The Rains (Untitled #1)(24)
We couldn’t lose track of our emotions, certainly, but we couldn’t give in to them the way we used to. Maybe Rocky and JoJo would need this information someday. Dr. Chatterjee certainly needed it now.
I finished telling him about the scene at the water tower and said, “Like those ants in that video you showed us. With the parasite?”
He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his rumpled button-down shirt, though they did not look in need of polishing. “Ophiocordyceps unilateralis,” he said quietly. “The pieces are starting to fit together.”
“How?” Patrick said.
“Those adults out there”—Chatterjee pointed a trembling finger through the doorway of the nearest classroom to the windows and beyond—“have been infected.” He shook the detector, the words blinking out at us again: UNIDENTIFIED PARTICULATE. “This parasite attacked their white matter.”
“So why didn’t it attack ours?” Alex asked.
“You’re teenagers,” he said. “You have less.”
Patrick drew back his head. “We do?”
“Of course. Kids have a lesser-developed frontal cortex.”
“Rub it in,” Alex said.
“Look,” Chatterjee said. His hands shaped the air as they did when he was in teacher mode. He seemed to forget that one of them was gripping a clawhammer. “Every year from childhood on, white matter wraps around more and more of the nerve cells of the brain—that process is called myelination.”
“What is white matter?” Rocky asked.
As the sun inched up, squares of light from the windows stretched across the classroom floor opposite us. Some of the male Hosts had drawn closer to the school, spiraling their way around the front parking lot. One man in a scuffed denim jacket drew closer to the fence, his shoulder rat-a-tat-tatting along the chain-link, the sound sending electricity up my spine. Dr. Chatterjee took Rocky by the arm, drawing him out of sight past the doorway, the rest of us following. Sensing that something was wrong, Cassius leaned into my leg, his black-mask face pointed up, no doubt reading the stress coming off me.
“White matter transmits information from different parts of the body back to the cerebral cortex,” Chatterjee said, the hammer wagging by his face. “Which helps with executive function—decision making, attention, planning, motivation. Think of the myelination of axons as creating information pathways, connections that allow communication between all the parts of the brain. That’s what maturity is, really. Teenagers grow more white matter every year. But the last part of the brain to be myelinated is the frontal lobe.”
“So you’re basically saying we’re all stupid,” Alex said.
Chatterjee shook his head. “I’m saying that part of being a kid, a teenager, is that you literally don’t have the capacity yet to think fully about the consequences of your actions.”
Alex cut in: “Where have I heard that before?”
Patrick had leaned back around the doorjamb to spy on the Hosts outside. Chatterjee yanked him back, as if proving his point, while barely slowing down. “That’s why teenagers can be impulsive, angry, lovesick, higher in risk taking—”
“Well,” Patrick said. “We’ll need risk taking now.”
“That’s absolutely true. But if what Chance is saying is correct, then this airborne parasite invades its host and gains control by spreading through the white matter, seizing control of the frontal cortex.” He waved the clawhammer in a circle. “From there it takes over the brain and the nervous system, manipulating the host like a puppet. It can run the human body as if it’s a machine, operating the muscles without regard for pain or injury.”
I thought about Uncle Jim’s death shudder. All those men we’d seen out there, walking their mindless spirals. Coach Hanson scrabbling forward to get us, not even caring about the bone sticking out of her leg.
I suddenly understood. “So if the parasite is spread through white matter, the frontal cortex—the puppet master—has to be covered with white matter for it to become infected. Or else the spores have no pathways to get to our brain’s control centers.”
“That’s right!” Dr. Chatterjee said. “Which means the thing that makes it harder for teenagers to formulate mature decisions is the same thing that saved you. And saved me.”
Suddenly I felt much younger than my fifteen years. There it was, tightening around my spinal cord, that same sensation I’d felt as a six-year-old waking up to Sheriff Blanton standing on our porch, shifting awkwardly from boot to boot, hat in his hands, bad news on his face. That feeling of bone-deep aloneness, as if I’d been set adrift, a boat left to navigate across the rocky slate of the ocean. If what Dr. Chatterjee was saying was true, then the people least equipped to make good decisions were the only ones around Creek’s Cause left to make them.
Like me.
But Patrick was still focused on Chatterjee. “Why’d it save you?”
“Do you know what causes multiple sclerosis?” Chatterjee asked.
We all shook our heads.
“White-matter lesions.” He smiled. “I have enough holes in my brain that the parasite couldn’t take me over either.” Turning, he started back up the hallway, wobbling past the cracked-porcelain bank of water fountains. I hurried to keep up, Cassius scampering along at my side. With his big strides, Patrick had no problem regaining the lead.