Catalyst (13 page)

I fight to keep my eyes open. Mikey snored again last night, so I put on my sneakers and ran until I got lost, then I kept running. It was like I had an extra lung or something. The farther I ran, the more energy I had. And then I came home and watched television until Mikey woke up.

Construction noise echoes off the hills and penetrates the stained-glass windows. If I listen hard enough, I can hear the sound of the rotten parts of Teri’s house being ripped up. Not all the volunteers go to our church, and some of them have been working since breakfast. Teri went down there with a flashlight before the sun rose.

I pray to Zeus. To Hera. To Thor, Loki, Freya, Aphrodite, to Jesus, to Mohammed, to Moses, to Lord Vishnu and Ganesha and the Turtle with the World on His Back and to the Godplace I lost in me when I wasn’t looking: Let me in. Let me in MIT. You all know I belong there, I need to be there, it’s all I’ve ever wanted, it’s what I’ve worked for my entire life. Let me in and I’ll be nice to Teri, honestly, truly nice. I’ll live up to every standard of charity and kindness. I’ll help her with her house, her brother, her mom, her hair. I’ll find her a date. I’ll find her a job. I know you’re testing me. I’m good at tests.

After I murmur “Amen,” it occurs to me that I don’t pray.

Too late.

The congregation stands to sing. Toby is glued to the Game Boy hidden in his hymnal. When we sit back down, Mikey crawls into my lap. Two minutes into Dad’s sermon, the kid is sound asleep—not snoring. I smooth his hair and press his head against my shoulder. I wish my contacts could see into his head, see the world through his eyes. What would he think of MIT? Of college? All he cares about are trucks and cartoons and cereal. And Teri; he worships her.

Dad’s sermon wanders through the Old Testament, skims across the New Testament, touches down by Walden Pond, and borrows the wisdom of Woody Guthrie and Nelson Mandela to make his point about helping neighbors and building community. If I were feeling cynical, I’d point out that he is guilting the congregation into helping the Litches. But he’s so happy, so earnestly, ministerly, Dadly happy; this is what he was put on earth to do, to remind people how to be nice to one another.

Mikey stirs, turns his face. The cheek that was lying against me is damp with sweat. I blow gently on his skin to cool it down. I wish there were someone big enough to hold me in their lap so I could nap. No, a coma. I wish I could slip into a coma for a few months. That would feel good.

I just need a way to get through this week. I have to find a way to get some sleep, deal with MIT, put up with all the withering, pitying, gloating looks from my classmates, evade the well-meaning support of teachers, not piss off Teri, figure out why Mitch is beginning to bug me, and stop running. I think I can do it.

Please, gods.

6.0

Electrostatic Forces

SAFETY TIP: Use gloves when handling steel wool.

By Monday morning, Operation Amish Rebuild is in full swing. Teri blows off school so she can work with Pete and his construction crew. My job is to drive Mikey to preschool, the one at Merryweather High. It feels weird, looking in the rearview mirror and seeing him waving at me. I sing the elements song fifty million times. He says “Twuck.”

Cerberus the security guard stops us at the door to school. I have my ID card out and ready.

“Do you want to see his, too?” I ask.

Her upper lip twitches. “Why do you have Teri Litch’s little brother with you?”

“He’s an extra-credit project.”

“Don’t get an attitude with me, missy.”

I consider biting off her head, but it would set a bad example. I do the boring thing and explain about Teri, house, fire, yadda-yadda. She waves us through. Once we are through the lobby, I swear under my breath. Mikey repeats what I say, as loud as humanly possible.

“I heard that!” bellows the security guard.

“We definitely need to work on your vocab, pal,” I tell him.

As we walk past the
Student Body
sculpture, Mikey growls like a bear, then bursts out laughing.

After I drop off Mikey, I have to face my failure and humiliation. Chem class is torture. People keep looking at me with pity and Diana won’t let me touch the Bunsen burner. The guidance office is still jammed with bodies.

Mitch isn’t in the cafeteria second period and that’s just fine with me. I do not want to finish the conversation he started in the grocery store. Sara makes me eat a jelly doughnut and then forces me to write up a list of options. She wants me to “free my imagination, be bold.” Here is what I come up with:

Quantum Futures

1. Get MIT to admit they made a mistake. Enroll.

2. Sue MIT to get them to admit they made a mistake. Enroll.

3. Steal identity from someone who was mistakenly let in. No, can’t do that.

4. I still like Option #1.

5. (Okay, Sara. How’s this?) Apply to Stanford.

6. Drive to MIT and force them to admit they made a mistake. Enroll.

I don’t say anything to Mitch in English. Things feel wicked out of sync with him.

I gut out the stares and gleeful whispers that follow me all day. Everybody loves a loser. Coach Reid won’t let me practice because of the Treadmill Incident on Friday. I try to explain, but he orders me to take three days off. It’s a conspiracy, I swear.

One day, over. Whew.

6.1 Atomic Structure

After school, I take Mikey to see the progress on his house. Teri meets us on the side porch, wearing dirty work clothes, a leather tool belt, and a hint of a smile.

“Was he good today?” she asks.

Mikey leans out of my arms and into hers. She settles him on her hip, above her belt.

“He was great,” I say. “He waved to every truck driver on the way to school and back.”

I step back so two burly guys can carry a charred mattress out the door. The house is filled with the sounds of saws, hammers, and high-powered fans. It still smells of bitter smoke.

“Can I have a tour?” I ask.

“Suit yourself. Not much to see yet, but it’ll get there.”

She steps inside and I follow. The curtains have been taken off the living room windows and all the furniture stacked in the middle. As we cross the room, the carpet squishes under our feet. The fire didn’t get this far, but the water from the fire hoses did.

“Yeah, it’s a mess, I know,” Teri says. “You’ve got to use your imagination.” She taps bare wood at the far end of the room, where the carpet has been pulled back. “We’re going to sand this. Coat it good with polyurethane.”

“It’ll look nice.”

“Yeah. I like hardwood floors.” She hikes Mikey higher on her hip, walks across the hall, and opens a door. The windows in here are covered with blankets, and a table in the center of the room is piled high with boxes. “This used to be the dining room, before Charlie’s junk took it over. I want to make it into a playroom. There’s hardwood under that rug, too. We could use new baseboards and crown molding, but they’re luxuries at this point.”

“Who’s Charlie?”

Mikey pops his thumb in his mouth and sucks hard.

“He was our father,” Teri says, closing the door.

She’s on the move again, down the hall to the back of the house. “The kitchen is a wreck, but it was a wreck before the fire, so no loss there.”

I look over her shoulder. The work crew has already finished what the fire had started; the kitchen has been completely gutted, stripped down to the beams under the floor. Mikey’s thumb slips out of his mouth at the sight.

“We’re almost ready to lay a new subfloor,” Teri says. “That’ll go fast. What I really want to do is to frame out the wall so we can bust through an opening into the playroom, see, have it be one big open area. We could work around the load-bearing beams, that’s not a problem.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That’s why you’re not in charge here. The problem is convincing Pete that it’s worth the time to frame out the opening. He’s a real moron. ”

“If you say so.”

She walks back down the hall. “We’re leaving the bathroom alone for now, though someday I’d like to do some tile work in there.” Teri shifts Mikey to her other hip. “Most of the first floor is cosmetic, except for the kitchen. Upstairs is going to take a little longer. Watch your step.”

We climb over the child safety gate at the foot of the stairs and head up. Mikey puts his arms around her neck. Halfway up the stairs, the banister stops. The higher we climb, the heavier the smell of smoke. The work crew crawling around on the roof sounds like they’re about to fall through on top of us. I stick close to the wall. “I thought the fire only affected the roof.”

“It burned through in a couple of places, and there’s a lot of water damage.” Teri waits for me at the top of the stairs. “We have some old Charlie damage, too.”

“What is Charlie damage?”

Mikey squirms in his sister’s arms, and Teri slides him around her body so that he’s riding piggyback. “Charlie rewired the house and ran an illegal tap off the power lines out front. Cheap SOB. The code officer freaked when he saw it. He won’t let us move back in until everything is up to code. Guess how long it will take.”

“Months?”

She chuckles. “Nah. Couple of weeks, tops. Don’t be so gullible. Your dad found a guy who said he’d do it and only charge for parts. Come on, I’ll show you Mikey’s room.”

The doors along the dark hall are all closed. One has three locks installed in a column above the doorknob, like a television version of a New York City apartment.

“Who do you have locked up in there?”

Teri reaches down and jingles her key ring. “That’s my room. And no, I’m not showing you. Here.” She opens the door at the end of the hall.

Mikey’s bedroom is small, with tall dormer windows on three sides. One window looks straight up the hill to our house. The walls and ceiling are smoke stained. Some furniture is stacked in a corner: a crib, a chair, dented cardboard boxes of toys and clothes. Mikey squirms to get down and play, but Teri locks her arms under his legs. The electrical outlets have been pulled from the walls, and their wires writhe and coil.

“I know exactly what I want this to look like,” she says. “I want to put wainscoting on the bottom third of the wall and build in a chalkboard so he’ll have a place to draw. I want built-in shelves where he can keep his toys and books and stuff. And a big-boy bed. If we run out of money, I could probably make one from scrap lumber.”

“I’m sure someone will find him a bed,” I say.

“When he gets older, we’ll get him a desk. A computer, too.”

“Ucky,” Mikey says, still squirming to break free.

“No way, dude,” Teri says. She spins in a tight circle. “You’re not getting down.” She spins faster to distract him. Mikey giggles and throws his head back. Teri whirls like a centrifuge, her boots thudding the floor until she stumbles a bit, slows down, and stops. Mikey rests his face between her shoulder blades, still giggling.

“So.” Teri hikes up her tool belt. “Feel like helping?” she asks.

“I’d, um, I’d love to, but I don’t know how to do any of this.”

“Let’s see if you can learn how to hold a hammer.”

Of course I can hold a hammer. Any idiot can hold a hammer. It’s the
act
of hammering, the physics of the process, that I’m struggling with. I’ve never been completely comfortable with physics.

“No, no, no,” Teri says for the eighty-third time. “Like this.”

She holds a nail with her left hand (no, I will not comment on her black thumbnail, I will not, I will not, I will not), takes a breath, and
bam—bam
—BAM! The nail slides into the wood like butter. She’s doing the real thing, nailing the kitchen subflooring to whatever they’re called, the long boards under the floor. She pulls a nail from the pouch on her tool belt, sets it,
bam—bam
—BAM!

“Isn’t there something called a nail gun?” I ask. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“This is a low-budget job,” Teri says. “We’re powered by muscle and sweat, the old-fashioned way. Try again.”

I take a breath. Weight, velocity, and angle. Remember to hit the nail in the center of the head.
Tap—tap
—damn! The nail droops sadly to one side. I killed it, just like I killed all the other bent nails in my little test board.

“I don’t know, Kate. Maybe you’re not made for real work. You should stick to school.”

“Cut me some slack. I’ve never done this before.”
Bam—bam—thonk.
“Damn.”

Teri pries the bent nail out of the wood and throws it to the ground. “Kate Malone, you suck at hammering.”

I drop the hammer in the dirt. “Is there something else I can do? Sawing, maybe.”

“You’d be dangerous around a saw. Have you always been a spaz?”

“I’m not answering that.”

I wait until everyone goes to sleep, then I put on my sneakers and head outside. The houses that line the streets are the walls of a maze I’m trying to find my way out of. My breath feels as if it’s coming from a different body. I am afraid to open my mouth and talk to myself because there is a chance I might start to scream. It’s like I’ve been chopped into tiny pieces of Kate, and all my pieces look like me and run like me and talk like me and act just the right way, but they are all lost in this maze. Bad Kate (still stalking me) says the maze has always been there, I’m just seeing it for the first time because of these contacts. Good Kate says nonsense, it’s time to go to bed.