Naked Mole Rat Saves the World Read online

  “K.i.t., keep it together,” kit whispered.

  Kit locked and bolted the door behind her mom—the Batman guy was still out there, after all—and sat back down. She thought about writing a note that said something along the lines of “No clocks in kitchen” to stick on the front door, so he would skip their apartment. The last thing she was up for dealing with right now was some kind of robbery. But maybe now that he had a clock, he needed other things instead, like a houseplant or a radio. You could never know what you had that someone else might want, that was the problem. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a shadowy shape that might be a masked man, but when she looked, it had turned itself back into a floor lamp.

  Her mom was right. She shouldn’t have told kit about the Batman guy.

  Her mom often did not quite the right thing.

  She also shouldn’t have left kit alone. A better mom would have stayed. Kit knew that. A better mom might have guessed that something more was wrong. Wouldn’t she?

  “I hate you,” she said to the picture of her mom that hung over the fireplace. “You don’t understand anything.” Her mom smiled down at her, beautiful and unmoved.

  The portrait was an outtake from the photo shoot for the cover of her mom’s rock album, which had been very famous in the ’90s. It had been her only album. When kit saw her mom’s name (her former name, Cyng) mentioned on the internet, it was often with the words one-hit wonder, which meant that she was super famous for a split second for one song and then never hit the charts again and disappeared.

  Her hit song, “Girls With Wings,” was having a comeback—“a feminist anthem,” that’s what people called it—and her mom seemed even more anxious than usual as though she was afraid someone would find her and want something from her. She wasn’t wrong. Kit found a whole webpage devoted to “Where is Cyng now?” but luckily, no one in the group had guessed correctly where they were. She didn’t tell her mom about it, that was for sure.

  “No one will find you,” kit said to the picture. “How would they find you?”

  But kit knew that someone would eventually figure out that Cyng was now Cynthia Hardison and from there, it wouldn’t be hard to find their address and maybe they would come to the door, but what would they want? An autograph? A photo? Her mom always looked camera-ready. There was nothing really to worry about. And maybe if it happened, and it wasn’t as bad as her mom thought it would be, then maybe she could get past her fear.

  “Face your fears!” was what Mom always said to kit. It’s just that she didn’t always seem to apply that same mantra to herself.

  Kit sang a few lines of the song, which was what she did to calm herself down when she felt less-than-calm. That song was woven into kit’s DNA. She knew the song was probably why she loved wings, birds, and things that flew; maybe even why she believed her dad was the Night Sky and why it was so important to her that he was.

  It all circled back to her mom. Everything did.

  Maybe even the thing that happened.

  The faint thing. The I-turned-into-a-rodent thing. The maybe-magic thing.

  If it really happened.

  Kit felt confused and even the memory of what happened was getting away from her somehow, like dreams did. It was starting to feel like something she made up.

  She must have.

  Besides, if she were going to turn into an animal, it should be a bird. That would fit her story much better. If she could be a bird, she could fly up into the night sky and ask her dad for the truth. That would be the kind of weird magic she would appreciate. It would make sense.

  It would definitely be a lot less unsettling.

  Kit climbed out onto the warm metal of the fire escape and let her legs dangle. She tried to just be.

  She breathed in lungfuls of the now-darkening blue sky and let the lingering heat of the evening soak into her skin. The air smelled like hot tar and traffic but also like the wilting green of the trees that lined the street. Even though it was September, the weather was still unseasonably hot.

  Below her, on the sidewalk, two men were having a loud argument in a language she didn’t understand. Their voices rose and fell, angry and jagged. Then abruptly, one of them laughed. While kit watched, the men hugged and slapped each other on the back, their fight completely forgotten. A bus pulled up to the stop and they got on, disappearing from sight. Their laughter was left hanging in the air, a silvery shape that shimmered and then fluttered.

  She felt like she was being watched and she also knew that she was.

  “Hey, Dad?” she said, looking up at the sky. “Is Clem okay?”

  She waited, then a meteor streaked across the sky, just like that. She grinned. “Thanks.”

  Somewhere down on the street, there was a screech of brakes and some honking. A shout. A dog barking. Some loud music that rose and fell.

  Then the sounds of another bus, pulling away from the stop.

  It was what it sounded like when life didn’t pause, not even for a minute, even though Jorge had been right and something terrible had happened.

  Clem

  In the hospital, it seemed really important to Jorge that Clem say what happened, that she remember all the details. His voice made her think of a loud bell, ringing right beside her ear. “Just say what you remember. Like do you remember falling? Do you remember right before? Do you remember going on stage? Do you remember . . . ” She tried to focus on him. He kept taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes and then putting them back on again.

  “No,” Clem managed to say, which wasn’t true, but talking hurt. She tried to shrug, but she couldn’t. It hurt, too. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt. Anyway, she did remember but she didn’t want to remember. She pushed at him, flapping her arms as much as she could, which wasn’t very much at all.

  “Are you trying to hit me?” he asked. “Why?”

  “No,” she said again. It was the only word that worked.

  The problem was that she remembered exactly what happened. She closed her eyes and replaced Jorge’s face with the red-patterned blackness of the backs of her own eyelids.

  She remembered being backstage and how she was, after all, really embarrassingly nervous.

  She remembered the kid-magician throwing up into his hat and then crying.

  She remembered the family who had trained chickens. One of the kids in the chicken family had put his chicken on his head and the chicken had cocked its head at Clem, like a golden retriever.

  She remembered that he said, “Don’t stare. Staring makes chickens nervous.”

  She remembered that she said, “What if he poops on your head?”

  She remembered that he said, “She’s a girl, you dummy,” like Clem should be able to tell a chicken’s gender just by looking. Chickens all looked the same!

  “Is she asleep?” she heard Jorge say, like he was very far away. “Why is she making that face?”

  “Maybe she has gas,” said her dad. “Babies smile when they have gas.”

  “Verrrry funny,” said Jorge.

  Clem felt like she was climbing down a ladder of her own memories, but at each rung, there was a little door with another little door behind it: layers of doors that she kept opening, like an advent calendar. Behind every one was something else she didn’t really want to remember but couldn’t stop seeing.

  “No,” she said again.

  “Do you think she’ll remember what happened?” said Jorge. “When she wakes up for real?”

  If you can remember, can you member? Clem thought, and then she laughed. I’ll member this to tell kit later. Also, what about demember? Demembering would basically be remembering and then intentionally forgetting, or maybe more like erasing.

  “Demember,” she mumbled.

  “It’s the medication messing with her,” she heard her mom say and then the scene changed, like a
slideshow behind Clem’s closed eyes.

  She saw the exact sandwich that she had eaten: crusty bread, avocado, and some kind of spice that made her tongue tingle. It might have been chipotle. The meat was chicken, which seemed wrong to eat in the presence of chickens.

  She saw a dog. A chicken-like dog, she thought, and laughed again, except the laugh didn’t break the surface. She was too far down the ladder, which seemed to have gone underwater but she could still breathe so it was okay. Okay-ish.

  The golden dog had leaned on her legs, like he had been waiting his whole life to meet her and now that she was there, he could finally relax.

  She remembered the weight of him, pushing against her, and she remembered that she patted him, as though she weren’t severely allergic to dogs. Her hand did it. It wasn’t her. It had seemed to be acting of its own volition.

  “Honey, we are just going to move you down to X-ray,” a voice said. It was a soft whispery voice, the voice of someone kind.

  “I ’member,” Clem said, and the voice squeezed her good leg, the one that didn’t hurt. For a second, she opened her eyes and the walls slid away and turned into a hallway and then an elevator. Where were her parents?

  Then the Whispery Voice said, “Shhhh,” and Clem made herself think about things that weren’t scary, like the thick, soft carpeting on the living room floor at home. “Oops, she’s going to throw up,” someone said, and then she did, half sitting before falling gratefully back into the fog, which smelled bad now, which made her remember the locker room smell of being backstage—“Flop sweat,” Jorge had whispered.

  She remembered the lights and how unbelievably hot it was.

  She remembered the way people fussed over the judges, as though the judges were the show and everyone else was just an extra and not actually the talent.

  Someone lifted her up and put her down. She tried to focus her eyes, but they wouldn’t cooperate and maybe it wasn’t important to see clearly right now. It seemed like the Whispery Voice had things under control, and she was so tired. She heard a whirring sound and then she was somehow inside a sound that felt like it was spinning around her. “Hold still,” a louder, more robotic voice said.

  Clem reached around. The walls were way too close. Her nose was almost touching the ceiling. She sat up and bumped her head.

  “Please lie down,” said the voice.

  And then, just like that, she remembered falling.

  She remembered the way that Jorge was holding her hands tightly and then he wasn’t.

  The fall had taken an eternity, as though she were tumbling through time itself. She had a lot of time to think and flail and reach out and think: Catch me. Help me. I’m falling.

  But she also had other thoughts, like: I’m going to die. And Please don’t let me die.

  She had time to wish she hadn’t agreed to be on the show.

  She had time to wish that she’d told her parents the truth, that she didn’t want to do it, that she didn’t even like acrobatics.

  Her thoughts whirred almost too fast to actually think them.

  Why didn’t she say no?

  She had reached for Jorge’s hand, but it wasn’t there.

  Just because you are good at a thing doesn’t mean you have to do the thing!

  Her lungs had expelled an explosive whump of air as she crashed into the floor, as though they had burst. It actually felt like she herself had exploded, her bones crumpling on impact.

  A wave of pain swept through her that made all other thoughts pretty much entirely irrelevant.

  “No.” Clem blinked her eyes open. Above her, a fluorescent light flickered.

  “All done,” said the Whispery Voice. “You did really well.” That was funny to Clem because she hadn’t done anything except lie there.

  “No,” she said again.

  Then the pain pulled her under and she slept and then there was a weird sweet taste at the back of her mouth and Jorge was back, sitting on the side of her bed and saying, “Do you remember now? How about now?” in a way that made her think of when she and kit used to play in the park with the tube you could talk into from one side of the playground and hear on the other side. “Can you hear me now? What about NOW? AND NOW?”

  “No,” she murmured again and again, falling asleep and waking up, dreams overlapping with reality and reality spilling back into her dreams, all of it overlaid with a pain that wouldn’t quit.

  She fell over and over and over and over again in her mind. Whump.

  Doctors came and went and talked importantly about surgery and options, and shoes made noises on the hard floor, and people pulled at her eyelids and shone lights right into her brain.

  After what felt like a few minutes or maybe hours, Jorge left with their mom and Clem was alone with her dad. Machines beeped. Her body felt familiar and not familiar, as though pain was all she’d ever known, as though pain was who she was now. Then a machine would hiss and the pain would diminish for a few minutes, but when it didn’t hurt, she couldn’t feel anything.

  “Dad,” she tried to say.

  Her dad was talking, mostly to himself. He was very big on talking without saying much, even at the best of times, and it all wove in and out of her half-sleep, but she had an important question and she needed an answer.

  “The Yankees don’t even have a chance!” he said.

  “Dad,” she said again—it really felt like her mouth was full of mothballs, so her words were probably poisonous to moths, and she pictured them falling dead around her bed, all dusty brown wings and sadness—“Why?”

  He looked at her and his eyes widened and she knew he was looking around the room for her mom because this was a mom question, not a dad question, but finally he spread his arms—and even his fingers—wide so that it looked like his whole body was shrugging and he said, “Who knows, sweetheart?” and she had felt something small and hard, about the size of her glass turtle, lodging in her throat.

  She coughed, but she couldn’t dislodge it, and then a nurse came in and changed something in her IV and she fell asleep almost too fast, like falling off a cliff, or, say, from a human ladder. She crashed into a deep sleep.

  kit

  Clem’s mom didn’t phone back that night and kit stayed up all night, worrying, imagining that Clem was dead, sort of like she was trying on the idea in case the worst happened.

  “She isn’t dead,” her mom insisted when kit had left the next morning. “I promise it would have made the news if she died.”

  Kit hadn’t found that very comforting, but she pretended that she believed her mom. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “I know she’ll be okay.”

  But then, luckily, the principal, Mr. Hamish, made an announcement about Clem at school. He used the words “unfortunate accident” and “miracle,” his voice crackling and buzzing over the loudspeaker. It sounded like he was talking about something that happened far away in the world, like something on the news, not about kit’s best friend, Clem. He coughed and it sounded like a dog barking. Woof woof.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and the microphone clicked off.

  Clem and Jorge really wanted a dog. They were both obsessed with dogs, but they couldn’t have one, because of Clem’s terrible allergy. That seemed extra tragic to kit, because she volunteered (unofficially) at a shelter and she knew there were a lot of dogs who really needed a family. And the Garcias, who would have been the best dog owners of all time, could not have a dog.

  “We could just get a hairless dog,” Jorge had suggested, the last time they talked about it. “A kit-dog.”

  “Ha ha, you should totally be a comedian when you grow up,” kit had said. Mostly no one joked about her hairlessness, so she didn’t actually mind when Clem and Jorge did. It made it seem like less of a weird thing.

  “There have to be some dogs that don’t have hair,” Jorge insisted.


  “Maybe,” kit allowed, but she’d never seen a hairless dog and she had seen a lot of dogs at the shelter.

  “I don’t want a bald dog. I want a soft-and-loose dog,” Clem had said. “With big lovey eyes. The silky kind that chases sticks and saves you from bad guys.” Her voice went soft when she said silky.

  “A hairless dog could save you, too. And chase a stick,” Jorge pointed out. “And have lovey eyes.” He crossed his eyes at her.

  “Not the same,” Clem said.

  “Soft and loose!” kit had repeated, and they’d both started laughing. Jorge drew on his placemat and ignored them. They’d laughed so hard, they fell over in a heap, right there on the floor at Dal’s.

  “Get up, you lunatics!” Jorge had said, which had made them laugh even harder.

  The loudspeaker crackled on and then off and then on again with a piercing feedback sound that brought kit back to the present, flinching.

  “Sorry, technical difficulty,” said the principal’s voice, then he coughed again.

  “Woof,” kit repeated.

  Next to her, Jackson laughed. Lately, his laugh felt like it was at her, not with her. “The dog is barking. Let it out!”

  It didn’t matter how many times kit had torn up a tiny piece of paper with Jackson’s name on it and blown it into the wind, he wouldn’t stop making little comments like that. It wasn’t quite bullying, but it wasn’t not bullying either.

  It was extra confusing because she was the one who was mad at him but now it seemed like he was mad at her. Why? She couldn’t figure it out. He didn’t need her. He had two new best friends, both boys named Ethan. They always walked down the hall in a group of three that made the Ethans look like Jackson’s henchmen.

  “Shut up,” she whispered. “Seriously. I’m trying to listen.”