The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 7

  Some bouncer.

  Some daughter.

  I could picture it hanging over my head, like in a spiderweb: SOME DAUGHTER. Except instead of cheering, everybody would look at me and shake their heads and say, “Too bad she’s not a pig. At least you can eat those after they destroy your life.”

  I forced myself to breathe.

  There had to be something.

  Whitney wasn’t coming back. Sure, she might have tried to help if she’d heard the messages, but the phone had been in that drawer when Inko called—Whitney’d never heard any of them.

  The idea of telling my parents what I’d done made me sick, but if I didn’t, then it was up to them to accidentally save themselves. And since the message was from yesterday, they only had one day left. Twenty-four hours to find the thing. The specimen. Or else he would ruin them.

  Jail. And even worse, in a way, losing the lab. That’s what would really ruin them. My parents without their work—it was impossible to imagine. It was what defined them. It was how they defined the world. It was how they defined me, even. I couldn’t let it happen. I had to tell them.

  Or.

  Or I could find it myself.

  I could ask somebody who could tell me exactly where it was.

  I walked down the Hall of Innards and toward the lab. I hesitated for just a second outside the door, and then stepped in. They were still right there, on the table.

  Except now there was a new guy, just on the other side of Andy.

  Three. There were three now. Oh help.

  The third head was on the end next to Andy, looking a lot more frozen than the other guys. That wasn’t slowing him down, though.

  “And then I said, ‘Maybe I should get out of this graveyard, buddy, and then we can have a man-to-man conversation about where my strikes are landing.’ And he said—”

  “Fovea!” cried Lake. “Look, everybody in the whole lab, it’s Fovea!”

  “There are only three of us,” said the new head, looking ticked off. “And we can’t really look anywhere else. And you interrupted me.”

  Lake winked at me. “I’m not that into bowling. What do you think about bowling, Fovea?”

  “Bowling?” I asked.

  “Bowling!” bellowed the new guy.

  “I can see how bowling might not be a great hobby for right now,” I said slowly, trying to appear calm. “Also, by the way, just as I was coming in, you mentioned graveyards? Is that something I should be kept in the loop about?” My fears of a zombie-head apocalypse returned, my mind filling with images of terrifying graspy hands pushing through dirt and reaching out of graves, that kind of thing. Except minus the terrifying graspy hands. How would they get out? Well, I thought optimistically, at least this was going to be a short zombie apocalypse.

  “That graveyard stuff was a bowling story,” said Lake.

  “Only the bowling story,” said the new guy.

  “Of course.” I stared at the three of them. I hoped they didn’t keep multiplying. Andy and Lake were looking more relaxed than ever, which I figured must be the upside to the defrosting process. The downside: they were getting mushy around the neck. This new guy had an icicle hanging off his chin, and a lot of slightly damp curly gray hair. He took the moment to puff some of the hair out of his face.

  “I’m Fovea,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ve heard about you.”

  “That’s super great,” I said, giving the other two a stink eye, “because I hadn’t heard about you.”

  The new guy harrumphed. “How about that. Who cares about Old Man McMullen? Been in that freezer longer than either of these two clowns. But who remembers that? Nobody. So, you do bowl or you don’t bowl?”

  “No, sorry,” I said. “I don’t. Especially not in graveyards.”

  “McMullen wasn’t talking about a real graveyard. It’s like a bad bowling lane or something,” Lake explained, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “Very juju.”

  “There is nothing juju about it!” roared McMullen. “Juju is for fortune-tellers and crystal sniffers! I’m talking about red-blooded physics!”

  “Well, anyway,” Lake continued cheerfully, “it’s great to see you again!”

  “Um, you, too,” I said, hoping all this small talk would butter them up. Make them more likely to help me.

  “By the way, I’ve been thinking you’re probably a ­Sagittarius,” said Lake. “The archer!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The way you were holding that mop.”

  “Baloney,” McMullen muttered.

  “Thanks, um, for thinking of me. Anyway, I was wondering,” I said, as normally as I could, “if you guys could help me out with something?”

  “What about our favor, Fovea?” Andy said. “The one from yesterday?”

  They all looked at me. I looked back at them. Right. Their favor. Life was coming at me so hard that what with the blackmail and the decapitations, I’d completely forgotten about their favor. I was the only one who could help them, they’d said. And now they were the only ones who could help me. We were all kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, as far as help went.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. Then I thought of Em. And the Lauras. And the rest of seventh grade. “But I am NOT your Igor.”

  “You’re not our what, now?” asked Andy.

  “No bringing you your elbows or something, just because you miss them. No body reassembling. And I probably can’t, you know, figure out who killed you or whatever.”

  Lake laughed, “Oh, honey, nobody killed me.” He stopped abruptly. “Unless.”

  “Nobody killed you, Lake,” Andy said. “Natural causes, natural causes. You’re absolutely fine.”

  “Fine? That’s a load of tuna,” McMullen muttered.

  “And you’ll help me?” I asked.

  Andy smiled. “We’ll do anything we can—”

  “WHICH IS REALLY NOT SAYING MUCH,” ­McMullen pointed out loudly.

  “He’s having trouble adjusting to the transition out of the freezer,” whispered Lake.

  “I can HEAR you. No ice in my ears,” said McMullen. “Well, maybe a little.”

  “The thing I need is simple,” I said. “I’m trying to find something that’s missing.” I glanced around at the spotless counters, the smudge-free silver metal operating tables, the organized-to-oblivion shelves. How could anybody lose anything here? “It’s a specimen. I don’t know what it’s a specimen of, just that it’s not where it should be. So I need to know if you noticed a specimen of something that somebody might have accidentally thrown out or put in a wrong cabinet in the last couple of days.”

  Suddenly each head was looking off in a different direction. For no reason at all. It was the fishiest thing I’d ever seen.

  They knew.

  “Where is it?” I asked, feeling the edge in my voice. “What is it?”

  There was another pause and then Andy cleared his throat. “To begin with, speaking scientifically, erm—”

  “We’re specimens!” Lake said. “There’s no shame in it. I’m an excellent specimen.” He winked at me.

  “Thank you, Lake,” Andy said. “I was getting there.”

  My brain was working in slow motion. “So…”

  “Yes, we know about the specimen that’s missing, and what’s more, we know where he went.”

  “He?”

  “Right,” said Andy. “There should be four of us.”

  Of course.

  OUT OF FREEZER: Heads (2.5 days to thaw)

  My parents had LOST AN ENTIRE HEAD. No wonder they weren’t themselves. And Inko had actually been right. I didn’t know much about what made something a bio­hazard, except that you were supposed to stay away from those sorts of things, and a random loose drippy head just rolling around somewhere? MASSIVE BIOHAZARD. A quick look around confirmed that there weren’t many places in the lab where a head could roll off and hide.

  “Where is it?” Metal counters ran along the walls of the l
ab, and there was tons of storage underneath. I tried one cabinet after another, but every one of them was full of boxes. Small boxes. Large boxes. No heads.

  “He,” Lake corrected me.

  “Okay,” I said, trying the cabinets on the far wall. “Where is he?”

  “We’ll tell you,” Andy said slowly, “after you do our favor.”

  “Why don’t we all do our favors at the same time?” I asked as I opened a door toward the back. Nothing but boxes of gauze, stacked high. It was the last place to look, aside from the body part freezer, and I wasn’t setting foot in there. I shut it and returned to my usual spot in front of the operating table.

  Andy cleared his throat. “You weren’t going to come back, were you?”

  “What?”

  “It was fairly obvious.”

  “No, come on, you’re so…hard to forget,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that you forgot us, I said you weren’t coming back. It’s true, isn’t it?” I heard Lake gasp, and then Andy continued, “Except then you needed something from us.”

  I didn’t figure I needed to say anything. I could feel how guilty my face looked.

  “And see, we don’t have much leverage around here. We can’t go on strike. Can’t just walk out.”

  “Could you just go ahead and tell me where it is if I promise to do the favor? If I cross my heart a million times?”

  “Hearts: not actually that reliable,” said McMullen. “Where’s mine? Who knows? Detroit?”

  “Hearts are not the issue,” said Andy.

  “Hearts are always the issue!” cried Lake.

  “The issue is”—Andy took control again—“that we just can’t risk it. But as soon as it’s over, we’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  Lake blinked his blue eyes and smiled.

  McMullen puffed hair off his forehead.

  Andy raised a giant dark eyebrow.

  They clearly weren’t going to budge. Miserable heads. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll do yours first.”

  Andy waited to begin until I’d dragged in a chair. “This is going to be just a little complicated,” he said as I set myself down in front of them.

  The three heads glanced at each other as well as they could. Then Andy began. “First, we need you to find somebody for us.”

  “Just a…just a minute. What do you mean FIRST?”

  He raised his giant brows innocently. “There are a couple of parts to the favor.”

  “Don’t forget, you agreed!” said Lake.

  “You left out the details! You did it on purpose!” I couldn’t believe this.

  Or maybe I could. I had no reason to believe the heads were trustworthy. It had only been a day since I’d suspected they might be flesh-eating or planet-conquering. Why was I suddenly surprised that they might be a little tricky?

  “The favor technically has two parts,” said Andy.

  “Three,” said Lake, making a very pointed face.

  “The last part is negotiable,” said Andy, more to Lake than to me.

  “It is non-negotiable!” said Lake.

  “Baloney,” muttered McMullen.

  I put my head in my hands. “How many parts?” I whimpered.

  “I say one,” said McMullen. “’Cause it’s all going to be one giant fiasco anyway.”

  I had a feeling I agreed with McMullen. These guys were the worst. I took a breath and reminded myself how important this was. I needed the missing head to get my parents off the hook I had created. That was non-negotiable. I had to finish this. “So who do I have to find?”

  “Normally I would do a drumroll here,” Lake explained. “It’s just: no hands.”

  Andy sighed. “We need you to find us a baritone.”

  “And he has to be good,” Lake added.

  “How’s she going to know if he’s any good?” McMullen said.

  “A baritone?” I said.

  “A singer with a baritone range, of course. Not the brass instrument!” Andy chuckled. Lake hooted. Even McMullen grumbled something that sounded like a laugh.

  I did not think it was very funny.

  “Mac has a point, we need to have auditions,” Lake declared.

  “Don’t call me Mac! Only my son calls me Mac!” McMullen said. “And that was not my point—you’re not paying attention to my points! We don’t have time for auditions. We don’t have time for any of this!”

  “Seems like maybe you guys haven’t ironed out the specifics,” I said. “So maybe in the meantime you can just tell me—”

  “If we’re going to do this right, we’re going to have auditions!” yelled Lake.

  “Don’t you rile him up, now,” Andy said to McMullen.

  “But that’s my point, you numbskull,” McMullen yelled at Lake, completely ignoring Andy. “We’re not going to be able to do this right!”

  “WE ARE NOT GIVING UP,” Andy roared, shaking the metal table they were all on. “All for one and one for…”

  “All!” Lake yelled enthusiastically.

  “That didn’t work before,” McMullen grumbled.

  “We’ll make it work this time. Honestly, McMullen. You’re almost as moody as Lake is, and you don’t even have freezer burn to blame. Remember what I said, you two. The more worked up we get, the faster we defrost. We all need to be cool. Literally, please.”

  “You were the one yelling,” McMullen said under his breath.

  “That’s because you’re driving him nuts,” Lake said under his breath.

  “Let’s all respect the defrosting schedule, folks,” said Andy.

  “It should take you two and a half days to defrost,” I jumped in, remembering Whitney’s reminder on the computer. “That’s what you’re on the calendar for.”

  “Well,” Lake said smugly, “I certainly can’t help it if I have a lot of brains and it takes me an extra-long time.”

  “I’ll show you brains,” said McMullen. “You just—”

  “Everyone here has approximately the same amount of brains!” said Andy quickly. Then, before they could find something new to fight about, he turned his attention back to me. “So, yes, we need you to find us a baritone singer. And we’d like to hear a couple of candidates before we make our choice.”

  “You want me to find several baritone singers and bring them here to the lab to sing for you as part of a tryout.”

  “Precisely,” said Andy. Then he whispered, “Although one will be just fine.”

  I pictured Inko Fredrickson, cremator extraordinaire, burning up my parents’ hopes and dreams. “I’m on it.”

  Andy smiled. “Wonderful.”

  There was exactly one person I could think of who could sing.

  I knew he could sing because I’d seen him doing it, just four months ago during the chorus section of the all-school assembly. It was hard to miss him. He’d played violin with the orchestra, then switched to play trumpet with the band, and then stood on the risers to sing. He also looked miserable, which was probably why, while the rest of my class was laughing and I was using every bit of my strength to keep clapping and not shatter into a million Igor-y pieces, I found myself staring at Howe Berger. He looked as miserable as I felt. It was uncanny.

  And uncomfortably familiar.

  Howe and I had avoided each other ever since second grade, when he’d performed this very serious and very elaborate puppet show for extra credit. It was called: Who What When Where Me. Afterwards, when I asked him a question during the question-and-answer period, he got this super anxious look on his face. Then, leaving the puppets all over the floor, he walked out of the room. Everybody, including our teacher, Mr. Daniels, looked at me. I didn’t mean to make him walk out, but it was clear I’d done something awful, and the longer they looked, the more I started to panic, so I walked out, too. I didn’t see Howe anywhere in the hall, so I just went to the girls’ bathroom and hung out there worrying about everything until the vice principal came and got me. I apologized, but I didn’t even know what I was apologi
zing for.

  Okay, so there was a lot of pressure in second grade.

  But also, it was pretty traumatic, him just leaving and the puppets on the ground and all those people looking at me, and I was so afraid of it happening again, of somehow the combination of us being a disaster together, that it seemed safer to avoid him. And once I was in the habit of avoiding him, the habit stuck. Plus, he got weirdly popular, or at least, popular as a weird kid, which made avoiding him even easier. I wasn’t usually anywhere near the popular kids, weird or not.

  On the other hand, Howe was the only kid in my grade who hadn’t called me Igor in the last four months. Which, along with the fact that he could sing, made two solid reasons to call him. I was just going to have to risk the possibility that we’d end up panicking in separate bathrooms.

  Those heads better be grateful.

  By the time I got back to the desk, I had a plan. I looked up the phone number for the Children’s Refinement ­Center, this place Howe’s mom started about a million years ago. They had classes in all sorts of things, and everybody I knew had taken one there at some point—I, for example, had a fuzzy kindergarten-era memory of doing a terrible job in a macaroni painting class. The CRC was the only way I knew to reach Howe.

  I took a deep breath and dialed.

  “Thank you for calling the Children’s Refinement ­Center of Chicago, this is Howe.”

  I didn’t expect to get through to him so quickly, and the surprise of hearing his voice almost made me hang up. Looked like I wasn’t the only one doing the Family Business thing this summer.

  Before I could convince myself to speak, someone else picked up and another voice came on: “Thank you for calling the Children’s Refinement Center of Chicago, this is Lanissa Berger.”

  “Mom,” Howe said, “I have it.”

  “Howe?” Mrs. Berger asked over the noise of a lot of little kids yelling. “I’ll take the call—can you help out by the pool?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Wait!” I said, forcing myself to stop him. “I actually want to talk to you, Howe. This is Fovea. Munson. From school.”