China is spending the day doing something with Tamaqua de la Cortez.
Just because I’m in a lab coat and up to my eyes in dead animal organs a lot of the time doesn’t mean I didn’t hear about what happened to Tamaqua. Everyone heard.
China seems to think I heard something about her, too. She says, “You know.” She says, “Everyone knows.” She said to me yesterday morning at the drill, “Even Gustav knows.”
She doesn’t understand that I don’t want to know. Not about anything. I want to crawl into a hole and not come out. I want to split in two so I have something to say. I want to go somewhere where there are so many mirrors that there is a reflection of twenty of me and I don’t have to choose the one I like best.
I keep having this dream.
There are four coffins standing upright. One is mine and one is Gustav’s. The other two are nailed shut, and I don’t have a crowbar.
Each coffin has a doorbell. I ring Gustav’s twelve times and he answers wearing a tuxedo and top hat. He asks me if I know how to waltz and I feel stupid because I don’t know how to waltz. He tells me it’s okay because he doesn’t know how to waltz, either.
Then the drill bell sounds and the other two coffins open and the entire student body pours out of them. There are twelve hundred teenagers crowding us, waltzing. They waltz beautifully. The song is Mozart’s Waltz no. 1. It is played solely by cellos.
This is the waltz drill.
I realize in the dream that Gustav and I are failing the waltz drill.
We don’t panic. We seem to enjoy the others’ ability to waltz so well. We hold our hands to our mouths as if we are viewing something extraordinary. Then we go back to our coffins and close the doors.
Then we are in the helicopter, flying higher and higher.
The student body is below us, and as they waltz, they look like a thousand tiny test dots, changing their minds with each step.
A, B, C. A, B, C. A, B, C.
The music stops and they all turn into tiny beetles and scurry into their respective dots and stay there.
Then I wake up.
Mama and Pop say we’re going for a short family outing tomorrow. They tell me it will be fun. I go onto my master list and try to figure out which crime scene they have in mind.
State College? Swarthmore? Edinboro?
I got the master list from a list of school shootings on the Internet encyclopedia. But sometimes they list people who just happened to shoot themselves/their lover/their enemy in a school. The list goes all the way back to Pontiac’s War. It’s like they added these not-really-school-shootings to the list to make it look like there have been school shootings all through history. You know, to downplay the problem or something.
Gustav is right. You can’t read a thing or see a thing or study a thing without seeing the infestation. I walk to his house to tell him. Really, I should be writing my poem for English. It’s due on Tuesday. I still haven’t even tried. It’s just a poem. I don’t know why I’m so worked up about it.
The dangerous bush man has set up a lemonade stand. He is selling pink and classic lemonade. He has a sign that reads ROOFIES COST EXTRA. I stop and ask him how much the lemonade costs and he says, “A quarter.” I ask him how much lemonade with the roofies cost and he says, “Add a dollar.”
He says, “Not a lot of people walk by here anymore.”
Gustav is lying on the concrete on his back with a large pair of pliers and a screwdriver. Next to him on the garage floor are a welding torch and a face shield. I can smell burnt metal.
“Still in your lab coat?” he asks.
“Yep.”
“Do you dissect things on weekends?” he asks.
“Do you build your helicopter on weekends?” I answer.
“Touché,” he says. A minute flies by. “Do you want some lemonade?” He points to the pitcher of pink lemonade that sits on the tool bench next to the large garage door.
“Did you get that from the man in the bush?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Did you pay extra for the roofies?”
“Of course not,” he says.
“I trust you.”
“I know,” he says. “You’re probably the one who trusts me the most.”
This makes me feel guilty because if I’m the one who trusts him the most, I should be able to see the helicopter all seven days.
“Can you tell me where we’re going yet?” I ask.
“We’re going to an invisible place,” he answers without looking up from his work. “We’re flying an invisible helicopter to an invisible place.”
“Did you know the man in the bush knows where we’re going?” I ask.
“Who do you think bought me the kit?”
I feel my forehead move into a frown—not a sad frown, but a thoughtful one. I say, “The bush man bought you the helicopter? You said it cost you, like, fifty thousand dollars.”
Gustav doesn’t answer.
“And did he tell you where you were going?”
“He told me that people like us—like you and me and him—that we don’t belong here. We belong somewhere else.”
“In the invisible place?”
“Yes,” he answers. “Apparently, it’s a hotbed of genius.”
Half of me laughs at this. Half of me cries.