The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (13 page)

* * *

On the way home, Ava felt calmer than she had in a long time. She sat back in her seat, not feeling compelled, for the time being, to check herself in the mirror, because she was beautiful, Mr. Boy had seen her naked and confirmed it.

“That thing we just did cost a lot of money,” Nance said, her eyes darting over at Ava.

“Thank you very much,” Ava said.

“It’ll be worth it. This is just the beginning for you, my dear. You’re going to get on that show and get rich and famous and show everybody!”

“Show them what?”

“You’ll be a star!” Nance leaned forward like she was pushing the car with her upper body. “Nobody will mistreat you ever again.”

“Really?” Ava didn’t believe this for a minute. People were always mistreating people.

“We’ll show them,” Nance muttered, pounding her little fist on the steering wheel.

Ava didn’t really want to show people anything. “If my mom finds out about this,” she said, “I’ll tell her it was your idea. It
was
your idea.”

Nance tightened her grip on the leatherette wheel, her mouth in a tight line. She looked like Miss Clavel’s evil twin.

“But thanks
so much,
” Ava said, “for taking me and paying for the pictures. It was
so
nice of you and I
really
appreciate it.”

“Does your grandfather ever go for walks by himself?” Nance said, not seeming to hear the thanks. “Is there any place he goes on a regular basis?”

“He likes the Cracker Barrel,” Ava said, because she couldn’t think of what to say to Nance’s nosy questions, and she herself liked the Cracker Barrel. “He doesn’t get to go there much,” she added, and Nance smiled.

He’d drawn their locations on a grid for maximum efficiency, and since a lot of the shops were on South Monroe, he decided, on his first Saturday off from McDonald’s in three weeks, to work his way south on Monroe. Actually, he didn’t
get
the day off—he was taking it off. It was Memorial Day weekend so they’d be swamped at McDonald’s, but he’d called in anyway and left a message for his boss, Oinker, saying he was sick, which might mean he’d get fired the next time he went in. He’d worry about that later.

All the antique stores in town had wimpish names: Remembered Treasures, Grandma’s Attic, the Ding a Ling, Miss Sandy’s, Old Glory, Sisters, Something Nice, Southern Chicks. Antique stores were for old ladies. If you didn’t already know that, the names of the places would be a big hint. He felt conspicuous and clumsy going in, but his Geiger counter helped. As soon as he opened the trunk of the Pontiac and took out his Geiger counter—a blue metal machine about the size of his forearm that looked like a cross between a car window scraper and huge dildo—he always felt better. He had a purpose. He was a man with a machine, a man on a mission. The women in the stores watched him curiously as he waved his machine over the merchandise, but they watched him with respect. Or, maybe they were just scared of him, which was okay, too.

He ticked the stores on South Monroe off his list, one by one. At
the next to last store, Grandma’s Attic, his was the only car parked in front of the shop. With his trusty Geiger counter in hand he opened the door, setting off the usual electronic bell sound, and stepped inside the tepid air-conditioning. The room smelled both dusty and moldy, like all the shops he’d been in. This one, though, had a stinky cinnamon-scented candle burning somewhere.

He took in his surroundings. Long room with no windows except the dirty plate glass ones in the front. No other customers—no visible people, period. Typical stuff. Lots of old dishes, toys, random furniture, shelves of paperbacks, cases of costume jewelry. He didn’t see any clocks, but there had to be some, maybe hidden, even buried. He would cast a wide net.

He switched on his Geiger counter, turning it to signal with a blinking light rather than sound, and started up the aisle, swinging his machine slowly over the shelves of junk. On the little Geiger counter screen the dial occasionally jumped around and the light flashed on and off, picking up random bits of radioactivity here and there, but nothing substantial.

“Hey, hon.” A woman’s voice. She was planted on a chair behind a counter, reading a magazine. She sat there so motionless that his eyes had swept right over her, detecting no life in that vicinity. “What’cha got there?” she asked him. Dark helmet hair and fat. Jabba the Hutt, wearing red plastic jewelry. Sucking on a lollipop.

Otis told her that he was trying to find radioactive things for a school science project. He could have just asked her if she had any old clocks, but he didn’t want her help, because that would mean more conversation and interference on her part.

“Nothing radioactive in here, hon,” she said. She pulled the red lollipop from her mouth and shook it at him. “Better not be.”

“Mind if I look?”

“Just be careful with that thing. Don’t go breaking any of my valuable merchandise.” The lollipop went back into her mouth.

“I won’t break anything,” he said. She might’ve been kidding about the valuable merchandise, but he had a hard time telling if people were kidding. He just hoped she wasn’t going to keep asking him questions, because if she did, he’d have to move on to his final location—Sister Sandy’s. Or was it Miss Sandy’s?

He swept his Geiger counter over a box of dolls with china heads, then over a shelf of Happy Meal toys—might be a clock or watch hidden anywhere—moving steadily toward the back of the room and away from Jabba the Hutt.

“There’s an article about the Red Hills Horse Trials in here,” Jabba announced. “You go to that?”

Otis told her that he didn’t go, not volunteering that Ava went every year. He didn’t want to give Jabba any information she might use as a net to trap him into talking to her.

“Who’d want to gallop a horse over these gigantic fences?” she asked. “Sheesh. Even after Christopher Reeve they do it. You could break your fool neck.”

Otis hated it when people made pronouncements like this, because he never knew if they expected a reply or not. He opted for not speaking. The light on his Geiger counter was just flipping on occasionally. So far no clocks at all. He kept moving, like a shark. Sharks probably had radioactive stuff in their stomachs, because they’d eat anything. Funny how he was terrified of sharks but not of radioactivity.

By this time he was at the back of the room and he noticed another room to his left, a whole room next to this one, a room where there wouldn’t be any Jabbas watching over him.

He moved into the other room, waving his wand over dressers, coffee tables, souvenir ashtrays, raggedy couch pillows, and stacked flowered tablecloths. He bent down and stuck the wand back into a corner where there were some iron piggy banks.

“Well, if it ain’t the spaceman.”

Otis, startled, backed into a brass floor lamp and steadied it before it fell.

Rusty, the goth girl who lived in his neighborhood, the minister’s daughter, was sitting in an old yellow lounge chair with a stack of comic books in her lap, a can of Coke resting on the arm of the chair.

Otis hoped she wouldn’t spill the Coke. He worried about things like drinks spilling. “What are
you
doing here?” Otis said. Rusty was the last person in the world he’d thought would hang out at Grandma’s Attic.

Rusty took a big swallow of her Coke and belched. “This is my grandma’s shop.”

“Your grandma is
the
Grandma?”

“So they say.” She took another sip of Coke and then flung the empty can into the room behind her. It hit something and rolled a ways.

“Pick up whatever that was!” Jabba yelled from the next room, but Rusty didn’t budge.

“I’m perusing these comic books while I wait for Royce,” Rusty told Otis. “You know Royce, right?”

Otis did know Royce. Royce and Rusty were a scary couple, pale, skinny, dyed black hair, permanent smirks on their faces. They walked the streets of Canterbury Hills and the halls of Sunny Side High School like two ghouls risen from the graveyard. Why did Rusty have to be sitting here in Grandma’s Attic? Weekends were when he was supposed to have a rest from people like Rusty.

Otis felt anxiety bubble up in his stomach, the way it did every morning when he went into Sunny Side High School, a horrible feeling he was used to and had learned to hide. He gravitated toward the teachers because most of them were patient with him and didn’t openly laugh at him or whisper about him or ignore him. Except his English teacher, Mr. Lennon, who seemed to find everything Otis said side-splittingly funny. The teachers were getting paid to put up with him,
it was true, but for Otis the knowledge of this fact was only a small humiliation compared to the myriad other humiliations visited upon him, either on purpose or not, by his fellow classmates. Fresh in his memory was yesterday’s history class, when, toward the end of the hour, he’d opened his mouth and began to speak—offering up tidbits about World War II bombers—information he’d read somewhere—and as he was talking about P-51 Mustangs, and P-47 Thunderbolts and B-29 Flying Fortresses he saw the teacher, Mr. Fusek, shaking his head at someone, so Otis looked around. Half of the class was rolling their eyes or covering their ears, and the other half was snickering. This was bad enough, but even worse was the realization he’d had later, on the bus going home, that they’d probably been doing this all year long and he just hadn’t noticed.

There was just one more week of his junior year to endure until they got out for the summer. And this would be a great summer. This summer would be his summer! The summer of his triumph! Surely he could handle Rusty for a few minutes, since she wasn’t attached to Royce and they were in a totally different place than usual.

He switched off his Geiger counter and glanced around the big room—a huge walnut bed, a red dinette set, a glassed-in bookcase, racks of what looked like old prom dresses, but no clocks. “What kind of comic books are you reading?” he asked Rusty, just to stall.

“
Radioactive Man
. From
The Simpsons
. Ever seen him?” Rusty held up a comic book with a Bart Simpsonish–looking character on it, dressed in a superhero suit.

Otis had never heard of Radioactive Man. Was this just a coincidence? Or was Rusty mocking him? Was this a planned prank? But Rusty hadn’t known he’d be coming in here. Like usual, Otis was taking too long to reply to someone, which made him seem even more gooney. He needed to say something quick, something safe. “There was a big earthquake in Indonesia. Six thousand people were killed.”

Rusty tossed her dyed black hair. Even from here, Otis could smell cigarettes. She mimicked Otis. “I heard about the earthquake in Indonesia.” Then back to her own voice. “Is that an alien detector you got there? The only alien in here is my grandma. Did she give you a hard time? She doesn’t like men, only horses. Hey, isn’t
unguent
a great word? It’s my new favorite.”

“I’m looking for clocks. The old kind, with glow-in-the-dark dials. The bigger the better.”

Rusty did her smirk. “You’re so twisted. Hey. Want to come to a party with us tonight? Me and Royce. FSU party. Free beer and other stuff, if you get my drift.” Instead of lowering her voice, she’d raised it. Her grandma would hear!

“Can’t, I got plans,” Otis said. He’d learned that most invitations he received weren’t sincere, so it was best to say no straightaway just to be safe. And he really did have plans. When he was done building his model breeder reactor—the youngest person ever to build one, the only civilian to ever build one
—then
he could take time out to go to parties. People would be having parties in his honor!

“What plans? Jerking off to Internet sites about aliens?”

“I don’t believe in aliens,” Otis told Rusty. “There’s no definitive proof, from any reliable source, that any so-called alien beings or their crafts have ever visited Earth.”

“Whatever.” Rusty slouched back in the chair. “You look normal, but you’re like totally abnormal. Are you going to pull a Columbine one of these days? Just let me know when so I can sleep in that day.” Rusty smiled at him again, a nice smile this time, and Otis saw that she was still as pretty as she used to be in elementary school, even under all that black eyeliner and dark lipstick. Rusty had been a born-again Christian in elementary school. Back then, she went around telling everyone that her father was a minister, and she was always inviting other kids to her church. What had happened to her? She used to be a
cheerleader in middle school, but now she skulked around the edges of everything, making fun.

Desire came over Otis with surprising force. He really, really, really wanted to tell Rusty what he was doing in the shed, exactly what he was making, how much work it had been, how difficult it was to do it, and how much acclaim he was going to get for making it. The closer he got to being finished, the harder it was, he’d discovered, to keep his mouth shut. And the fact that she was reading
Radioactive Man
—that had to be a sign! “I’m building a model breeder reactor in my shed,” he blurted out.

Rusty looked at him and waited.