He rolled his eyes at himself.
Wes thought about it. Adam’s statement seemed absurd on the face of it, yes. But Wes hadn’t gotten where he was today by dismissing ideas without thinking about them just because they sounded impossible.
“Leeches and lampreys feed on blood. So do some bats. Mosquitoes and fleas do too, and bedbugs. The oxpecker is a bird that eats bugs off oxen, then drinks blood from the wounds they created. Oh, and there’s a finch that lives in the Galápagos that drinks blood from the booby bird. So, the blood-drinking part isn’t unreasonable. It’s really the immortality that’s the sticking point. And the transforming others into a different creature through their bite. But I suppose those things could just be part of the mythos, not the biology.”
Adam was watching him with a strange look. Usually, Wes hated being looked at. But Adam’s attention didn’t make him squirm.
“You’re very open-minded,” Adam said.
Wes shrugged. “It’s just science.”
Adam regarded him in silence, like he’d forgotten why he’d come.
“So, show-and-tell,” Wes prompted. “When is it?”
“Huh? Oh, Friday. We leave at 8:30.”
“In the morning,” Wes said.
“Yeah.”
Adam just looked at him. Wes had been trying to make a joke, but it had fallen flat.
“Okay,” he said, and moved to shut the door, embarrassed.
“Thank you!” Adam called.
Wes watched him walk across the street, arms wrapped around himself against the cold.
He watched him and wondered what Adam would think if he knew Wes had just offered to leave Knockbridge Lane in the daylight for the first time in four years.
* * *
Early Friday morning, the ancient alarm clock that Wes had found in the basement and plugged in for the first time jerked him awake with violent beeps.
Banana chirped with displeasure at the unusual interruption, shoved her face under the blanket, and curled back up with Janice, looking more like a grouchy cat than a raccoon.
Wes wished he could curl back up with them. His nocturnal schedule was usually aligned with the raccoons’, but today Wes dragged himself out of bed and into the shower. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten up before 2:00 p.m.
But that disruption to his schedule paled in comparison to the larger disruption. Westley Mobray was about to leave his house and go to a school full of people—full of children, no less—in the daylight, where anyone could look at him.
The mind reeled.
Wes wasn’t agoraphobic. He didn’t get panic attacks in crowded places, nor was it precisely fear he felt at the prospect of going to them. What he absolutely, positively hated was being looked at. Feeling as though he was being observed.
And because of that, he had a habit of trying to make himself invisible in scenarios when people would observe him. This resulted in a sensation of being alienated from his own body. Little by little as he stood there, pieces of him would begin to feel wrong. The arm closest to people would go all strange—like it had no function. Then perhaps the legs he stood on. Then a shoulder.
Until, after a while, he felt like a mass of whirling energy trapped in a strange and clumsy form that became a prison. When people looked at the prison, or needed it to function, it became bigger and clumsier and less effectual.
And then, all Wes wanted was to disappear.
It had begun the year he was fifteen. The year the whole world had seemed to be observing him. And it had never gone away. For the next three years he’d been forced to capitulate to social conventions because he was living in his parents’ home. But once he moved out, he had the freedom to eschew those conventions and avoid people as he pleased.
With each passing year of doing so, he’d found it increasingly unpleasant to attend the social functions that other people seemed to navigate with ease.
Now, with no one to dictate his schedule or police his habits, Wes was free to avoid the places and situations that made him feel distant from himself.
He had everything delivered, from groceries to laboratory equipment. During the day, when sensory stimulation and chance encounters with people were at their height, Wes slept. In the quiet, private darkness, he lived his life. He found places to do experiments and caught rodents for the snakes. He socialized online or via video chat; and conducted his meetings and conference appearances in the same way.
Wes had cultivated precisely the life he wanted.
And now he was breaking every barrier he’d put in place to take a tarantula to a little girl’s school.
Chapter Seven
Adam
Adam had spent the previous evening trying to temper Gus’ excitement by reminding her that it was possible Wes might not show up.
“He will, Daddy. I know he will,” Gus insisted, and Adam’s heart clenched at the faith she already had in Wes—and at the knowledge that Wes might betray it.
He cursed himself one hundred times for not getting Wes’ number so he could text to remind him.
By 7:00 a.m., he was a mess of nerves, gulping coffee and peering out the kitchen window at Wes’ house, trying to see if he could spot a light or a TV on that might indicate his mysterious neighbor was awake.
It was impossible because of the paper covering all the windows.
“God, he’s so weird,” Adam muttered to himself as he poured another cup of coffee. “And hot,” he added, regrettably honest with himself when he’d had very little sleep—which he had, the night before, waking at 2:00 a.m. convinced Wes would be a no-show, then watching a loop in his mind of all the times Mason had disappointed him or let Gus down.
“Why do I think he’s so hot?”
Wes Mobray was strange and awkward and lived in a hellscape of a haunted house crawling with things that Adam didn’t even wish to think about.
He was also kind and generous and obviously brilliant. He took Gus’ interests seriously and didn’t treat her like a kid. He loved animals that most people thought were creepy and was gentle with them. His blue eyes were warm and honest and when he smiled it made Adam want to smile.
“Welp, I guess that’s why.”
“Why what, Daddy?”
Gus wandered into the kitchen rubbing her eyes, wearing jeans, one sock, and her pajama top.
“Why you’re the greatest kid in the world.”
Gus rolled her eyes, but smiled a little, and Adam brushed her soft blond hair back from her face. She had a spot at the back of her head that was always knotted from sleeping on it and his heart swelled with tenderness whenever he saw it.