneath a flat green awning, a sheet of paper taped to a stop sign caught my eye. I hung further out the car, noticing the face on the poster as it drew closer. “Stop!” I yelled.

The wheels screeched against concrete. I popped the lock and slammed the door behind me. The flyer fluttered against the metal pole. I tore it down and held it in trembling hands. A black-and-white picture of a dark-haired boy with deep-set eyes and a straight nose stared out at me with the word
Missing
branded over his head and the words
John Wheeler
printed underneath it. Unlike when I'd first seen the picture of Trent Jackson Westover, I knew immediately that this boy was Adam.

Only less dead.

I scoured the surrounding area. Not ten feet away, there was another, identical flyer pinned to the display window of a jewelry store. I marched over to it and stripped the paper from the window.

John Wheeler
. That name was a punch to the face, waking me up to what was real. And that was a boy named John.

I saw another one a short distance farther. A corner tore off when I ripped it down, crumpling the page in my fist. Owen's horn blared behind me.

I worried that I was being watched, that someone would see me. I crushed John Wheeler's photograph over and over as I followed the trail of flyers. An engine revved beside me and a door slammed. Lock beeped twice. Footsteps ran toward me as I reached up for another flyer. I was two blocks away from where I'd begun.

“What are you doing?” Owen said, spinning me. “I'm double-parked.”

I crammed the freshly picked flyer into his chest, and he shuffled back. Peeling the paper away from his body, he stared down at the picture. There weren't very many words on the page, but Owen looked for a long time. His lips pressed into a white slash. “It's him,” he said at last.

I took a deep breath. “It's him.”

Owen and I collected flyers like bread crumbs, destroying the evidence and the search for John Wheeler. The fact that anybody might have seen these was enough to make me break out in hives. I handed my collection to Owen, and he stuffed it in a garbage bin.

He straightened and froze. “Look.” He nodded up the road where a stoplight blinked from yellow to red. Near a sign that marked the way toward State Highway 24 was a girl taping a poster to a storefront with boarded-up windows. She stood on her tippy-toes and fastened the paper to the wood.

I took off toward her.

“Tor,” Owen hissed. “Where are you going?”

I didn't pay attention to him, and he didn't follow. When she heard me approach, the girl snapped her chin up to meet me. At first, I thought that I'd misjudged and maybe she was just a kid, but when I got closer, I saw that she was only small. She clutched a stack of papers in her hand and a roll of duct tape.

“Just posting, if that's all right with you,” she said in a thick country accent. This girl was all pointy elbows and sharp eyes. She wasn't unpretty exactly. I could appreciate her in the same way I might the appearance of a starving raccoon. Cute, but scrappy. Tattered jean shorts hung off her hips, exposing a heart-shaped freckle on the bony ridge of her pelvis. “Been putting these all over town,” she said, tearing off a strip of tape with her teeth.

I hadn't prepared anything to say. She stared at me expectantly, like she wasn't sure whether to call a doctor or the police. At this point, both were probably worthy choices. “Who—uh—” I pointed. “Who is that? Do you know him?” In my mind I repeated the words she had said:
all over town
. My palms began to sweat.

She looked at me sideways. “Why? You seen him?”

I folded my arms, squirmed, and then scratched my temple. “Me? No. I—there's just been a lot of boys going missing around here, you know?” I rubbed my arms to fight off imaginary goose bumps. On a hazy day like today, it was always tough to tell when the sun was beginning to set, but I noticed her shadow stretching along the length of sidewalk and knew that the day's light was fading. “Hard to feel safe anywhere.”

She nodded. “I heard about that. The Hunter of Hollow Pines. Gives you the creeps, doesn't it?” She made a little visible shiver. “If it eases your mind, though, I don't think he's one of them.”

“Oh.” I forced a smile. “That's good to hear.”

I couldn't pull my eyes away from the poster. Heat crawled up my neck. I tugged at the fabric around my collar. I wanted to snatch the poster away and add it to my trash collection.

“How do you know that he—” I kicked the ground, hiding my face in case I was a worse liar than I thought. “Isn't, you know, one of the other boys that went missing?”

She started to open her mouth when another round of honking came from the road. I looked over to find Owen had pulled even, and he was waving me in, mouthing,
Are you crazy?

“Looks like your ride's here.” She offered a small shrug and handed me a flyer. “If you do hear or see anything, call me, okay?”

“Sure,” I glanced back over my shoulder at her. She was already taping up another flyer. We'd have to circle back to tear down the rest of them later. I folded Adam's face in half, then in quarters, until he was hidden from view, but not from memory. The boy smiling in the picture was genuine. He was more than decaying energy racing through his blood and forcing his neurons to fire. He had history. And he had Meg.

 

THIRTY-THREE

I wish I had access to a CT scan. Then I could really see how Adam's brain is functioning. By my best estimate, the brain stem and cerebellum would be lit up, firing on all cylinders. The frontal lobe would exhibit moderate coloring, and the hippocampus would be waking up to the first blooms of light on the scan.

*   *   *

“Victoria Frankenstein.” Owen put the Jeep into park and extended his hand, palm up. Moonlight gleamed off the windshields of dozens of empty cars in the school lot. “Will you go to the dance with me?” A sly smile dimpled his cheek. His eyes danced under his lenses.

I rolled my eyes. “Don't make this worse than it already is.” I climbed out of the car and stared up at the school gymnasium. “Let's just go.”

Owen's door banged shut. “Is it because I'm underdressed? Because I must say, you look positively stunning if I do say so myself. Who are you wearing? Is that Levi's?”

Okay, I probably did look like hell caked over and then left to ferment in the sun. I was still wearing my clothes from last night, which now looked like they'd been left for three days in the dirty laundry bin. Instead of heels, I followed the sidewalk in a pair of threadbare high-tops. I had meant to stop home before heading to the dance, but then we'd found all those flyers and we spent every spare moment ripping them down, a difficult task when they seemed to multiply faster than fruit flies. At least my face had stopped throbbing like one giant zit waiting to be popped.

“Save your corsage,” I said. “We're just here to find Adam.”

In front of us, the gym was busy barfing up orange and black balloons and techno beats. A white banner welcomed us to “A Night in Paris,” the theme of this year's Homecoming dance. We walked through a cardboard cutout of the Arc de Triomphe, where a chaperone offered us a glass of “French champagne.” I sniffed the cup. My stomach rumbled. The last thing I'd eaten was a handful of tortilla chips in Knox's kitchen. I drank the swigs of sparkling grapefruit juice in two quick gulps and wiped my mouth.

“Just so you know, if I see Knox, I'm going to kill him.”

“One illegal act at a time,” Owen said. Together, we surveyed the crowd. Adam had now been missing for nearly twenty-four hours. We'd looked everywhere we could think of, and this now seemed like the best possible bet for an Adam sighting. Unfortunately, there was no scientific term for “last-ditch effort.”

The dance was in full swing. A flock of girls passed by, hair twisted up into unnatural knots, rhinestones sparkling off chiffon dresses. “I think we should split up,” I said. “Cover twice the ground.”

“Cell phone signal?” Owen asked.

I pulled out the clunky prepaid phone I'd purchased at the mall. “Check.”

“Meet back here at the Arc de Triomphe if we haven't found him in thirty minutes.”

I nodded, and then, without a backward glance, I disappeared into the mass of people. Even though I was a slight person, slipping through a horde of dancing bodies wasn't easy. It was tougher still since the definition of dancing seemed to be grinding one's rear end against the front end of someone else. I searched faces for anyone who had been at the party. “Have you seen Cassidy Hyde?” I yelled into a girl's ear. She shook her head and kept dancing. At the center of the throng, I knew I'd reached the fifth circle of hell, where all the people who were coupled up came to make out beyond the reach of the chaperones' watchful eyes.