Teen Frankenstein (High School Horror Story #1)
Chandler Baker
For my parents, Coni and Mike,
for nurturing my love of books
ONE
The Seventh Rat:
We’ve retired Mr. Bubbles Six. The new specimen is a field rat acquired from outside the main house. I’m pleased with the find. He’s two ounces heavier than Bubbles Six, who recently lost his fur in a small fire. I consider the extra mass to be advantageous. Bubbles Seven has slightly coarser and more tawny fur, but he comes to us already missing a toe. Will run the first tests tonight and report back findings.
*
Yesterday I didn’t win a Nobel Prize. I didn’t win one last year or the year before that, either. Each of these stacked up behind me in a neat little pile of non-Nobel-Prize-winning days. And I hated every one of them.
Marie Curie didn’t have a Nobel Prize when she was seventeen, either. But then again, Marie Curie lived in Paris, which might as well be located in a different solar system from Hollow Pines, a dead-end Texas town that sucked you in up to your ankles and held you there fast and tight as quicksand.
Seven feet belowground, in a tornado cellar dug beneath the soil of the world’s biggest cultural black hole, Owen Bloch and I toiled to fix our problem of scientific obscurity by extracting a dead rat from a jar of formaldehyde. Dressed in a dingy white lab coat that fell to my knees, I pinched the tail through a pair of latex gloves while Owen slid a metal tray under the rodent and sealed the lid on the rotten-egg smell that wafted from the jar. Drops of formaldehyde, the color and consistency of pus, dripped from the nose of Mr. Bubbles, the posthumous star of our experiment. Mr. Bubbles came from a long line of Mr. Bubbleses before him. The tip of his tail draped like an earthworm over my right wrist as I lowered him to rest, bellydown, on sterile metal.
A roll of thunder rattled the shelves already sagging under the weight of cleaned-out pickle jars and sent their contents sloshing against the glass walls, where they caused the floating animals inside—lizards, fish, and, in one case, a roadkill armadillo—to sway suspended in the murky liquid, as though to music. On the counter below, liquid bubbled in a series of Erlenmeyer flasks attached by rubber stoppers and glass tubing. Steam gathered in the bottle necks. A sticky red substance coated a microscope slide clipped on top of the scope’s stage.
A flash of lightning illuminated the cracks in the cellar door. The exposed lightbulbs hanging overhead flickered dark and then bright. Owen scratched the scalp beneath his shock of sandy-blond hair. “Not to be a cosmic buzz kill, but a wise man may consider, you know, not throwing down serious kilowatts in the middle of a lightning storm while standing on a damp floor.” He stared down at his sneakers, laces untied and dragging on the dirt-covered concrete. He was wearing a red T-shirt with the words Homo sapiens inside printed on the chest.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re too close,” I muttered. The chemical stench burned my nostrils as I bent closer to Mr. Bubbles to take inventory of our last experiment’s leftover effects. We’d only just begun using this rat tonight, but already he had a singed ear, which I marked down in my black-and-white-speckled composition book before gently lifting the curve of his snout to reveal the enamels of two teeth sticking out from the gums. I noted this, too, along with a spot on his right shoulder blade where the brown fur had begun to blanch as though it’d been bleached. I circled the location on the Mr. Bubbles diagram.
Owen slumped down onto a stool and lifted his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Here’s the thing: It’s midnight. On a night before which we have to get up for government-mandated compulsory education.”
I was in the middle of rolling over the dead rat to examine his belly but stopped to glare at him. “Was that Edison that said, ‘Try, try, and stop trying again after midnight’?”