TWO: HARLAN

 

Two things you need to know about my friend Lenny.

1. He is a genius.
2. He’s a total tool.

He can’t help it. You try growing up with two Nobel Prize-winning scientists sitting across the breakfast table from you. Lenny doesn’t like to talk about it, but he’s at least as smart as his mom and dad, probably smarter. And let’s face it: You can’t be that smart without being extremely dumb in other ways. It’s like the universe strapped this jet-pack on his back, then Gorilla-glued his sneakers to the floor. He’s constantly reaching out too far and falling flat on his face.

Sometimes it’s painful to watch.

 

 

Like the time he decided to bury my uncle’s old camper in my backyard and turn it into a groundhog colony, complete with underground video cameras—until the groundhogs started gnawing on the wires and electrocuting themselves, blacking out the whole neighborhood in the process. Or his garage gene-splicing experiment, when he was ten years old, where he tried to use a box turtle to fertilize a frog’s egg. He got the idea from an old Ripley’s Believe It or Not paperback he found in my basement. I still remember the crushed look on his face as he stood there with the stethoscope around his neck and that dead egg in his hands.

His brain was supercharged. He had a photographic memory and he could memorize entire college textbooks in an hour or less, and understand everything he’d read. Someday his heart and his feelings were going to catch up to his brain, but it was going to take some time. I had no doubt that if Zooey Andrews could just see what he was going to be like in fifteen years—curing cancer and patching up the ozone layer, or whatever—she’d fall in love with him on general principles. He was one in a million. He was destined for greatness. Everybody knows that it pays to keep guys like him around and happy.

But when Zooey finally did pay attention to us, it wasn’t in the way that any of us expected.

 

“Harlan?”

I was standing in the doorway outside homeroom, trying to decide whether I needed one more Mountain Dew to get through Mr. Grant’s algebra class, when I noticed Zooey coming over to me with her usual morning Diet Coke. Aria Keen was standing next to her with an iPad, on which, I could see, she was reading the Hollywood Reporter.

“Oh,” I said, “hey.”

“What’s going on?” Zooey asked.

“Not much,” I said. “What’s up with you?”

“I need your help,” she said, and took a sip from the bottle. “The fate of the universe depends on it.”

I faked a yawn. “Is that all?”

“Uh-huh.” She glanced up over her shoulder at the poster hanging between a row of lockers and a fire extinguisher. It showed a big white North Pole landscape with a single bloody footprint in the snow, a red Santa cap underneath it. Across the top, in dripping red letters, it said:

 

YOU’D BETTER WATCH OUT.

 

And underneath the picture, in slightly smaller letters:

 

ESCAPE CLAUS

Written and directed by Zooey Andrews
December 7th–9th, 15th–16th
3:30 and 7:00 p.m.
Cosgrove Middle School Auditorium

 

Escape Claus was Zooey’s play—she’d finished the script back in seventh grade, but it had taken a year to persuade the school board to let her produce it, which wasn’t a surprise, considering the subject matter.

“A few days before Christmas,” Zooey had told the school paper, “the army receives a distress signal from the North Pole. They send a team of commandos to check it out, and they find Santa’s workshop, but the whole place seems abandoned. Doors are torn down, windows are broken, and snow is blowing and drifting across piles of broken toys. As they explore the workshop, they realize something terrible has happened. There’s something wrong with Santa. He’s been infected by some kind of virus in the ice that’s turned him into a monster. Our heroes have twenty-four hours to cure him, fix the toy shop, and save Christmas...if they can —Escape Claus.” It was a musical. Zooey had spent two years writing the play. The decision to add music and lyrics was partly because of Aria, who was captain of the Cosgrove Middle School Songleaders and refused to be in any production that didn’t allow her to sing. The school board wasn’t all that thrilled about Zooey putting on a Christmas play with an evil Santa Claus to begin with, but apparently adding music made a difference. She said there’s a musical called Sweeney Todd that does the same thing, and that one’s about a guy who turns people into meat pies.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Zooey. “Did the principal finally get cold feet and yank your funding?”

“Hardly,” Aria said. “Our play is the best thing that’s happened to this school in a long time.”

“Well,” Zooey said, “I wouldn’t go that far. But things are going well.” Then, with a little frown: “Or at least they were, until now.”

In my pocket, my phone started to play the ringtone for “She Blinded Me with Science,” which meant that Lenny was calling me. I ignored it. It was ten minutes to eight, and kids were starting to head to their first-period classes. Lenny would be looking for me, probably trying to find out if I’d bring him a SmartWater. His brain didn’t need caffeine like mine did, but he was an electrolyte fiend.

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

“Here, hold this.” She had already gotten out a measuring tape and was unrolling it in front of me. “Keep this up by your head. That’s it.”

“Wait,” I said. “What—”

“Stop fidgeting.” She squatted down to line up the bottom of the measuring tape with my shoes. “Five-seven.” And then, wrapping the tape around my waist: “Twenty-four-inch waist. Thirty-inch chest...” Glancing up at me with a pencil in her teeth: “Anybody ever tell you that you’re built like a ballerina, Williams?”

“Zooey, what are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” She glanced at Aria, who was typing notes on her iPad. “That’s close enough, isn’t it?” Aria nodded but didn’t look especially happy about it. “It’s going to have to be. We can make modifications if we have to.”

“Whoa,” I said, backing away. “What’s going on here?”

“Weren’t you listening? We need your help.”

“What, for the play? Zooey, I can’t act. And I definitely can’t sing.”

 

 

“But you’re five-seven, which means you can fit the suit,” Zooey said, “and right now that’s what matters.”

“What suit?” I looked at her, finally beginning to understand. “Wait,” I said, “you mean...”

“That’s right.”

“But I thought Ryan Forrester—”

“Ryan Forrester is out with a raging case of mono,” Zooey said. “Which puts you at the top of a very short list.” She smiled, the pencil still in her mouth, and I noticed it was a real smile, the kind that made her eyes sparkle around the edges. Why hadn’t I noticed how pretty she was before now? “Don’t worry, there are barely any lines. Nobody will even see your face.”

“Okay.” I took in a breath and let it out. “Here’s the thing. I’m, like, really flattered and everything...”

Zooey took the pencil out of her mouth and stared at me. “Flattered?” she asked, eyebrows up, but smiling a little, like she couldn’t believe her ears. “He says he’s flattered, Aria.”

“I heard him.”

I took in another deep breath. “Like I said, I appreciate the offer...”

“But?”

“But I think...you know, maybe there might be somebody else who would do an even better job at it than I would.”

“Who’s that?”

“Lenny Cyrus.”

Zooey and Aria both blinked at me. The smile slipped away from Zooey’s face, while Aria, who had never been smiling, began to actively frown.

“Lenny Cyrus?” Zooey said.

“Look, just—hear me out, okay?” Sensing that I was already losing her, I started to talk faster. “Lenny Cyrus is a nice guy. And plus, he’s tall. Taller than I am, probably, by at least an inch. Why don’t you ask him?”

She didn’t say anything. Next to her, Aria rolled her eyes and looked like she might throw up or slip into a coma or both.

“Lenny Cyrus doesn’t even talk to me,” Zooey said quietly. “He doesn’t even look at me in the hallway.”

“He’s shy.”

“Which isn’t exactly what I’m looking for on stage.”

“He can’t help the way he is,” I said. “Who knows? Maybe this will be good for him. You know, build his confidence or whatever?”

“This isn’t a self-help seminar,” Aria said. “We’ve got a show to do. We open in less than a week. Right now we just need what’s good for the production. And what’s good for the production...” she leaned forward and tapped me in the middle of my thirty-inch chest—“is you.”

“Hold on a second, Ar.” Zooey was still thinking. “Maybe there is something that Lenny could help us with. If he wanted to. I mean, I’m certainly not going to force him, but...”

I was thinking that Zooey probably wouldn’t have to force Lenny to do anything that involved spending time with her when my phone buzzed again, like a warning bell. Up the hall, I saw Mick Mason coming my way, followed by his friends Keegan Hoke and Deke Chambers. Mick had noticed that Zooey and Aria were talking to me, and now the three of them came drifting over with all the slyness of a pack of hyenas.

“Hey, Har-lan.” He leaned in close enough that I could smell his breath. “Where’s your little girlfriend?”

“You might want to go home and brush your teeth again, Mick,” I told him. “I can still smell the toxic waste you ate for breakfast.”

“How about I knock a few of yours out instead, jerk-nuts?”

Zooey sighed. “What do you want, Mick?”

“Just spreading some Christmas cheer.” Mick yanked a roll of stickers from his jacket pocket and slapped one on Aria’s shoulder and the other on Zooey’s sweater. Aria’s sticker read Naughty. Zooey’s said Nice. Behind him, Keegan and Deke sniggered like this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

“Well,” Aria said, grimacing, “spread it somewhere else.” She wadded up the sticker and flicked it back at him.

Mick looked at her with a weird mingling of surprise and anger but didn’t say anything. His eyes narrowed as he tried to kick the crumpled sticker into the corner of the hall. It stuck to the toe of his boot until he finally had to bend over to peel it off.

Meanwhile Zooey had grabbed my arm and dragged me over to the corner. “Well?” she said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

I realized that she was just going to keep after me, waiting for an answer, and finally found myself nodding along, not because I wanted to dress as a giant evil Santa—the suit Zooey had built for the production was its best special effect—but because I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. I’d been swept up in the rush of her enthusiasm. For a slightly nerdy girl with a ponytail and glasses, she had a kind of magnetic force, and after a while you just felt yourself getting sucked in.

“And tell Lenny,” she added, “that we could use his help too. But there’s not much time—we open on Friday afternoon.”

“Tick-tock,” Aria muttered, and twisted the gold doorknocker earring dangling from her left ear.

“Lenny?” Mick grunted, and stiffened up as if he’d just been hit with a cattle prod. “What’s that dorkwad got to do with anything?”

Zooey kept pretending he didn’t exist and walked off. I smiled at her and tried not to notice as Mick and his buddies gave me one last glare, then turned and followed after her and Aria. As soon as Zooey turned the corner, I pulled out my phone and looked at the screen. It was a text message from Lenny, all right, but he wasn’t asking me to bring him a SmartWater.

The message read:

Meet me in the science lab. RIGHT NOW.

“Hey, man,” I said, stepping into the lab, “I’m already gonna be late for class. We’re not all lucky enough to have independent study, you know.”

Lenny didn’t even look up from his microscope. He was wearing a white lab coat that was too short in the sleeves and standing behind the counter in the otherwise empty lab that our biology teacher, Dr. Snyder, let him use during free period. It made his schedule a lot more flexible, so he was able to help me with my homework.

“Harlan,” Lenny said, “you need to see this.”

“Did you even hear what I said?”

He didn’t answer, just made some small adjustment to the microscope. On the metal shelves behind him, white rats rustled in their cages and rattled their water bottles. One of the cages was empty, the lid leaning up against its side, but at the time it didn’t occur to me to wonder where the occupants were. Lenny was always getting the rats out and playing with them, or just letting them scurry around the lab while he worked.

“Listen, Lenny,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you. I was outside of homeroom this morning, and—”

“Harlan, I did it.” He straightened up, his face flushed with excitement. “It works.”

I glanced at him. “What?”

“See for yourself. I’m a shoe-in for the Singer Prize. As soon as I’m finished here I’m going to ask Dr. Snyder to write my letter of recommendation. And once Zooey hears about it—”

“That’s actually kind of what I wanted to—”

“Check it out. I mean, it’s crazy, and it’s not supposed to work, but it totally does.” He turned and pointed at the blackboard, which was crammed with equations that I wouldn’t have been able to decipher in a million years. Then he started talking very quickly, barely catching his breath, the way he did when an idea had taken hold and wouldn’t let him go. “Okay, so you know what Planck’s Constant is, right?”

“Uh...”

Lenny rolled his eyes. “It’s a physical constant reflecting the size of quanta in quantum mechanics.”

“Okay.”

“Harlan, if you’re not even going to try to understand—”

“Okay,” I said, “I just think you’d better hear what I have to say first, all right?”

“I reduced it.”

“You reduced it, that’s great.”

“Yeah, I reduced Planck’s Constant. See, you’re not supposed to be able to do that, but...” He just stared at me, rubbing his hands together, waiting for me to congratulate him. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Lenny, Zooey Andrews just—”

“Just look for yourself,” he said, and pointed at the microscope.

“Fine.” More to shut him up than anything else, I leaned in and looked through the eyepiece at the petrie dish.

And I forgot all about Zooey Andrews.

 

I stared through the lens, unable to believe what I was seeing.

The little things scurrying around in the petrie dish were rats.

Tiny microscopic white rats. With little whiskers, little pink tails, and little twitching noses. I stood there watching them for a second, then stood up and looked back at Lenny and the empty cage sitting beside him.

“You did that?” I said.

“I did that.”

“You shrank the lab rats?”

“Uh-huh.” He was grinning and nodding his head, reminding me of the time when he was six years old and had discovered how to open every garage door in our neighborhood using the rewired stereo equipment in his dad’s Oldsmobile.

“How small are they?”

“Between six and eight micrometers,” he said. “About the size of a bacteria cell.”

“How...I mean...” For a second I was at a loss for words. “Holy cow, Lenny. That’s...amazing. Even for you.”

“I know, right?”

“How did you—”

“I already told you.”

I glanced back up at the briar patch of equations on the blackboard. “You reduced Planck’s Constant.”

“It’s simple chemistry—a basic application of nanotechnology, actually. Once I was able to miniaturize the individual atoms in their bodies, I used a modified virology algorithm to encase them in a protein sheath, and—”

“A protein shake?”

“A sheath,” Lenny said, but for once he didn’t sound exasperated. “The point is, for all intents and purposes, though they are miniature rats, they move and behave like benign viruses. They’re alive. They’re perfectly healthy. Their little lungs can even draw oxygen directly from the hemoglobin sample on the slide. They’re just extremely small.”

“But...they’re rats.” I glanced one more time at the wall-size snarl of equations on the chalkboard, none of it making any more sense than it had a second earlier, and then back at the empty cage. “Those rats.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Those exact rats, which were in that cage this morning.”

“Yep.”

“Has anybody ever—”

“Nope.”

“Lenny,” I said, and now I was starting to get excited, “we have to call the news. Tell somebody. Tell everybody. This is amazing.”

“What’s so amazing?” a voice asked behind me, and we both turned around to see Zooey Andrews step into the science lab.