Specimens

The first time Olivia noticed the boy next door, he was performing surgery on the dead.

Ten seventeen on a Wednesday. Sodium-vapor streetlamps, the orange ones the city council bought in bulk in 1987, turned every lawn jaundiced and every face into a missing persons flier. A squirrel lay on the curb. Fresh kill. The boy sat cross-legged beside it in yellow latex gloves, the kind from under kitchen sinks, with a Walmart tackle box open on the asphalt. X-Acto knife. Tweezers. A mechanical pencil from AP Biology, its lead retracted, repurposed as a probe.

He peeled the fur back with the patience of someone unwrapping a gift they already knew would break. Ribs underneath like tiny prison bars. Intestines coiled tight as earbuds crammed into a pocket. Pink lung tissue deflated to a wafer.

Olivia sat on her porch with one Nike Air Force 1 dangling off the step and a Diet Coke leaving wet rings on pressure-treated lumber. She'd come outside to smoke the Marlboro Light she'd stolen from her mother's emergency pack, the one hidden behind the expired flour where nobody in the house looked because nobody in the house baked. The cigarette sat unlit between her fingers.

"Hey."

The word left before her brain caught up.

He looked up. Glasses fogged. A smear across his left cheek that could have been blood or could have been Hershey's syrup. The sodium light refused to settle the question.

"Uh. Hey."

He held her gaze while gripping what looked like a femur between latex-covered thumb and forefinger. His sleeves bunched at the elbows. Thin forearms, pale, the veins showing blue in the orange light. Lines on the left one. Neat and parallel, running from mid-forearm toward the wrist.

"You're gross, you know that?"

He shrugged. Returned to work.

"Why do you do that?"

"I wanted to see how it worked." He lifted something purple and wet into the orange light. Turned it the way a jeweler turns a stone he suspects is fake. "The blood vessels branch out. All these tiny highways. And they all connect."

The cigarette had gone damp with sweat. She pocketed it without lighting it.

He sorted the squirrel's organs into the tackle box's compartments, the ones built for fishing lures, each chamber now holding something that had kept a small animal running twelve hours ago. He hummed while he worked. Tuneless. The sound of someone who had forgotten anyone could hear him.

She stayed until he finished. Until he sealed the tackle box and peeled off the gloves and walked back to his house without saying goodnight, without looking up.

Inside, she washed her hands. Her father snored in the recliner downstairs, a sound like a bandsaw hitting a knot, and the recliner's mechanical hum ran underneath. He'd slept there every night since the bypass, because lying flat made him feel like drowning, and the hum of that motor had become the sound of her father staying alive.

She brushed her teeth. Spit toothpaste into the sink. Went to bed.

The recliner hummed through the floor.

His name was Wesley Rourke. The cafeteria called him Milquetoast. Sophomore year, two boys had pinned him to the linoleum and poured whole milk over his head while three hundred phones recorded it, and someone set the footage to circus music, and by Monday the name replaced his.

Olivia had watched the video on Ashley Frazier's bed during a sleepover, and Ashley had laughed so hard she'd snorted Sprite through her nose, and Olivia had laughed too.

Friday. She tore a page from her physics textbook. Chapter twelve: Thermodynamics and Irreversible Processes. Five words in black Pilot G2:

You wanna do something gross tonight?

Locker 447. Through the vent slots. She posted up near the water fountain between classes and watched. He found the note. Read it twice. Folded it. Pocketed it.

Nine o'clock. October air sharp enough to sting the sinuses. The moon hung dissolved and pale, a tablet dropping through water.

Her backyard. The dead oak at the back fence still stood. Her father had promised to remove it the spring before his chest opened.

Wesley came through the gap between the privacy fences. His Jansport hung heavy. The weight inside shifted when he walked with the quality of something that had recently stopped moving.

"I brought something."

The zipper opened. Each tooth releasing its grip. Tzzzz.

"Jesus Christ. Is that a cat?"

"Found it on Route 12. Shoulder of the road."

Orange tabby. Female. Seven or eight pounds. Eyes clouded. Rigor setting the jaw into a slight grin, lending the animal an expression of faint amusement at its own predicament. The smell came with it: blood gone to rust and the thick sweetness that gathers where fur meets wound, the smell of a body keeping no more secrets.

"Gross."

Wesley grinned. His whole face changed. She'd never seen his teeth. He looked younger with them showing.

"You wanted gross."

They knelt in cold dirt near the dead oak. The ground resisted their knees. His Swiss Army knife. Her mother's Henckels kitchen shears, German steel, 1998 wedding registry, the year her parents still believed in things that required registering.

He guided her hand on the first cut. Fingers around her wrist, adjusting the angle. The latex cold and slightly tacky against her skin.

"Lighter. Let the blade work."

The fur parted. Beneath it: liver the color of a bruise going green at the edges. Kidneys nested like quotation marks around the spine. Small intestine compressed into the volume of a child's fist. Cold air made everything steam, the heat of recent life still leaking from opened tissue.

"Spleen," he said, pointing with the knife's tip. "Filters blood. Recycles dead red blood cells. Your body runs a whole recycling program and never tells you."

"Like a background app."

"Exactly like a background app." He went back to work.

They stayed an hour. He named things. She held the flashlight. The beam caught structures she'd never pictured inside an animal that weighed less than a newborn: a trachea no wider than a cocktail straw, an aorta the diameter of a pencil lead, a diaphragm thin as cling wrap. Her fingers went numb and she kept holding.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You just did."

"Why are you here?"

She looked at the open cat. The organized interior.

"I don't know. Same reason you are, maybe."

He reached into the cavity and lifted the heart free. Held it in his palm. Smaller than a golf ball. Dark red muscle, four chambers visible, reduced to something you could lose between couch cushions.

"You want to hold it?"

She held out her hand. He placed the heart there. Cold. A few grams of stopped muscle that she could feel in her whole arm.

"Can I keep it?"

He looked at her. Behind the fogged glasses, his eyes held the color of creek water after rain: dark brown, close to black, with something moving underneath.

"It's yours."