Читать книгу Bieber's Finger - Craig Nybo - Страница 14

Chapter 6

Meanwhile, Somewhere on Earth...

Shana Perkinson, with her eyes magnified by a pair of far-sighted spectacles, looked down her nose at Twana as she hung her backpack in her locker.

“What’s that smell?” Shana asked, wincing.

Twana put a hand over the lipstick case pennant under her shirt and forced a smile. “What smell?”

“You smell like a dead mouse or something.”

“Keep your nose out of my business,” Twana said. She gathered up her science books and headed to class.

It was frog day. Mr. Murphy wore a white lab-coat. He stood at the front of the science room, a long wooden pointer in one hand. As he lectured, he aimed the pointer at a set of anatomical diagrams fixed with magnets to a white-board at the front of the class. Earlier in the semester, Mr. Murphy had held up one of the hundred or so bottles he kept on the shelves in the back room, a small glass jar filled with formaldehyde and a dead frog. “If you are really good,” Mr. Murphy had said, “I will let you cut one of these open some day.” Most of the kids had winced at the promise. Some of them had smiled, practically rubbing their hands together in glee.

Mr. Murphy stopped lecturing and put his hands on his hips. He cocked his head to one side and panned across the class with his blue eyes, his mouth stern and fixed. “Can I get two volunteers?” A few kids raised their hands. He pointed out a duo of students, then pointed to a long table at the front of the room, lined with row after row of jars, each containing a frog. “Hand them out if you please.”

As his volunteers went to work, placing a jar on each desk, Mr. Murphy told the rest of the students to open up their dissection kits.

Twana untaped her kit and unrolled it on her desk. She used a white towel in the kit to cover her work surface. She opened a little plastic bag of tools, a wooden plank, a handful of push pins, a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, and a tongue depressor.

After his volunteers had finished distributing the frogs, Mr. Murphy explained the process of conducting a frog autopsy. Twana thought that dissecting a frog would gross her out. But she actually found the whole process interesting. First, following Mr. Murphy’s orders, she pinned the frog to her wood plank, belly up, driving the push pins through its appendages and spreading it out like a star fish.

She used the scalpel in her kit to slice open the frog’s belly from head to crotch. One by one, with Mr. Murphy as a guide, she explored the frog’s inner parts, its lungs, its heart, its intestines.

As she worked, she realized that the stench that had wafted around the room when the students had first drawn their specimens out of the formaldehyde had flagged off. She thought about Shana and her comment about smelling a dead mouse. She touched the little lipstick case sized bulge under her shirt and looked around the room. She’d been wearing Bieber’s finger for over 12 hours now. Twana hadn’t noticed the smell; she’d grown used to its company. But if the finger drew the wrong attention, she didn’t know if she could come up with a convincing explanation.

She waited for Mr. Murphy to turn his back then took the pendant off her neck. She opened the plastic tube, checked both ways, and poured in enough formaldehyde from her specimen jar to submerge the finger. She snapped the lipstick case shut and restrung it onto her gold chain. She’d have to seal the case later with superglue, but for now she had taken care of the foul smell and acted to preserve the finger at the same time.

Pleased with her ingenuity, she finished up with her frog autopsy.

At the end of class, Mr. Murphy walked the room, row by row, his pointer in one hand and a slate in the other. He checked each student’s project and wrote grades on his slate. He lingered for an extra minute at Twana’s desk, looking over her work. “This is a fine autopsy,” he said.

Twana smiled up at him.

“You’re incisions are clean, your dissections are precise. You have talent, young lady.”

Twana beamed and touched the little bulge at her chest beneath her shirt. Although Twana couldn’t see it, she knew that Mr. Murphy wrote a big fat A next to her name on his slate.