Hyde and Shriek (5 page)

We left the mall and headed toward her house. It felt nice to get out of there. It was a good place to shop, but it also seemed to bring out the worst in people.

“Thanks again,” I said to Dawn as we crossed the street. “You're a good person.”

“I guess.” She sighed and shook her head.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Being good isn't all that much fun sometimes,” she said. “People step on you. They take advantage and they make fun. It's tough being good. I wish I had some other label. It's always
Oh, Dawn is so nice,
or
That Dawn is such a good girl.
I get tired of it sometimes. I wish just once I could be bad.”

Wow. I'd never seen that side of her before. She'd been in my science class all year. But I'd always seen her as her teacher sees a student. And she was right. That's how I thought of her. Nice Dawn who always smiled. Sweet Dawn, the girl who always behaved. Good Dawn, who did her homework and never made trouble in class. I had one advantage—I knew it was worth holding on to goodness as you grew up. I remembered some tough years when I was in school, but not counting my current problem, I had a pretty good life. “Listen, it might be rough now,” I told her. “But the older you get, the easier it will be.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

That was a question I couldn't answer right now. If I told her, she wouldn't believe me. “I just know. Trust me.”

“I hope you're right. Hey—we're here.” She pointed to the house on the corner. “You aren't afraid of dogs, are you?”

“Nope.”

A very friendly collie greeted us in the yard. “That's Newton,” she told me. “That's Jackie,” she told the dog.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand.

Newton offered his paw and we shook.

I followed her inside and down the hall to her room. A tall bookshelf and a dresser lined one wall. There were posters and two framed prints on the other walls. One print was a painting of water lilies. The other was a woman with a baby. I recognized the artists as Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. Dawn had good taste in paintings. “This is very—” I stopped before I said the word.

“Very what?” she asked.

“Nice.”

Dawn laughed. “I guess I can't get away from it, can I?”

I shook my head. “There are worse things to be stuck with.” That was sure true. I thought about Ms. Hyde. She was certainly a bad thing to be stuck with.

I noticed a table in the corner with a variety of objects on it. Dawn pointed over to it and said, “That's my project for the science fair. Want to see it?”

“Sure.”

“My title is
Vision and Perception.
” She laughed. “That sounds like something Norman would say.”

I nodded in agreement. “But it's okay to use a big word if that's the right word.”

“Yeah.” Dawn pointed to one of the things she'd built for her project. “For example, that's called a
zoetrope.
There's no other word for it. At least, I don't think there is. Unless you want to call it a
picture thingy
or a
whatchamacallit
.”

“Whatchamacallit's a pretty big word, anyhow,” I said. I looked at the zoetrope. Dawn had done a nice job with it. It was a very early version of a moving picture. There was a cylinder with slits. On the inside of the cylinder, she'd put a series of drawings, like from a flip book. There was one drawing between each pair of slits. I bent over and looked through one of the slits, then spun the cylinder. The pictures appeared to animate, showing a chick hatching from an egg.

“Cool,” I said.

“Thanks.” Dawn picked up something else. “Check this out.” She handed it to me. It was a round wood stick with a file card attached to the end. On one side of the card, she'd drawn a bird. I turned it over. On the other side, she'd drawn a cage.

“Put the bird in the cage,” she said.

I knew the answer, but I didn't want to spoil her surprise.

“Here. I'll show you.” Dawn took the stick back from me and twirled it between her palms. The card spun, showing each side quickly enough that my eyes saw both the bird and the cage. She'd put the bird in the cage.

“That's great,” I said.

She showed me the rest of her project.

After that, we sat on her floor and looked through some of Dawn's art books. No question—I was having a nice time. I probably should have been worrying about what had happened to me. However at the moment, there didn't seem to be anything I could do. There was no point ruining a pleasant time by worrying.

But as the shadows crept through the sheer curtains of her bedroom window, I knew that I needed to move along. I couldn't stay there. Sooner or later, she'd ask me questions I wasn't ready to answer. I didn't want to lie to her. I suspected I might not even be capable of lying.

“Thanks for inviting me over,” I said as I stood up.

“My pleasure,” Dawn said.

“Guess I'd better get going.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow?”

I nodded. “I hope so.”

Dawn went out the front of her house with me. As I was about to leave, she said, “You know, sometimes I envy the kids who misbehave.”

“What do you mean?”

“It must be nice to go through life without trying to do everything the right way. I can't stand being late for anything. It would be so nice to be able to show up an hour late and not feel like I'd done something wrong. Or forget my homework and not worry about it.”

I just wanted to hug her and tell her that it would be okay. That it would get easier. And that the world would be a terrible place without people like her. I had a funny feeling that the kids she envied didn't like getting in trouble. They were probably just as unhappy with their actions as she was. I reached out and patted her arm. “Dawn, you can't change the way you are. Not the way you are deep inside.”

“Yeah. I guess…”

“Thanks again for inviting me over.” I headed down the road and walked until I was out of sight. Then I stopped. It was hard to walk when you weren't sure where you were going. I'd thought about going home. That wouldn't do me any good. There was nothing at home that would change things.

But there was one place I could always go to. One place that had plenty of answers.

 

Twelve

CHECK THIS OUT

I've loved libraries ever since I was old enough to chew on a book. Okay, chewing books is bad, but I got past that stage pretty quickly and moved on to looking at picture books and then reading chapter books as I grew older, and from there I leaped to novels and big thick science books. Wherever I've lived, I've always made sure it was near a good library. And Lewington certainly had a nice one. It wasn't as big as the library across the river in the capital, but it had a great selection of books, and several very helpful librarians.

So there I went.

Now, where to start? I was pretty sure the problem had something to do with the chemicals I'd accidentally put in my breakfast drink. So maybe it was a chemistry problem. But they'd affected my body. So it might be a medical problem. They'd also affected my mind—perhaps more than anything else. So I decided to start with psychology. I went to that section and found several books on personality changes. I brought them back to the reading section and plunked myself down at a table.

“Are you finished yet?”

I looked across the room. Sebastian was there, hovering behind Norman. Without glancing up from his book, Norman said, “No. Not yet. I need to make sure my project is perfect.”

“You may as well give it up,” Sebastian said. “I'm going to win. I have the coolest project. Flat-out first place. No contest.”

“I'm happy for you,” Norman mumbled.

I couldn't help watching them. They were so different on the outside. But inside, I think they had a lot in common. They both had good hearts. Maybe that's why they were such good friends. Norman could get so lost in thought, and Sebastian could get so lost in himself, but they were always there for each other. I hoped they'd stay friends as they got older.

I looked away, but not in time. Sebastian caught me staring at them. He wandered over. I guess he was bored watching Norman read.

“Hi,” he said. “You're Dawn's friend. Right?”

“Right.” I smiled at him. He was so cute. If I ever got married and had a son, I'd want him to be like Sebastian. He was far from perfect, but there was just something about him that made me like him.

He picked up his backpack and dropped it on the table. “Wanna see my project for the science fair? It's real cool.”

“Sure.” I fought to keep my smile from turning into a grin. He seemed so proud of his project. Knowing Sebastian, it could be anything from an assortment of moldy food to clay models of famous monsters. Sebastian was wild about monsters, and managed to work them into almost everything he did.

He unzipped his backpack, then started pulling stuff out. “Here it is,” he said after digging through comic books, old test papers, candy wrappers, and a couple baseballs. He placed his project on the table in front of me and said, “Ta dah!”

I looked down. Sunglasses? A piece of thin red wire was taped to one frame of the glasses. The wire ran to a small block of wood that was painted black. A second wire ran to a dirty, worn-out gardening glove. Sunglasses and a glove?

“Very nice,” I said.

He stood there as if he expected me to say more.

“Very, very nice.” I said. “You obviously put a lot of work into it.”

“Don't you know what it is?” he asked. His tone suggested I'd just dropped in for a visit from Mars.

I shook my head. “Sorry. I don't.”

“It's a virtual reality system,” he told me. He pointed to the glasses. “You see everything through here. And you interact with the world through the glove. Everything is hooked up to a miniature supercomputer. Cool, huh?” He tapped the black block of wood. “Eighty terabytes of memory and a five-hundred-gigahertz processor.”

I picked up the glasses and put them on. The room got a bit darker, but nothing else happened. “It doesn't do anything,” I said.

“It's a model,” Sebastian explained. “It's not supposed to do anything. You know. Like the dinosaur model in the museum. It doesn't do anything. Right?”

“Right.”

“There are model cars that just sit on a shelf. And stuff like that. So this is a model of a virtual reality system. Get it?”

I nodded. I really didn't know what to say. I guess he was trying his best, but projects had never been Sebastian's strong point. Still, I had to admire his enthusiasm. And nobody would ever worry about his self-esteem. Sebastian thought very highly of himself.

“Good luck with it,” I told him.

“Thanks. I'm glad you're not judging the science fair,” he said. “Ms. Clevis will see how cool it is. She's a really good teacher.”

Norman wandered over. “Okay. I'm done. We can leave,” he told Sebastian. He glanced down at the table and said, “Better pack up your sunglasses.”

“They aren't sunglasses,” Sebastian said as he stuffed everything into his backpack.

“It's tragic to think of your mom out in the backyard, trying to weed her garden with only one glove while squinting in the bright light of the sun,” Norman said. “But I guess we all have to make sacrifices in the name of science.”

Sebastian started to walk off, then looked back at me and asked, “You really think it needs more work?”

I shrugged. “It never hurts to try to improve something.”

“I guess.” He headed out of the library with Norman. On the way, I could hear them squabbling and giving each other a hard time the way only best friends can do.

Okay,
I told myself.
Back to work.
I searched through the psychology books without finding anything that would help. Then I tried the medical ones. As I was going through the chemistry books, the librarian came over.