Laughter at the Academy Read online

  @boo_peep (07:00): IT’S MY VOICE IT’S MY VOICE AND I’M SAYING THE THINGS FROM THE WALLS AND I CAN’T STOP. #connollyhou

  @boo_peep (06:20): WHY CAN’T I STOP WHAT AM I SAYING WHAT DOES IT MEAN

  @boo_peep (06:03): IT’S NOT JUST A STORY THE HOUSE LIED TO ME HOW CAN A HOUSE LIE

  @boo_peep (05:12): the thing in the circle the thing in the circle it’s not @deadhot anymore it’s not PETER anymore IT’S MOVING IT SEES ME

  @boo_peep (04:07): NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

  @boo_peep (03:06): no

  @boo_peep (02:05): make it stop no I can’t see this I can’t no

  @boo_peep (01:04): no

  @boo_peep (00:03): it has no shadow IT HAS NO SHADOW it is the shadow IT IS THE SHADOW AND IT NEVER ENDS IT NEVER NEVER ENDS

  @boo_peep (00:02): how

  @boo_peep (00:01): no

  @boo_peep (00:00): …oh

  @boo_peep (00:00): Sorry about the fuss. I was confused before. Old house + stale air = hallucinations. No big deal. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): I’m back upstairs now. Everyone is with me. @deadhot and @screamking and @screamqueen. We’re all fine. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): We just found some surprises the original owners left for any unexpected guests, that’s all. Like party favors. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): The house was just so happy to see us, it didn’t know how to contain itself. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Joke ha ha. Houses aren’t alive. That would be silly. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): The owners should be ashamed of how they’ve let the place go. This proud old lady deserves so much better. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): I think I’ll live here now. I think we’ll all live here now. #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): You should come live here too. I can show you what the shadows showed me. How they bent away from the truth. #no #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Come to Peaks Island. Come let me show you the truth. #no #stayaway #itsmakingmelie #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Come. #helpme #killme #dontleavemehere #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Come. #please #please #please #please #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Come. #dontleavemeinthedark #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Come. #theyweremyhashtags #itriedtowarnmyself #connollyhouse

  @boo_peep (00:00): Come. #ifailed #youllfailtoo #connollyhouse

  Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves

  As a kid, I always enjoyed it when short story collections had that one really long story for me to sink my teeth into. Because I am curating this book as much for myself as for anyone else, here it is.

  “Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” combines some of my favorite topics: ocean-dwelling sentience, scientific malpractice, mutating your friends, and eldritch terrors. It was originally written for the book The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, but I don’t think Lovecraft would approve of my Deep Ones.

  No, I don’t think he would approve at all. And I’m okay with that.

  Jeremy plucked the white mouse from its tank as easily as he would pick an apple from a tree, grabbing the squirming, indignant rodent without hesitation. The mouse squeaked once in furious indignation, no doubt calling upon whatever small, unheeded gods were responsible for the protection of laboratory animals. Jeremy ignored the sound, holding the mouse steady as he moved his syringe into position.

  “I’m not saying you have to run right out and jump into bed with somebody, okay?” he said, continuing our earlier conversation as if he weren’t holding a struggling research specimen in his left hand. Jeremy was like that. He had a lot of compassion for living things, but his ability to compartmentalize was impressive, even to me. He was the sort of man who, under the right leadership, could probably have been talked into some remarkable human rights violations. He knew that about himself. No one in our lab policed their own actions more tightly than Jeremy did.

  “That’s a good thing, because I’m not planning to,” I said, folding my arms and leaning against the counter. “Were you planning to scare that mouse to death before you injected the serum? I ask out of scientific curiosity, and not because it will fuck up our results. Even though, spoiler alert, it will fuck up our results.”

  “What? Oh!” Jeremy frowned at the struggling mouse like he was seeing it for the first time—which maybe, in a way, he was. It had been background noise before. Now it was real. “Sorry, Mr. Mouse. Let me just give you your daily dose of carcinogens, and we can put you back in your box.”

  The needle slid into the mouse’s belly with venomous smoothness, the fang of the great serpent called “Science,” which had more worshippers than most gods could ever dream of. The mouse squeaked once more and then was silent, consumed by the tremors wracking its body. Jeremy placed it gently back in its enclosure, treating it with more care now than he’d shown when it seemed healthy.

  “Six more days of this and the tumors should start to become visible under the skin, if this specimen follows the path charted by the last twenty,” he said. “We’ll have concrete results by the end of the week.”

  “Causing cancer in lab mice isn’t ‘concrete results,’” I said. “These things have been inbred and twisted until sneezing gives them cancer. We should be trying to induce tumors in something that hasn’t been primed for twenty generations. You want to make the headlines? Induce tumors in bees.”

  “You hate bees.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not going to figure out a way to cause cancer in bees just because you don’t like them. They have enough problems.”

  “Colony collapse disorder is sort of like bee cancer, if you treat each bee in a hive as serving the same role as a cell in a larger body.”

  For a moment—one beautiful moment—Jeremy looked like he was seriously considering it. I smiled winsomely, hoping to keep him distracted with the thought of cancerous bees, dancing and dying through fields of flowers. Maybe it was a little cruel to the bees, but it wasn’t like I was actually killing them by offering a thought experiment, and if Jeremy was focusing on science, he wasn’t focusing on my lack of a social life.

  Alas, good things never last. I learned that when I was just a child. Jeremy shook himself back into the present and frowned at me. “That was a mean trick,” he accused.

  “Yes,” I agreed. It was best not to argue when he was right. That would just spark more argument, and could take up the entire day.

  “You need to get out more. It’s not healthy for you to spend all your time in the lab.”

  “Uh, hello?” I held up a hand, counting off my fingers as I said, “First, pot, meet kettle. Second, grad students are supposed to spend all our time in the lab. Third, if we don’t get results by the end of the month, they’re going to give our lab to Terry and her weird plant project. Four, my grants run out at the end of the semester, and I promised my family I would come home. So this is sort of my last hurrah. Dating can wait until I’ve got my doctorate.”

  Jeremy crossed his arms and scowled at me. I recognized that face. “About that. What is this crap about you giving up everything to go home to your weird hick family? They don’t deserve you.”

  “You can call them all the names you want. They’ll still be my family, and that will still be where I belong.”

  “You’re really going to give it up?” Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t understand you. I mean, I really don’t understand you. You’re brilliant. You’re beautiful. And you’re going to give up everything to go back to what, a bed and breakfast with a nice view of the Atlantic? Come on, Violet. I know you want more than that. You have to.”

  “Oh, believe me, I do.” I wanted the sea, the blue-black sea, the great wide expanse of endless water. I wanted the benthic and the abyssal and the clear, shallow water that looked like glass in the sunlight. I wanted to have it all. And the first step was, as Jeremy so charmingly put it, a bed and breakfast with a nice view of the
Atlantic, where a private room had been waiting for me since the day I was born.

  All I had to do was get there, and show that I was worthy. All I had to do was get results. I pushed away from the counter. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat,” said Jeremy.

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  There’s nothing like Harvard in the fall. New students in their carefully chosen outfits, wandering like lost lambs in need of a shepherd; returning students, half of them in their pajamas, the other half dressed for the job interviews they have scheduled after class. The specter of student loans hanging over all but the very rich and the very careful, crushing mountains of debt and madness primed to come crashing down as soon as the stars are right.

  My family is very rich, and very careful. I’ve managed to swing enough grants to make my standard of living believable, keeping me connected to my peer group and capable of sympathizing with their concerns, but the bulk of my expenses have always been covered. It’s important for the family to have a few like me in every generation, bold explorers who will go out into the world and come home with pockets packed with treasure more precious than pearls—knowledge, understanding, and the scientific methods to spread that understanding even further.

  Jeremy strode across the campus like a young demigod, his back straight and his hair ruffled by the breeze. Some of the passing undergrads looked after him with lust in their eyes. Most were science majors, and had seen him walking in the faculty halls, putting him far enough above them to be desirable, but far enough below the professors to be safe. Humans are an innately aspirational species, always wanting the next rung up on the ladder, always afraid to reach too far, lest their grip fail them, and they fall. That odd combination of courage and cowardice has served them remarkably well, all things considered, keeping them striving without allowing them to wipe themselves out.

  I trailed in Jeremy’s wake, largely unnoticed by the student body. I didn’t teach; I barely graded. I stuck to the lab, to the needles and the mice and the endless march of charts and graphs and information. Jeremy would have been lost without me. Everyone in our department knew it. And he repaid me by drawing the focus of the people who might otherwise have kept me from my work. It was a symbiotic relationship, like the clownfish and the anemone, and every time I thought too hard about it, I realized anew that I was going to miss it when I ended.

  The off-campus pizza joint we had claimed as our own during the first year of our program was packed, as always, with bodies both collegiate and civilian. Jeremy cut a path through them, making space for me to slide through the crowd unnoticed, until we came to the round table at the very back, where several of our classmates—Terry of the weird plant project, Christine of the epigenetic data analysis, and Michael of the I wasn’t really sure but it involved a lot of maggots project. Jeremy dropped into an open chair. I did the same, with slightly more grace.

  There was a shaker of parmesan near my side of the table. I palmed it while Jeremy was exchanging enthusiastic greetings with our supposed “friends.” We were all in constant competition for lab space, funding, and publication credits. Even though our fields were dissimilar enough that I would have expected us all to have the freedom to work as we liked, it seemed like we were forever stepping on one another’s toes. Only the fact that Jeremy and I were running a combined experiment—his tumors, my documentation of social changes in mice that had been infected—kept us from being at each other’s throats just like everyone else.

  To be fair, it helped that I didn’t actually care about any of this. My classmates were counting on long careers in their chosen fields. I was only ever counting on the sea.

  Christine flashed a quick, expensive smile at me, showing the result of decades of orthodontia. “Hey, Violet,” she said. “How’s every little thing?” Her accent was landlocked and syrupy sweet, Minnesota perfect. When we’d first met, I hadn’t been able to understand a damn thing she said. Coastal accents were something I’d grown up with. Speech defects were no problem at all. But vowels that stretched like storm warnings and snapped like sails? That was something I hadn’t been prepared for.

  “Every little thing is fine,” I said. “How’s every little thing with you?”

  Michael groaned. “You did it,” he said, in an accusing tone. “You asked her. You asked her with your face. Do you hate us all? Is this how you show your hatred?”

  “I was being polite,” I said. That was all I had time for before Christine launched into a long, detailed description of her day. Terry put her hands over her face. Michael dropped his head to the table. I smiled, looking attentive and like I actually gave a damn, and all the while I was unscrewing the container of parmesan and tipping cheese out onto the floor.

  Getting the test tube out of my pocket and transferring its contents to the cheese container was more difficult, since I couldn’t risk anyone realizing my hands were moving. There were some things my fellow grad students accepted unquestioningly, such as when Michael had spent an entire week wearing the same Hawaiian shirt, “for luck,” or when Terry gave up all fruits and vegetables that hadn’t been harvested according to Jainist standards. Replacing their favorite powdery cheese-based condiment with a mixture of my own creation was not on that list. There would be questions.

  No one would like my answers.

  Christine was still talking when I finished doctoring the cheese. I cocked my head and waited for her to take a breath. Then, quick as a striking eel, I asked, “Did we want to order a pizza?”

  Everyone started talking at once. Jeremy pulled out his phone and began taking notes, trying to work out how much pizza we actually needed and what the optimum mix of toppings would be. I demanded mushrooms, as always, and took advantage of the chaos to slip the cheese back onto the table. No one noticed. No one ever did. I’d been pulling this trick on this same group of people for three years, and not once had I been caught, which spoke more to their remarkable self-centeredness than it did to my incredible skills at sleight of hand and misdirection.

  When the pizza arrived, everyone dumped parmesan on it like the stuff was about to be outlawed. So as not to stand out, I did the same. I just used a shaker I had swiped from another table, combining it with the excuse that I didn’t want to wait for Terry to be done. She liked cheese so much that sometimes she ate it directly out of her palm. Monitoring her dosage had been a nightmare, and now that we were moving into the final stage, I had given up. Let her have as much as she wanted. I had my data.

  The pizza tasted like tomato sauce and garlic and charcoal, the bottom burnt black by the speed with which this particular parlor pumped out their pies. I ate enough to be sociable, then put down my half-consumed slice and smiled winsomely at my classmates, my comrades, the people who’d defined my grad school experience. We weren’t friends. We could never have been friends. But out of everyone in the world, these were the people who understood what my life had been since I’d arrived at Harvard, a shy biology student from U.C. Santa Cruz, whose academic career had taken her first very far, and then very close to home.

  “I wanted to ask you all for a favor,” I said, and they went still, curiosity and suspicion in their eyes. I never asked for favors. That wasn’t my role in the social group. I performed favors, giving selflessly of my time, my intellect, and my snack drawer, when Terry inevitably forgot that she was a mammal and couldn’t photosynthesize like her beloved plants.

  “What do you need?” asked Jeremy. Then, brightening: “Did you want us to vet a potential date?”

  “What? No. Ew. I told you already, I’m not interested in dating.” I was interested in marriage, but there were specific ways for that to be arranged, very particular forms to be observed. My parents would have forgiven me for a sticky, ill-considered tryst while I was away at school. I would never have forgiven myself. “You all know my grants run out at the end of the semester…”

  As I had expected, they all began talking at once again, trying to offer so
lutions, some practical, some ridiculous. I said nothing. It was best if I let them run themselves down, talking themselves into the inevitable silence.

  When they quieted, I said, “I’m going to miss you too, but this is for the best, honestly. The experience always mattered more to me than the degree. Now I want to give you something in return. My parents want me to come home for spring break, and they’ve invited me to bring you all along. There’s plenty of room at the inn, so to speak.”

  The silence remained intact. It was well known that my parents operated a bed and breakfast in the sleepy seaside town where I’d been born. Miles from anywhere, sheltered by natural cliff walls, surrounded by the sea, it was the perfect place to raise a family. We didn’t get many tourists, but the ones who came for a season always went home raving about our hospitality, our food, and the incredible clarity of the air. Why, sometimes, it seemed like the air was so clean that the stars didn’t even glimmer. It was the perfect place, as long as you were prepared for its…eccentricities.

  I had never been shy about where I came from, but I had also never extended an invitation home before. Certainly not for the entire group at once. I could see the calculations in their eyes, the war between curiosity and caution playing out all over again. I picked up my pizza and gnawed idly at the crust, feeling the crunchy dough press up against my gums and ease the ache there a bit. I was running out of time. If my friends didn’t agree to my proposal, I would need to find a way to convince them.

  The idea was not appealing. Some experiments only work if the rat enters the maze willingly, and I have never been a fan of using physical force when a temptingly waved piece of cheese will do.

  “I hate to ask, because I’m sure it makes me sound cheap, but…would your folks be expecting us to pay for rooms?” Christine’s cheeks colored red. “I know, I know. It’s just that most of my cash is already spoken for, and I can’t afford a seaside getaway. No matter how nice it sounds.”