Melody leaned over the dissection pan and stared at the poor dead frog, which looked like it had died dancing – nose in the air and jazz hands. ‘I don’t see a thingy. So it’s a girl?’
I laughed. ‘Frogs don’t have external thingys.’
She scowled, the back of her gloved hand covering her nose to block the embalming fluid’s eye-watering odour. ‘Then how the hell are we supposed to tell?’
I looked at the sheet again. ‘Says here the male has an enlarged thumb pad.’
Heads together, we both stared at the frog for one long moment.
‘C’mon now, he’s not doin’ it with his thumb!’ she said.
Oh. My. God. I stared at her. She blushed and giggled, and then we were both laughing and Mr Quinn was scowling in our direction. Apparently, dissection was not supposed to be fun.
‘Let’s skip that part for now,’ I said.
Don’t think about your own goddamned thumb, either, for f**k’s sake.
Melody dutifully inscribed tiny labels and stuck the pins through them while I sliced the frog stem to stern and pointed out internal organs. We grew accustomed to the formaldehyde and she made fewer and fewer gross-out protests. She began sticking the pins through the parts I removed, though she refused to even pick up her scalpel or tongs unless Mr Quinn was making rounds to confirm that everyone was participating.
‘Aww, everything is so tiny,’ Melody said in complete seriousness. As though the parts inside a six-inch-long amphibian could be anything else. She looked at the diagram and back at the frog. ‘Ooh, are those his little nut things?’ She picked up the pin with the testes label.
I chuckled. ‘Yeah. That’s his nut things. Congratulations, we have a boy.’
She frowned. ‘So he doesn’t have a …’ She trailed off while my brain filled in the blank: dick, penis, cock, boner, phallus, beast. That last was Boyce’s designation.
‘Er. No.’ Caught between regret and intense relief that Boyce wasn’t here, I read the sheet, paraphrasing. ‘The male fertilizes the eggs by …’ Son of a bitch. ‘Uh … climbing on to the female, wrapping his front legs around her, and squirting sperm over the eggs, after the female lays them.’
We looked at each other from behind two sets of goggles. I was surprised mine hadn’t steamed up yet.
‘Kinda sucks for him, huh?’ she said.
Don’t think about putting your arms round Melody Dover. From behind.
Jesus H. Christ.
With Boyce out sick, I was back to walking to and from school. His rebuilt Trans Am might have been a loud, ugly, potential deathtrap – but it was wheels. I was four months and a few driving hours away from my licence. Grandpa and I located empty dirt and minimally paved roads inland every Sunday afternoon or evening so I could practise, taking the ferry to get there. He was close to determining that I was ready to drive on an actual road.
I’d hidden my face to roll my eyes, and I definitely didn’t tell him Boyce had been letting me drive the Trans Am whenever he’d had one too many beers or taken too many hits of a pipe or joint and I was relatively sober. He’d have probably ripped up my permit right then and there, and I’d never get behind the wheel of that old Ford alone.
There was only one reason I wanted that truck.
As if Melody would want to ride in that rusted POS instead of Clark Richards’s snowy white Jeep – the one he got for his sixteenth birthday, a year ago. I’d heard him bragging about what Melody had done with him in the backseat of that Jeep, and his words made me furious and harder than hell. Furious because he shouldn’t share that shit with a bunch of dumbasses around a fire on the beach. Hard because I wanted her to do those things with me.
Kicking the arm off a cactus as I stepped from the road into the yard earned me a sharp spine right through the toe of my black Vans. ‘Ow! Fuck!’
That was when I noticed Grandpa’s truck parked next to the house. Along with Dad’s SUV.
The front door was unlocked, although that could just be Grandpa forgetting to lock it. Dad and he had gone round and round about security and leaving the house unlocked – Grandpa insisting that he’d never locked the damn house in all his damn years of living there, and Dad insisting that it was no longer 1950.
When some out-of-towners broke into Wynn’s Garage and stole an assload of tools, Grandpa conceded, sullenly. Sometimes he forgot to lock up, though.
‘Grandpa?’ I called, shutting the door behind me.
The interior of the house was dim after the bright, cloudless afternoon outside, even when I pulled off my sunglasses. At first, I didn’t register that Dad was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hands grasped between his knees. He was staring at the threadbare rug under his feet.
He was hardly ever home this early in the afternoon, and if he was, he was working at the table, not sitting on the sofa. I frowned. ‘Dad?’
He didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t look at me. ‘Come sit down, Landon.’
My heart thudded, the pace escalating slowly like an engine warming up. ‘Where’s Grandpa?’ I dropped my backpack to the floor, but didn’t sit. ‘Dad?’
He looked up at me, then. His eyes were dry, but red. ‘Your grandfather had a heart attack on the boat this morning –’
‘What? Where is he? Is he in the hospital? Is he okay?’
Dad shook his head. ‘No, son.’ His voice was gentle and quiet. I felt like he’d struck me with the unyielding words, sharp and irrevocable. ‘It was a massive attack. He went quickly –’