The Mortification of Fovea Munson Read online

  “I bet my parents would be happy to help.”

  They glanced at each other.

  “Your parents, they can’t. We have other business with them.”

  “You have business with my parents?”

  Andy cleared his throat. “Mostly we play, you know—”

  “Games?”

  “Dead,” said Andy.

  “I like possum better,” Lake offered. “Playing possum sounds all-around nicer.”

  “So they don’t know you can talk.”

  Lake giggled. “They don’t expect it, see, so we just close our eyes and keep quiet, and they don’t notice a thing. I’m a double threat, you know. Singing, acting. I could dance, too, if I had my legs.” He looked off into the distance and sighed dramatically. “Miss those things.”

  “Bummer about the leg thing, but you should really just ask my parents. For the favor. Really. They’re doctors. Helping other people is what they’re supposed to do. They even took, like, an oath about it.”

  “No,” Andy said sternly. “Your parents’ view that we are just a collection of anatomical features needs to stay in place. That’s why we donated our bodies to science in the first place. We won’t be helpful to science if they’re more worried about hurting us or interested in talking to us.”

  “We do have a lot of interesting things to say,” Lake added.

  “Hold up.” I had to steady myself on the counter again. “Does that…neck business hurt?”

  “No, no,” Andy reassured me. “In fact, nothing has hurt since we, you know, became one of the deceased.”

  “NOT that it’s all hunky-dory, mind you,” said Lake.

  “True, true. There have been a few, erm—”

  “Surprises,” Lake said darkly.

  “Exactly. But overall, this postdeath business has been quite painless. So, thank you for your concern, but as I was saying, we could really use a favor.”

  I tried to make my brain catch up. They wanted a favor. Right. “Maybe you should try somebody else.”

  “There is no one else, Fovea.”

  I was already backing out of the room. “You know, they’ll be back soon, and I shouldn’t even be in here. You didn’t see me, okay? The thing is, you guys, you like to play possum and I like to play responsible, direction-following, non-lab-going daughter. Good luck, though, working out the favor thing.”

  As I walked out, I could hear Andy trying to get me to reconsider, and behind him, from the way back of the lab, where I’d spotted what looked like the walk-in refrigerator, a new, deep voice rang out. It was singing.

  “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…”

  I walked faster.

  My parents came back pretty soon after that, and congratulated me on holding down the fort, but I wasn’t feeling too talkative on account of my raging case of PTSDH (Post-Traumatic Stress from Dead Heads), so I just nodded and let them go on through. I was certain they’d be in the lobby again stat, having discovered that I’d been in the wet lab, that I’d barfed and talked to the heads. It felt inevitable.

  After an excruciating twenty seconds of waiting, I pulled out Whitney’s purple nail polish and, very slowly, started painting my nails. I only got through two fingers. “Fo!” my dad called out from behind the blue door, and I jerked, swiping purple across my knuckle. This was it. I’d been caught. I braced myself. The two of them spilled out into the lobby. My dad was wearing his blue surgical cap and a headband with a high-powered flashlight on it. My mom was wearing one latex glove. They were both grinning. This wasn’t what I was expecting.

  “Mom had a great idea,” my dad said. “Something you could help us with, when you don’t have anything else to do!”

  “Before we dig back in,” my mom said, pulling off the glove excitedly and tucking it in her pocket. “We wanted to get your brain on the job.”

  “We’ve been working really hard,” my dad added. “But we’re having trouble tying it up.”

  “Not the bull urethra,” I said under my breath. “Please not the bull urethra.”

  They didn’t seem to hear me, because my mom started beatboxing.

  And then.

  Then my dad began to rap:

  “My name is Hippocrates, I come from Kos

  I am the inventor of the Hippocratic Oath

  I’m known for my wisdom and my smarts and my charm

  But most of all I’m known for Do No Harm!”

  My mom joined him and together they repeated, “Do No Harm!”

  That was the first verse. The second verse was about Hippocrates’ childhood. The third one was about his schooling. It went on and on and on and I mean on, while giant, skull-holding Hippocrates smiled down on all of us cheerfully, just having the time of his life, and I should have been relieved that they weren’t upset that I’d been in the lab, but it actually made me madder that I’d had to deal with their dumb sawed-off heads—literally the most horrific office supplies imaginable—and my parents didn’t even notice.

  PTSDH. And they didn’t even notice.

  All they cared about were terrible jokes. And Hippocrates. I was so sick of Hippocrates and body parts and jokes and mortally embarrassing parental rapping. I wanted to run out of there and go somewhere completely Hippocrates-free, which was, of course, nowhere, since technically I was always going to be partly Hippocratesed myself, since my parents had considerately tagged me the moment I was born, just like all their other stuff, all their paintings and soaps and aprons.

  By the time they got to the eighth verse of the Hippocrates rap, I couldn’t take it anymore. “This doesn’t even make sense! How can you do harm to patients WHO ARE DEAD?”

  They stopped, right in the middle of a “Do No Harm.” Hippocrates smiled down at us. My face felt hot.

  After a moment, my mom broke the silence, her voice unsure. “Fo, sweetheart, it isn’t just about hurting somebody or not hurting them. It’s about having ethics. And believing in the skills and knowledge to heal people.”

  “That,” my dad tried to explain, “was what the third through fifth verses were about.”

  “But you’re not healing people.”

  That got their attention. I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was just too afraid to say what I wanted to say, which was, Whywhywhywhy are you making me do this. I’M NOT LIKE YOU.

  “Maybe we should go ahead and get back to work,” my mom said after a moment.

  “Yeah,” my dad said, drooping a little in his scrubs.

  “No, I—”

  “It’s okay, honey.”

  My parents can do a lot of things, but they can’t lie to save their lives.

  “You don’t have to like the rap.”

  “We’re just glad you’re here.”

  Then they were gone, and it was just me, Hippocrates, and Herophilus. All of us left to sit and think about what we’d done. I didn’t mean to hurt their feelings. Maybe. Ugh.

  I missed the good old days where I fell off horses all summer.

  That was all the thinking I managed, though, because suddenly the front door blew open. Standing with his back against the sunlight was a guy in a black suit. He was the right age to be a student, but he had the wrong look. His suit, first of all: the students wore either blue scrubs or white coats. This guy looked like he was going to a funeral.

  A huge bag hung at his side, but he wasn’t wearing a beret or a jumpsuit. Not a deliveryman.

  Process of elimination: I had a salesman in front of me. I already knew I wasn’t interested in whatever he was selling.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Well, hello,” said the guy. His voice snaked in ahead of him, filling the lobby, and I suddenly wished it wasn’t just the two of us in there. He slunk toward me. “Looks like there’s been a changing of the guard.”

  “Can I help you?” I asked again.

  “Or not a guard,” he continued, looking at me sideways. “No, not a guard at all. Guardlike, maybe. Guardish. A demi-guard, perhaps. So, can
you?”

  I hesitated.

  He leaned over the desk and smiled. “Can you help me?”

  He was giving me the heebie-jeebies, and I ducked his creepy stare by reaching for the clipboard with the list of acceptable visitors. “What’s your name?” I started to ask, but he cut me off, taking the clipboard right out of my hand and laying it down on the desk.

  “You see,” he said, “I’m looking for Whitney.”

  So apparently, Whitney had a way more exciting life at the lab than I’d ever realized. Between the heads and the creepy dudes it was hard to imagine why she’d ever want to leave the job.

  “Inko Fredrickson,” the man said, stalking across the lobby to rap his knuckles on Herophilus’s tank a few times. Herophilus scrammed into his fish castle. I’d have gone in there, too, if I could. “Inko Fredrickson of Fredrickson and Son, Crematorium Express. I’m the son.” He raised his eyebrows at me, and did a little magician thing with his hand. “‘We Burn It, Then We Urn It.’ That’s our slogan. It also references our fiscal responsibility, you see. Earn, Urn. Homophones. Yes indeed, we’ve ended every year in the black, hmm.” He smoothed down one eyebrow.

  “A cremator,” I said.

  He smoothed down the other eyebrow in agreement.

  “You burn up…people.”

  An ooky smile spread across his face. “We simply help the deceased along their way. People, pets, whatever you got.”

  “Pets?”

  “Fired up an alligator once.” As he spoke, he gazed over at Hippocrates. I couldn’t tell whether he was admiring the portrait or working out how much energy it would take to chop a seven-foot-tall man into steaks. I was guessing steaks, because he didn’t really seem like a Do No Harm kind of dude. A cremator. That was definitely worse than my parents. I’d have wondered what led him down that particular career path, except that he looked like he was born to be a cremator.

  And I figured a cremator looking for somebody could only mean bad news. “Did Whitney have a death in the family?”

  “No.” He turned from the painting and sat on the edge of the desk, flipping the back end of his dark coat at the last minute so he wouldn’t sit on it. Settled, he looked down at me. “No death in the family. But it is exactly that serious.” He very slowly put a hand over his heart.

  “Should I call for a doctor—”

  “No! Don’t call them. Just Whitney.” He was definitely starting to get irritated.

  “But Whitney’s not here anymore. She quit.”

  “Oh?” he said, startled. His hand hovered, like he wasn’t sure what to do with it anymore. “Is that so?”

  “It’s so.”

  “Perhaps she’s going to drop in today.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “She’s in Florida. With her boyfriend.”

  He looked shaken and half snorted, “Impossible!” Then, instead of leaving, he informed me that I must have made an error. I said I was pretty sure not, but he wasn’t even seeing me anymore. He walked over to one of the chairs, tapping absentmindedly on Herophilus’s tank as he went. He sat down. And there he stayed.

  I was supposed to be a bouncer, but I didn’t know how to bounce that.

  I mean, I tried.

  “Well, too bad,” I said. “About Whitney not being here.”

  “Probably a waste of time for you to stay,” I said.

  “Did you need her phone number?” I said.

  “Somebody should really feed that fish,” I said. “Am I right?”

  “Is there anything else you wanted?” I said.

  “No!” He twisted to face me. “Whitney will show up. She will. She would not have simply left town without informing me. She is quite in love with me.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked before I could help myself.

  “I have the evidence right here. See?” he said, reaching into the too-big bag and pulling out a fistful of folded papers. “Love letters.”

  “She wrote those?”

  “No, I did,” he said, stuffing them back in the bag.

  “I’m not sure that’s the kind of evidence that proves—”

  “Enough!” He stormed out of the lobby onto the sidewalk, and I watched through the window as he made a phone call. I was hoping that would be the end of him, but then he stomped back in, flopped into a chair, stared off at nothing, and started sniffling loudly.

  I slouched down and played Nut Commander on mute, hoping he would just leave on his own. Probably all bouncers gave up once in a while. I wasn’t interested in getting between Whitney and any of her possible boyfriends. Especially this kind. The burning-people-up kind.

  Eventually he did leave, right around the time that my mom called. Right after she called, actually. If he’d left before she called, this would be a completely different story.

  At the time, I was in the middle of a bonus round. ­Variety Nut Skee-Ball. I was scoring big, but the cremator in the room was a real buzzkill. And then I heard this bleeping coming from the phone on the desk. I answered and barely heard my mom say, “How’s our favorite cellular mass?” The speaker phone made her sound miles away. “Hello? Fovea?” she said.

  “I’m here.” I tried to find the button that controlled volume. I pushed one that had a bunch of circles on it, and the phone made an angry honk.

  “Everything okay out there?”

  “Uh-huh.” No need to tell them about Inko Fredrickson, still sitting five feet away from me, and how I wasn’t even cut out for the simplest thing they could find for me to do.

  I kept pushing the buttons.

  “We, uh, probably won’t be that available for the rest of the afternoon; we’ve hit a bit of a snag.”

  “Uh-huh.” A snag. Or else they just didn’t want to see my face. I glanced at Inko Fredrickson as I hit a couple of buttons toward the bottom, one of which made my phone go all speakerphone, so that Inko and I could both now hear my mom’s voice as it projected out into the whole lobby loud and clear. Back back back. Which button would take it back to normal phone?

  “…still on for dinner at Grandma Van’s, so we can reheat some of that frozen chicken adobo…” She spoke louder as she walked away from the phone, and, as I tried another few buttons, I could hear my dad yelling from even farther away, “I’ve officially looked everywhere! It’s definitely not in the freezer!” Then my mom again, saying, “How could a specimen just disappear—”

  Finally, I did the first useful thing I’d done the whole day. I hung up. They probably didn’t even notice. They hadn’t been talking to me at that point, anyway, and I really, really hoped all that didn’t mean they were keeping chicken adobo in the body freezer. Or, possibly worse, that they’d lost a chicken adobo in the body freezer.

  I looked up to see Inko Fredrickson staring at me, his mouth open. Without another word, he shut his mouth and took off. I was so relieved to see him go, I didn’t even wonder why he left. Instead, I was remembering how I’d thought for a minute that this might be a peaceful job. Right. Nothing was peaceful here. Not even the freaking cadavers.

  I went back to the game, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept glancing up to make sure the cremator wasn’t coming back in, which is probably how I accidentally clicked on the calendar. A reminder window immediately opened, beeping at me:

  PRACTICUM: Thoracic Cavity (thawed)

  It took me a second to realize what I was looking at—this was part of Whitney’s schedule for the lab. Complete with pop-up reminders. Based on what my dad had said earlier about the ribs, I was pretty sure that was the lab my parents had done that morning before the barbecue lunch. Gross. I closed the window. The computer beeped as another one immediately popped up.

  DELIVERY: Bull Urethra (frozen)

  Like I needed to be reminded. I closed that reminder window, and it beeped again instantly. There was another one.

  INTO FREEZER: Bull Urethra

  I closed it quickly, hoping they’d stop, but another reminder appeared, and I switched off the monitor before I could
read it. Whitney needed to learn how to space out reminders, and I seriously did not need a play-by-play of what the bull urethra was up to.

  MAKING FRIENDS: Bull Urethra

  HAVING A GREAT AFTERNOON: Bull Urethra

  GETTING DISSECTED: Bull Urethra

  AFTERNOON GOING DOWNHILL DRAMATICALLY DUE TO DISSECTION: Bull Urethra

  SINGING EIGHTIES SONGS ABOUT LONELINESS: Bull Urethra

  I didn’t want to know.

  And I didn’t need to know either. Keeping track of the bull urethra’s busy day was not receptionist stuff. Or even bouncer stuff. It was straight-up Igor business. Whitney might have enjoyed keeping track of the schedule, but I was drawing a line. Tomorrow I’d turn off the reminders. Right now, though, I was just trying to get through the day without messing up any more than I already had.

  Which was getting harder and harder every second.

  My dad came out from the back about an hour later. He was not humming. “You doing okay out here? Need anything?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said miserably.

  He held up a file folder. “We’re still dealing with a minor problem back there, but every Monday, Whitney orders—well, ordered—whatever supplies we need to restock. We thought maybe you could do it, since you’re such a computer whiz? You just look at the form, which gives you the website and the account number and password. For example, let’s go to the site We Love Gloves: Hand ­Coverings for All Your Needs.”

  I clicked the monitor back on and pulled up the site my dad was talking about.

  “We log in like so…”

  As we leaned in together, I wanted to say I was sorry for what I’d said earlier, but I didn’t think that would fix anything. Being at the lab wasn’t making my parents and me closer. It was just emphasizing how much I didn’t belong with them.

  He went on. “Now that I’m into our account on the site, I just look at the order form in the folder.” We studied the form, which was, in fact, pretty self-explanatory. Then we turned back to the computer screen. “You click here to order two boxes of small gloves, here for three boxes of medium, and here for three boxes of large. Make sense?”