Naked Mole Rat Saves the World Read online

  Karen Rivers

  Algonquin Young Readers 2019

  For all the anxious heroes, especially L. and L.:

  One day, you’ll realize just how amazing you are.

  Contents

  Prologue: Keep It Together

  1: kit

  2: kit

  3: Clem

  4: kit

  5: Clem

  6: kit

  7: Clem

  8: Clem

  9: kit

  10: Clem

  11: Clem

  12: kit

  13: Clem

  14: kit

  15: kit

  16: Clem

  17: kit

  18: Clem

  19: kit

  20: kit

  21: Clem

  22: kit

  23: Clem

  24: kit

  25: Clem

  26: kit

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Keep It Together

  Kit’s mom had a tattoo that wound around her left wrist. The ink was faded like something that had been washed so many times it had gotten thin and holey and was now just a blurry memory of black.

  If you looked closely at the tattoo, you could see that the leafy, twining ink wound its way around three tiny, fancy letters—k and i and t—which stood for keep it together. It also spelled kit’s name, which was kit, not Kit, because when kit was a baby, her mom said she was much too small for capital letters. Back then she fit inside her mom’s two hands, a funny wrinkled thing that looked not-quite-ready to be alive, more like a hairless baby animal than a human being.

  “My little naked mole rat,” her mom would say every time she saw the first photo ever taken of kit, which had been stuck on the fridge for most of kit’s life. Then she would put her hand on her heart.

  One day, kit took the picture down and slipped it into a drawer and her mom didn’t say it as much anymore, which was good because it didn’t exactly feel like a compliment.

  Kit’s mom had had the tattoo for years before kit existed at all.

  “Because I knew you were coming,” she said.

  Kit’s mom often told people that she was searching for kit for her whole life and the tattoo was the map that she followed to find her. She said that when she found kit, she was saved.

  Found made it sound to kit like she was not someone who was born, but instead someone who just appeared, maybe in a box on the doorstep. Even though kit knew this wasn’t true, she sometimes dreamed of scraping her fingernails against cardboard walls, scrabbling to get out.

  She also thought that being responsible for saving her mom was an awful lot of pressure. Not that she’d ever say anything; she knew her mom loved that story and the way she told it made kit feel things she didn’t usually feel. It made her feel heroic and kit normally had a pretty hard time imagining that she’d ever be able to save anyone from anything. She was too small to be a hero.

  She could still sometimes fit into clothes labeled 6x. That’s how small.

  “The size in your shirt should be the same as your age,” Clem told her once when they were shopping at the Brooklyn Flea, which was the best place in the world to find stuff you didn’t know you needed, and kit had felt worse than if Clem had reached over and punched her right in the nose.

  Clem was also small, but not nearly as small as kit. She was normal-small. Like kit, Clem and her twin brother, Jorge, had been born too early. But unlike kit, the only fallout for them was that Clem had super bad allergies and Jorge had had to wear glasses since the age of two.

  Small-ish and small were two different things.

  That was the day kit had bought her favorite hoodie, the black one with the small rainbow star on the front and the bigger rainbow star on the back. The color was as faded as kit’s mom’s tattoo. It had cost $5, which was the exact amount their moms gave them each to spend. “That looks . . . comfortable,” Clem observed, but she meant, “That looks old.”

  Kit didn’t care that Clem didn’t like it. It was big and soft and as soon as she saw it, it looked like it belonged to her. It was already familiar. The fact that it was way too big only meant she wouldn’t grow out of it anytime soon.

  Clem had spent her $5 on a small glass turtle. “It’s not a very turtle-y turtle,” she said. “Don’t be such a turtle!” she told it.

  A lot of what Clem said didn’t make sense, but it was funny anyway or maybe it was just funny because it didn’t make sense. They had both laughed so hard that they had to sit down, right there on the pavement, the crowd parting around them. Clem clutched the non-turtle-y turtle, tears running down their cheeks, while Jorge looked dreamily off into the distance, not quite paying attention to what was so funny. Jorge was like that. There, but not always entirely there.

  “He has a rich inner life,” Clem said, which made kit picture a whole miniature world existing inside Jorge. “But his outer life needs work.”

  Then she laughed.

  Clem was someone who was almost always laughing, at least back then. At first, kit had been friends with Jorge because she was friends with Jackson and Jackson was friends with Jorge. It had been the three of them. Clem had bugged her, with her always-laughing thing. But after not very long, kit started to find the same things funny that Clem did, and soon kit and Clem were the closest friends. Their friendship grew to be the biggest and the best. So even when Jackson and Jorge were busy—Jackson with his sports and Jorge with his “rich inner life”—Clem and kit were either together or talking on the phone.

  Clem was the most important person in kit’s life, other than her mom.

  And Clem got it. She understood what kit’s mom was like. She knew what kit’s life was like and that kit had to look out for her mom because her mom had issues.

  Kit’s mom’s main issue was that she was afraid. She was scared of cancer and bad guys and fire. She was terrified of traffic and heights and crowds. She was afraid of spiders and germs and blood. The list was pretty long and always growing.

  “K.i.t., keep it together,” kit would say, and her mom would put on her brave smile and hold up her wrist so that kit could see she was trying.

  Sometimes, kit and her mom would go in the bathroom and perform magic over the tub or sink so the oils and “potions” didn’t spill anywhere that couldn’t be easily cleaned up. They had a whole glass shelf of bottles and jars, labeled with things like bravery and truth or rosemary and sage.

  Kit’s mom owned a hair salon. She was a hairdresser, not a witch, but kit thought her only employee (and her best friend), Samara, might be both. If you didn’t know Samara, you’d think she was just a nice, funny person—she loved riddles—but once you got to know her, you’d find out that she also believed in magic the same way kit did. She believed in spells, believed they could give them courage or love or money or luck, believed in the possibility that herbs and oils and words could really and truly fix any problem.

  Mostly it seemed to be luck that kit’s mom was conjuring, but kit thought she should specify whether she wanted good luck or bad. Everything was either one or the other, if you thought about it.

  And anyway, details mattered.

  “You’re as small as a detail and the details tell the story. You are the best story of all,” kit’s mom liked to say.

  “I’m not a story!” kit used to always say back, but now that everything had happened, she wasn’t sure this was true anymore.

  After all, everybody has a story, even if the sto
ry doesn’t feel like a story when you are the one who is living it.

  It’s only afterward, in the telling, that it becomes the thing it was meant to be all along.

  kit

  Kit watched Clem and Jorge’s episode of The Most Talented Family in America alone. Everyone in the Garcia family was an acrobat. They were amazing.

  She couldn’t watch it in person because it was being filmed in Los Angeles and they lived in Kensington, which was in Brooklyn, which was part of New York City, the greatest city in the world. It was very far away from California.

  Kit was more nervous that day than she had ever been in her life. She was probably more nervous than both Clem and Jorge. It was as if she had to be extra nervous so they wouldn’t be.

  Sometimes she imagined the three of them were connected by lines in the air, like the invisible lines between stars that make constellations. The three of them made a triangular constellation. A constellation of friends.

  There used to be four stars in their constellation. Back then, they were a differently shaped constellation, more of a trapezoid.

  Jackson Spencer was the fourth star.

  But after Jackson did what he did, he was not their fourth friend anymore. He was still—sort of—buddies with Jorge but kit would have nothing to do with him, and so neither would Clem, even though kit never said what he’d done. That’s just how it worked with them.

  Kit did not miss Jackson very much. At least, that’s what she told herself. She saw him every day at school and every day he seemed to change more, to get meaner, which made her miss him even less. She only missed him a tiny bit right when she sat down to watch TMTFIA because Jackson lived across the street. It would have been nice to be able to call him and say, “Come over! We can watch Clem and Jorge on The Most Talented Family in America together!” He could have walked across the street and flopped down on the floor in front of the couch and stuck his stinky feet up on the coffee table while she waved her hand in front of her nose and pretended it was too gross for words. Then she wouldn’t have to watch alone, her heart beating like it was a fist, punching her from the inside.

  Kit even went so far as to pick up the phone. Then she put it back down. “No way,” she said.

  She picked up the remote control. The sun was shining in and she put her legs in the sunshine-y spot, which was warm and bright.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the thing that Jorge had said before the Garcias had left, which was, “Don’t tell Clem, but I sort of have a bad feeling about this, like something terrible is going to happen.”

  Kit had told him he was wrong, that it was going to be great, that they would probably even win. “You’ll be famous,” she had told him. “And Marina will for sure probably fall in love with you.”

  Jorge had had a crush on Marina since kindergarten. Marina was not in their constellation of friends. Clem couldn’t stand Marina because Marina loved mermaids and Clem thought the mermaid thing was bananas. “Bananas” was a word Clem used a lot.

  Kit was on the fence about Marina. She admired people who went all in, but Marina was pretty over the top. She always wore mermaid colors. She had aqua­marine streaks in her hair. She wore a shell necklace with a mermaid pendant. She’d even once gotten detention for drawing a mermaid with a Sharpie on the princi­pal’s scooter helmet. Drawing was what connected her to Jorge even though Jorge didn’t draw mermaids.

  He drew dogs.

  “Ha ha,” Jorge had said. “Famous. That’s funny.” Then, “That can’t happen, can it?”

  Kit had laughed. “Duh! Of course, it could happen. It will happen.”

  “I’m just sort of nervous, I guess.”

  “I’m not nervous,” Clem had said, overhearing the last part. “Why would I be? We’ve done this a million billion kajillion times.” She yawned, showing all her teeth. She didn’t have any cavities, which was something she was really proud about. Kit had a lot. “Bad tooth enamel,” her mom always said. “You must have got it from your dad.”

  The thing was, kit didn’t have a dad. Until recently, her mom had always said her father was the Night Sky. When she was little, she used to write letters and cards to him, addressed to “Dad, the Night Sky, the Universe, XOXOX.” Then she and her mom would take them outside and they would let the wind carry them where they needed to go. When they blew away, they looked like a tiny flock of miniature white birds.

  “We’ve never done it on TV. It’s different from practicing,” Jorge said.

  “Is not,” said Clem.

  Kit had made a face that meant, “I get it! It is different!” and “You’ll be fine!” Then she’d handed Jorge the vial of good luck serum that Samara had made. It smelled like luck should smell: vanilla and maple syrup and roses.

  “Am I supposed to drink it?”

  “No!” Kit had no idea what else was in it, but what if it was poisonous? She didn’t want to kill Jorge. “I think just having it in your pocket is enough.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Clem rolled her eyes.

  Then Clem and Jorge’s parents had hustled them into the big black car that was taking them to the airport. They waved through the open window and shouted “Goodbye!” and kit had yelled, “BREAK A LEG!” which meant “good luck” in show business, her mom had told her, and then they were gone.

  Kit got up off the couch and went to the kitchen. Every­thing she did sounded too loud and echoey because she was the only one home. She made a huge bowl of popcorn and sprinkled it with the perfect amount of hot sauce and then added cheese-flavored salt. It was her specialty. Then she took it back to the couch, with a glass of water. She gulped the icy water between salty, spicy handfuls of popcorn, the ice cubes bumping satisfyingly against her teeth. Being nervous made her hungry. And thirsty.

  When the familiar opening sequence of the show began, a fly buzzed near kit’s ear and she found she couldn’t swat at it. She couldn’t move. I am paralyzed with fear, she thought.

  “Duh,” she scolded herself in Clem’s voice. “Don’t be so dramatic. It will be fine.”

  Kit shoved more popcorn into her mouth and made herself watch.

  Finally, Mr. G. appeared on the screen. He picked up the microphone just as kit crunched down too hard on a popcorn kernel. Her tongue poked the sharp spot where the kernel stuck to her tooth.

  Mr. G. looked very small on the screen, which was strange because he was normally a big, smiley, blustery, yellow umbrella of a person—a person who flung his arms around people and shouted about everything enthusiastically. He was definitely not a trembler, yet the microphone was shaking in his hand. Kit tried not to notice, because if she noticed then that meant other people might also notice and she didn’t want other people to get the wrong impression of Mr. G.

  “So what brings you here?” said the judge, the one with the huge beard who always looked bored. “What makes your family special?”

  Kit thought that was kind of a dumb question. The Garcias were special because they were amazing. They were gorgeous and nice and smart and funny and they were acrobats. For as long as she could remember, kit had been the audience to everything the Garcias did and she couldn’t imagine that the rest of the world wouldn’t feel the same way as she did, which was amazed.

  “My family?” Mr. G. looked down at the stage for so long that kit’s breathing started to feel funny: staticky and wrong-ish. “Our kids are as bendy as rubber chickens!” He bent his hands and wrists backward, warming up to the crowd. “They’re like octopuses, you know how they get out through little holes in fish boats? Like that! My kids fit through the heads of tennis rackets. Without the strings though!” The crowd laughed and applauded. Mr. G.’s voice got louder. “My wife and I met at an audition. It was love at first sight. My wife is Canadian!” He bellowed the “Canadian” so loudly and proudly, it sounded like he was selling the audience the country itself. S
omeone whooped. “We didn’t get jobs, but we did find each other and the rest, as they say, is history! We’ve been performing together since the kids were babies! And we’re so happy to be here on the greatest show on TV!”

  He finished with a huge flourish and bowed so deeply that the top of his hair brushed the stage.

  The popcorn kernel dislodged just then, and kit started choking. She paused the show while she coughed and gasped. She couldn’t catch her breath but her body kept trying. She coughed and coughed. Then the room went funny and gray and the screen started to blur, like she’d taken off her glasses, which she hadn’t.

  But just when she thought she might have to run downstairs to get her mom, it seemed like her throat opened back up and she could breathe again. If she had died, it would sort of have been Jackson’s fault for not being there, for her not wanting him to be there. She added it to the list of reasons why she couldn’t ever forgive him. Then she cleared her throat a few times and un-paused the show. She had only missed a little bit of the talking.

  “What an incredible story,” the judge with the strong Southern accent was saying. She was wearing what looked like a bikini top under a jacket that seemed to be made from a clear plastic shower curtain. “Really heartwarming.”

  Was it that heartwarming? Kit wondered. Really? The octopus part or the falling in love part or the not getting the job part or just that Mrs. G. was Canadian?

  By then, Mr. G. had positioned himself in the middle of the stage. The lights went down. The spotlight highlighted the sweat gleaming all over his face.

  “You’ve done it a million kajillion times,” kit said, repeating Clem’s words. Her voice was raspy from all the coughing.

  From downstairs, she heard a peal of loud laughter, which was her mom’s client, Leandra, who was an almost-famous actor. She had been on three episodes of a Netflix show about aliens. Kit was glad Leandra had a loud laugh. The laugh made her feel less alone than she was.

  She was alone a lot.

  She was alone making the popcorn.