How My Brain Ended Up Inside This Box

Chapter Nineteen

Marta was still staring at me and I remembered what Midgerette used to tell me about people-people, how they were all about buying and selling. I sensed she was measuring me and gaging my worth at that moment but I was taken by surprise when she suddenly pulled out a syringe and stabbed me in the chest with it. I was instantly paralyzed. She plugged a vial into the thing and began to slowly extract some blue-green fluid from my body, the whole time fixing me with her eyes.

"Any questions?" she asked. I could not even shake my head.

"Well, I have some," she said. "And you will answer each one immediately. Tell me the password."

"Carnage88," I promptly replied.

"How long did you stir the bunny dough?"

"Three minutes, seventeen seconds."

"The seventh letter of the last name of the author of the book you read?"

"T."

"How many books on the bottom shelf?"

"Nineteen."

"Where was the window?"

"There," I pointed to a section of cinder block wall.

"What do turtles talk about?"

"I've never met a turtle."

"Photons in the lamp?"

"Per second? Three times ten to the twentieth more or less."

"How many can you see?
"All of them."

"What do you want?"

"Home," I said, and with that she pulled out the syringe and I could breathe again. She stuck a plug in the capsule and put it back in her jacket pocket. Still holding the needle she pointed it at my face and said,

"You're lying to me, and I don't like it. Stan won't like it either. You'll want to be on Stan's good side, you know."

"Who is Stan?" I asked, but she'd already turned away and was walking out of the room.

"You'll find out soon enough," she said, "now come."

I was glad to be leaving the garage, and snapped several mental images of the hallway outside the door, the way to the exit, the numbers nailed onto the house frame, the motions Marta made to open and close the doors, start the car, pull the center vertical stick to R and push the center horizontal stick down to go backward, then turn the stick to D and step on a metal shoe on the floor to go forward, turning the wheel with her hands to make the car change direction. Then I studied the street to see if I could find things to remember about it.

I sat in the back of the long gray car between June Lee and Josef, while Marta had the whole front to herself. This was not the fancy fast car we'd come from Mother's house in, but a dirtier, smellier thing. Nobody talked for a while, but I could feel the heat of their thoughts, Josef's especially. I was glad at that moment not to have Margaux's powers of foresight, because I'm sure I would have seen bad things in store for that boy, and I was glad not to have Lindley's mind-reading capabilities, because I didn't want to be inside June Lee's little brain. I was sure it was full of herself.

"I want ice cream for dinner," she declared at one point, "mocha almond fudge," but no one bothered to reply and she sulked for a bit at not having made as much of an impression as she'd hoped. It was already late in the day but still warm when we got to the beach parking lot. June Lee was first out of the car and led us single-file down a concrete sidewalk built right onto the sand alongside a rock-pile jetty. The ocean was calm there, lapping gently onto the shore with a quiet hushing sound. There were still a lot of people on the beach, all huddled into small groups with umbrellas and loud radios competing with each other for the most pseudo-heartfelt emotion.