In response, I gripped the oversized steering wheel so tightly the blood drained from my knuckles as I pulled myself to the edge of my seat and peered over the dash into the blustering night. Lightning split the darkness horizontally, forking into electric veins that pulsed through the gray-black sky, hanging heavy and thick as a corpse’s skin over the farmlands.
“Just a little bit farther,” I pleaded with Bert. He had a bad track record of getting me stuck in situations that nobody would want to be stuck in. It was Bert that’d made me late for the PSATs. My mind chewed over the events of the night, the stack of mounting failures that rubbed at my nerves, the unshakable feeling that the answer was obvious only I was somehow too thick or nearsighted to see it.
Thunder rattled the cup holders, and I put my palm over the top of an empty can of Dr Pepper till it stopped. I gnawed on my lip, rifling through my brain the same way an ordinary kid might the pages of a textbook, before making another go of concentrating on the highway instead of the rat.
The sky hovered tangibly above like a ticking time bomb. My headlights scouted the road ahead by inches not feet, and the rain fell in white sheets I could hardly see through. It was only when I was practically even with it that I could read our city sign: WELCOME TO HOLLOW PINES, TEXAS!, with an exclamation mark, like Hollow Pines was some place to get excited about.
I peeled a hand off the steering wheel to fiddle with the radio; the speakers were drowning in static. I slammed the heel of my hand onto the dash, but the faint buzz of static persisted. I cursed at the station before fumbling for a scratched CD I kept in the side-door compartment. A halting, stop-and-go version of the White Stripes’ first album crackled through as the city-limits sign melted into the rain. The dark silhouette of cornstalks blurred in the faint glare of my windows, and from here the two-lane country road started to curve around town. I forced Bert to stay centered.
Just then, my phone buzzed in the center console. A text from Owen flashed on the screen:
Eureka!
Lightning flickered overhead. Eureka?
Oh my god.
Eureka!
This was it. The breakthrough. The universal code of scientists everywhere. Eur-freaking-eka.
I shoved the phone into the pocket of my zipped hoodie and glanced up. For an instant, time was suspended like two objects dropping through a tub of high-density glycerin. There was the car. There was me. And then …
There was him.
He appeared in the middle of the road like a highwayman’s ghost. Rain tumbled down around him, and the golden glow of the headlights lit up his white face as he screamed.
My foot fumbled for the brakes. My elbows straightened. I pushed back into the headrest. Wheels skidded and the moment filled with cottony silence. Then Bert’s nose plowed into him with a sickening thud.
THREE
Scientific Method, Step 2—Applied Research:
Professor Giovanni Aldini first performed the process of galvanism in 1803. The process of galvanism involved three troughs that combined forty plates of zinc and copper and were applied through the arcs of two metallic wires descending from the ear to the jaw. The first experiment took place on the severed head of George Forster, who was hung for an hour at Newgate Prison at subfreezing temperatures for the drowning of his wife and child in the Paddington Canal. Aldini secured the body and succeeded in causing the jaw to quiver and the left eye to open.
*
The body hit the hood. The windshield splintered into a star. I ducked as the clunk of shoulders and boots pounded the sunroof on their way to the trunk.
My foot finally slammed on the brake, and Bert’s tail whipped sideways. I slid to a stop, facing the opposite direction from where I began. I turned the CD off and could hear my heart hammering. My hands shook.
“One Mississippi … two Mississippi…” My breath wavered. I cut the engine but left the headlights on.
There, in the middle of the road, lay a heap. It wasn’t moving.
I squeezed my eyes shut. This was not happening. I was supposed to go to Harvard or Penn—not penitentiary. But all I could see was his face lit up by the glow of headlights. Over and over, I saw his features morph into surprise.
Swallowing hard, I unlatched the door. Rain poured over me as if from a showerhead. Sodden strips of auburn hair, dangling almost to my shoulders, cleaved to my throat and chin like leeches.
It was the sort of moment that didn’t seem real. The part in a dream where you suddenly become self-aware and start looking around for clues that your surroundings are projections. But the asphalt was hard beneath my sneakers. The rain turned my thin black sweatshirt into dead weight that stuck to my ribs and clung to the waist of my jeans. I gulped a sticky wad of saliva, and the roar of the storm grew louder.
One foot in front of the other, I trudged on wobbly legs closer to the heap. The nearer I got, the more human the heap became.
My insides lurched.
“Hello?” I yelled through the sheets of rain. I glanced back at Bert looming in the distance. I’d seen horror movies begin this way. “Hello? Are you all right?” I used my cupped hands as a megaphone. There wasn’t so much as a flinch.