“No time like the present, apparently.” My eyes flitted up to the tiled ceiling, where there was a smattering of chewed-up gum. I twisted my head. How on earth did people get it up there?
“It’s weird. Our paths just, like, never crossed until now.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to tune her out. “Ninth grade,” I said through gritted teeth. Idiot. I regretted saying anything the instant it came out of my mouth.
“Huh?”
I sighed, unfurling sheets of toilet paper. “You put fliers up at the football games. A superunflattering picture with my number and the caption: Call for a good time. Effective, but zero points for originality.” One of the Oilerettes had caught me picking a wedgie in my PE uniform and snapped a photograph. Three days of prank calls and I was convinced I’d have to get a new phone number. Finally, I just stopped checking voice mail altogether, a habit that had stuck.
“Oh.” Her toes disappeared from my line of vision. “Right. It wasn’t just you, though.”
I wanted to say something to this, but I wanted to pee even more, so I did and then kicked the handle to flush.
“I’m really sorry about that.” Cassidy followed me to the sink. In the mirror’s reflection, I saw her bite her lip. “It wasn’t me. I swear. Paisley has a tendency to take things a little too far.” I stared at her through the mirror. “Okay, a lot too far.”
I wiped my hands on the back of my jeans. Something in the way Cassidy said this felt sincere. “It’s no big deal.”
She lit up with the kind of smile you’d see on the “after” pics of an acne commercial. “So, how long have you and Adam been hooking up, anyway?” she asked all nonchalant. She even turned her nails over to examine them up close.
I wanted to leave, but Cassidy was standing directly and strategically between me and the door. “What does hooking up mean, anyway? People always say that—hooking up—what is that? Does it mean dating? Making out? Boning? These seem like pretty important distinctions except that no one ever knows what anyone else is talking about. I move for the uniformity of the phrase ‘hooking up.’ Who’s with me?” I put my hand out, team-huddle-style.
Cassidy had a Tinker Bell laugh. “You’re funny.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “But seriously, how long have you and Adam been hooking up?”
I rolled my eyes. “We’re not.” I determined that at least in the Victoria Frankenstein dictionary, planting a surprise kiss during a carnival ride didn’t meet the hookup threshold.
Her eyelashes fluttered over her cheeks. “Not?”
“No way.” My neck felt sweaty and gross. “We’re, I don’t know, like brother and sister or something.”
“Not hooking up,” she repeated under her breath, now turning to fluff her hair in the mirror.
“That’s what I said.” I rocked back on my heels.
She pulled a canister of lip gloss out of her pocket and glided the wand over her mouth from corner to corner. “So you wouldn’t mind, then, if I did.” I could tell by the drop in her intonation that Cassidy wasn’t asking a question. She smacked her lips together and stepped back to admire her reflection.
In that moment, I’d suddenly forgotten what to do with my hands, and my throat felt like someone had poured a bottle of Elmer’s glue down it and the only thing that I could gurgle out was a weird strangled version of, “Of course not.”
Of course not. I really was getting used to this lying thing.
TWENTY-ONE
The experiment results are unprecedented. The subject displays keen athletic ability, a pleasant demeanor in social settings, and the ability to interact with peers. A once-dead body has been absorbed by a high school. Adam is a near-perfect specimen. I’m reminded of the great scientist Ian Wilmut, who could find not one fault in his cloned sheep Dolly. I must be vigilant, though, if the story of Dolly is to be recalled, since that sheep had only half the life span of other sheep of her breed, so Wilmut must have been missing something.
*
“In ten thousand years, creatures like you and me will be completely phased out, and the world will be overrun by Cassidy Hydes.” I’d made the mistake of telling Owen about my lunchtime adventures, and this was his response. “And then someday a kindly old scientist will come extract our DNA from a preserved sample of fossilized amber and they’ll create a whole park filled with misfits and rejects, and people will come from far and wide to gawk at the hideous creatures that once roamed the earth.” Owen performed a dramatic sweep of his arm. “And that’s when we’ll go all crazy-eyed and try to rip their hearts out, and they’ll try to Tase us or something but will ultimately decide that they should have never re-created us in the first place and leave us to be weirdo misfits all alone together on an island where there will hopefully be mai tais with those little umbrella straws.”
“You have issues.” I fitted my lab goggles over the bridge of my nose. “You know that, don’t you? Real problems. You should see a psychiatrist.”