Holly Black (39 page)

I am uncoordinated. If there is a piece of furniture in the room, trust me to stub my toe on it. I’m sort of like an allosaur or a T. rex—they could move somewhat quickly, but only straight ahead. The saurischian hip structure isn’t designed to swerve from side to side, so they blundered in a straight line, sometimes changing direction by shifting their weight with their tails. But dodging? Sidestepping something? No way. Can’t happen. It’s just a fact of anatomy.

“Close your mouth,” Sooz whispered to me. “You’re chewing like a theropod.” She picked up some of the lingo just from hanging out with me. Theropods were meat-eaters.

The lingo, but not the facts.

“Theropods didn’t chew their food,” I told her. “They didn’t have crushing teeth like we do. Their teeth were for tearing. Like this.” I demonstrated with my hamburger, attacking it with my front teeth, tearing off wads of meat and bread and growling.

Sooz looked at me in horror.

“See?” I told her, after I’d gotten it down. Grease and ketchup dripped down my chin. I wiped at it with a napkin. “They would just tear off chunks and then swallow them whole.”

“Um, Katya, you’re really loud….”

“They had these awesome teeth with serrated edges, called
denticles
?—”

“Katya…”

“Testicles?” someone said much too loudly.

I looked over my shoulder. At the table behind us, everyone was laughing, mimicking the way I’d chomped my burger.

“She said they have
testicles
for teeth!” one of them howled.

“No, not testicles. Denticles. They were for?—”

“Katya.”

“What?” I turned back to her.

“Let it go.”

I checked over my shoulder again. “I’m eating with my testicles!” one guy said in a mockingly nerdy voice, holding a French fry near his crotch.

“What am I going to do with you, Katya?” Sooz asked, and shook her head.

Only Sooz ever called me Katya. My real name is Katherine and everyone called me Katie, but Sooz said Katya was more exotic and claimed she would call me Katya for the rest of my life, even during the maid of honor’s toast at my wedding.

“I’ll never get married,” I told her. “Guys don’t like geeks.”

“You know,” Sooz said as we left the cafeteria, “it’s okay to do the dinosaur stuff with
me
. I like it, even when I don’t get it. But not everyone’s like that.”

“But dinosaurs are important! They ruled the earth for millions of years. When we study them, we can understand not just them, but also the way the world
was
, the way the world
changed
, maybe even what the world is changing
into
.”

She gave me the special Sooz look, the one that meant I was talking too loud again. Sure enough, people around us were snickering, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes. A few junior boys tucked their arms up like velociraptors and staggered around like drunk birds.

“Any day,” I said, more quietly, “we could wake up and there could be a discovery that could change everything. Right now, while we’re standing here, there are bones, Sooz. Bones and other fossils, filed away in museums all over the world. They’ve been in the ground for millions of years and they’ve been sitting in the basement of some museum for ten years or more, but every single day, someone looks at one of them for the first time. And that could be the one that changes everything. We could hear about it on the news any moment. Isn’t that amazing?”

“It is,” she said, and she was sincere because she was Sooz and she got it. “It really is.”

I didn’t tell her the rest. The best part.

The news could come at any moment. Or years from now.

I could be the one to make it.

And then everyone would notice.

Everyone would love me and respect me.

“I don’t get how you can
like
Andi,” Sooz said later that day, at her house. “She’s so mean. She once made so much fun of another girl that she went into the bathroom and cried for, like, an hour.”

I filed that one away, another “mean Andi moment” brought to you courtesy of Sooz, who has an endless supply.

“Jamie likes her,” I explained. “So there must be
something
to her, right? It’s just biology. Attractive specimens are good by definition—they reproduce and they pass down their genes.”

“This isn’t
science
,” Sooz said. “You’re in
love
with the guy. She’s your arch nemesis, not a science experiment.”

But I just couldn’t find it in me to hate Andi. I figured it had to be difficult to be her. There were all kinds of stresses that came with being Andi, things I couldn’t understand because I was
not
her. She was beautiful and funny and athletic and popular and I was…

When I was a kid, I had a picture book about T. rex. It talked about how juvenile T. rexes probably hunted in packs, and there was an illustration of a bunch of them ganging up on a lizard, probably an ancestor of the crocodile, judging by the spine and the tail.

But it was weird. They weren’t biting it or slashing at it or even
touching
it. They just surrounded the poor thing, which was slithering along the ground because it didn’t have the proper hip and tail alignment to stand on two feet like the T. rexes did. And the lizard had…It had this look on its face. This long-suffering look of
Here we go again
. And the T. rexes were leaning in, almost like they were taunting the poor lizard, making fun of it.

I knew how that lizard felt. And I hated that. I hated that I felt that way because that made me think that maybe…Maybe I was a lizard. I didn’t
want
to be a lizard. I wanted to be a dinosaur.

Andi was definitely a dinosaur. Sooz called her the apatosaur, but at least that’s a dinosaur.

“She has a biological advantage,” I told Sooz. “I need to figure out how I can get a biological advantage, make myself evolutionarily attractive.”

She waggled her eyebrows. “Oh? Really?” Sooz was marginally more girly than me—she actually wore makeup.

“Maybe. I’m thinking about it.”

That night, I went to my dad, simply because he’s a male and, therefore, would probably have an opinion.

“Dad, am I pretty?”

He grinned. “Honey, you’re the prettiest girl in the whole world.”

Well, that wasn’t helpful. He didn’t even stop to think about it. When someone answers a question that fast, they’re never telling the truth. I couldn’t possibly be the prettiest girl in the world. That’s just scientifically impossible. And what did I expect my dad to say? He’s not going to look at me and say, “Well, sweetie, your mom and I have been talking about this since you were born and we’re just sorry that we have such an ugly daughter, but we love you anyway and it’s what’s inside that counts.”

Right.

In my room, I looked in the mirror. I took off my glasses. My reflection became a big blur. How could I know what I looked like without my glasses if I couldn’t
see
without my glasses?

I squinted, scrunching up my face until I could make something out, but all I saw was my own scrunched-up face, which looked disgusting.

I checked my bank book. I’d been saving money forever—for the dig, for college. They’re both way expensive. I could buy contact lenses, maybe some makeup…some new clothes….

That wouldn’t totally drain my bank account. I would have money left over, but I would also have a new Katya to show off, a new,
evolved
Katya to attract Jamie, maybe.

Back to the mirror. I wished my boobs were bigger. Then it would be easy to get Jamie to notice me. I knew how
that
worked. I would just wear a button-down shirt with a couple of buttons undone and my boobs would work their magic boy-power. Maybe I needed a new bra. I could get one with padding in it, make everything stand up and stand out.

(Dinosaurs didn’t have boobs. Dinosaurs didn’t
need
boobs. Lucky dinosaurs.)

I thought about Andi, effortlessly juggling with her knees and feet. I thought of her lithe form in gym. Everything physical came so easily to her. She could head-butt a soccer ball in less time than it took me to realize there even
was
a soccer ball.

And Jamie loved her.

I had two things I thought of: dinosaurs and Jamie. Sometimes—like that night—the two merged in my dreams, and I was a T. rex hunting him down. Or he was hunting me (don’t I wish!).

Predator and prey. Prey and predator.

The next morning, at breakfast, I guess I still looked depressed. Dad asked me what was wrong.

“I wish I was good at something, Dad.”

He jerked his head like someone grabbed his hair from behind and pulled. “Honey! Why would you say that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Like baseball. Or soccer. Or something.”

He said what he
always
says when I shake him up: “Maybe we should have held you back after all.”

I have the dubious distinction of being the youngest freshman in school. Back when I went into kindergarten, I missed the cut-off by two days. My parents could have held me back and then I would have been the
oldest
freshman…next year. I would have never met Sooz, though, and that’s a world I’d rather not contemplate. My parents—Dad in particular—think all of my ills stem from that decision they made a bunch of years ago.

“This isn’t about
that
, Dad.”

Dad said, “Everyone is good at something. Some people play baseball or football. Some people are musicians. You’re good at dinosaurs.”

Yeah, but dinosaurs wouldn’t make Jamie fall in love with me. I already
knew
that.

You’re not a girl
, that boy said on the playground.

Dinosaurs are
neutered
. Dinosaurs are sexless.

(Well, not really. Dinosaurs were amniotes—they fertilized eggs internally, just like human beings. I wanted to be amniotic with Jamie, and I couldn’t believe I just thought that with my dad right across the table!)

“Honey?” he said, because I’d drifted off.

“Nothing.” God, what am I, a total slut or something?

But when I got on the bus, I still thought about it. Thinking about Jamie not just liking me or talking to me, but actually
kissing
me. And maybe more.

Did being a dinosaur geek have to mean being sexless? Did T. rex discoverer Sue have a boyfriend? Did anyone ever kiss Sue, out on a dig or down in some dark, musty museum basement? Passion among the catalogued artifacts of a dead world.

Sigh.

On the way to homeroom, I kept my eyes down, watching my own feet. No footprints on school linoleum. A million years from now, if some future paleontologist tries to retrace the steps of the
geekus girlus
, she’ll have no luck because there aren’t any pathways to follow. Not like the dinosaurs. We take the fossilized imprints of their feet and string them together into “pathways,” which we use to reconstruct the way they moved. Along with the skeletons, this allows us to figure out how they walked and how fast they could run. Like, T. rex had a sort of lumbering run/walk, with its feet staggered.

I watched my own feet and started to mimic the T. rex. They had to start slow because they were so big—it took them some time to build up to velocity, but then they could move at twenty-five, maybe even up to forty miles an hour.