The class fell silent. ‘DNA makes up everything inside of you,’ he boomed. ‘It determines what you look like and how you think, if you’re going to get sick and whether you’re smart or stupid. All you need to know about yourself is right here in this little molecule. Everything about your future, everything about your past. Nothing else matters, and you can’t change it. It’s passed down, directly, from your parents. You can’t escape your parents and your parents can’t escape you, as hard as either of you might try. You’re tethered to them for life.’
Everyone murmured. Jennifer Lake raised her hand, then put it back down quickly. ‘Even the DNA that may not code for anything,’ Mr Rice went on, his voice swooping up and down, the way a hawk climbs and dives. ‘The stuff that’s called junk DNA. It does code for something-something huge. It codes for the secrets, stuff we never admit to anyone. Once we crack its code, we’ll have the answers to everything, but right now, I think the only beings that understand junk DNA’s secrets are the aliens.’
Mr Rice turned and drew a dish-shaped spaceship on the board. An eggplant-headed alien peeked out the top, and Mr Rice etched a dotted line beaming right to the helix of DNA. The sweat on his forehead reminded me of the beads of water that gathered on the outside of a plastic bottle on a hot day. A couple of boys at the back coughed insults into their fists. But Mr Rice’s words echoed in my mind. This is what your whole life is about. You can’t escape your parents and your parents can’t escape you.
Before this, our school’s principal had missed every other instance of unorthodox teaching, so it was something of a surprise when his face appeared outside the classroom door. Then there was a knock. ‘Everything okay, Mr Rice?’ He stuck his head in. His eyes glided to the slapdash spaceship on the chalkboard.
I stared at the spaceship, too. There were so many things I worried about. I’d always been a worrier-my father said worrying was in our blood. Just one week before, one of my most pressing worries had been that I would drop my set of keys to the apartment onto the subway tracks. I was so obsessed with the precarious danger of it, I flirted with the idea of pitching the keys down there willingly, just to know what would happen. But if I did, I would have to sit on the stoop in front of our apartment building, keyless, until my mother returned home from work. I didn’t want to imagine what she would say, the pinched, disappointed shape her face would take.
I used to worry about the lone gray hairs I often saw sprouting from my mother’s head, terrified that she was showing signs of advanced and debilitating age. When she started to shut herself in the bathroom for hours at a time, talking quietly on the phone, I worried that she was hiding a horrible sickness from the rest of us. I pictured a devastating disease ripping her apart, her skin peeling off in curls, her heart blackening. When we received a catalogue from the Vitamin Shoppe in the mail, I put it by her plate at breakfast, convinced its glossy pages contained a miracle pill. But she pushed the catalogue aside. My father absently flipped through it instead, commenting on the high price of spirulina tablets and chromium picolinate diet pills. In all my what-if scenarios, I never envisioned my father physically ill. The dark hours he spent under the covers were due to something different, not sickness.
What had happened to my family a few days before this was something else entirely-something far bigger than anything I’d even dared to consider. But Mr Rice’s words made me think that maybe I didn’t have to worry about it after all.
The substitute’s shoulders slumped as he walked into the hall with the principal. As soon as the door shut, one of the fist-coughing boys snorted, ‘What a loser.’ Someone threw a balled-up piece of notebook paper at the alien spaceship. One by one, like dominoes falling over, everyone began to talk, to forget. I was the only one who didn’t laugh.
The following day, when my father told me that Claire Ryan and her mother were coming over to visit in a few minutes, I was struck dumb. Just because I was friends with someone a couple years ago didn’t mean we liked each other now. I thought my father understood this.
‘Claire?’ I shrieked. ‘Are you sure? Why?’
‘Her mother wants to talk to me, that’s why,’ my father explained. ‘And she’s bringing Claire because she thought it would be nice for you two to see each other again.’
The doorbell rang. I looked at my father. He was wearing plaid slippers and had the same Pfizer t-shirt he’d been wearing for days. Our house had magazines piled by the fireplace, empty soda bottles on the coffee table, and a crooked, undecorated Christmas tree in the corner, needles all over the floor. It was amazing how messy things could get in just two weeks.