The Mortification of Fovea Munson Read online

  Plus, I’d really been hoping that going to camp would change things with my best friend, Em Taylor.

  Former best friend.

  Temporary former best friend.

  We met three years ago at camp.

  “You’re hogging that tarantula,” was the first thing she ever said to me.

  Nothing screams zoo camp like tarantulas.

  At that point, we were about halfway through the two-week-long Chicagoland Chimp-Champ Zoo Camp. It was held in this circular room with wall-to-wall carpeting way in the back of the zoo. Inspirational animal posters lined the walls. It was creepily like somebody’s idea of an artificial habitat zoo enclosure for nine- and ten-year-olds.

  I’d thought the Lauras were doing the camp, too, but they apparently changed their minds.

  At the Chimp-Champ Zoo Camp, each day had a theme. They were trying to build the excitement, you know, so the first day was “Get to Know Your Phylum” and the last day was “How to Properly Hold a Monkey.” At the halfway point, we’d just reached “Predator Day.”

  Cue the tarantulas.

  So aside from me, my tarantula, and the girl with the Indiana Jones whip who was crowding us, there were ten other very loud and excited kids, three other tarantulas, and only one counselor.

  Just to recap: four tarantulas total. One counselor.

  The tarantula-to-counselor ratio was way off.

  If there had been fewer tarantulas and more counselors, somebody would have noticed that I’d been stuck holding a tarantula for the last thirty minutes.

  “I’ve held all the other tarantulas and I’m going to hold this one, too,” the girl said as she leaned in.

  Her name was Em, and she’d carried that Indiana Jones whip around all week, and I wanted to ask if she thought there was a chance the tarantulas were going to get rowdy, but I didn’t actually say anything to her, because over the previous twenty-nine minutes, the specific tarantula I was dealing with had slowly wandered over to the edge of the handler’s glove I wore, and was currently one billionth of an inch away from stepping directly onto my arm. I wasn’t planning on breathing, much less speaking, until it backed the heck up.

  The tarantula raised one leg, taunting me.

  Over the noise in the room, Em half yelled at me, “I can’t compare them if I don’t hold them all.”

  A second tarantula leg went up.

  Oh boy.

  “It’s unscientific if I don’t,” she said loudly.

  A third leg.

  “I’m making a chart,” she hollered.

  The legs twitched.

  The tarantula was about to start moving.

  Oh help.

  “I’ve been—” But she didn’t say any more, because at that moment, three legs still hovering, the tarantula leaned, sort of slow-motion glommed toward the patch of my arm in front of it, and I straightened my arm with a snap and the tarantula popped into the air, legs scrambling.

  That was when the giant owl flew directly between me and Em and ate the tarantula with a loud crunch.

  We’d flattened ourselves on the ground, but once we recovered enough to look around, we saw that the bird had perched on the bookcase next to us, parts of the tarantula hanging out of its mouth.

  “What did you do?” cried the counselor, Jenny, as she rushed over to me.

  “Don’t look at her,” said Em. “Fovea’s not the one who ate the tarantula.”

  The entire room turned to watch while the owl finished swallowing.

  “Watch closely,” Em narrated. “They don’t chew their food. They just swallow it and then whatever they can’t digest, they’ll barf up later in a pellet—”

  “Why were you hiding that tarantula?” Jenny was not happy with me. “I clearly announced that we were moving on to the next predator. I collected the tarantulas!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pulling myself back to sitting. “It was so loud. I didn’t notice—”

  “Terrific. You didn’t notice,” said the counselor, “and now we’re one tarantula short—”

  “Wait. Why is it all her fault?” asked Em. “You didn’t count the tarantulas—and there were only four.”

  “I was thinking about the owl already,” Jenny said, but she didn’t sound too sure of herself. “I really like the owl.”

  “And the owl really liked that tarantula,” Em said. We all looked at him. His eyes were closed and he looked extremely satisfied. A small piece of leg came unstuck and fell from the owl’s beak.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again. Partly to Jenny, but mostly to the tarantula.

  “Don’t you dare apologize!” Em said. She stood to face Jenny. “And you! This is natural selection, and natural selection doesn’t care about your plans. If you’re going to call it Predator Day, you have to be okay if something eats something else. That is the definition of a successful Predator Day.”

  Jenny stared openmouthed at Em. The rest of the campers started a slow clap. The owl made a noise that I am 99 percent sure was a burp.

  Afterwards, while Jenny was putting the owl away, Em leaned over to me and said, “That was amazing. The life cycle in action.”

  “I still feel bad, though,” I said. “And I’m not even a tarantula person.”

  “Doesn’t matter what kind of person you are in the face of the food chain,” she said. “Nice people get eaten by lions just as often as mean people do. No big deal.”

  “I’m not sure I under—”

  “And anyway,” she added with a wicked smile, “you made that owl’s day.”

  “I guess—”

  “Look at him.”

  I wouldn’t have guessed that owls could smile. I’d have been wrong, apparently. And Em was right: the happy, peaceful look on the owl’s face made me feel better. By the time we all left that afternoon, I completely agreed that it was the tarantula’s destiny to get eaten by the owl.

  And Em was just getting started. For the rest of the time, she ruled zoo camp with me at her side. She broke into the snack cabinet while I was lookout, and then we ate the heads off the entire carton of animal crackers. She taught the parrot to say “I am not a parrot” while I distracted Jenny with a fake stomachache. Em even led a protest until all of the last three days were renamed “How to Properly Hold a Monkey.” During her victory speech at the lunch table, I stood behind her with a poster she’d made that said MONKEYS ARE WORTH IT.

  On the last day of camp, as Em and I ate cold grilled cheese sandwiches together under the rain forest mobile, she said, “So, what’s next for you?”

  “A week of swim camp with the Lauras. If they show up.”

  “Sounds boring,” she said. “Pottery camp is where it’s at.”

  My mom and dad made a couple of calls, rearranged my plans, and all of a sudden I was seeing Em every day. For three summers in a row, we hit all the same camps at the same time. At pottery camp the first summer, she made a vase with eight compartments. I made a lot of those coasters. At theater camp the next summer, she played Hamlet. I played the skull. At horse camp last year, she rode horses; I fell off them. It was a perfect summer friendship that became a perfect regular friendship when Em showed up at my school at the beginning of seventh grade. I couldn’t believe it.

  “My parents separated,” she said. “So my mom and I moved to be closer to her work.”

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t sure what to say.

  She didn’t look like she knew either, which was not very Em-like.

  We stood in the hall by her new locker, kids pushing past us on either side.

  “I am not a parrot?” I finally said.

  She smiled. “I am not a parrot.”

  And instantly school was the best. We’d hang out afterwards, too. Em’s mom was always home by the time school was out, so I started going there in the afternoons. Em came to my house on weekends. It worked out perfectly.

  Until Em started spending time with Dana DeLuce.

  Suddenly Em didn’t think it was so convenient for me
to go over to her house.

  Back in my own kitchen after school, I’d make toast for myself with the toaster that burned Hippocrates’ face on each piece of bread, and tell myself that Dana DeLuce was temporary and that I just needed to try harder. If I tried harder, it would be fine.

  But it wasn’t. Dana DeLuce was like Em in every way I wasn’t—she was sporty and cool and in loads of clubs. The harder I tried, the tighter they got. I kept telling myself that it was only a matter of time before Em realized that she was bored hanging out with somebody so much like herself.

  I was wrong.

  Dana turned out not to be the boring one.

  “Hey, guys!” I wedged myself in line behind Em one morning in early January. She and Dana were talking as our class slowly inched its way down the science hall toward the auditorium. There was some sort of big music assembly that day, and the whole school was on the move. “Hi,” I said, again. They didn’t even glance back at me.

  Try harder.

  “Hey,” I said one more time, and they actually turned. “If you—both of you—wanted to come over this weekend, my parents might take us somewhere.”

  “Not the museum again,” said Em.

  “What’s wrong with—”

  “Will they take us to their lab?” she asked. Back when she was exclusively my summer friend, I’d told Em all about the lab. And ever since, she’d been determined to check it out. I think it was part of her cycle-of-life appreciation. It was kind of nice to fall into the old routine. She’d ask and, just as predictably, I’d tell her there was no way in a million years.

  “There’s no way in a million—”

  “What lab?” interrupted Dana.

  “Oh,” I said as we reached the auditorium and headed up the aisle toward our block of seats. “My parents are…doctors.”

  “Not just doctors,” Em said.

  “No—they are totally just doctors,” I said, hoping that Em was getting my message. “Plain old normal doctors.”

  We scooted into the row and sat down just in time for Ms. Jacobs, the principal, to come out and start talking into the microphone. She was welcoming us and telling us stuff about the assembly: the orchestra would play, then the band, then the chorus, as a sort of Welcome Back From Winter Break concert of something something something, but I barely heard any of it. I was only aware of Em on the other side of me whispering to Dana.

  “No way,” I heard Dana say, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end, because then Dana turned to Devon Kovach and whispered something to him.

  “What?” Devon said loud enough to make Ms. Peters shush him from the end of the row. He waited a second and then leaned past Dana to ask me, “With dead bodies? Like, your mom and dad have a legit morgue?”

  “No!” I whispered down the line. “Not a morgue! They’re doctors.”

  But next to Devon was Kylie, who picked up on the conversation. “Your parents are morticians? Like for family time, you embalm people and stuff?”

  “Don’t morticians drain all the blood out of bodies?” asked Costa on the other side of Kylie.

  “Like vampires,” agreed Devon.

  “Doctors,” I whispered again, uselessly.

  But the news was spreading. I watched it go, saw it hit the Lauras, who had thought my parents were regular ­doctor doctors since the third grade, and that wasn’t going to be a great conversation, and Costa had to lean over them to keep it going down the line, and I thought, This isn’t happening, how can I stop it, maybe I can fake a heart attack, people do that in movies, or I can freeze time with the superpowers I will discover right now, right now, if I just cross my arms and blink.

  I crossed my arms. I blinked. I did not freeze time. I did not have powers.

  It was clear what was happening.

  I tried too hard. And there was no reversing it.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as the awful game of telephone turned the corner, and the whispering jumped from my row to the next row, where the rest of our class was sitting. Beside me, Em watched the assembly, bored, like she didn’t have a clue what she’d done. What exactly had she told Dana? Did she just mention the lab? Or did she go into detail, like the time she came over for dinner and my mom spent the whole time describing the inside of the spleen she’d operated on that day. Or when my dad talked enthusiastically about the wonders of flash-freezing the recently dead. Or both of them trying to come up with rhymes for “mucus.”

  I could not stop thinking about all the possibilities.

  Finally, the chorus stopped singing whatever song they were singing, and Ms. Jacobs stepped over to the podium again. She adjusted the microphone, cleared her throat, and said only the worst thing she could possibly have said.

  She said, “Now, everyone, let’s give these folks a hand.”

  The second the sentence was out of her mouth, the entirely normal sentence “Let’s give these folks a hand,” somebody in my class started giggling, and within seconds, they were all giggling, and then they were turning and looking directly at me, like they thought I might do something, except I couldn’t think of a single thing I was supposed to do. The rest of the school was clapping for the chorus, but MY ENTIRE CLASS was staring at me and giggling wildly.

  And then Dana leaned past Em, looking right at me. Her voice was a scalpel cutting through the giggles. “You can give them a hand, right?”

  A few seats down, I heard Kylie snort, “Just a hand? How about a foot?”

  “How about some eyeballs?” Costa added.

  “It’s not like that,” I said desperately. “It’s not a morgue. They’re doctors. They work in a lab.”

  “Oh, I get it,” said Dana. “They work in a lab.”

  “Yes,” I said, grateful. “Yes.”

  “Yessss, masssster,” said Devon, doing a terrible impression from that Frankenstein movie.

  And with that, they all lost their minds.

  Now that the cat was out of the body bag, I knew how this was going to play out. I couldn’t possibly say, No, wait, it’s just my parents. I don’t cut up bodies every day. It’s those people I live with. They do it.

  It wouldn’t matter at all. I was gross by association. Even while they were laughing and yesss-massster-ing, I could see the kids around me pull away, like I was contaminated with cadaver grossness. It was exactly what I’d been afraid would happen if anybody found out.

  I closed my eyes and sank into the hard wooden chair and wished that I could keep sinking, out of the auditorium, down past the first floor and the school’s basement, through the dirt and the Earth’s crust and those other layers and all the way to the other side of the planet, where I could start a new life.

  The gravity of humiliation should’ve totally made that possible.

  But it didn’t happen. Even with my eyes closed, I knew I was still stuck in the auditorium, because to my left, I heard a sound that made it all heart-smashingly, unignorably real.

  Em. Laughing along with the rest of them.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I stared hard at the stage. Everything else—everyone else—blurred and fuzzed until the chorus was the only real thing left in the room, and I’d never seen anything so clearly before. I started clapping for them, like nothing was going on at all, like everything was fine.

  I did it. I gave the chorus a hand.

  The sharp, tooth-hurting smell of smoke in the classroom shook me out of the memory. An enthusiastic cheer went up and the kids at the “How to Determine Electric ­Conductors” table started chanting, “Pyro! Pyro! Pyro!”

  In the middle of the group, Howe Berger held some sort of plug-in wand and stared at the smoldering ends of ­Lindsey Weston’s previously waist-length hair. Howe and Lindsey looked equally shocked. Ms. Peters actually noticed and snapped into action, throwing her novel down and grabbing at the small fire extinguisher on the wall.

  “Pyro! Pyro! Pyro!” The rest of the class was catching on now.

  For the briefest moment, I though
t to myself—maybe this is what I need. Howe Berger will become The Pyro, and too bad for him, but maybe everybody’ll forget about The Igor, and I can get back to being invisible. Was it wrong to want that? I pushed the question out of my mind. Quietly, I joined in. “Pyro. Pyro. Pyro.”

  But then Lindsey, apparently recovered, grabbed Howe’s hand with the wand and held it in the air triumphantly as the chants continued and Ms. Peters sprayed white foam all over the place.

  Howe was a freaking hero.

  As the chanting died down, Devon held the frog over his head, intestines tumbling down, and yelled, “Igor! Help! The Monster hates fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire!”

  Howe was a hero, and I was still Igor.

  I scraped the clay from my catapult off the table, vaguely aware of the Lauras. It wasn’t my imagination. They’d moved their chairs away from my side of the table.

  It was official.

  The assembly was the reason I did not technically have any friends whose houses I could stay at for the summer. It was pretty obvious that I was as likely to make a new friend as my parents’ cadavers were to get up and start walking around.

  So, the gross stuff is coming. Heads up.

  No pun intended.

  But also, seriously.

  The next day, the first day of what should have been summer vacation, my mom and I set out to walk the six blocks from our building to the lab. My dad had already left, so it was just the two of us, me squinting against the daylight and her trying to walk with hot coffee.

  “Darn,” my mom said, spilling the coffee while she grabbed a newspaper from one of the sidewalk boxes.

  “Oops,” she said, sloshing it as she dodged somebody going into the Korean grocery.

  “Arg!” she said half a block later as the coffee splattered in front of the old Museum of Holography.

  She stopped to shake the coffee out of her bag, and while she was busy, I pressed my forehead against the door of the museum, looking for any signs of movement or change. It was still dark inside, and the sidewalk trash that had piled up in front of the door wasn’t exactly encouraging.