FOURTEEN

IN THE PARKING LOT before school on Monday, I told Daisy about the texting and the kissing and the eighty million microbes.

“When you put it that way, kissing is actually quite disgusting,” she said. “On the other hand, maybe his microbes are better than yours, right? Maybe you’re getting healthier.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe you’re gonna get superpowers from his microbes. She was a normal girl until she kissed a billionaire and became . . . MICROBIANCA, Queen of the Microbes.” I just looked at her. “I’m sorry, is that not helpful?”

“It’ll probably get less weird, right?” I said. “Like, each time we kiss and nothing bad happens, it’ll get less scary. I mean, it’s not like he’s actually going to give me campylobacter.” And then after a second, I added, “Probably.”

Daisy started to say something, but then she saw Mychal walking toward her from across the parking lot. “You’ll be fine, Holmesy. See you at lunch. Love you!” she said, and then took off toward Mychal. She threw her arms around him, and kissed him dramatically on the lips, one leg raised at the knee like she was in a movie or something.

—

I drove over to Davis’s house straight from school. The wrought-iron gates at the entrance of the driveway were closed, and I had to get out to press the intercom button.

“Pickett estate,” said a voice I recognized as Lyle’s.

“Hi, it’s Aza Holmes, Davis’s friend,” I said.

He didn’t answer, but the gate began to creak open. I got back in Harold and drove up the driveway. Lyle was sitting in his golf cart when I arrived next to the house. “Hi,” I said.

“Davis and Noah are at the pool,” he said. “Can I give you a ride?”

“I can walk,” I said.

“Take the ride,” he responded flatly, gesturing to the space on the cart’s bench beside him. I sat down, and he set off very slowly toward the pool. “How’s Davis doing?” he asked me.

“Good, I think.”

“Fragile—that’s what he is. They both are.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You gotta remember that. You ever lost somebody?”

“I have,” I said.

“Then you know,” he said as we approached the pool. Davis and Noah were sitting next to each other on the same pool lounger, both hunched forward, staring at the patio beneath them. I was thinking about Lyle saying then you know. I didn’t, not really. Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.

When Davis heard the golf cart pull up, he turned his head to me, nodded, and stood up.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey. I, uh, need a few minutes here. Sorry, uh, something came up with Noah. Lyle, why don’t you show Aza around? Show her the lab, maybe? I’ll meet you there in a bit, okay?”

I nodded and then got back into the golf cart. Lyle took out his cell phone. “Malik, you got a few minutes to give Davis’s friend a tour? . . . We’ll be there shortly.” Lyle drove me past the golf course, asking me about my school and my grades and what my parents did for a living. I told him my mom was a teacher.

“Dad’s not in the picture?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

We followed a packed-dirt path through a stand of trees to a rectangular glass building with a flat roof. A sign outside read LABORATORY.

Lyle walked me to the door and opened it, but then said good-bye. The door closed behind me, and I saw Malik the Zoologist leaning over a microscope. He seemed not to have heard me walk in. The room was enormous, with a long black table in the center, like the ones from chemistry class. There were cabinets beneath it, and all kinds of equipment on top of the table, including some stuff I recognized—glass test tubes, bottles of liquids—and a lot of stuff I didn’t. I walked over toward the table and looked at a circular machine with test tubes inside of it.

“Sorry about that,” Malik said at last, “but these cells don’t live very long outside the body, and Tua only weighs a pound and a half, so I try not to take more blood from her than necessary. That’s a centrifuge.” He walked over and held up a test tube that contained what looked like blood, then placed it carefully in a rack of tubes.

“So you’re interested in biology?”

“I guess,” I said.

He looked at the little pool of blood in the bottom of the test tube and said, “Did you know that tuatara can carry parasites—Tua carries salmonella, for instance—but they never get sick from them?”

“I don’t know much about tuatara.”

“Few people do, which is a real shame, because they’re by far the most interesting reptile species. Truly a glimpse into the distant past.” I kept looking at the tuatara blood.

“It’s hard for us to even imagine how successful they’ve been—tuatara have been around a thousand times longer than humans. Just think about that. To survive as long as the tuatara, humans would have to be in the first one-tenth of one percent of our history.”

“Seems unlikely,” I said.

“Very. Mr. Pickett loves that about Tua—how successful she is. He loves that at forty, she’s probably still in the first quarter of her life.”

“So he leaves his whole estate to her?”

“I can think of worse uses for a fortune,” Malik said.

I wasn’t sure that I could.

“But what fascinates me most, and is the focus of my research, is their molecular evolution rate. I apologize if this is boring.” In fact, I liked listening to him. He was so excited, his eyes wide, like he genuinely loved his work. You don’t meet a lot of grown-ups like that.

“No, it’s interesting,” I said.

“Have you taken bio?”

“Taking it now,” I said.

“Okay, so you know what DNA is.” I nodded. “And you know that DNA mutates? That’s what has driven the diversity of life.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So, look.” He walked over to a microscope connected to a computer and brought an image of a vaguely circular blob up on the screen. “This is a tuatara cell. As far as we can tell, tuatara haven’t changed much in the last two hundred million years, okay? They look the same as their fossils. And tuatara do everything slowly. They mature slowly—they don’t stop growing until they’re thirty. They reproduce slowly—they lay eggs only once every four years. They have a very slow metabolism. But despite doing everything slowly and having not changed much in two hundred million years, tuatara have a faster rate of molecular mutation than any other known animal.”

“Like, they’re evolving faster?”

“At a molecular level, yes. They change more rapidly than humans or lions or fruit flies. Which raises all kinds of questions: Did all animals once mutate at this rate? What happened to slow down molecular mutation? How does the animal itself change so little when its DNA is mutating so rapidly?”

“And do you know the answers?”

He laughed. “Oh no no no. Far from it. What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”

I heard a door open behind me. Davis. “Movie?” he asked.

I told Malik thanks for the tour, and he said, “Anytime. Perhaps next time you’ll be ready to pet her.”

I smiled. “I doubt it.”

Davis and I didn’t hug or kiss or anything; we just walked next to each other on the dirt path for a while until he said, “Noah got in trouble in school today.”

“What happened?”

“I guess he got caught with some pot.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry. Did he get arrested?”

“Oh, no, they don’t involve the police with stuff like that.” I wanted to tell him the police sure as hell got involved with stuff like that at White River High School, but I stayed quiet. “He’s getting suspended, though.”

It was just cold enough that I could see the air steam out of my mouth. “Maybe that’ll be good for him.”

“Well, he’s been suspended twice before, and it hasn’t helped him so far. I mean, who brings pot to school when they’re thirteen? It’s like he wants to get in trouble.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“He needs a dad,” Davis said. “Even a shitty dad. And I can’t—like, I have no fucking idea what to do with him. Lyle tried to talk to him today, but Noah’s just so monosyllabic—cool, yeah, ’sup, right. I can tell he misses Dad, but I can’t do anything about it, you know? Lyle isn’t his father. I’m not his father. Anyway, I just really needed to vent, and you’re the only person I can talk to at the moment.”

The only rolled over me. I could feel my palms starting to sweat. “Let’s watch that movie,” I said at last.

—

Down in the theater, he said to me, “I was trying to think of space movies you might like. This one is ridiculous, but also kind of awesome. If you don’t like it, you can pick the next ten movies we watch. Deal?”

“Sure,” I said. The movie was called Jupiter Ascending, and it was both ridiculous and kind of awesome. A few minutes in, I reached over to hold his hand, and it felt okay. Nice, even. I liked his hands and the way his fingers intertwined with mine, his thumb turning little circles in the soft skin between my thumb and forefinger.

As the movie reached one of its many climaxes, I giggled at something ridiculous and he said, “Are you enjoying this?”

And I said, “Yeah, it’s silly but great.”

I felt like he was still looking at me, so I glanced over at him. “I can’t tell if I’m misreading this situation,” he said, and the way he was smiling made me want to kiss him so much. Holding hands felt good when it often hadn’t before, so maybe this would be different now, too.

I leaned over the sizable armrest between us and kissed him quickly on the lips, and I liked the warmth of his mouth. I wanted more of it, and I raised my hand to his cheek and started really kissing him now, and I could feel his mouth opening, and I just wanted to be with him like a normal person would. I wanted to feel the brain-fuzzing intimacy I’d felt when texting with him, and I liked kissing him. He was a good kisser.

But then the thoughts came, and I could feel his spit alive in my mouth. I pulled away as subtly as I could manage.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, totally. Just want to . . .” I was trying to think of what a normal person would say, like maybe if I could just say and do whatever normal people say and do, then he would believe me to be one, or maybe that I could even become one.

“Take it slow?” he suggested.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, exactly.”

“Cool.” He nodded toward the movie. “I’ve been waiting for this scene. You’ll love it. It’s bonkers.”

There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that’s been rumbling around inside me ever since I first read it, and part of it goes, “Blown from the dark hill hither to my door / Three flakes, then four / Arrive, then many more.” You can count the first three flakes, and the fourth. Then language fails, and you have to settle in and try to survive the blizzard.

So it was with the tightening spiral of my thoughts: I thought about his bacteria being inside of me. I thought about the probability that some percentage of said bacteria were malicious. I thought about the E. coli and campylobacter and Clostridium difficile that were very likely an ongoing part of Davis’s microbiota.

A fourth thought arrived. Then many more.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I emerged from the basement to find the dying light of the day shining through the windows, making the white walls look a little pink. Noah, playing a video game on the couch, said, “Aza?”

I spun around and entered a bathroom. I washed my face, stared at myself in the mirror, watching myself breathe. I watched myself for a long time, trying to figure a way to shut it off, trying to find my inner monologue’s mute button, trying.

And then I pulled the hand sanitizer out of my jacket and squeezed a glob of it into my mouth. I gagged a little as I swished the burning slime of it around my mouth, then swallowed.

—

“You watching Jupiter Ascending?” Noah asked as I left the bathroom.

“Yeah.”

“Dope.” I turned to leave, but then he said, “Aza?” I walked over to him and sat next to him on the couch.

“Nobody wants to find him.”

“Your dad, you mean?”

“It’s like I can’t think about anything else. I . . . it’s . . . Do you think, like, he would really disappear and not even text us? Do you think maybe he’s trying and we just haven’t figured out how to listen?”

I felt so bad for the kid. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he’s just waiting until it’s safe.”

“Right,” Noah said. “Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.” I was starting to stand up when he said, “But couldn’t he have sent an email? They can’t trace that stuff if you just use public Wi-Fi. Couldn’t he have texted us from a phone he picked up somewhere?”

“Maybe he’s scared,” I said. I was trying to help, but maybe there was no helping.

“Will you keep looking, though?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure, Noah.”

He reached over to pick up his video game controller, my sign to go back downstairs.

—

Davis had paused the movie in the midst of a starfighter battle, and the bright light from a suspended explosion was reflected in his glasses as he turned to me. I sat down next to him, and he asked, “You all right?”

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“Is there something I should do differen—”

“No, it has nothing to do with you. It’s just, like, I just . . . I can’t talk about it right now.” My head was spinning, and I was trying to keep my mouth turned away from him so he wouldn’t smell the hand sanitizer on my breath.

“That’s fine,” he said. “I like us. I like that we’ve got our own way of doing things.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do.” I was staring at the frozen movie screen, waiting for him to un-pause it. “I overheard you talking to Noah.”

I could still feel his spit in my mouth, and the respite the hand sanitizer had provided was dwindling away. If I could still feel his spit, it was probably still in there. You might need to drink more of it. This is ridiculous. Billions of people kiss, and nothing bad happens to them. You know you’ll feel better if you drink more.

“He needs to see somebody,” I said. “A psychologist or something.”

“He needs a father.”

Why did you even try to kiss him? You should’ve known. You could’ve had a normal night, but you chose this. Right now needs to be about Noah, not me. His bacteria are swimming in you. They’re on your tongue right now. Even pure alcohol can’t kill them all.

“Do you just want to watch the movie?”

I nodded, and we sat next to each other, close but not touching, for the next hour, as the spiral tightened.