Naked Mole Rat Saves the World Read online

  She was alone sitting on the couch.

  She was alone watching Mr. G. talk to the judges.

  She was alone choking on the popcorn kernel.

  She was alone when Mrs. G. cartwheeled into sight and the music ramped up.

  She was alone when Jorge and Clem came tumbling into view.

  She was alone when the performance reached its dizzying climax.

  But the very worst thing was that she was alone at the startlingly abrupt ending to the Garcias’ performance— the terrible, unbelievable, horrifying split second when Jorge appeared to let go of Clem and she fell and fell and fell and landed with a loud crash that seemed to vibrate the entire TV and lay still on the stage before the screen abruptly went to the TMTFIA logo and then cut to ads.

  Kit hyperventilated. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help it. (Kit knew all about hyperventilation, which was when you breathed too much. Her mom sometimes hyperventilated and then actually fainted but that was part of her whole issue, which all fell under the big umbrella categories of panic and anxiety, kit’s two least favorite words.) Kit wasn’t like her mom, at least she hoped not. But she was definitely panicking, that had to be what it was: a panic attack. If she had to describe it to someone, she might say it felt like something thick and terrible swirling in her heart where her blood was meant to be.

  The room started to spin and spin and kit tried to tell herself to stop breathing so fast but it was too late. She didn’t remember about putting her head between her knees to stop herself from fainting. The room was whirling around so much that kit found she was clinging on to the couch, like it might throw her off. She closed her eyes, but that made it worse, so she opened them, but then she was flying off the couch. “Help,” she tried to say as she fell. She landed on the floor, on her hands and knees.

  But her hands weren’t her hands at all.

  They were something else.

  They were very small and very gray and very wrinkly, as though she had shrunk but her skin had not.

  “This is not happening,” kit told herself, but it also was happening. It didn’t make sense.

  Nothing made sense.

  She felt very small. Her heart was beating so fast that it made her think of the sound when she had dropped a whole bag of dried beans at the top of the stairs and they all hammered down, all the way to the salon door at the bottom.

  She tried to scream, but nothing came out of her mouth.

  What was happening?

  She had to get her mom. Her mom might know what to do. Or Samara. Samara definitely would. She could cast a spell on whatever this was that was happening and unhappen it, almost for sure.

  Beside the front door, there was a big mirror. The mirror went to the floor because her mom liked to make sure her entire outfit, head to toe, was perfect before she went downstairs to the salon. She said she couldn’t make other people feel beautiful unless she felt beautiful, too, which was funny to kit because her mom was always beautiful. She couldn’t look bad if she tried.

  But when kit managed to get herself over there and to look in the mirror, she wasn’t there.

  There was nothing there.

  kit

  Kit couldn’t see anything in the mirror except the things that were always there: the reflection of the hall table behind her and the row of shoes and boots lined up underneath, as well as the potted plant with the big leaves that looked like elephant ears.

  Her vision was really blurry. Her glasses must have fallen off when she fell off the couch.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and made herself take a deep breath. She tried to understand what happened: She choked. Clem fell. Kit hyperventilated. She got dizzy. She must have fainted. This must be what fainting felt like.

  It was not what she expected it to be, that was for sure. No wonder Mom hates it, she thought. This sucks.

  Kit stepped closer to the mirror to try and figure out the problem. When she moved, something small at the bottom of the mirror also moved. She had thought it was a shoe. She stepped back, and it moved back, too.

  This was a problem.

  The moving thing was her.

  She was as small and gray and terrible as a very blurry but fairly obvious rodent.

  Kit tried screaming, but the sound that came out of her mouth was more of a squeak, like when you try to scream during a nightmare, which must be what this was.

  It was definitely a very bad dream.

  Kit tried to pinch herself but her arms were too short, like a T-rex’s arms, and she was having a hard time seeing them. In real life, she could at least see her own arms when her glasses were off. But not now. The front hall table, where her mom kept her keys and an umbrella and an emergency twenty-dollar bill in a mason jar, towered over her.

  I have got to wake up, she thought. Now.

  She moved so close to the mirror that her nose, or the nose of the thing she was, bumped into it, but she still couldn’t see herself clearly, which was annoying. She gently nudged the glass and her teeth tapped against it. Her teeth seemed really huge and particularly terrible. She shivered.

  “Wake up!” she tried to say to herself, but her voice wasn’t working.

  She had to wake up, she remembered, because Clem fell and that was the most important thing right now, not this scary dream that felt like it was trapping her inside of itself.

  Samara had told her once that if she was having a bad dream, to try to look at her hand. If she could see her hand, she could get the dream back on track. It was called lucid dreaming.

  Just do it, she commanded herself. Look at your hand. She squinted. Her hand looked like a squashed gray leaf, with very wrinkly skin on it. It was the strangest hand she’d ever seen.

  Kit brought it closer to her face and really, really concentrated as hard as she could, holding her breath.

  She had to wake up. For Clem.

  And then, slowly and fuzzily and dreamily, her hand became her hand again and swam into focus. Her regular hand—a smooth, normal hand—on which she’d written with a Sharpie “math p. 201, 1–14” on Thursday, to remind her to do her homework, but then it hadn’t washed off all the way yet, even three days later.

  She was lying on the hall floor, shivering.

  She was really cold. She felt like she was going to die, that’s how cold.

  Kit opened her mouth and screamed with all the pent-up sound that hadn’t been able to come out before. She screamed all the way back to the couch. She screamed for so long and so loudly that her mom came running up the stairs and burst into the room, white-faced and crazy-eyed. She was brandishing her haircutting scissors like a knife.

  “Where is he?” she yelled.

  “Who?” Kit wrapped the big, fuzzy blanket around her. She rubbed her scalp, which was as smooth and round and bald as it ever was. That was something that she did, like a nervous tic, when she was upset.

  She opened her mouth to tell her mom what happened, but then she closed it again. She didn’t want her mom to worry. That was sort of her job, stopping her mom’s anxiety and panic from showing up. Besides, her mom had already disappeared around the corner. She was looking for something.

  Or someone.

  “COME OUT!” kit’s mom yelled.

  The TV was showing an ad for toilet paper. A bear strolled into an outhouse, whistling. “Something terrible happened to Clem, Mom,” kit said, but her words were all tangled up in her mouth and what came out was probably gibberish.

  “Calm down right now!” her mom said, coming back into the living room. “That isn’t helping!” She looked behind the couch.

  “Mom?” said kit. “What are you doing? Why aren’t you listening?”

  “I’m listening!” Her mom was looking in the big closet at the end of the hall where they stored their winter clothes and the Christmas tree. “I’m also looking . .
. ”

  “It’s Clem, Mom. There’s no one here. Clem fell! On the show!”

  Her mom didn’t answer. Kit could hear the vacuum cleaner closet door being opened and shut—it was very squeaky—and then the shower curtain being flung aside in the bathroom. The TV had already begun showing the next act, as though Clem hadn’t just crashed to the stage. Kit wondered how long she’d been out of it. It seemed like she hadn’t missed anything, but maybe she had. The camera zoomed in on a chicken sitting on a kid’s head. Kit hit pause on the remote. She wanted to get up and go get her mom but her legs felt too wobbly. “MOM!”

  Finally, her mom came back into the room. “There’s no one here.” She dropped the scissors on the table with a clatter and then she started crying.

  “I know there isn’t,” said kit. “Why would there be?” Kit was sort of used to her mom’s panic attacks, but sometimes they were a lot to take in. “Don’t cry.”

  Her mom took a deep, long, slow, shaky breath. That was how she calmed herself down. There had been a man wearing a Batman mask in their neighborhood breaking into apartments, kit’s mom then explained. Leandra had just told her. Well, one apartment, she amended. “But still,” she said. “He wasn’t caught.”

  When kit didn’t really react, she added, “He almost scared the woman who lived there to death. She came home! She caught him in the act! She said she couldn’t even scream, she was paralyzed by fear. He could have killed her. He stole her purse and a kitchen clock. What if he’d murdered her?”

  The back of kit’s neck had prickled. “Paralyzed by fear,” she repeated. It was something she didn’t say or hear very often, yet here it was again. “We don’t have a kitchen clock and anyway, I’m not a woman.”

  Kit knew these things were beside the point, but it seemed important to say them.

  “You’re a girl,” said her mom. “You’re a pre-woman.”

  “Well, I don’t look like one.”

  “You look like a girl,” said her mom. “You are a girl.”

  Kit’s mouth tried to form the words to tell her mom the actual problem, the something terrible that happened to Clem on TV, but it no longer felt real.

  Maybe, she thought, it didn’t happen.

  Maybe nothing happened. Maybe Clem and Jorge hadn’t even begun yet. Maybe when she choked on the popcorn, she passed out and both things were part of the same bad dream. She brightened up.

  “I do not look like a girl.” Having this conversation was normal. They had it a lot, every time someone mistook her for a boy. She was fine with their mistake. After all, she knew what she looked like. Her face was mostly hidden by her thick tinted glasses that made her eyes look huge. And she had no hair.

  The thing was, she liked being bald. She liked the silky feel of the air against her skin. Besides, she’d seen hair under a microscope and she was glad to not have that be a part of her. But mostly she loved what it was called: alopecia universalis.

  A galaxy, she thought. The universe.

  It made sense to her especially when she believed her father was the Night Sky. She must have got it from him, like how Clem had got good teeth from her dad, and Jackson had got athleticism and detective skills from his.

  The only bad thing about having alopecia universalis was that people assumed that she had cancer. When that happened, kit felt like she’d run right up to a kid who did have cancer and ripped something literally right out of his hands. But she didn’t wear wigs. They were uncomfortable and felt like floppy lies, slipping around on her scalp. Besides, wigs seemed to kit to have to do with making other people feel better and it wasn’t her job to do that.

  “You do so look like a girl,” said kit’s mother, sounding irritated, like always. “You’re beautiful. Look at your face!”

  “Errrrrhmm,” kit said, by way of not answering. She pointed at the screen. “Clem,” she said. “She fell.” She let out one huge sob that she hadn’t known was there. It surprised both of them.

  Her mom looked startled. Kit almost never cried. “What?” she said.

  “What is wrong with you?” kit whispered to herself.

  “What is wrong with me?” Kit’s mom leaned on the wall as though she would collapse if it weren’t there. “I shouldn’t have told you about that man! I’m a terrible mother. What kind of mother tells a ten-year-old something like that?”

  Kit shrugged. “I’m eleven.” It was too late, anyway. The Batman-masked man was real to her now. He may as well have been sitting on the couch next to her, someone’s kitchen clock—what was a kitchen clock, anyway?—perched on his lap.

  “Kit,” her mom said, but then she got choked up before she could finish the sentence.

  “Mom, stop. It’s Clem. This is about Clem.”

  Kit rewound and then pressed play, the sound turned down so low she could hear both of their breathing.

  There was Mr. G. doing a backflip away from the microphone after he finished speaking. There was Mrs. G. twirling twirling twirling and then leaping into his arms and suddenly upside down on his shoulders in the splits.

  Then there they were: Clem and Jorge.

  They were both smiling so widely that you could see their braces and even the teeth at the very back of their mouths. And their visible skin was covered with glitter that made it shimmer like the shell of the iridescent beetles that showed up in the summer.

  They cartwheeled and jumped and flipped and bounced like the stage was made of rubber, which it was not. They climbed their parents as though their parents were a tree, one on each side, then one on each of their mom’s legs, and then their mom scissored her legs somehow and they were higher still, Clem on top of Jorge, who was on top of their mom, who was on top of their dad, hands to feet, like a human ladder that reached up and up and up.

  Goose bumps appeared on kit’s arms and legs.

  She felt like she should be able to stop it from happening this time, but she knew she couldn’t.

  Mr. Garcia climbed on the chair.

  He stepped up onto the table and with the three others balanced on his shoulders, he reached behind himself, picked up the chair and put it up on the table, and climbed onto the chair.

  Kit’s mom gasped.

  Clem, who was at the top of the human ladder, flipped upright and then back onto her hands while balanced on Jorge, who was balanced on Mrs. Garcia, who was balanced on Mr. Garcia. Mrs. Garcia’s arms were quivering just the tiniest bit, kit noticed this time.

  The human tower teetered and then miraculously righted itself.

  The camera zoomed in on the judges: one was wide-eyed, as if making a joke about being terrified. One was covering her face, peeking out between her fingers. The third one was sipping his Coke and spinning his pen on his finger as though nothing unusual were happening.

  Finally, the camera panned the audience. A lot of people were covering their mouths, as if their un- muffled gasps might unbalance the Garcia family.

  And then Mr. G. lifted up one leg like a stork and shouted a word that didn’t sound like a word, something between an OOOOOH and a HAAAAAAAAH, the whole wobbly human pile balanced on his broad shoulders. Then he slowly began to spin.

  The music got more ominous, as though it knew what was about to happen. Kit knew what was about to happen, too. She cringed and pulled the blanket up around her face.

  “Mom,” kit said. “This is the bad part.”

  She knew it was real, but because it was on TV, it also wasn’t. Not quite. At least, it didn’t feel that way.

  Jorge flipped Clem, threw her in the air, so he was holding her hands, not her feet.

  They wobbled again.

  The camera zoomed in on:

  The judges.

  The audience.

  Mr. G. grimacing with effort.

  Mrs. G. with her wide smile, like a synchronized swimmer’s, unaware of what was ha
ppening.

  Jorge biting his lip, frowning.

  Clem’s eyes widening, her mouth opening.

  And then Jorge letting go.

  And Clem falling and falling and falling and

  LANDING.

  Then the screen jumped to the TMTFIA logo.

  Kit thought she might throw up this time, but she didn’t. She pressed pause.

  Clem was hurt. Badly.

  She had to be.

  “Oh my lord,” kit’s mom said. “Oh no.”

  Kit’s head felt funny, like her brain was buzzing in an inexplicable way.

  Something was wrong.

  Everything was wrong.

  The screen was frozen on the stupid outhouse bear, his mouth stretched into a wide grin.

  “This is terrible,” said her mom, standing up and sitting down again. “Poor Clem. Poor Jorge. Are you okay? Of course you aren’t. How could you be?”

  “I am a galaxy,” kit said. “I am the universe.”

  Kit’s mom’s hand was on her throat, as if she were taking her own pulse. Then she reached over, hugged kit—the long blond waves of her citrus-scented hair blanketed kit’s whole upper body—and whispered into kit’s ear, “Oh, honey.” She pressed her lips against kit’s scalp, leaving what kit knew would be a lipstick kiss. “She’ll be okay.”

  Before kit could really explain what she was feeling, which was a lot of things, her mom said she had to go back to Leandra, who must be wondering where she was and if she was coming back.

  “She probably thought I was abducted by those aliens from her show,” kit’s mom said.

  “Now is not a good time for jokes,” said kit. “Can you call Clem’s mom? We have to call her. We have to know if Clem is okay.”

  “Yes,” said her mom. She picked up the phone and looked at the piece of paper taped to the wall where they’d written down all their important phone numbers. She dialed.

  “It’s going straight to voicemail,” she whispered. Then she left a message. “Hi, it’s Cyn. We’ve just seen. Please let us know how Clem is, how all of you are.” Then she left their number.

  Then she walked over and hugged kit again. “I will call again later, I promise. Clem is going to be fine, honey. Breathe.” She let go. “Don’t forget to lock the door! I’ll go as fast as I can. Keep it together, remember? K.i.t.” Kit’s mom held up her wrist, as though the tattoo contained all the instructions they needed to survive, which, in a way, it did.