“Sure,” Laurence said without hesitating. He was poking holes in his gray, clammy hamburger with a knife. “You already know all of my secrets.”
“Great.” Patricia lowered her voice and covered her mouth. “So listen. You probably won’t even believe any of this. I know it’s going to sound crazy. But I have to tell someone. You’re the only one I can tell.” She told the whole story, as best she could.
6
EVERY TIME LAURENCE showed Patricia another one of his inventions, he felt a crick in his neck. Sort of a charley horse, that only happened when he pulled an experimental device out of his knapsack. He wondered about this for days until he realized: He was instinctively flinching away from Patricia and lifting one shoulder. Braced for her to call him a creep.
“Here’s something I’ve been working on,” he would start to say—and then his neck would spasm. Even when he realized he was doing it, he couldn’t stop. Like part of him always flashed back to his sixth-grade Show-and-Tell disaster, the Laserscoop.
But if anything, Patricia just seemed endlessly curious. Even when he showed her the remote-controlled cyborg cockroach kit he’d ordered from the internet, one day after school. “Here’s where you connect it to the roach’s central nervous system, so it will obey all of your fiendish commands,” Laurence said, pointing at the little wires on the tiny metal wedge, fresh out of the box. A truck belched underneath the pedestrian overpass they were sitting on, so neither of them could talk until it had passed.
“Roach-borg.” Patricia looked at the roach-saddle in Laurence’s palm. “That is nuts.” She started to do a Borg voice from Star Trek: “Doritos are irrelevant.”
“So you’re not grossed out?” Laurence put it back in the box it came in, and the box back in the knapsack. He looked at her: still kind of giggling, though with a nervy edge to it. A car pulled a boat down the road. Probably the last chance for sailing this year.
Patricia considered this. “Sure, it’s kind of yuck. But not as bad as when we dissected a cow brain in Biology class. I just don’t feel sorry for a roach.” Her legs kicked against the metal underside of the bridge, through the slats in the railing. Right now, as far as Laurence’s parents knew, he and Patricia were halfway up the Crystal Lake Trail.
They both just watched the cars for a moment. Patricia had taken to rolling up the sleeves of her uniform cardigan all the time, so people could tell at a glance that she wasn’t cutting herself—she really wasn’t, okay?
“Just remember,” Patricia said in a suddenly grown-up voice, “control is an illusion.” He could see the unscathed veins in her bare forearm. He realized she was quoting the magic voice she’d talked to. “And yet,” she went on, “I’m still jealous of your toys. You just never give up. You keep on making stuff. And whenever you show off something new to me, you have this look of joy on your face.”
“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.
She shrugged. “Well, you look joyful. You get all excited. I envy that.”
Laurence wondered if he could possibly cringe and be joyful at the same time. He rubbed his sore neck, first with one hand, then with both.
For some reason, Laurence believed Patricia’s story about talking to some birds and having an out-of-body experience. He was still kind of a gullible person, which had made him easy to prank at summer camp—but also, he rebelled at the idea of starting to close off possibilities in the world. If Patricia, who was sort of his friend, believed this stuff, then he wanted to support her. Also, she was suffering for her “witchcraft” and it would offend some basic sense of fairness for Laurence to think she was being punished for nothing. And really, was her story any crazier than other stuff, like the way Laurence’s body seemed to be rolling out new, totally unrequested features with alarming speed? Not really.