Lucy Read online

  “AKA Jungle Girl,” Amanda said.

  “And I simply want to say this: I know some people are going to be totally freaked out by this. Some people may even hate me for being what I am. But like all of you, I didn’t ask to be brought into this world. And if there’s something wrong with what my father did there’s nothing I could do about it then and there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’ll bet a lot of you can relate to that in your own way, too. Anyway, I’m here, and I am what I am. I don’t want any special treatment. All I want is a chance to live a normal life, to go to school and contribute something to society. So, I don’t know. I think I’ve turned out to be a pretty normal girl, given all that I’ve been through.”

  Amanda put her arm around Lucy. “She is. Totally.”

  “So with that,” Lucy said, “I’ll let you all judge for yourselves. Whatever my genetic material looks like, I’m just me.”

  “Oh, and don’t forget to check out Lucy’s Facebook and MySpace pages. They rock.”

  “Goodbye, everybody. Thanks for watching.”

  “Bye,” Amanda said. And they both waved.

  Jenny closed the laptop. She put her arms around the girls and drew them closer. She heaved a big sigh.

  “What do you think, Mom?”

  “You’re the money, baby,” Amanda said.

  “I think we’d better get you some new clothes,” Jenny said. “You’re going to be on television.”

  At about five o’clock that morning the phone rang. A gentle rain was still falling. Lucy could hear it ticking on the maple leaves outside the window. She heard Jenny talking down the hall. Amanda slept while Lucy went to find Jenny propped up in bed.

  “What? You want us to get on an airplane now?” Jenny said into the phone. “You’ll send a car …” Then: “No, it’s not that. It’s just that it’s five in the morning here. We need some sleep. Can you call back later?” She hung up.

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  “Good Morning America. They wanted to fly us to New York to be on television. How did they find out so quickly?”

  “Wow. You want to go?”

  “No. There’ll be plenty of time for that. Go back to sleep. You’ve been sick. Oh, and unplug that phone, will you?”

  “Sure, Mom.” Lucy unplugged the phone and returned to lie beside Amanda, who was snoring. They had done the math beforehand. She and Amanda began by telling everyone in their address books, mostly kids from school. Amanda sent out open-access Tweets and announced it on her MySpace and Facebook pages. They told everyone to watch the video and then tell all their friends. Lucy had calculated that if each person told only twenty others, in just seven steps more than a billion people would know. In addition, people would be putting it on their blogs and news organizations would take notice.

  By the time they all woke up again, it was nearly ten o’clock. The rain had gone, and light was streaming in through the kitchen windows. A cardinal stood on the tip of the topmost branch of the maple tree and sang his wolf-whistle call over and over. Jenny paced around the kitchen with the phone to her ear, listening to all the requests and dictating the information to Amanda, who sat on a stool at the island taking down the names and phone numbers. Lucy was at the stove making a Velveeta omelet with salsa and heating tortillas. Amanda had declared Velveeta-and-salsa omelets to be “the most ultra-yum breakfast.”

  Amanda’s phone rang. She had downloaded “American Girl” as her new ringtone. She looked at the screen.

  “Uh-oh. It’s my mother.” She put the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Have you seen the news?” She sounded angry. Amanda may not have realized that Lucy could hear her mother clearly. “Is this some sort of harebrained stunt? Because it’s not funny.”

  “No, it’s not a prank.”

  “Well, you come home this instant.”

  “She’s my best friend, Mom. I have to stick by her.”

  “You can’t have a monkey as your best friend,” her mother shrieked. Lucy glanced over to see if Jenny could hear it, too. But Jenny was still on the phone. Lucy thought: Wow, she doesn’t know the difference between a monkey and an ape. She wondered what it was going to be like out there in the world.

  “Don’t say that. That’s awful. Are you drinking?”

  “That’s none of your business. You come home right now.”

  “No. She needs me. We have a million things to do.”

  “Young lady, you’re not an adult yet, and I still make the rules around here.”

  “Mother, I turn eighteen in a week. And I’m staying here. I’ll go live with Dad in New York, if you like.”

  A long silence. Then her mother said, “Well, if that girl is what she says she is, you are going to regret the day you ever met her.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Amanda hung up without saying goodbye. She put her chin in her hand and bit her nails.

  “That sounded rough,” Lucy said.

  “My mother can be so ignorant.”

  “Would you really move to New York?”

  “Of course not.”

  Jenny was still listening to messages, now writing down the numbers on Amanda’s notepad. She finished and set the phone on the island.

  “What?” Jenny asked, looking at Amanda.

  “My mother. She wants me to go home and have nothing more to do with Lucy. Which is so not going to happen.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “What the—” Jenny said. “Who is that? Amanda, will you go upstairs and look out the window? See if you can see who it is. But don’t let them see you.”

  “Okay.”

  As Amanda ran upstairs, Lucy asked, “Mom. What?”

  “I don’t know. There are a lot of nuts out there. And I have no idea what your legal status is. I don’t know. I don’t know. You’re only fifteen and I am a little scared.”

  “Amanda’s mother called me a monkey.”

  “You heard?” She caught herself. “Duh. Of course you heard. Well, you see? We don’t know how people are going to react. We have to be careful from now on. People with guns shooting up college campuses. I mean, who knows what might happen?”

  With all the excitement of making the video, Lucy had forgotten about the risks. Working all night together, she and Amanda had been swept along with the feeling of taking control of the situation and doing something bold and exciting. Now Jenny’s words snapped Lucy back to reality.

  Amanda came running down the stairs with her finger to her lips. “There’s like a thousand reporters on the lawn and they’ve got satellite trucks and everything.”

  “How did they find us?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m in the book,” Jenny said.

  “What book?” Amanda asked.

  “The phone book. You’ve probably never seen one, right?”

  Amanda looked puzzled. “No, I think my mother has one … somewhere.”

  “What’re we going to do?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m going to tell them to get the hell off my lawn,” Jenny said, standing up and marching to the door.

  Amanda and Lucy listened as Jenny chewed someone out, saying, “She’ll do it when she’s good and ready. Now I’m going to call the police if you don’t get off of my lawn.” She slammed the door. Lucy and Amanda were giggling behind their hands as Jenny came sweeping into the kitchen looking angry. Jenny stopped, glaring at them, and then she laughed, too.

  “I guess you told them,” Amanda said.

  “Damned straight. Nobody tramples on my Koeleria cristata and lives to tell the tale.”

  The phone was ringing again. Jenny turned to Lucy and said, “Give me your phone.” Lucy handed it to her and Jenny dialed. A moment later, she said, “Harry. I need you.”

  Lucy heard him say, “I’ll just transplant a few more hearts and be right over.”

  “I’m not joking,” Jenny said.

  “I know. I figured things might get dodgy, so I got someone to cover for me today. There in a jiff, doll.”


  Jenny hung up and said, “Come on. Let’s pack. We’re not going to get any peace here.”

  Half an hour later, they were waiting in the garage when Harry phoned. Jenny opened the garage door and Harry’s car rolled in. She quickly closed it again.

  “This is totally bangin’,” Amanda said. “I feel like I’m in a movie.”

  The girls laughed as they loaded the car and got in. Jenny opened the garage door and Harry pulled out. As he drove down the alley, a group of reporters came jogging up from the other end. Lucy looked around at the crowd and felt a chill. Amanda turned around, too.

  “People are chasing you,” Amanda said.

  “They’re just reporters,” Harry said.

  “They’re chasing you, too,” Lucy told Amanda.

  Then Amanda and Lucy exchanged a grim look.

  As she watched the reporters, Amanda said, “Wow. This is pretty hairball.”

  Late that afternoon, Jenny sat in the kitchen and watched Harry work, while the girls explored the secret spaces of the old house like two puppies. Harry brought out a great steel wok for a stir-fry. Jenny began to cut lemons to make fresh lemonade.

  “I suspect it’ll be all fun and games for a while,” he said.

  “Yes. The latest public obsession.”

  “I assume you have a plan. For when things get ugly.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. What about Amanda?”

  “She and Lucy have been inseparable. She’s deep in.”

  “But when things turn bad. What will happen to Amanda then?”

  “She’ll be with me. Until she wants to leave.” Jenny knew where Harry was going with this, but she didn’t have a better answer.

  “I’m afraid for you, Jenny. I was always afraid for you in the jungle, but now I feel it even more.”

  “Well, why don’t you come with us to New York and we’ll get this show on the road?”

  “New York, is it?”

  “Good Morning America.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. I have surgery.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Dinner in thirty minutes. Maybe you could find out where the girls have disappeared to.”

  Jenny shook her head, laughing. They sounded like an old married couple. She began wandering through the labyrinthine house, thinking about what might have been.

  Harry’s house offered a deeper insight into who he was. He bought it when he was a young doctor. Jenny had only just met him and teased him that it was probably haunted. The old woman who owned it before him had died in there. It was hung with heavy maroon drapery. Deeply stained threadbare Oriental rugs covered the battered hardwood floors. When Jenny made fun of them, Harry had said, “My dear child, this is a silk Tabriz.”

  “Yes, but the moths have chewed it to shreds.”

  “Picky-picky.”

  The fireplace in the living room had been designed to burn coal, and the gaslights still worked. But as young as he was, Harry had a long-range plan. Little by little over the years he had ripped down the drapes to let the light in and refinished the floors. When he began making serious money, he gradually added to the improvements until it was once again a grand old Victorian, with the Belgian crystal chandeliers all cleaned up and glittering. This was the palatial estate that he had once offered to Jenny if only she had been willing to give up the jungle. And as she looked around now, she felt a twinge of nostalgia for those simpler days when she thought that she knew what she wanted and could just say no without a backward glance.

  For the first time, she truly appreciated the remarkable thing that Harry had done with the house. He had created a place of exceptional silence. The virgin pine beams that lay beneath the plaster, hard as iron with age, the colossal rooftrees somewhere above, the ancient stone pediments outside, and all the scrollwork and moldings and shingling enclosed her and muffled the world of noise out there so that she could hear the swish of her own jeans as she climbed the stairs to a beautiful suite of rooms furnished with period pieces, lush and moody, smelling of dust and tung oil. A watery sunlight fell through ancient imperfections in the window glass.

  French doors led to a deck overlooking an English garden. It looked like the courtyard of a museum, the naked candelabra of pear trees espaliered against a high stone wall like Shiva. Meadow saffron, naked ladies, butcher’s broom, led along narrow cobbled paths. In neat beds were bistort, foxglove, throatwort, lenten rose, and, in a far corner, live forever. Harry’s dark sense of humor. All of those plants were poisonous.

  The girls were sunning themselves in chaise longues on the second-floor porch. Jenny stood at the door watching them. They both wore bikinis, Lucy in yellow, Amanda in blue. They looked so beautiful. She felt her heart go out to them as if by force of emotion alone she could somehow protect them. Lucy was doing something strange with her hand. Jenny took a step closer to the screen doors to see. Amanda was giggling, saying, “No way.”

  “Yes, way,” Lucy said. “Watch.”

  Then it came into focus. A cabbage white was fluttering around between the two chairs. Lucy put out her hand, saying, “Come on. Come on.” The butterfly landed on her hand. “Okay, watch. Now fly,” she said. The butterfly began flapping around between the chairs again. “Now land,” she said. Jenny watched the butterfly alight on her hand again.

  “Get out of here! I don’t believe it. Do it again.”

  Again, Lucy made the butterfly take off and land. And Amanda said, “That is so money. I want to learn. Show me how to do it, Lucy.”

  “I can’t show you how.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re too human.”

  An ominous silence fell between them. An injured look crossed Amanda’s face, and Lucy looked sorrowful.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “That was mean. I’m sorry I called you a human.”

  The two girls stared at each other for another moment. Jenny had never seen them at odds before and wondered how they’d resolve it. Amanda looked as if she were about to cry. Then a light of comprehension flowed into Amanda’s eyes, her expression changed, and she broke up laughing. Lucy realized what they’d just done and began laughing, too. Amanda shouted, “I can’t believe I was just offended when you called me human!” Then the girls couldn’t stop themselves and fell into a fit, rolling out of their chairs and onto the deck, where they lay cackling, as the butterfly flitted away into the garden. When the laughter died down at last, they lay there groaning and holding their stomachs. “Dude,” Amanda said, “you really know how to turn a bitch’s world upside down.”

  23

  AMANDA HAD TAKEN CHARGE of Lucy’s wardrobe. “Let’s go sixties. What do you think?”

  “What does sixties mean?”

  “I mean the fashion of that time period. The 1960s.”

  “You’re asking me about fashion?”

  They’d had just enough time to make it to a vintage clothing store that Amanda knew in the East Village. Jenny let the girls go on their own, out into Manhattan. New York. Who could have dreamed up such a place? The throb of noise, the dazzling colors and the lights of Times Square, steam rising from the street in white columns as if the heart of the city smoldered with eternal fire—it all left Lucy breathless. She had to force herself to stop paying such close attention.

  At the vintage store, Amanda clawed through the racks and came up with one she liked. “There,” she said, holding it up against Lucy’s shoulders. “A nice A-line patterned dress with bell sleeves. That and a little pendant. I have just the thing.”

  Lucy had not known what Amanda was talking about, but she wore the clothes. And early the next morning, in a dark and cavernous space like a warehouse, she tottered uncertainly on heels as a woman led her through a clutter of equipment manned by shadowy figures. Cables snaked underfoot everywhere across the floor. “Watch your step,” the woman said. The darkened forms of technicians hunched at their stations, peering at dim red and green lights.


  They emerged into a cauterizing light, where a pretty, blond woman sat in what appeared to be a disembodied living room, torn free from its house and set inexplicably down here for no apparent reason. The woman sat in a beige easy chair, beaming as if she’d lost her mind. So this was the illusion, Lucy thought. All this mess led to that clean picture on the little screen.

  The blond woman leapt up and embraced her. “Oh, my dear darling girl, I am so honored to meet you. Welcome. Welcome. I’m Diane.” She sat once more, smirking and saying apologetically, “I can’t go too far. My microphone.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said, as she sat in the other beige chair before a great television screen that said “Good Morning America” on it. A technician approached and attached Lucy’s microphone.

  A rumpled man wearing headphones, his jeans falling down, came forward and said, “And ten seconds, Diane.” She smiled at Lucy and held up a finger, as if to say: Wait.

  Lucy watched as the man counted silently with his fingers: five, four, three, two, one—and then pointed at the woman, who clasped her hands together and beamed at someone who wasn’t there.

  “We are so lucky today to have with us our incredibly special guest, Lucy Lowe. I’m sure you’ve all heard already, but just in case you haven’t, Lucy is a hybrid human. Astounding as it might seem, her mother was a great anthropoid ape. Lucy, welcome.”

  “Thank you.” Lucy saw several television screens before her, and was trying to figure out where to look. “Sorry, I’ve never been on this side of the television screen before.”

  The woman laughed. “That’s quite all right. I understand. Now, let’s jump right in. First of all, we have heard from the Centers for Disease Control that this is not a hoax.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “So tell us what it’s like. What is it like to be a hybrid human?”

  “Yes. Certainly.” Lucy thought for a moment as her face flashed across continents. In homes, offices, restaurants, airport lounges, and even in hospitals, the image of Lucy hung before the world, as she contemplated what she was going to say. She looked down into her lap, then up at Diane. “I think that I’m really like a lot of teenagers. I think that what I feel is exactly what many of them feel. Something happened long ago that I had nothing to say about. No one asked me if I wanted to be here. Someone made me without my consent. Before I knew what was happening or why, there I was, walking around, talking, drawing with crayons, and having all the experiences that make up a life. By the time I was old enough to question it, well, it was too late. I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad I’m me. But I didn’t make myself. Someone else did that. And I feel kind of like a stranger in a strange land. Don’t you think all teenagers feel that way at some point, Diane?”