The Mortification of Fovea Munson Read online

  Boy, I hoped there wasn’t a reason.

  I flashed back to a conversation between my parents about surgery, and how if you picture yourself doing a surgery, you’ll be better prepared when you do it for real. So I pictured myself being the biggest, baddest bouncer ever.

  And then I had one bonus flash of inspiration.

  I remembered Whitney’s giant nail file.

  I ran back to the desk and dug under the menus to pull out the file. I slid off the cover. It looked crazy sharp. This was nuts.

  I pictured myself stabbing a robber in the leg so he couldn’t chase me. I pictured myself running back to the lobby and locking the blue door and calling the police.

  It was probably nothing. But I was prepared.

  Or I thought I was.

  This is what went down:

  With my heart doing its anatomically incorrect thing, I opened the blue door. I carefully stepped around the soda cans I’d left on the floor and stood right in front of the lab door. I could hear a voice on the other side, kind of singing a little, but I couldn’t quite hear what the song was. Okay. This was looking up. Maybe it was the radio.

  Or else a singing robber. Stab him in the leg, I thought. If you have to stab him, stab him in the leg.

  I put my hand on the doorknob, and as I pushed the door open, I heard a new voice singing. It has to be the radio, said part of my brain.

  Stab them both in the legs, said another part.

  And then the door was all the way open and the bright shining white of the lab floors and walls and the metal tabletops blinded me for a second.

  I blinked hard.

  And I saw that there was going to be no stabbing in legs.

  Because the voices were coming from heads.

  Two heads.

  Heads that did not have legs. Or, in fact, anything below the neck area.

  I definitely didn’t picture myself throwing up all over the floor.

  But I did it very well anyway.

  “Oh man, now I’m feeling sick,” one of the heads said.

  “You’ll be fine,” the other one said.

  “I’m going to vomit, Andy. I have that weird taste in my mouth,” the first one said. “I can’t help it, it’s like a natural instinct, I see it, I do it.”

  “You don’t have a stomach,” I said, stepping away from the small pool of my barf as it started to roll downhill toward the drain in the middle of the floor.

  “Thank you,” said the second one. “I’ve been trying to tell him that for days.”

  I started to say, “You’re welcome,” but there were two heads looking back at me, and then everything was spinning and my own head felt light, like a balloon floating away, and I turned and walked out, ignoring the voice that called after me, “Wait! Come back! Come back right now!”

  I pushed through to the lobby and the door shut behind me. It was quiet again. I laid the nail file on the desk and looked up at Hippocrates.

  “Are you playing with me?” I demanded. He just kept smiling.

  I closed my eyes. Was my own brain playing with me?

  Maybe. I’d accidentally just seen into the heart of ­Grossville. I’d probably seen something so horrible, so completely horrifying, my brain couldn’t compute. That was more than enough to make a person hallucinate talking heads. And therefore barf. I mean, I’d barfed for less before. It’s not that I’m delicate.

  I’m just…let’s say…suggestible.

  I floated over to Herophilus and leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the tank. I never should have gone into the lab. Nobody goes in the back, my mom had said. But I did, and now I had to do the responsible thing. Obviously, the responsible thing was to completely cover my tracks so that no one would ever know I was there.

  I prepared myself for a return visit.

  There was a supply closet along the Hall of Innards where I grabbed some cleaning stuff to take care of the barf. Then I stopped in front of the lab door. I might have hallucinated the talking, but I didn’t think I’d hallucinated the heads. I took a deep breath.

  This was the impossible part, actually forcing my feet to take me back into the lab. I pushed open the heavy door and took three slow steps forward. I tried to keep my eyes on the ground, but instead, I discovered this interesting fact: sometimes, your body just does whatever it wants. And so my eyes drifted from the barf on the floor up to the table, and whoops—right on top—there were the heads.

  Tabletop heads. Like a hologram gone solid. Like a hologram gone wrong.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  And they stared right back.

  They were side by side—similar-looking at first, both of them pinkish-gray and splotchy and potato-y. It was like a magic trick, like a magician had performed some kind of spectacular head removal act and then gotten a call from his grandmother and wandered off and left the heads right where they were, unattached and magically neglected.

  The longer I looked, the more I saw past the obvious, you know, and noticed how different they were from each other.

  One was totally bald with the lightest blue old-man eyes I’d ever seen. The blue was so faint it had faded to almost nothing. He reminded me of the white mouse we’d had in my second grade classroom, the mouse who’d always seemed old, even when we first got him as a baby.

  The other head was like a storm cloud, with dark eyes and absolutely colossal dark gray eyebrows that sprigged in every direction and looked so heavy they were threatening to droop all the way to his chin. He had hair on top, a dark gray wispy patch that stuck straight up into a triangle. He also had more neck, so he was taller, and somehow more serious. They sat next to each other on the metal operating table and blinked back at me.

  Oh help.

  I was not hallucinating.

  The tall one smiled.

  “Woooooooo,” the short one whispered, ghostlike. “Wooooooooo. Just kidding! But it’s not polite to stare.”

  “Sorry,” I tried to say, but no sound came out. My voice was curled up inside me, refusing to deal. I heard a drip and looked toward it instinctively, immediately wishing I hadn’t. Clearish liquid was running off the edge of the heads’ table. It dripped rhythmically three feet down into a red bucket somebody had placed on the floor.

  What’s that? I thought, or thought I thought, except apparently I’d said it out loud, because the tall one said, “What’s what?” and I pointed and they both tried to see what I meant, shifting their eyes as far to the left as they could, but apparently it wasn’t working, because the tall one said, “Maybe a hint?”

  My voice was a croak. “Something’s dripping. There. Off the table.”

  “Oh, that’s natural,” he said. “We’re defrosting.”

  I closed my eyes really tight, speeding back through time, considering the possibility that maybe there had been a robber, and he’d hit me on the head. Totally possible. I opened my eyes.

  Nope. Heads.

  Two of them.

  I dropped the cleaning supplies on the counter next to the doorway and steadied myself against the edge.

  “So, I don’t mean to sound critical,” said the short, mouselike one, “but really, could you do something about that vomit? As I was saying to Andy, I have kind of a sensitive stomach.”

  “You don’t have a stomach!” said the two of us, me and the tall one, at the exact same time.

  The short one gasped, offended.

  “All right, look,” I said, forcing myself to keep talking. “I’ve seen movies. I know what happens when you ignore the first step of a zombie disaster. It’s all downhill from there.”

  “I don’t believe I follow you,” said the tall one.

  “I shouldn’t even be in here,” I said. “But I am, and it would be uncool of me to ignore the beginning of this zombie-head apocalypse or body-snatching situation or whatever it is. So, um, can you please tell me what’s going on? What exactly are you doing here?”

  “We told you.”

  “D
efrosting.”

  It was time to walk away again.

  I hadn’t gotten an answer about the zombie takeover thing, and I hadn’t dealt with the barf. Those were the only two reasons I found myself in the wet lab again a few minutes later, face-to-face-to-face with the two chatty bodiless heads.

  “Whitney’s replacement, right?” the tall, dark-haired one asked.

  “No one is replaceable, Andy,” said the short, mouselike one.

  “First things first,” the tall one said, ignoring the short one. “What’s your name?”

  Before I could say anything, the short one added, “Ooh, and what’s your astrological sign? Your rising sign? Your moon sign?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “YOU DON’T KNOW ANY OF YOUR SIGNS?”

  “Also: Are you here all week?” the tall one asked.

  “I’m—”

  “How about this—do you know your year animal?” The short one was very focused. “Let me guess. Year of the Tiger? Rabbit? I’m getting huge rabbit vibes.”

  “I really don’t—”

  “We’re very pleased to make your acquaintance,” said the tall one.

  “What are you doing with that alarmingly big fingernail file?” asked the other.

  I’d picked up the file again. How did I not notice that? This was exactly how people accidentally stabbed themselves.

  “Alsoooo, just a little reminder about that vomit,” said the short one. “It’s not going away on its own.”

  “I’m working on it,” I said, trying to picture myself not hyperventilating. “I’ll be back.”

  “Fantastic,” the tall one said. “Looking forward to it.”

  The short one started to laugh. “I just tried to nod! Oh, that was weird! Andy, have you tried nodding?”

  As I turned to walk out, I saw the tall one roll his eyes.

  My dad was always telling me that when a project is overwhelming, you have to break it down into smaller pieces. Then it’s doable. This seemed like a good moment to try this out. So first I was going to clean up. Then I was going to talk to the two bodiless heads on the table about whatever they needed to talk about.

  Doable.

  I dropped the file back into the bottom drawer out front, grabbed a dustpan from the supply closet, and returned to the doorway. The tall one started to talk, but I stopped him. I wasn’t ready yet. I pushed the barf into the drain, and then got a bunch of paper towels to wipe up the rest. The heads watched, their eyes following my every move. One of them whistled a tune. They were pretty…­nonaggressive for zombies.

  “Ahem,” whispered the short one. “There’s a glop there on your right—”

  Maybe they were shooting for world domination by being slightly irritating. They were going to slightly irritate humanity into oblivion. It was a possibility. After everything was wiped up, I sprayed the area with lemony disinfectant, which made the tall one sneeze.

  “¡Salud!” whispered the short one.

  “You don’t have to keep whispering,” I said as I disinfected the dustpan.

  “Sorry,” whispered the short one.

  The tall one rolled his eyes again.

  When there was finally nothing else for me to clean, I washed my hands and stood in front of them again. “So, yes, I’m Whitney’s replacement.”

  “Hmm…” the tall one said, looking at me like he was figuring something out. “Well, I’m Andy Konak and this is Lake Lumino.”

  “Are you the leader of your people?” I asked Andy Konak.

  “I like to believe I am a leader,” he said thoughtfully. “So I’ll say yes.”

  “I’m the tenor, though,” said Lake. “Just so we don’t forget.” Then he turned his attention to me. “And you are?”

  I didn’t understand what was happening here, and I definitely wasn’t sure why we had to get to know each other. But, whatever. “I’m Fovea Munson,” I said weakly.

  Andy shot me a familiar, incredulous look. “Your name is Phobia?”

  “No, ‘Fovea.’ With an F. And a V.”

  “Sounds like ‘Phobia.’”

  “Thank you. That will be another great addition to my already really impressive list of nicknames.”

  “Really, it’s Fovea?”

  I nodded.

  “Ah,” said Andy Konak’s head. “That’s a family name?”

  I shook my head.

  “Um…because your mom’s from…She’s from somewhere, right?” asked Lake.

  I sighed. This was going just about as well as the beginning of every school year. I was pretty disappointed, frankly—here I was talking to two supernatural-ish heads and having the exact same conversation I had every single day of my life. “My name’s not Filipino. It’s Surgeon. It means ‘eyeballs.’” This was all making the afterlife seem a whole lot more predictable than I’d imagined it to be.

  “Ah,” Andy said again, politely.

  At least he didn’t laugh, which officially made him nicer than every single person I went to school with. He had that going for him. Too bad not much else seemed to be going for him. I couldn’t stop staring, first at one of them, then at the other.

  “What—what’s wrong? Is my hair messed up?” Lake asked, and then laughed hysterically. “Kidding. Oh, kidding. I know. No hair!”

  “No other things, too,” I said, realizing as soon as the words were out of my mouth that it probably wasn’t a helpful thing to say at all.

  “You don’t need to rub it in,” he said indignantly. “It’s no walk in the park, here. I’m eighty percent ghost. LOOK AT ME! ALL OF MY BEST PARTS ARE GHOST!”

  “Lake,” Andy said, “for heaven’s sake, please refrain from elaborating about which parts you consider those to be.”

  Lake sniffled. “Sorry. I’ve been having mood swings. It’s my stupid limbic system again.”

  “Your what?” I asked.

  “Er…you probably don’t care to hear about it,” Andy said.

  “Of course she does!” said Lake. “She cares.”

  “I…” There wasn’t a good way out of this.

  “See? She cares!”

  Andy sighed. “If you insist.”

  “I got freezer burn,” Lake whispered.

  “He…ah…was originally in a freezer at a slightly less upstanding lab.”

  “Freezer burn on my feelings,” Lake whispered again.

  Nope. I definitely didn’t want to hear about this.

  “The other lab missed a few electrical bills and their power was shut down.” Andy cleared his throat. “During that time, Lake partially unfroze, and there was some unfortunate positioning.”

  “I fell sideways.”

  “So a little more water got into certain sections of his brain, and then when he refroze, those areas expanded, and to cut a potentially very long story short, he has a lot of feelings now. Strong feelings.”

  “The new me is exhausting,” Lake said. “But I love it!”

  “I see,” I said, trying to sound like I saw. I took half a step closer to Lake. “How long—you know? How long have you been…a head?”

  “Ahead of what? Like, the curve?”

  I bent down to his level. “Right. Okay, how long have you been…here?”

  “No clue,” he said glumly. “It’s really hard to tell in the freezer.”

  Andy agreed. “He’s right. It can be difficult to keep track. But, speaking of being out of the freezer, we need a favor now that we’re out on the town!”

  “You mean out on the table,” I said.

  “Well, semantics,” said Lake breezily.

  “Ahem,” said Andy. “The important part is actually that we need a favor.”

  There was a pause in the conversation.

  I stood again. “You mean from me?”

  Andy smiled a mostly toothless smile. It is not cool, in my book, to ask a person for a favor before you’ve told them whether or not you are a zombie. I said, “Nothing personal, but…” and then I got stuck on it actually being ver
y personal. The fact that they had no bodies seemed very, very personal.

  “But what?” asked Lake, like he couldn’t think of a single problem with any of this.

  “I understand this is a slightly unusual situation,” Andy said.

  “Slightly? This doesn’t make sense at all,” I said, darting around to the back of the operating table, like it might help me figure them out. It didn’t, of course. They were heads in the back just as much as they were heads in the front. “Is this like that chicken thing I’ve heard about, the running-around-with-the-head-cut-off thing?”

  “Is she comparing us to chickens?” Lake asked.

  “No,” I said. “Well, yes, actually. I just want to know if this is normal. Like, is it a regular thing that happens to everybody and I just don’t know about it? Is this eighth-grade biology stuff?”

  “Oooh, it’s been such a long time since we were in school, a really long time—” Lake started.

  “I think, by the way…” I interrupted him as I made my way back around to the front of the operating table. “There’s a monumental flaw in the system if we have to take sex ed before we take the class where they tell you that you go on living after your head is cut off. What about, like, Marie Antoinette? That whole getting-her-head-chopped-off thing was no big deal? AND,” I said, wheeling around, “what about death in general? Does this mean my Grandma Van will never actually die?”

  “I, er, don’t believe I know her,” Andy said.

  “So? So maybe? How do you figure out something like that for sure?”

  “Well…it’s all a bit iffy,” Lake began.

  “It’s IFFY? Death? IS IFFY?”

  “He means it’s complicated,” Andy jumped in. “Much, it seems, like your relationship with your Grandma Van.”

  “Yeah. That’s—complicated.” There was a pause and they glanced at each other. I should have left Grandma Van out of this. “Let’s forget I said anything. Next question: Do you talk to everybody?”

  “No, but we used to talk to Whitney,” Lake said. “Before she—”

  Andy coughed.

  “Before she what?”

  “Oh, left. Before she left.”

  “And,” Andy interrupted, “she was going to do a very important favor for us. Now that she’s gone, we need someone else to help us.”