Peeps

“But you…” She trailed off.

“In other words, Lace, it just can’t happen. I can’t even kiss anyone!” I spat these last words at her, furious that I was having to say this all out loud, making it real and inescapable again. I remembered my pathetic little fantasy at the restaurant, hoping someone might mistake us for a couple, confusing me for a normal human being.

She shook her head again. “And you didn’t think this would be important to me?”

My pounding head reverberated with this question for a while, remembering the sound of her breath filling the room the night before. “Important to you?”

“Yeah.” She stood and dragged her chair under the overhead light, climbed up onto it, and screwed the bulb back in. It flickered once in her hand, then stayed on.

I squinted against the glare. “I guess everything’s important to you. Do you want to read my diary now? Go through my closet? I told you practically everything!”

Lace stepped down from the chair and crossed to the door. Her backpack lay there, already full. She was leaving.

“Practically everything wasn’t enough, Cal,” she said. “You should have told me. You should have known I’d want to know.” She took a step closer, placed a folded piece of paper on the table, and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m really sorry you’re sick, Cal. I’ll be at my sister’s.”

My mind was racing, trapped in one of those nightmarish hamster wheels when you know it really matters what you say next, but you can’t even get your mouth open.

Finally, a flicker of will broke through the chaos. “Why? Why do you care if I’m sick?”

“Christ, Cal! Because I thought we had something.” She shrugged. “The way you keep looking at me. From the first time we saw each other in that elevator.”

“That’s because … I do like you.” I felt my throat swelling, my eyes stinging, but I was not going to cry. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You could have told me. It’s like you were playing a game with me.”

I opened my mouth to protest but realized that she was right. Except I’d been mostly playing the game with myself, not admitting how much I liked her, trying to forget the fact that it was bound to come to this—her feeling disappointed and betrayed, me caught in my deception, sputtering hopelessly.

But I didn’t know how to say all that, so I didn’t say anything at all.

Lace opened the door and left.

I sat there for a while, trying not to cry, clinging to that minuscule place inside me that somehow managed to be quietly pleased: Lace had liked me too. Yay.

Some time later I fed Cornelius and got ready for a long night awake in the throes of optimum virulence. I unhid my spore-ridden toothbrush and got out all the Night Watch books I’d secreted away, returning the apartment to how it had been before Lace had arrived. I even sprayed the couch with window cleaner, trying to erase her scent.

But before I went to sleep I looked at the folded piece of paper she’d left behind. It was a cell-phone number.

So I could call and tell her when her building was safe? Or when I was ready to send a replacement spaghetti strainer? Or was it an invitation to a really frustrating friendship?

I lay down on the futon and let Cornelius sit on my chest, comforting me with all his fourteen pounds, and getting ready to relish these questions and others as they danced behind my eyelids for the next eight hours.

Wait, did I say eight hours?

I meant four hundred years.

Chapter 18

PLASMODIUM

Imagine dying from a mosquito bite.

About two million people every year do just that, thanks to a parasite called Plasmodium. Here’s how it works:

When an infected mosquito bites you, Plasmodium is injected into your bloodstream. It moves through your body until it reaches your liver, where it stays for about a week. During that time it changes into a new form—sort of like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

Did I say butterfly? Actually, it’s more like a microscopic tank. Plasmodium grows treads that allow it to crawl along your blood vessel walls, and it develops a sort of missile launcher on its head. This launcher helps the parasite blast its way into one of your red blood cells.

Inside the blood cell, Plasmodium is safe, hidden from your immune system. But it stays busy. It consumes the insides of the cell and uses them to build sixteen copies of itself. Those burst forth and go on to invade more of your blood cells, where they each make sixteen more copies of themselves…

You can see where this might become a problem. This problem is called malaria.

Getting malaria sucks. As your blood cells are consumed by Plasmodium, you get chills, then a high fever that comes back every few days. Your liver and spleen expand, and your urine turns black with dead blood cells.

It gets worse. All those blood cells are supposed to be carrying oxygen through your body. As they get turned into plasmodium-breeding factories, the oxygen stops flowing. Your skin turns yellow, and you become delirious. If your malaria remains untreated, you’ll eventually go into a coma and die.

But why is Plasmodium so nasty? Why would a parasite want to kill you, when that means that it too will die? This seems to go against the law of optimum virulence.

Here’s the thing: Humans can’t give one another malaria, because most people don’t bite each other. So to infect other humans, Plasmodium needs to get back into a mosquito.

This is trickier than it sounds, because when a mosquito bites you, it only sucks a tiny, mosquito-size drop of blood. But plasmodium doesn’t know which drop of blood will get sucked, so it has to be everywhere in your bloodstream, even if that winds up killing you.

In this case, optimum virulence means total domination.

But plasmodium isn’t completely lacking in subtlety. Sometimes it takes a break from killing you.

Why? Because if too many humans in one place get malaria at the same time, it might wind up killing them all. This would be very bad for Plasmodium; it needs a human population to keep breeding. So every once in a while, Plasmodium plays it cool. In fact, one strain can hang around inside you for as long as thirty years before it makes its move.

It lets you think that you’re okay, but it’s still there, hiding in your liver, waiting for the right moment to unleash its engines of destruction.

Clever, huh?

Chapter 19

VECTOR

I woke up in a foul mood, ready to kick some ass. I started with Chip in Records.

“Hey, Kid.”

“Okay, first thing: Don’t call me Kid!”

“Jeez, Cal.” Chip’s big brown eyes looked hurt. “What’s with you? Didn’t get enough sleep last night?”

“No, I didn’t. Something about Morgan Ryder living half a mile away kept me awake.”

He blinked. “You did what now?”

I sighed as I sat down in his visitor’s chair. I’d been practicing that dramatic line all the way here, and Chip was looking at me like I was speaking Middle Dutch. “Okay, Chip. Listen carefully. I found Morgan Ryder, my progenitor, the high-priority peep that you guys have been looking for since the day before yesterday. In the phone book!”

“Huh. Well, don’t look at me.”

“Um, Chip, I am looking at you.” It was true. I was looking at him. “This is Records, is it not? You guys do have phone books down here, don’t you?”

“Sure, but—”

“But you’ve been messing with me, haven’t you?”

He raised his hands. “No one’s messing with you, Cal.” Then he leaned forward, lowering his voice a bit. “At least, no one in Records is. I can tell you that.”

I stopped, mouth already loaded with my next sarcastic remark. It took me a moment to switch gears. “What do you mean, no one in Records?”