I take a really good look at him. He’s got a cherubic face, all round cheeks and pug nose. Big, dark, almost-girl-pretty eyes guarded by eyebrows knit together in an expression of annoyance and suspicion. It’s all topped off by a huge mushroom cloud of kinky hair. Calhoun High. Fourth-floor bathroom.
“You’re the gamer,” I say.
“Four-time Captain Carnage champ. It’s Gonzo, if you don’t remember. Well, my full name is Paul Ignacio Gonzales, but everybody calls me Gonzo.”
“Cameron. Smith.”
“Yeah, I know.” Gonzo scrambles up onto his bed, which is like watching somebody’s kid brother try to do it. “So. You’re the guy with mad cow disease. Wow.”
“Yeah. Wow.”
“Wow, wow, wow.” Pause. “That is some crazy shit, dude. How’d you get that?”
“Nobody really knows,” I say.
“Hey, no offense, but isn’t that fatal?”
Nobody’s come out and said it so directly. Gonzo’s just gone up a notch in my book. “Yeah. Supposed to be. They’ve got me on some experimental stuff.”
“Man. That sucks.” Gonzo adjusts his bed. The back rises up with a mechanical groan till he’s at a ninety-degree angle.
“So … what are you in here for?” I ask.
“Me? I’m in here a few times a year.”
“Oh,” I say, not sure if it has something to do with his Little Person status.
Gonzo pours his can of Rad XL soda into a plastic cup and swigs it, following up with an impressive belch. “My mom’s always convinced that there’s something terrible wrong with me and that I’m going to die. If I get a rash, she thinks it’s beri-beri. If I lose a little weight, she thinks I’ve got colon cancer or a tapeworm. If I get a cold she thinks it’s pneumonia. I think I hold the record for most chest X-rays ever performed on a single human being under the age of twenty.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Me too.” I take another sip of my water. “What are you here for this time?”
“I took this growth hormone?” he says, like he’s not sure whether he took it or not. “It was supposed to help me get taller. Didn’t work. You probably figured that out already. Anyway, the stuff was made from cows—there was this whole class-action lawsuit—so when my mom read about you in the paper, she kinda freaked, wanted them to, you know, test my blood and stuff, make sure I wasn’t gonna … you know, go bovine.” His smile pushes his cheeks up like Venetian blinds, till his eyes have nowhere to go but into a squint.
“So,” I say. “What’s the word? Is your brain sponging out even as we speak?”
“No, dude. I’m good. But I’ve had this bad cough, too, so you know, gotta do the old chest X-ray and rule out pneumonia. Or TB. Or lung cancer.”
The phone beside Gonzo’s bed rings. He lets it ring twice, like he doesn’t want to pick it up, but the third ring he cuts short.
“Hi, Mom. Nah, I’m okay. Lunch? Some kind of gross, pureed chicken thing with mashed potatoes and carrots, a little pudding. Mom, how could the chicken be poisoned—it’s in a hospital? I’m not being mean. ¡No soy malo! Okay. Okay, okay, siento. Yes, they took me for the spinal. No. No meningitis, so I’m cool. Mom, I don’t have a brain tumor. I don’t! What do you mean? What article? Well that doesn’t mean … but not every dwarf gets it!”
Gonzo shifts down low in the bed. “When are you coming by? Can you bring me some books? My Big Philly Cheese Steaks CDs? Oh, and my Star Fighter DVD.”
Of course he’s a Star Fighter guy.
“All right. You too. Mom. I can’t. I can’t.” He sighs, then lowers his voice. “Love you, too.”
The minute Gonzo hangs up, he grabs an asthma inhaler from his bedside table, puts it in his mouth, and takes two huge puffs, finally letting everything out in a big exhale and a few dry hacks.
“You okay?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah, dude. My mom was just freaking me out a little, that’s all. I’m her only kid. She raised me totally on her own and shit. My dad wasn’t up for kids, especially not a dwarf kid.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Hey, you like the Copenhagen Interpretation?” Gonzo asks. “Got the remix of ‘Words for Snow.’ Did you see the commercial they cut to that song for Rad XL: ‘For when you’re too much for any other soda!’? Dude, it is severe! Hey, do you like Star Fighter?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Dude, I have that whole movie memorized! My favorite part? When Odin—right? He’s the old master?—when he says, ‘These Star Fighters are not worth the trouble. You will help them escape,’ and totally mind-numbs the guards into letting those guys go. Man, I wish I could do that to Mrs. Rector. ‘These are not the grades you wish to assign me, teacherling. You will reach for a higher letter or taste the righteous mojo of my Ultimate Peace Weapon.’ Awesome. Hey, do you—”
The phone goes off again. Gonzo’s jaw tightens. He stares at the phone like he’s afraid of it. He makes it to four rings this time. “Hi, Mom,” he says with a deep sigh. “You what? Mom. Why? Why did you look up the nutrition content of the hospital food on the Internet? No way. No, they don’t. They have to clean the table free of peanuts before they make the chicken, okay? I mean, it’s a hospital. I’m sure they’re super careful. No hago esto. I’m not asking for an EpiPen. Mom! You’re not listening to me …”
I turn over and slip my headphones on, scroll through the dial till I find my cache of Great Tremolo songs. One press, and Gonzo’s increasingly desperate arguing with his mom is drowned out by the familiar recorder-and-helium voice of my favorite cheesy musician. The notes swoop and fall, like someone trying to sing while being tickled. It’s the only thing that’s made me happy in the past two weeks, and I’m not letting go of it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Of What Happens When I Am Assigned a Mission of Crazy Importance or Just Plain Craziness. Because Sometimes It’s Hard to Know the Difference.
When I wake up, Gonzo’s asleep, and my parents must’ve stepped out. The edges of the room soften with a white glow that grows so bright I have to put up my arm to block its radiance.
“Hello, Cameron.”
The glow dies down, and she’s standing at the end of my bed—the one who’s been following me around leaving feather messages. I take in the torn fishnets, plaid mini-kilt, shiny, riveted breastplate with leather straps at the sides and a worn, Great Tremolo decal near the left shoulder. Her wings are a crazy black-and-white-checkered pattern, like they’ve been spray-painted at a body shop to look like hipster sneakers.
Blink and the hallucination will go away, Cameron. Shut my eyes tight and open them and she’s still there, all bright and shiny and smiling.
“Hullooooo,” she trills, waggling her fingers at me.
“Please,” I croak out. “I—I’m not ready.”
“Not ready for what?” She sits next to me on the bed and hooks the heels of her combat boots on the metal frame. She pulls a bag of candy from behind her breastplate and offers it to me. “ChocoYum?”
An involuntary laugh-squeak escapes me, and then I go right back to being freaked out. “You’re not real. I’m hallucinating.”
“Do I seem real to you right now?”
I nod.
“Well, there you go.” She gobbles down a handful of ChocoYums. “Oh my gosh, these are seriously amazing. So often there’s no truth in advertising. But these really are both choco and yum.” She catches me staring at her wings. “Go on. Touch them, if you want.”
“Huh-uh,” I say emphatically. If I don’t touch her, she doesn’t exist.
She scoots closer, singsongs, “You know you want to. …”
“Okay, could you not do that? Makes me feel dirty.”
She makes a show of zipping her lips.
“No offense, but this is just”—I swallow hard as my fingers move toward that broad expanse of wings—“just, um … sometimes my brain kinda throws a switch, see? And …” They’re the softest thing I’v
e ever felt, velvety as a baby duck. “Shit!” I snap my hand away. “Oh God. Oh crap. Felt real. Oh wow.”
“‘Wow’ is a palindrome! The same word backward and forward. Isn’t that cool?”
I stare at her. “Who … who are you?”
The room grows brighter with her smile. “I’m Dulcie. Pleased to meet you.”
“My hallucination has a name.” I try to grasp at some semblance of sanity. “Right. You—you’ve been following me,” I say like some annoyed headmaster reprimanding a student. “First at my house. At Buddha Burger. In the school gym. You left me a feather.”
“And still you didn’t call. Men.” She points to the unopened pudding cup on my hospital tray. “Are you gonna eat that?”
“No,” I croak.
“Do you mind?”
I can only shake my head.
“Thanks. Oh, hey, watch this.” She puts the spoon on the end of her nose and slowly takes her hand away. It balances there for a second before dropping into her waiting palm. “Cool, right?”
“Yeah. Cool.” I’ve got a lump in my throat the size of Chet King’s manly hands. “So … are you just, like, visiting? Or is this … am I … ?”
“What?”
“Dead?”
Her eyes widen in surprise. “Oh yowza! No! Don’t be such a Goofy Gloomer.” Her smile fades fast. “But we’ve got a lot to talk about and we don’t have much time.”
“What do we have to talk about?”
“Your mission,” she says through a mouthful of chocolate pudding.
“My … mission.”
“Your mission. We need your help, Cameron.”
I can feel my heartbeat in my skull. “Define ‘we.’”
She writes in the air with her spoon. “We. Plural form of ‘I.’ ‘Nos’ in Latin. Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun—all those exciting verbs that don’t come until the end of the sentence. It’s like a movie trailer for language.” She downs another spoonful of pudding, rolls her eyes in bliss. “Sure you don’t want some of this? It’s surprisingly edible.”
“Mission?” I prompt.
“Right.” She stares right at me. “You ever hear of a guy called Dr. X?”
“No,” I say.
“No Dr. X?” she asks again.
“There are several Dr. Assholes who come in here every day to scribble on my chart and poke me with sharp objects so they can collect points for their Sadism Scout Badges, but so far, no Dr. X.”
“You know, you are very funny!”
“That’s because I’m hallucinating.”
“Dr. X is a brilliant scientist. Like beyond genius. Branes, parallel worlds, time travel, wormholes, superstring theory, M-theory, Y-theory, Double-Z-theory, the Theory of Everything Plus A Little Bit More. This guy was at the forefront of it all.”
Just trying to follow her is making my head hurt. “My dad says that stuff isn’t real science, that it can’t be proven.”
Her left eyebrow shoots up. “Hmmmm. Anyway … Dr. X finally did it.”
“It.”
“Yeah.” She licks the spoon clean. “Personal pronoun, non-gender-specific, third-person singular.”
This is officially my weirdest and most annoying hallucination yet. “What did Dr. X finally do?” I say slowly.
“He figured out how to break through, to travel through time and space. He’s been parallel world hopping, raking up quite a few cosmic frequent flier miles. But that’s not the problem. He’s come home again.” Her dark brows are furrowed. “And he brought something back with him.”
“Something meaning like a T-shirt or coffee mug?”
“Not quite.” She puts the spoon down. “Ever hear of dark energy?”
“No. What is it?”
“Beats me. Nobody really knows what dark energy is except that it makes up most of space. It’s an eternal mystery. When Dr. X traveled through space and time and stopped to smell the roses in the Higgs Field, he tapped into that stuff. Something was created, and it followed him back to this world. Now it’s massing into something new, expanding and accelerating events, destabilizing everything.” Her expression is grave. Chocolate’s smeared around her mouth like a clown’s lipstick. “You’ve got to find Dr. X, get him to close the wormhole before the whole planet goes up in flames. Before everything is obliterated.”
“Whoa. What do you mean I’ve got to find Dr. X? Shouldn’t that be your jurisdiction? Use your angel superpowers or whatever. Leave me out of it.”
She fixes me with a stare. “Cameron, do you wonder how you got your disease?”
I’ve spent, like, a billion hours wondering that very thing. “They say it might have been a bad burger.”
Dulcie makes a disgusted growl in her throat. “So unimaginative. No. Everything’s connected, Cameron. There are no accidents. Your disease isn’t a virus or a bacteria—it’s something completely different, something that actually alters your DNA. Those prions are like car body shop guys pimping the ride of your mind, my friend.”
“Thanks. That’s very encouraging.”
“Don’t you get it? The prions attacking your brain right now? They’re from the same unstable, dark energy. That’s why the doctors can’t figure it out. Because what’s attacking you is from another world.”
“But how—”
She holds up a finger. “I’m getting to it. Don’t rush a girl in the middle of her exposition. But it’s also what’s going to allow you to find Dr. X. Those prions can help you see what everybody else would miss. By not working ‘right,’ your brain is actually capable of seeing more than anybody else’s, including mine.” She taps the side of my head. “What’s going on in here right now will help you make sense of the signs and find Dr. X’s secret location.”
“Signs?” I repeat, because I’ve only understood about three words she’s said.
“Yes. Yes! Signs!” She leaps up in excitement and nearly sends my plastic water pitcher to the floor. “Tabloids, billboards, ‘coincidences’—things no one else pays attention to. These are the clues for your journey. It’s up to you to decipher it, to connect the dots and find the meaning.”
I squeeze my hands against my head as if I could make this stop. “This is officially the craziest shit I’ve ever heard.”
“Really? Man oh man, I could tell you a few things …” She laughs, then stops. “Right. Not important. So. Anyway. There’s a lot going on in those tabloids. You’d be surprised. It’s like alternate universe code. And that’s how Dr. X has been communicating. Through tabloid code. He needs help, Cameron—he’s not a well man.”
“But that’s so totally random!”
Dulcie tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.”
“Wait, I thought you just said everything’s connected. How can it be both—”
“Randomly connected, connected very randomly,” she says, examining Jenna’s stuffed cat, Mr. Bubbles Kitty. “Cute. So soft. Cotton? Hey there, kitty. Do you think Cameron should go on this mission and save the world from complete destruction? Just nod for yes.” She makes the cat nod.
I tear Mr. Bubbles Kitty out of her hands. “I still don’t understand how it is that you can’t find this guy. You’re an angel. Aren’t you? Don’t you have any angel superpowers—appearing to shepherds in fields where they lay, blowing trumpets? Laser eyes? At the very least, you should have some kind of angel GPS for locating missing people.”
“I’m just a messenger. That’s all.”
A prickly feeling works its way up my arms. “Wait, are you an alien? Where’d you come from?”
“Great question! Anyway, I don’t want you to fret. I’m not gonna abandon you to tabloids and billboards. I’ll be checking in, here and there.”
“Checking in?”
“Here and there.”
I fold my arms over my chest. Out in the hallway, an orderly pushes somebody on a stretcher. “Tell me one reason why I should do this?”
She sucks on the
plastic spoon again. When she pulls it out, it’s coated in what’s left of her lipstick. “I was saving the best for last. There’s a bonus round. Dr. X is the one person who can cure you.”
I sit straight up. “Wait, they said there is no cure—”
“—That they know of,” Dulcie interrupts. “But there is a cure. And Dr. X has it.”
A cure. It seems as ridiculous as those spray-painted feathers she’s sporting. But a cure …
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m hooked up to an IV. I can barely move.”
“Yeah. I can help you out a little there, cowboy. I’ve got something Dr. X left behind. One of his early experiments. Hold out your wrist?” I do and she hooks what looks like a big plastic watchband around it. “Your temporary pass. It’ll keep the symptoms at bay and stabilize you for about two weeks. After that …”
“After that, what?”
She’s not smiling anymore. “The prions will take over. They’ll tear your mind apart the same way that dark energy will tear the world apart.”
Hearing her say that makes my heart beat a little faster. The watchband has something inside—a laminated green card with writing on it. Walt Disney World. Magic Kingdom. “E.” Adult Admission. Good for Choice of One. On the left side is a list: Adventureland, Frontierland, Liberty Square, Fantasy-land, Tomorrowland. “What is this?”
“An E-ticket,” she says excitedly.
“An E-what?”
“E-ticket. They used to have them at Disney World a million years ago. They got you a straight shot to the best rides. So awesome! Of course, those tickets are discontinued now, so you should be careful with that one.”
I stare at it. It’s just a green ticket in a bracelet around my wrist. “And this would protect me … how?”
She licks the rest of the pudding spoon clean and drops it on the tray. “Sorry. That is top-secret angel info.”
All the hope I’d felt vanishes. In a minute, I’ll wake up. I’ll wake up and it will be another day in which I’m living a dream of dying slowly, a dream I hope I’ll wake up from, on and on till it’s over.
“Okay, you know what? I’m clearly having some kind of pain-meds-induced hallucination, and I’m sure you’re a very nice hallucination with a supergreat, nonreal personality, but I’m going to go back to sleep now, and when I wake up, you’ll be gone.”