Turtles All the Way Down(40)

Him: Nothing is wrong with you. Want to come over after school Monday? Watch a movie or something?

I paused for a while before finally writing, Sure.





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.”