Challenger Deep Read online

  The sea is calm tonight. Only the occasional swell sprays us with a light, salty mist. As she holds me I whisper to her the things I’ve learned.

  “The captain believes that you are good luck,” I tell her. “That your gaze will charm the sea monsters.”

  “Good luck?” she scoffs. “How lucky am I if I must pose forever on this bow and take all the abuse the sea doles out upon me? And as for sea monsters, nothing will charm them but a full belly—of that you can be sure.”

  “I’m just telling you what he said.”

  We hit a swell and the ship rides high, and then dips low. She holds me so tightly that I don’t have to hold on anymore. I reach out my hand and run it gently across her flowing teak-wood hair.

  “Do you have a name?” I ask.

  “Calliope. Named for the muse of poetry. I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard she’s beautiful.”

  “So are you.”

  “Careful,” she says with the faintest of grins, “false flattery might make me lose my grip, and then where would you be?”

  “All wet,” I say, grinning right back at her.

  “Do you have a name?” she asks.

  “Caden.”

  She considers it. “A goodly name,” she says.

  “It means Spirit of Battle,” I tell her.

  “In what language?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She laughs, I laugh. The ocean seems to laugh, but not in a mocking way.

  “Keep me warm, Caden,” she whispers, her voice like the tender creak of a sapling branch. “I have no warmth of my own—only what the sun brings me, and the sun is halfway around the world. Keep me warm.”

  I close my eyes, and radiate body heat. It’s so nice being there, I don’t even mind the splinters.

  43. It’s All Kabuki

  “Do you know why you’ve been called in here?” the school counselor asks. Her name is Ms. Sassel. Kids like to say it because it sounds like something else.

  I shrug. “To talk to you?”

  She sighs, realizing this is going to be one of those conversations. “Yes, but do you know why you’re here to talk to me?”

  I hold my silence, knowing the less I say the more control I have over the situation. The fact that I can’t stop my knees from bouncing undermines any sense of control, though.

  “You’re here because of your science exam.”

  “Oh, that.” I break eye contact, then realize you must never break eye contact with the school counselor, or she’ll find something deeply psychological in your downward glance. I force eye contact again.

  She opens a file. I have a file in the counselor’s office? Who else has a copy of my file? Who gets to put things in and take things out? Is it in any way related to my permanent record? What is a permanent record? When does it stop following you? Will I have to spend my life looking over my shoulder for my permanent record?

  Out of the file, Ms. Sassel (I like saying it, too) pulls out the Scantron from my science test, which has more than the usual number of circles filled in. “It’s a very creative . . . interpretation of an exam,” she says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Could you tell me why you did it?”

  There is really only one answer a person can give in a situation like this. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  She knew I would say that. I know she knew, and she knows I know she knew. This is all like a formal ritualistic performance for both of us. Like Japanese Kabuki theater. I actually feel for her having to go through this with me.

  “Mr. Guthrie isn’t the only teacher who has expressed concern for you, Caden,” she says as kindly as she can. “You’re missing classes; your attention hasn’t been on your work. Historically that’s not like you.”

  Historically? I’m being studied like history? Are they filling out Scantrons about me somewhere? Are they giving letter grades on the subject of me, or is it pass/fail?

  “We’re concerned, and we just want to help you, if you’ll let us.”

  Now it’s my turn to sigh. I have no patience for Kabuki. “Let’s get to the point. You think I’m on drugs.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then neither did I.”

  She closes my file and puts it aside, perhaps a gesture to imply our conversation has just become informal and off the record. I don’t buy it. She leans a little closer, but her desk is like a wasteland between us.

  “Caden, all I know is that something is wrong. It could be lots of things, and, yes, drugs is one of those things, but only one. I’d like to hear from you what’s going on, if you’d like to tell me.”

  What’s going on? I’m in the back car of a roller coaster at the top of the climb, with the front rows already giving themselves over to gravity. I can hear those front riders screaming and know my own scream is only seconds away. I’m at the moment you hear the landing gear of a plane grind loudly into place, in that instant before your rational mind tells you it’s just the landing gear. I’m leaping off a cliff only to discover I can fly . . . and then realizing there’s nowhere to land. Ever. That’s what’s going on.

  “So you’re not going to say anything?” Ms. Sassel asks.

  I put my hands firmly on my knees, pushing down to stop them from bouncing, and I keep serious eye contact. “Look, I had a bad day, and I took it out on the test. I know it was stupid, but Mr. Guthrie drops the lowest grade anyway, so it won’t even affect my grade.”

  She leans back, a little bit smug, but trying to hide it. “Did that occur to you before or after you turned in the test?”

  I’ve never been a poker player, but now I bluff with the best of them. “C’mon, do you really think I would have done it if I thought it would affect my grade? Historically, I’m not that stupid.”

  Ms. Sassel only half buys it, but she’s a good enough counselor to know that pushing me will only be counterproductive.

  “Fair enough,” she says.

  But I know there’s nothing fair about it.

  44. Boss Key

  The need to walk fills me more and more. I pace my room when I should be doing my homework. I pace the living room when I should be watching TV.

  Normal afternoon shows have been replaced by a live report of a kid somewhere in Kansas who fell into an old abandoned well. There are interviews with the kid’s tearful parents, firefighters, rescue workers, and experts on wells—because there are experts on everything these days. They keep cutting to an aerial helicopter view as if they’re watching a car chase, but the kid in the well isn’t going anywhere.

  Through all of this I pace, drawn to the drama, unable to keep still.

  “Caden, if you want to watch, sit down,” my mother says, patting the seat on the sofa beside her.

  “I’ve been sitting in school all day,” I tell her. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”

  I go upstairs to get out of her hair, and lie on my bed for a whole ten seconds before getting up to go to the bathroom, even though I don’t really have to go, then back downstairs to get a drink even though I’m not thirsty, then back upstairs.

  “Stop it, Caden!” Mackenzie says when I pass her room for like the tenth time. “You’re freaking me out.”

  Mackenzie is currently addicted to a video game that she won’t stop playing until she beats it, forty or fifty game-hours from now. I’ve already beaten it, although I doubt I’d have the patience to play it now.

  “Can you help me?” she asks. I look at the screen. There’s a large treasure chest in a caged room that appears to have no way in or out. The chest is sparkling gold and red. That’s how you know it’s not just any treasure chest. Sometimes you bust your ass to get to one, only to find there’s nothing inside but a stinking rupee. But the red and gold chests—they hold the real treasures.

  “The boss key is in there,” Mackenzie says. “It took me an hour to find the key to unlock that chest, and now I can’t get to it.” Funny that you need a key to unlock a chest that ju
st gives you a bigger, better key.

  She continues to run around the outside of the caged room, as if maybe the iron bars won’t be there the next time around.

  “Look up,” I tell her.

  She does and sees the secret passageway right above her avatar’s head. So easy when you know the answer.

  “But how do I get up there?” she asks.

  “Just reverse gravity.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Didn’t you find the lever?”

  She growls in frustration. “Show me!”

  But I’m done, because my walking fever has reached a critical mass. “I can’t do everything for you, Mackenzie. It’s like math; I can help you, but I can’t give you the answer.”

  She throws me her best glare. “Video games are not like math, and don’t convince me they are, or I’ll hate you!” Resigned, she searches for the antigravity lever, and I head out. Not just out of her room, but out of the house. Even though it’s almost dark—even though it’s just a few minutes to dinner, I have to walk. So while Mackenzie runs herself ragged in game temples, I wander through my neighborhood making random turns, maybe in search of my own boss key.

  45. Ten Graves Deep

  How unlucky does a kid have to be to fall into an abandoned well? You hear these stories all the time. Some kid’s playing out in a field somewhere with his dog, and down he goes—fifty feet or more, vanishing into nowhere.

  If the kid is lucky, and the dog isn’t too stupid, people find out in time, and they get someone with no collarbones to go down the well and fish the kid out. Then the no-collarbones guy gets to spend the rest of his life feeling there was a reason he was born with no discernible shoulders, and the rescued kid gets to pass his genetic material on to future generations.

  If the kid isn’t lucky, then he dies down there, and the tale ends sadly.

  What must it be like to suddenly be swallowed by the earth, finding oneself nearly ten graves deep? What thoughts go through a person’s mind? “Man, this sucks” doesn’t quite cover it.

  There are times I feel like I’m the kid screaming at the bottom of the well, and my dog runs off to pee on trees instead of getting help.

  46. Food Fight

  “You’re skin and bones,” my mom tells me at dinner the next day.

  “He needs more meat!” is my father’s instant solution, attacking my mom’s attempts to vegan-ize us. “Protein to build muscle.”

  Dad hasn’t noticed I’ve just been moving the food around my plate. Since eating has always been a given for me, he treats it like breathing. He assumes it’s happening. Mom, however, is the one who has to toss out my unfinished meals.

  “I eat,” I tell them. Which is true, I just don’t eat very much anymore. Sometimes I don’t have the patience, and other times I forget.

  “Supplements,” Dad says. “I’ll get you some protein shakes.”

  “Protein shakes,” I repeat. “Good.”

  My answer seems to satisfy them, but now both of them have been alerted to my eating patterns, and watch my plate like it’s a time bomb.

  47. We Even Have a Diving Bell

  Our ship has turned to copper. It happened overnight. All the wood, my bunk, the sparse furniture. It’s all been turned into tarnished metal, the color of a worn-out penny.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, mostly to myself, but the navigator answers from across the room.

  “You said the ship was too old-fashioned for the mission, and what you say makes a difference around here,” he tells me. “Difference, inference, interference. You’ve interfered with the order of things is what I’m saying. You should have left it the way it was. I liked this place when it was wood.”

  I run my fingers along the wall. Instead of smooth plates—which you might expect on a metal ship—it’s still made of grooved planks, but they seem to have changed at the molecular level, like wood that has petrified into copper. There are no bolts and rivets—the metal planks are still held together by dark pitch that seems to squirm in the crevices.

  I leave my quarters and go up on deck to find that the entire ship has petrified into brown metal, shiny in some places but dull in most, already beginning to turn green in the corners, as copper will do. It’s still the same ship, but now it’s a copper galleon. All very steampunk without the steam, or the punk. I didn’t know there was that much copper in the world.

  The captain sees me and grins. “Look at what your thoughts have bought you,” he says loudly, gesturing to the copper deck around him. He’s no longer wearing a pirate’s costume. Now his uniform looks more like something from a mock nineteenth-century navy. A blue, woolen coat with oversized brass buttons and gold-tasseled shoulders, plus an equally ridiculous hat.

  I glance down to see that my clothes look sailorly as well, although just as worn and frayed as before. The slippers on my feet are scuffed patent leather. My striped shirt looks like a sun-faded barber pole.

  “After careful consideration, we have modernized, as per your suggestion,” the captain tells me, although there’s nothing modern about it. “We even have a diving bell!” And he points to a perfect replica of the Liberty Bell sitting heavily on the deck. A porthole has been cut into its face and through it I see a lone sailor trapped inside. I hear his dull thuds on the metal as he pleads to get out.

  “You see what you’ve done?” says the parrot from the captain’s shoulder. “You see? You see?”

  The eyes of the other sailors are on me, and I can’t tell if their stares hold approval or disdain.

  48. Really That Lonely

  That first night of our copper transmutation, I venture out to see how Calliope has weathered the change. I slide down to her, and her arms embrace me with a different kind of firmness. A harsher kind of strength.

  “You should not have handed the captain so many of your thoughts,” she says. “It’s so cold now. I’m so cold.”

  It’s true. She’s much colder now. Smoother. Harder.

  “Keep me warm, Caden. And I promise I’ll never let you fall.”

  Since she faces the saline spray, her copper skin has already turned green, but she wears it majestically, nobly.

  “You’re like . . . the Statue of Liberty now,” I tell her, but it doesn’t comfort her.

  “Am I really that lonely?” she asks.

  “Lonely?”

  “That poor shell of a woman must forever hold her torch aloft while the world does its business around her,” Calliope says sadly. “Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?”

  49. Don’t You Want a Whopper?

  I fill the empty neighborhood streets with my presence. It’s a Saturday during spring break, so I have all the time in the world. I’m going to see a movie with my friends this afternoon, but I have the morning to walk.

  Today I start a game. The signs I see will tell me what to do.

  LEFT TURN ONLY!

  I make a sharp left turn and cross the street.

  DON’T WALK!

  I cease walking and count to ten before moving again.

  FIFTEEN MINUTE ZONE

  I sit on the curb for fifteen minutes—challenging myself to keep still for that long.

  The road signs become too repetitive, so I expand to other things. An advertisement on a bus stop says, “Don’t you want a Whopper?” I don’t, but I walk to the nearest Burger King and get one anyway. Can’t remember if I eat it or not. I may have just left it there.

  “Time to upgrade? Visit your neighborhood Verizon store today!”

  The nearest one is pretty far away, but I make the trek, and have the clerk spend twenty minutes trying to sell me on a phone I have no intention of buying.

  There are so many signs out there! I’m out until the sun sets. I never make it to the movies.

  I can’t recall when it stops being a game.

  I can’t recall when I begin to believe that the signs are giving me instructions.

  50. Garage Widows


  Not all spiders have perfect webs. Black widows don’t. There are black widows in our garage, or at least there were before the house was tented. But even if they’re gone, they’ll be back faster than the termites. Black widows are easy to identify. A red hourglass design on their bellies. They’re hard and shiny—they look almost like plastic Halloween spiders. They’re not as deadly as people think. Without antivenom you might lose a limb at worst. It would take three or four bites from different spiders to kill a full-grown human. The thing is, they’re shy spiders. They don’t bite easily; they’d rather just be left alone. Very reclusive. Ironically it’s the brown recluse spider that’s aggressive and will go after you. Their venom is pretty deadly.

  I always know when there’s a black widow in the garage because of the web. Black widow webs are messy. No pattern. Like whatever mechanism in their tiny brains that makes webs is broken. They lack the engineering skill to make picture-perfect, fly-catching nets. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered. Maybe they embrace the randomness. Maybe the lines they draw have meaning to them that the rest of the arachnid world is blind to.

  For this reason I have more than the usual amount of sympathy when I crush them with my shoe.

  51. Not Entirely Me

  “I can’t contain myself,” I tell Max as we work together in my living room on a school project.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you happy or something?” He doesn’t bother to look up from the PowerPoint that he’s creating on my computer. I can’t get comfortable in my chair. I wonder if I actually look happy, or is he just ridiculously unobservant?

  “Ever have an out-of-body experience?” I ask.