I laughed. This was the guy I was scared might be a monster? “I’ll see if we have some in the freezer.” I had already learned that Adam could consume an entire bag all by himself.
I was stepping out of the car when I noticed something different about the hatch. “No.” My eyes got big. I left the car door hanging wide open. “No, no, no, no, no.” I jogged over to the door of my laboratory. It was boarded shut. Plywood lay across the length of it, with bent nails sticking halfway out. “What?” I tugged on my hair. “No!” Everything was in there. All that I needed for a recharge. All my data. All my texts. What was it doing boarded up?
I spun back to Adam and held out my palm. “Stay inside,” I said. “Stay down.” He dropped back into his seat, and then when I motioned to him again, he lay down, disappearing from view but for the barely visible curve of his back. I looked back one more time at the spot where Adam was hiding and then at my laboratory. Einstein let out high-pitched barks from behind the screen door.
“Mom!” I yelled, stomping into the main house. “Mom!” I repeated. “Did you see someone boarding up my lab—the cellar? It’s all blocked. I can’t get in. Mom!” I tore through the kitchen, passing the piles of dishes and pushing a wicker chair out of my way.
I didn’t have to look far, because I found her waiting for me in the living room, twirling a glass of red Merlot like she was at a fancy dinner party instead of in the middle of our crummy living room.
“Mom!” I shouted again. “Somebody nailed boards to the cellar.” I pointed outside.
“I know,” she said, and took a long slurp from her wineglass. “Because it was me.” She grinned. The wine made her mouth look toothy.
“You?” The rest of the words lost their sound the moment they tried to leave my mouth. I stood dumbstruck. The fact that my mother conceived of this scheme and then succeeded in actually carrying it out was almost too much to comprehend. “What are you talking about? You can’t do that,” I shouted, panic climbing up my throat. “That was Dad’s cellar. He wanted me to have it. What were you thinking? All my equipment is down there. I’m doing my best work. Why would you do that?”
She pointed her finger at the ceiling, where, through the roof shingles, we could hear the metallic squeal of the weather vane. “I’ve been telling you to fix that racket, Victoria Frankenstein. I’ve been telling you more times than I have fingers or toes. But all you care about is your laboratory. And your cellar. And your science.” She said these words like a playground taunt, and I felt the skin around my neck flame. “You’re just like your father.”
“Good!” I screamed. As long as I was nothing like her. Fury clawed at me. I wanted to break something. A chair. A vase. Anything. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and seethed.
Her shoulders shook with laughter. “I told you, you think you’re smarter than everybody, but I’m still your mom.”
Tears burned the back of my eyes. Tears that never came for my father but were now there in a white-hot rage. “You are the opposite of helpful! You are worse than Einstein!” I yelled, and stalked out of the room. I sounded like a teenage girl, which I absolutely, positively hated, but my mother was standing in the way of progress. What I was doing was important. It was maybe the most important work on the planet right now. Didn’t she realize that Dad had been killed by a single shock, but I’d manage to create life from the same source?
Of course she didn’t. She knew nothing. I knew when I’d been beat. Breathing hard, I retrieved the ladder from our garage, which acted more as a storage shed than a place for cars. I dragged the ends of the ladder across the dirt until I could prop the top of it against the roof. I put my foot on the bottom rung and shook it to make sure I wouldn’t fall to my death. Mom would probably think that was my fault, too.
When it seemed secure enough, I scaled the rest of the rungs and pulled myself onto the roof, still wishing I had any mother but the one I had. The shingles were warm and gritty. Bits stuck in my hands and dimpled the heels. I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to take a hammer and nails to my laboratory. It made me want to stomp through the roof and break the ceiling.