I KNOW HOW to keep a secret. I know how to lie better than anybody. My dad has drilled me about a million times on what to say, so I’ve had plenty of practice.
It’s June, almost the end of the school year. Our room has air conditioning, but the summer heat blazes in scarlet waves on the windows. Prismatic snakes of light pulse in the red. But if we were writing poems about summer, I would say, The sun is bright. It looks pretty on the grass, and then shut up.
The problem is that my body could still tell on me, any time. There are two nurses from the local government at the front of the room, and our teacher, Ms. Holleman, is twitching, she’s so angry. One of the nurses looks nice, a nerdy guy with big teeth and floppy light brown hair that keeps spilling over his glasses, but the woman nurse has a nasty sharpness in her voice.
“It’s a routine check, Ms. Holleman. Ears, eyes, throats. Don’t panic.” Eyes. My heart starts drumming so fiercely I wonder if everyone can hear. I might have to slip into a bathroom and hope against hope that no one says anything. My parents take me to see doctors a lot—they’re kind of paranoid about my health—but eye checks are absolutely off limits. The nurse smiles in a tight pucker. “No need to go hiding any of the children in broom closets.”
“Well, if it’s routine—we have three students whose parents have opted out of routine medical checks. I trust they’re exempt?”
For a second the woman nurse’s eyes flash and her lips give a little squirm, like she thinks this is exciting news. “Of course they are. Which students are you referring to?”
I pretend to read. I prop my hands on the desk to stop them from trembling and hold my book in a tight pinch.
“Well.” Ms. Holleman is poking through some papers; I watch her from the corner of my eye. “Well, we have Aidan Matthews, Josiah Simms, and Ada Lahey. Your father has some kind of religious objection—isn’t that right, Ada?”
I barely glance up from my book, nod. My ancestry is such a crazy mix of Greek and French and Eritrean and English and Persian that no one can begin to guess where my parents are from, or what we would believe, so people will accept anything we say. It’s a perfect lie.
“They can wait on the benches outside the gymnasium while the others are checked, then.” The nurse has a tense smirk on her face that stops me from feeling completely relieved.
“Can’t they wait in here? It’s so hot out!”
“No. We’ll need you to come with us, Ms. Holleman. The students who have opted out can’t be left unsupervised.”
Ms. Holleman doesn’t look thrilled about this, but there’s not a lot she can say without seeming like she’s trying to get away with something. I start to wonder if she suspects about me. I can’t imagine how she would. I’m very careful.
We all get in line and file out, first down the hallway and then out into the blazing heat. It’s almost a hundred degrees today. The woman nurse waves toward a bench in the sun for Aidan, Josiah, and me, and she manages to make it look like an obscene gesture. No one will be supervising us here either. All that’s in front of us is a bright swoop of lawn surrounded by the U-shaped school. The nearest trees are all the way across the street, off school grounds, and we’d get in big trouble if anyone caught us over there.
So we sit, and read, and sweat. Sweat trickles down my ribs and pools in the small of my back. The white pages of my book glare into my face.
I read twenty pages, then forty, then seventy. Whatever they’re doing, it’s taking forever. No one comes for us. Aidan and Josiah try running around for a while, then give up and wilt on the bench. It’s so hot that I’m starting to feel dizzy. My dad says it never used to get this bad so near the ocean; he says it’s the climate changing so quickly that evolution can’t keep up, and people can’t, either. Sea levels are rising fast, ready to engulf Long Island. I imagine all the houses across the street under water, with fish swimming out of their windows and coral fanning off the mailboxes.
The nerdy male nurse walks toward us and then stands dithering in his white lab coat. Hair falls in his face, and he juts out his lower lip and tries to blow it out of the way. It flutters and flops back down. Oh, he does that because his hands are full: a clipboard in one and three Popsicles in the other. My mouth waters.
“You must have thought everybody forgot about you. Right?” He gives an awkward laugh. “No, no, it’s just taking longer than we expected. Here. I brought you Popsicles. It’s such a hot day!”
We’re already reaching for them. “I call the orange one!” Josiah yells. I get cherry. Already dripping, the cellophane droopy with sticky red syrup. So sweet and cold that when I start slurping, I feel better right away. Bright dots splat onto my book.
The nurse doesn’t go away. He sets his clipboard on the grass and stands there looking gawky, smiling at us through his limp hair and saying pointless things. “It’s a nice school. I went to school near here, just over in Riverhead. But I bet you’re looking forward to summer vacation, right?”
“Sure,” I say. It was nice of him to bring us Popsicles, so we should be polite. The boys grunt and nod. Cherry ice flakes off in my mouth. It’s melting so quickly that I can barely swallow fast enough.
“Summer! Me and my friends, we never left the beach. Oh, but now I’m a grownup, I just have to keep working, like it or not. Too bad for me, right?”
Josiah crunches his way down the stick and gulps, orange dribbles sliding down his chin. He glances around for the garbage, but the nurse reaches for his stick.
“Here, now. I’ll take that.” Then he just holds the stick between his pinky and ring finger. He’s starting to give me the creeps. “Your name is Josiah, right? Josiah Simms?”
“Yeah.”
“And how about you two? Almost done there?” His voice keeps getting friendlier, doggier. “I’ll take those sticks now. Thanks a bunch.”
Why should he thank us? We hand our sticks over, and he fans them between the other fingers of his left hand. Like he’s making sure to keep them separate.
A sick feeling starts gathering in my stomach, even before he reaches with his free hand and pulls a glass vial out of his pocket. It has a label reading Josiah Simms. He pops Josiah’s stick into it and shoves on a plastic cap, then slides it back into his pocket.
And all at once I get it. They can use spit to test your DNA. They can put it through a machine and see every gene in your body, read you like a book. Which would be fine, except that my DNA holds the biggest secret of my life. My heart lurches.
“Excuse me. Can I please have my stick back?” Oh, he’s already got my vial in his hand. Ada Lahey. I want to grab it from him and smash it on the pavement, but then they’d figure it out anyway.
“Nope, little lady. You sure can’t.” He slides my stick inside the glass tube and closes the lid. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”
“But my dad has opted out of routine testing. I mean for me. It’s against our religion!” My voice is jumping. I can’t afford to sound upset. I’ll give myself away.
“Ah, well.” He grins and all his sloppy, doggy friendliness is completely gone. “Maybe this isn’t so routine after all.”
“Um, what? Are you taking about? I mean, why would anyone want—” Aidan sputters. He and Josiah look totally confused.
“I’m glad to see you boys don’t understand what this is about,” the nurse says, finishing up with the last stick. “That tells me a lot right there.”
“So—what is it about?”
The nurse makes a face halfway between a grin and a sneer. His glasses flare like two holes full of burning sun. “Ada knows. Ooh, she knows exactly what we’re looking for—and I bet I know ex-act-ly what we’re going to find. Why don’t you ask her?”
They stare at me while he walks away.
I might as well say it. I won’t be able to hide it much longer. They’ve got the stick, and that means I’m doomed. I want to run after him, grab his lab coat, and beg him for mercy, but I saw that sneer. There’s no mercy for kids like me.
“They’re looking for kimes. He tricked us into giving him our DNA, on those sticks. So they can analyze it.”
“Gross! How could he think we’re kimes?” Aidan flings himself off the bench and starts stalking around with his back hunched, his arms bowed out, and his face twisted horribly. “I’m a kime! I’m a kime!”
No, Aidan, you aren’t. Or if you are, you don’t know it.
A kime? That would be me. A kime, short for chimera: a word that starts out like chimney but that is actually pronounced kye-MEER-uh. It means a kind of monster with the parts of two different animals, or more than two. And I’ve known what I am for years.
∗ ∗ ∗
I can’t make myself call my dad and tell him what happened. He and my mom will find out as soon as the tests on my saliva are finished, and she’ll be nauseated to learn she’s been raising a monster, and he’ll be devastated that he couldn’t protect me from people finding out. Because he figured out the truth when I was still a little girl. He knew before I did.
It’s the worst thing that can happen to a parent. That’s what my mom always says. It’s worse to give birth to a chimera than it is to watch your kid die in front of you. Of course she has no idea how that makes me feel, every single time. She completely missed the irony of what she was doing, working on all those anti-kime campaigns, after people started to realize the possibility of kimes like me: the ones where you can’t tell just by looking at them. I think the reason my dad never discouraged her is that he didn’t want her to get suspicious.
The instant I get home, I run into my room and throw myself face-down on the mattress, but somehow I can’t cry. How did I fool myself into thinking I’d get away with it forever? I grind my face in the pillow, but there’s no relief, and I guess I don’t deserve any. I’m being punished, because lying was a terrible thing to do.
Whatever made me a kime might be contagious, possibly; no one really knows. That’s why the whole South Fork of Long Island is under quarantine and no one can leave here. So far, Chimera Syndrome hasn’t spread outside the area under containment. Everyone stuck behind the line is terrified out of their minds of having kids like me. My dad really should have turned me in as soon as he realized I was a monster, but he was too selfish. He loved me too much. And I told myself that what we were doing was just fine.
Every time I heard my mom, or a newscaster, or our principal say that chimeras represented a threat to the very survival of the human race, I told myself they were just being dramatic. I told myself I was human in all the ways that count. Like, why shouldn’t I see things other people can’t? What’s so bad about that?
But I knew. Secretly I knew why it was wrong. Say, if a pregnant woman near me at the grocery store catches whatever it is I have, her baby might not be so lucky. Her baby might end up with something a lot worse than crazy vision, or it might even die. A lot of kimes die as soon as they’re born, or before. That was the first sign that there was something wrong: hundreds of deformed babies that came months early, already dead. Even now that they know to test for us before birth, it seems like a lot still slip through.
So maybe I’ve killed people, not on purpose, but just because I wanted to be free and have a real life. Just from being greedy for everything normal people take for granted and putting myself first and not caring if that hurt someone else.
My mom will hate me when she finds out, and I guess she’ll be right.
I try to force the tears out, but all that happens is that my breath comes out sounding like someone hacking wood. I get up and grab my violin and bow instead, because whenever I can’t let myself say what I think, or whenever I can’t remember who I am inside, that’s my way out. You can only tell the truth with music, but music keeps your secrets at the same time.
I start off with the violin parts from this singer Andrew Bird, who my dad likes a lot. But pretty soon I let go of the melodies and just set the strings screaming. I’ll make the sounds that are right for me. Right for what I truly am.
Monster, I tell myself while I play. Ada Lahey is a disgusting monster. She deserves to be locked up. Monster. Monster.