Joseph Morales, a zoologist at the National Zoo, does not believe that the birds involved in the plane crashes were diseased and thinks that the exterminations may not be necessary. “I think that the likeliest cause of the bird strikes was an electromagnetic storm that disrupted the birds’ magnetoreception capabilities,” Morales said. “Testing them for some kind of disease or genetic abnormality wouldn’t prove much.”
Nonetheless the Randall Administration will continue with the targeted exterminations for the time being. “Our number one goal is to make sure that Americans are safe in the skies,” said Homeland Security Chief Sandra Rinaldi. “Right now, culling flocks of Canada geese is one step to that safety.”
Reese couldn’t bring herself to call the internship. She had lost so much time while she was in the coma that it was already the second half of July, and school started in less than a month. She didn’t want to be cooped up in an office for the next three weeks, making copies and writing boring arts listings. She decided to put off the phone call and instead went for a walk.
It was overcast outside, and fog still clung to Twin Peaks in the west. She turned away from the cool mist and headed northeast toward Dolores Park. She had taken this route countless times on the way to Kennedy High School, which hugged the northern edge of the park. But it had been over a month, she realized, since she had last been here, and as she trudged up the hill on Church Street she began to notice tiny differences. Ragged strands of yellow police tape were caught in the branches of the Chinese banyan trees. Someone had affixed duct tape in giant Xs across all the windows of a nursery school, as if to prevent breakage. And as she passed a mural of wildflowers, she noticed that something had been added. A black bird with outstretched wings had been graffitied onto the mural, the eyes spray-painted in dots of neon orange. She zipped up her hoodie and dug her hands into the pockets, hurrying past the image on her way up the hill.
The sun was attempting to break through the cloudy sky, but it shone only weakly over the bowl of Dolores Park. San Francisco spread out to the northeast like a toy city cupped in the palm of a giant’s hand. She skidded down the grassy slope past a few hardy sunbathers, cutting across the pockmarked lawn toward the café on the corner of Eighteenth and Dolores, across from Kennedy High School. It was a Monday morning and not very warm outside, but the café still had its share of patrons with their laptops. She bought herself a coffee and lightened it with cream, then began to walk back up Dolores Street to find a seat in the park. She was approaching 19th Street when someone came careening around the corner and smashed right into her.
Reese went sprawling, the concrete slamming into her knees and the palms of her hands. Her coffee splashed, steaming hot, all over the sidewalk. The shock of impact left her speechless.
A girl with bright pink hair came running at her. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you!” She knelt down beside Reese, propping a skateboard against the side of the building nearby. The bottom of it was inked with a picture of a spiderweb, but in the center of the web a long-lashed eye had been drawn. “Are you okay?” the girl was saying. She touched Reese’s arm, and Reese flinched. Pain shot up from her hands as she lifted them. Her palms were torn open, dirt from the sidewalk embedded in her flesh. “Oh shit, I’m so sorry,” the girl said again. “Let me—I’ll go get some water. Hang on.” She got up and sprinted away.
Reese’s heart was racing. A woman with a pierced lip walked by talking on her cell phone, but she barely noticed Reese. A man wearing ripped jeans and pushing a stroller paused and asked, “Are you all right?”
But the girl with the pink hair was back. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” she told the young father. She picked up Reese’s hand and pressed a damp napkin to the skin. “Does it hurt?”
The girl gazed at her with anxious gray eyes. She had a trim nose—just slightly upturned at the tip—and lips the color of coral, full and perfectly shaped. Her hair was short and dyed hot pink, cut in a trendy, mussed style. She wore a white tank top and khaki cargo pants, and the strap of her hot pink bra peeked out, bright as her hair. A light sheen of sweat shone on her throat, her pale skin gently flushed as if she had been running. Which, Reese realized, she had.
“Are you okay?” the girl asked again.
“I—I think so.”
“I am so sorry,” she repeated. “I totally didn’t see you coming. I should have looked.”
“I wasn’t looking either.”
The girl dabbed at Reese’s bloody palms with the napkin. “But I was going too fast. I know I shouldn’t go that fast.”
Reese stared down at her hands, at the girl’s hands cradling hers. Her short nails were painted deep purple. Reese could feel the places where they touched so clearly that it disoriented her, tipping all of her awareness into the girl’s fingertips. If Reese hadn’t been sitting already, she would have stumbled, and now she leaned toward the girl as if the ground had tilted. Her own heartbeat seemed to echo the pulse she swore she could feel through the girl’s skin.
The jarring peal of a telephone cut through the weighted air between them, and Reese started, pulling away from the pink-haired girl. Her right pocket was vibrating, and she realized it was her new phone—she didn’t recognize the ring yet. She pulled it out, glad that she hadn’t landed on it. It was her mom.
“Hi,” Reese said, breathless.
“Hi, honey. I called Dr. Wong’s office, and she can fit you in on Wednesday at noon. Does that work for you? Did you call SF Radar?”
“Not yet. So Wednesday’s fine.” The girl sat back, wrapping her arms around her knees. She watched Reese with a half smile on her face, and Reese felt a flush creeping up her own neck. She broke the gaze, looking instead at the girl’s sneakers. Purple Converse high-tops.
“All right, I’ll make the appointment. Tonight I won’t be home till around seven. I’ll pick up some takeout on the way home.”
“Okay.”
When Reese hung up, the girl said, “I’m a klutz. Do you forgive me?”
“What? Of course. I’m totally fine.” Reese tried to get up, but she didn’t want to put her cut-up hands on the ground, so she had no leverage.
The girl moved swiftly, cupping her hand beneath Reese’s elbow to help her up. “You should wash that out,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay? That was kind of a bad crash. Can I replace your coffee at least?”
“No, it’s all right.” Reese bent over to pick up the now empty coffee cup, avoiding the pool of hot liquid on the ground.
“You’re sure?” The girl flashed her a brilliant smile. She had the face of a movie star, polished and sharp and knowing. The gray irises of her eyes were almost crystalline in the sunlight.
Reese felt dazed, as if the sense had been knocked out of her along with her breath. It was disorienting, and she shook her head. “No, I’d better go home and wash off.”
“All right,” the girl said. “Bye.”
“Bye.” Reese turned away, heading south on Dolores. It wasn’t until she was five blocks south that she realized she was still carrying the empty paper cup. Rattled, she tossed it into the next trash can.
When she got home, she went into the bathroom to wash her hands. As she lathered soap over her palms, she wondered who the girl was. Reese guessed that they were about the same age, though the girl might be a little older. She rinsed the soap off, lingering over the memory of the girl’s smile. She was… pretty wasn’t exactly the right word. It was too bland for this girl.
Reese stared down at her hands. After washing away the dirt and tiny pebbles that had been stuck to her palms, she could barely see the cuts at all. There were only a few shallow scrapes, nothing that could have bled as much as she remembered. She reached into her pocket with damp hands and pulled out the napkin that the girl had gotten for her. It was pink now, soaked through with her blood. She looked back at her hands, and then again at the napkin. She felt a crawling sensation over her skin. She put the napkin down and pulled her hair
back from her face as she had done the day she returned home, examining her reflection in the mirror.
There was no longer a scar there.
With a growing sense of urgency, she pulled off her shirt. There had been scars on both sides of her body, but now…
She couldn’t breathe. The long white lines that had marked her from armpit to belly were gone. She turned, remembering the bruises on her back, but there was no trace of them either. She unlaced her sneakers, kicking off her shoes so that she could take off her jeans. But even as she peeled them off, her stomach sinking, she knew what she would find in place of the ridge that had cut over her knee and thigh the day before yesterday.
Nothing.
CHAPTER 13
Reese spent hours researching cuts and scars online, but other than being forced to view some pretty gruesome images, she didn’t learn anything that cleared up what had happened. In fact, the stuff she read led her to believe that it was impossible for injuries to heal that quickly or for scars to vanish overnight the way hers had. That would be the holy grail for plastic surgery.
She gazed down at her palms. Since she had washed them earlier that afternoon, even the small scrapes had disappeared.
Her fingers curled into fists and she dropped them into her lap. Her computer was still open to an image of a scarred knee. She had learned that nearly every wound leaves some type of scar, except in the case of animals capable of regenerating their tissue, such as salamanders. There were cases of humans, usually young children, regenerating fingertips that had been sliced off, but otherwise human regeneration was a thing of science fiction… or extremely advanced medical research, the kind that might be done by the Defense Department.
Reese had also found a news article that reported the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was working with a biomedical corporation in Massachusetts on regeneration technology to treat soldiers who had been seriously injured in combat. Had she been given that kind of treatment? Was that what Dr. Brand had meant when she said they had been treated with advanced medical procedures? Had David had the same treatment?
She dug her fingers into the tense muscles in her neck, trying to ease the pain that was throbbing in her head. She wanted to tell David about her hands and ask him if he had experienced anything similar, but she had lost her old phone in the accident and, consequently, his phone number. She was reluctant to e-mail or leave him a message at his page on the Hub; she had never communicated with him that way before. They had always texted each other, and to do something else now seemed weird.
Her stomach twisted into knots. Weird. Only because she was still completely embarrassed by the way she had acted at nationals that night in the hotel. When they were driving away from Phoenix, after Mr. Chapman was shot and even while they were in that military hospital, the awkwardness between them had seemed to disappear. They had been in a bizarre situation, and there wasn’t any time for her to be embarrassed. But now that they were at home and everything was supposed to be back to normal, the awkwardness was back too.
Don’t be a dork, she chastised herself. You’re overthinking this. She opened the Hub and clicked through her friends to David’s page. He hadn’t updated in over a month. His last post said: We rocked quarterfinals! Heat spread over her skin. She opened a message window, her fingers hovering over the keys. She wrote the note at least a dozen times before she settled on the final text.
David,
Remember when I asked you about the scar on my head at the funeral? Something strange happened. The scars disappeared. I looked up info about scarring and wounds online, and I don’t think this is normally supposed to happen. I think this is related to whatever happened to us in the hospital. Have you experienced anything similar since we got back?
Reese
That’s good. There was no trace that she was still thinking about that night in Phoenix. She had clearly moved on.
But she stared at the message for several tense minutes before she pressed Send. Now she just had to wait for him to respond.
By the next morning, there was still no response. Filled with a jittery impatience, Reese cleaned her room, even lining up the pens in her top desk drawer according to brand. By mid morning she had vacuumed and dusted as well and knew that she had to get out of the house or else risk going crazy. She decided to head back to the corner of 19th and Dolores, hoping that seeing the place where she had crashed into the pink-haired girl would give her some insight into how her hands had healed so quickly.
When she arrived at the corner, the ground where she had fallen didn’t look any different from any other stretch of concrete. There was an amoebalike shadow on the sidewalk that was probably the remains of her coffee, but if some of the darker flecks nearby were bloodstains, she couldn’t tell for sure.
Frustrated, she crossed the street to sit on the low concrete wall at the 19th Street entrance to the park, staring at the building across the street where the girl had propped up her skateboard. That girl. Reese’s thoughts circled around her repeatedly, as if there was something there she didn’t quite understand. She could remember the girl’s face so clearly that when she saw her walking down the sidewalk twenty feet away, at first she thought she was just imagining it.
But then the girl saw her too, and she stopped, recognition lighting her face. “Hey,” she called. “It’s you.”
Reese blinked. The girl was wearing a red hoodie with a racer stripe down each sleeve, unzipped over a gray T-shirt printed with the image of a melting ice-cream cone.
She walked toward Reese and asked, “Revisiting the scene of the crime?”
Reese was startled to see her. But it was a good kind of startled. “The crime scene’s across the street.”
The girl grinned. “How’re your hands doing?”
“They’re fine,” Reese said without thinking. And then she remembered the reason she had come back to the park, and she asked, “Do you remember—they were cut up pretty bad, weren’t they?”
A puzzled expression flitted over the girl’s face. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—I—” Reese stopped. What was she going to say? That she thought she had miraculously quick-healing hands? That sounded ridiculous. “Nothing. Never mind.”
The girl cocked her head. “Hey, what’s your name anyway?”
“Reese.”
“Hi, Reese. I’m Amber.”
“Hi,” Reese said. The single syllable seemed to hang awkwardly in the air between them, and then Amber smiled.
“So, what are you up to? Can I buy you that replacement coffee now?”
Reese was surprised when a tingle of excitement went through her. “Um, sure.”
“Cool. Let’s go to the café on the corner. It’s the least I can do after knocking you over.”
Reese slid off the low concrete wall and joined Amber as she walked down the street toward the café, chattering about how she had only recently bought that skateboard and was still getting used to it. Reese found herself losing track of the conversation. Every time she looked at Amber, she became transfixed by the way the shocking pink of her hair clashed with the red hoodie, or the way the sunlight shone over her pink lip gloss.
When they entered the café, Reese saw the other patrons’ glances skitter off her, drawn to Amber. She turned to Reese and asked, “What do you want?”
Reese was taken aback. “What?”
Amber smiled coyly. “Coffee?” She pointed at the menu hanging on the wall.
“I—I’ll have a regular coffee.”
They took their drinks back outside to the sidewalk patio, choosing a table in a patch of pale morning sunlight. “So where do you go to school?” Amber asked, peeling the lid off her large cappuccino.
“Across the street. Kennedy.” Reese took a careful sip of her coffee. It was so hot, she almost burned her tongue. And it needed cream. She had forgotten to add that when they were inside. She settled for pouring in three packets of sugar.
“High school?
”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, I’m new to San Francisco. What year are you?”
“I’m a—I’m going to be a senior.” Reese looked down at the black metal table. Through the mesh, she could see Amber’s purple Converse swinging in the air. “What about you? You just moved here?”
“Sort of. I went to high school on the East Coast; I graduated in June. I’m taking a year off before college, and my uncle has an apartment here. He’s traveling for the summer and is letting me house-sit for him.”
“Wow, that’s cool. What are you going to do in your year off?”
“I haven’t really decided yet.” Amber dipped a finger into the foam of her drink and licked it contemplatively. Reese noticed all the people seated nearby swiveling their heads to look at Amber. “My mom wants me to major in chemistry or microbiology in college, so she’s encouraging me to find an internship or something. But I don’t know if I want to be a scientist.”
“Is your mom a scientist?” Reese took another sip of her coffee, but now it was too sweet. She put it down.
“Yeah. How about yours?”
“She’s a lawyer.”
“Do you want to be a lawyer?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you like to do now? Like, are you in a band or anything?”
“A band?” Reese laughed.
Amber grinned. “Why not? You could be in a band. You have that look—you know, with your belt and that T-shirt.”
The sun suddenly seemed excessively hot. “Uh, no,” Reese said, glancing down at herself. She was wearing her metal belt and a blue T with the word AMPLIFY stamped on it over a faded image of a fist. She had bought it out of a bin at Community Thrift last winter. Actually Julian had picked it out for her, saying, “You should wear this to debate.” Reese watched Amber take a sip from her cappuccino, her purple nails almost black against the white paper cup. “I think you have that look. I’m, um, on the debate team.”