Free The View From Who I Was by Heather Sappenfield Page B

Heat rushed through Corpse.
    â€œOona,” Sugeidi said, “I like wear this. En Mexico, es uniform of the maid.”
    Corpse slumped back. After a minute she said, “I’m sorry.”
    â€œWas I that bad?” Mom studied Sugeidi’s immaculately pressed dress and her lower lip trembled.
    â€œActually,” Corpse said, “maybe I’ve been worse.” I remembered how making Mom suffer had been one of our last freezing thoughts. The day weighed Corpse down, and she bent till her forehead rested against the counter.
    Mom’s hand came to Corpse’s back and rubbed it in a tentative circle. Corpse heard Mom sigh and felt that circle grow firmer. Corpse watched for tears to rain onto her jeans, but felt only her eyes’ dryness.

Ten
    From Oona’s journal:
    Compared to other liquids, water loses a large quantity of heat for each degree of temperature change, though water resists changing its temperature. The measure of how a substance resists changing temperature is called “specific heat . ”
    â€”Biology: Life’s Course
    Mr. Bonstuber had written Genetics of Drosophila across the white board. Drosophila meant fruit flies. Beneath that, he’d written each step of the lab. Corpse finger-combed her hair into a ponytail and maneuvered it awkwardly through a tie she’d pulled from her jeans pocket. When we used to do this before labs, Ash would roll her eyes and say “Dork.” Corpse imagined Ash rolling her eyes at the back of the room.
    Clark returned to his seat with the foot-long wooden mount holding four tubes of flies that he’d prepared the week before, while Corpse was still at Chateau Antunes waiting for her face to become socially acceptable. Special blue food filled the bottom of each tube. “Mating pools,” Mr. Bonstuber called them. Over the last two weeks, those pools had laid eggs, hatched larvae, pupated, and were now flies, ready for study to determine how certain genetic traits were passed down. Corpse’s left hand rested on a sheet of paper with the heading Female Wild, Male Vestigial , brilliantly white against the black lab table. On it were six columns, titled Eyes—Ee, EE, ee, and Wings—Ww, WW, ww . Below the sheet on top were three other sheets differing only in their headings: Female Vestigial, Male Wild; Female Wild, Male Wild; Female Vestigial, Male Vestigial .
    Clark read step two on the board. “You want to do this?” he said.
    Corpse held out her right hand, just a couple Band-Aids masking the healing gaps now.
    â€œSo what?” he said. “It’s not rocket science. You just slide this brush with the FlyNap inside the rubber stopper.”
    Ash’s giggle drifted to them, and then her voice saying “Ew!” Corpse glanced her direction, and their eyes glued. For a second, Ash’s expression matched the one when she was six and had fallen from an aspen tree in Chateau Antunes’s front yard. Corpse wanted to rush to her, but Ash straightened and turned away.
    â€œHow about I do the first one?” Clark said.
    â€œOkay.”
    He lifted out a tube and read its label: “Female Wild, Male Vestigial.”
    Corpse checked the heading at the top of the paper to make sure it matched. Clark took the Q-tip-like brush and pinched back the stopper at the top of the tube as he slid it in. They leaned close to watch the flies conk out; they were supposed to pull out the brush when 90 percent were asleep.
    â€œClark,” Corpse whispered, “how did you become my partner?” She could feel him concentrate on the flies to keep from looking at her.
    â€œBonstuber stopped me after class. Asked if I wanted to switch.”
    â€œYou’re not afraid of me?”
    Clark grinned. “I’ve never been afraid of you, Oona.” He turned quiet, and she could hear him worrying that he’d insulted her by referring to when she was gorgeous. “I’d have