The Mad Scientist's Daughter (7 page)

  Cat didn't say anything. She looked from her mother to her father and back again. The adrenaline from the fight had disappeared, and now she was exhausted.

  "They've suspended you for the rest of the day," her mother said. "I hope you're happy."

  Her father frowned.

  When they arrived back at the house, Cat threw her bag on the couch and headed toward her room. But her mother slapped her hand on Cat's arm and made her sit down. "Tell me what happened," she said. Cat's father came into the living room and sat down in his reclining chair.

  "You won't like it." This was the first thing Cat had said to either of them since they picked her up.

  "No, I don't expect we will." Her mother glanced over at her father.

  "He said–" Cat stopped. She looked up at the ceiling. She already knew what their reaction would be. Her hand ached. "He said Finn was an abomination."

  "For Chrissakes," said her mother, just as her father said, "Oh, Cat."

  "Are you happy?" her mother said to Cat's father. Cat wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear. "I told you you shouldn't have brought that thing here–" She looked at Cat and held up a finger. "Don't start with me, either."

  Cat buried her head in the arm of the couch.

  "Sweetie, I don't think it's that big a deal–"

  "Daniel! She punched a boy
in the face
."

  "Oh, please, Helen. That was Frank Martin's kid. You're going to tell me he didn't deserve it? The little shit's got daterapist written all over him."

  "I can't believe we're arguing about this." Her mother stood up and pulled at the ends of her hair. "You're grounded," she said to Cat. "No. Scratch that. I'm not letting you stay in this house any more than I can help it. I'll… sign you up for community service. Something." She stomped out of the living room.

  "Daddy," said Cat. "Daddy, I'm sorry, I just–"

  "I know," said her father. "Give her time to cool off."

  "You're not going to send Finn away, are you?"

  Her father sighed and stared out the window. The sunlight reflected off his glasses. He looked immeasurably sad. Finally, he said, "There's no place else he can go."

 

That evening, Cat walked out to the garden. Everything was dead from the autumn heat. She sat underneath her citrus tree and turned on her music player and closed her eyes. She was able to move her hand now, though only barely. In her mind she watched the fight with Erik Martin over and over again. She remembered how she felt afterward, her hair loose and wild, her hand dripping blood. She wondered what she looked like to all those spectators. She wondered what they would say about her when she went back to school tomorrow.

  When Cat opened her eyes Finn stood over her, watching her in the violet twilight. Cat took off her headphones.

  "You shouldn't have done that," he said.

  "Oh, God, you too?" Cat sighed and kicked out her feet. "Did he tell you why I did it?" Cat knew her mother never talked to Finn if she could help it.

  Finn shook his head.

  "I was defending you," she said.
Abomination
. Her face flushed with anger.

  "Why would you do that?"

  "Because you're my friend! Jesus!" Cat threw up her good hand. "Why is that so hard for everybody to understand?"

  Finn sat down in the grass next to Cat. The hot, dry wind blew his hair across his face, covering up his eyes' faint silver gleam. "You're my friend, too," he said after one of his long, mechanical pauses. "But I don't think violence is ever acceptable–"

  "Yeah, yeah, I know." Cat paused, looked up at the stars. "Remember when you taught me all the constellation myths?"

  "I don't see what that has to do with–"

  "I loved those stories," said Cat. "I loved all the stories you read me. They don't really encourage us to read in school. It blows. All calculus problems and computer programs. Finn…" She looked over at him, the tips of her hair tickling her bare back. "Finn, do you think I'm pretty?"

  Finn stared at her. "Pretty?"

  "You know, beautiful. Hot. Whatever."

  "I do not–" Finn stopped. His eyes vibrated, and his brow furrowed. "May I think about this?"

  Cat immediately regretted asking him. She laughed to make herself think it didn't matter. "It's not really a thinking-about sort of question," she said. "Forget it. It's OK if you don't."

  "I believe it is for me." His eyes continued to vibrate. "A thinking-about sort of question." Cat heard the inflections of her own voice, as though she were listening to herself on a recording. She stretched out on the grass, lying on her back, her hands over her head. She didn't know why it mattered if he thought she was pretty. Cat had never considered her own prettiness before that moment. So why now?
No one told me she looked like you
. But Erik Martin was an asshole.

  "I bet everyone at school hates me now." She looked at Finn sideways through the grass. "At least you don't hate me."

  "I cannot hate," he said. "The programming inside me won't allow it."

  But Cat had turned her face back toward the night sky. The cicadas were buzzing and the night air was warm and sweet on her skin and she didn't comprehend at all what Finn had just said to her.

 
 

 
 
 

Because Cat had, apparently, broken the nose of the most popular boy in school, two girls in eyeliner and knee-high boots came up to her in the courtyard the morning after and told her the fight was the most badass thing they'd ever seen.

  "Holy shit," said the first girl, whose name Cat later learned was Miranda. "Holy
shit
you don't know how many times I've wanted to smack that smug little bitchass face of his."

  Miranda and the other girl, Ashley, took Cat over to the place where their friends slouched in the branches of the courtyard trees, looking like clothes hung out to dry. The air there smelled of cigarette smoke. Cat had noticed them before, these people, this clump of trees, but they had always looked through her as though she were invisible.

  "OK, assholes," said Miranda. "This is Cat. Be nice to her."

  And so Cat suddenly found herself with friends her own age, friends who were not Finn. The travails of school became instantly more sufferable, though Cat never quite felt as though she belonged. Her clothes weren't really right, no matter how many times Miranda and Ashley went shop ping with her online – she didn't inhabit them properly. She disliked the taste of cigarettes and the burn of them against the back of her throat. She didn't recognize the names of the augment-games Miranda uploaded onto her comm slate, and she hated the raucous, screeching music they listened to in Ashley's bedroom after school. But none of them asked her leading questions about her father or about Finn, and none of them wanted to be engineers, even if they also didn't like to read. Although Miranda did like photography.

  "Let me steal your soul," she always said, stalking around smoky parties with her camera. It was an old analog camera, one that used up rolls of ancient film she bought from a vendor through the Internet. Miranda knew how to develop the film and the prints herself. She had a lab set up in the spare bathroom in her parents' house, the lone window taped over with aluminum foil and moth-eaten black fabric, a red light installed above the mirror.

  "I told them it was, you know, chemistry," she explained to Cat while swirling a sheet of photography paper in a tub of oily chemicals. Cat watched the images appear, the darkest parts first: the pupils of the eyes, the muddy shadows. The photograph showed one of the bands that played the VFW hall on Friday nights, the lead singer screaming into his microphone as he leaned over the edge of the stage.

  In an ostentatious display of trust, Miranda lent Cat one of her old cameras, a Nikon F10. "Break it and die," she said.

  Cat kept the camera in the top drawer of her desk for a few days before she used it. She didn't know what to take pictures of – Miranda already had the VFW shows covered – and she didn't want to waste film, even though Miranda had told her that was the point.

  "You want to burn through miles of film," Miranda said when she told Cat she'd let her borrow a camera. They stood in her bedroom, Miranda holding the camera out in the space between them. "You have to. Just to find that one perfect shot."

  "That's so wasteful."

  "That's the beauty of it," said Miranda. "The beauty of waste. We don't see it much anymore. Everything becomes something else." She dragged on her cigarette and made quotation marks with her fingers. "
Progress
."

  Eventually, Cat took a few pictures of the garden. She took a picture of the river. They were both such dull subjects. So she decided to go after her family: her father hunched over a soldering iron and circuit board in the laboratory, her mother frying steaks in the kitchen. She smiled indulgently as Cat peered through the viewfinder.

  "From your friends at school?" she said.

  Cat nodded and went to find Finn.

  He was up in the stuffy attic bedroom, tapping patiently on his computer. The minute Cat walked in the humidity curled her hair into ringlets. "Let me steal your soul," she said, cocking her shoulders back like she'd seen Miranda do. The words were marbles in her mouth.

  "I don't understand," said Finn.

  Cat snapped his picture, and then stood on his bed and took another. Finn turned back to his computer. Cat laughed. "I just want to take your picture." She jumped back down to his dusty floor. The sunlight streaming through the windows made his hair glisten. She took a picture of him typing. He glanced over at her and smiled faintly, in that way he did whenever she used an idiom he didn't understand. Suddenly and inexplicably emboldened – by his confusion, by the lemony sunlight – she reached over and put two fingers along his jawline and turned his face so that he was looking right at her with his black eyes. The skin of his face was soft. She did not expect softness.

  For a moment, she didn't move, just kept her fingers pressed against his jaw. They stared at each other. They were so close their noses almost touched. Then Cat dropped her hand to her side, stepped back, lifted the camera up to her right eye, and pressed the button that seared his image into film.

  A few days later, Miranda showed her how to shake up the film in plastic canisters, how to stretch it out in the darkroom, how to line it up under the glass of the photo processor. Cat made a contact sheet with all the pictures she had taken, and then carried it into Miranda's bedroom to look it over. She half-expected Finn to be missing from the tiny thumbnail-sized pictures, like a vampire.

  "That's a good one." Miranda leaned over Cat's shoulder and pointed at one of the portraits of Finn, the one where he stared straight into the camera – straight at her. "It's intense. Who is that?"

  "My father's assistant," said Cat softly.

  Miranda made an odd noise in the back of her throat. She fell back down on the bed and lit a cigarette but didn't say anything. Warmth stung Cat's cheeks.

  She ended up making prints from only three of the pictures on the contact sheet: one of her father, one of a spray of water from the sprinklers, and one of Finn, his eyes unfathomably black.

 

Cat went to a party on a balmy spring night. She was nearly seventeen. Her parents let her go, no questions asked, be cause they were heartened by the fact that she had friends and went out most Friday nights. She even brought home a boyfriend named Oscar, who despite his long hair and ratty coat met with her parents' approval because he was, as they put it,
her own age.

  Oscar picked her up the night of the party in his noisy old Chevy, the one his redneck father sold to him for five dollars. Cat had been waiting for him on the porch, and the headlights nearly blinded her. She threw her hand up, caught in the spotlight, and then ran through the dewy grass and climbed in. Oscar nodded at her and turned up his music, and they roared down the road into town. The truck still smelled faintly of the emu his father raised. Cat sat primly in the seat beside him, aware of the stiffness of her hair, the itchiness of her spangled, low-cut top. She had painted her fingernails dark blue earlier that afternoon in Finn's room, leaning against his bed while he worked at his desk, holding her hands up to the light. Now the polish felt heavy and thick against her nails. Her eyelashes were weighed down by mascara.

  The party had already begun to spill out into the hazy night when Oscar and Cat arrived. Oscar threw his arm around Cat's shoulders and indolently dragged her through the garage to the backyard. Someone had strung blinking LED lights from the trees. An old refrigerator filled with cheap beer lounged next to the fence. Oscar got one for himself and one for Cat. When she drank it, she repressed the urge to make a face – she'd never gotten accustomed to the taste of beer.

  Miranda showed up a little later, her arm slung around the waist of the drummer from some local band. He had graduated a year ago but he still hung around the high school, flirting with the same three or four girls. Cat knew Miranda had been trying to get this drummer to date her – or maybe just sleep with her, Cat could never tell which – for the last few months.

  Somebody dragged a sound system outside and put on music. Miranda and the drummer disappeared to one of the bedrooms inside. Cat stuck close to Oscar while he told stupid jokes with his friends because all the people she knew at the party were either inside or stoned, and impossible to talk to either way. She watched Oscar swig from his beer bottle. Whenever he laughed, he bared his teeth. She realized she didn't like Oscar that much. But she did like that he liked her.

  After a while, Oscar took Cat by the hand and led her to the edge of the yard, to a spot where dewberries grew wild against the fence. His face glistened with sweat. He smiled down at her.