Free Deconstructing Dylan by Lesley Choyce Page B

the very fact that she started to freely give away her research made the establishment mistrust her. It’s a crazy world we live in.”
    â€œIt is. What about now? What can I do to help?”
    He shrugged. “I ask myself that question all the time.”
    We reached the ravine, got out, and began to hike up the rift. We stopped and picked up some interesting stones — an agate and some smoky quartz. My dad snapped several pictures of me with his micro-digicam.
    I clawed away at some loose slate and came across a nearly perfect fossil of an insect that I later identified as an ancestor of the modern diving beetle, the
Dysticus
. Frank E. Lutz, ever insightful about every insect he encountered,had written, “Adults discharge from behind the head and also from the anal glands, fluids &hellips; which are probably defensive against fish.” Lutz also noted that a fellow colleague named Harris kept a diving beetle for a kind of pet “for three years and a half in perfect health, in a glass vessel filled with water, and supported by morsels of raw meat.” My
Dysticus
fossil was my prize for the day. After an hour or so of poking around, we returned to the skid, both of us feeling better after the strenuous hike.
    On the skid’s computer screen, I looked at the snapshots he had taken of us that day and then accessed some old photos he had archived there as well. As my dad drove, I scrolled through batch after batch, looking for that curious photoshopped version of me set in the past. It wasn’t there.
    â€œWhat’s the story behind that photo you altered of me? The one in the night table beside your bed?”
    He furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
    So I described it. “She said you had given it to her as a joke. But I don’t quite get the joke.”
    He paused, and then looked over at me. “Hmm. Oh, that one. I had forgotten about it. Just fooling around with a new phototool program, I guess. You should have seen the ones I did of me. I was an astronautin an Apollo spacecraft. Me and Buzz Aldrin. And Neil Armstrong. Only I was the first one to set foot on the moon, not the other guy. ‘One small step for man.’” And then he slapped me on the leg. I kept scrolling back through the archives, further and further until I came to the baby pictures of me. God, I was an ugly kid — big fat head, skinny arms and legs. Bald as well.
    I’d seen them all before but now something seemed different. Something about my parents. They looked like the younger version of my parents in my math class daydream. I felt my head get dizzy and I was losing focus.
    â€œTell me about Glencoe,” I said, frightening myself. “Tell me about the deer.”
    My father kept his eyes focussed on the road. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
    â€œTell me about Kyle,” I said.

C HAPTER F OURTEEN
    My father sat in silence for a minute. We both looked straight ahead at the road back home. “Kyle was my grandfather’s name,” he said. “You must have known that. He designed ships. Big luxury liners. When I was young, he told me stories about the sea, about the old days at sea.”
    It was a diversionary tactic. Kyle
had
been the name of my great-grandfather but there was more. Much more. My head was swirling with theories. Was I experiencing some sort of strange ancestral memory? Hearing about my great-grandfather was one thing, but the images in my head were not in sync with his life at all. Maybe his name had been swimming around in my brain. Maybe it was all mixed up and didn’t make any logical sense like a dream. Maybe there was just a photoshopped version of me by myparents’ bed, just as my parents had said. Or maybe there was much more to it.
    â€œYour great-grandfather helped design the
Victoria III
. They called it unsinkable.”
    â€œLike the
Titanic
.”
    â€œSomething like