The Hellers were like family to me. They always had been. They always would be. But they were just that – like family. They weren’t really mine.

13

Landon

‘The frog is dead. It can’t hurt you.’

Melody batted her lashes from behind a huge pair of goggles. ‘That thing is disgusting. I’m not touching it.’ The one-size-fits-all lab apron fell to her knees and wrapped all the way round, and she held her forearms up, elbows bent, to keep the gloves from falling off her small hands. She looked like a child playing operating-room nurse.

Don’t think about her hands right now.

I crooked an eyebrow at her – the one with the barbell she was staring at last week when Pearl snapped her fingers in front of Melody’s face to get her attention. ‘Would you have said that to Pearl?’ I asked.

She shrugged one shoulder, her eyes on my eyebrow. Her dark green sweater looked as soft as her hair. The colour darkened the edge of her irises and contrasted starkly with the pale strands forked over that shoulder. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Don’t think about her eyes. Or her hair.

I sighed. ‘Okay. I’ll dissect. You pin and label.’

She thrust her plump lower lip out in a pout that should have looked ridiculous on a sixteen-year-old girl. God. Damn.

I was grateful for the heavy canvas apron I was wearing. And the high table between us. ‘Fine. I’ll dissect and pin … and you label?’

She picked up a pen and smiled – awarding me positive reinforcement for caving so easily. ‘What’s first?’

Like a lab rat, I itched to discover where she hid that lever. I’d push it over and over to have that smile directed at me.

‘Uh … well, let’s see …’ I checked the instruction page. ‘Um. First we’re supposed to determine the sex.’

Melody caught her glossy lower lip with her flawlessly white, straight teeth, and I felt that bite – as though I was made of a single nerve ending – in one concentrated place. My dick twitched like a flag caught in a sudden gust of wind. Jesus, what am I – eleven?

Damn Boyce and his stupid mononucleosis. Damn Pearl and hers, too. They’d both been out for a week. Without Pearl’s dampening presence or Boyce here to irritate Melody every five seconds, we’d begun to talk every day like we hadn’t done in over a year. Since the doomed geography project. Since her boyfriend paid Boyce to kick my ass.

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.