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the wind to finish its incantations.
    “I’m fluid, like when I sneak to the lake. I can go anywhere. Well, maybe not the boys locker room when they’re changing.” Unfortunately. “I wish I could have seen Tommy Johansson’s face as his hair fell out in his hands.” It wasn’t enough but it would have to do. It would have to do.
    Music drifted down through the floorboards from the living room, Johnny Cash, and then Lyle lifted the needle off the record, strumming the chords and singing. “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.”
    “No, no one knows still , not even the Principal. Nobody knows I’m The Beaver.” Ingenious really —I liked the word ingenious. The combined junior high and high schools decided that the mascot had to be strong and super-athletic, like me, and was too important to switch every game. Years before I arrived they had constructed a top-secret system: ‘The blind candidate,’ so no one knew exactly who was in The Beaver. Me .
    I sat back satisfied, but really still a bit dazzled. I combed my hair, the hair Lyle called manila as a child, meaning vanilla. He put on a blues record.
    “I hear people talking about each other, gossiping. Like Christina whatchamacallit always trashing somebody. She shouldn’t do that. She doesn’t know, nobody knows what goes on at home. Nobody knows the troubles inside.” I stopped combing and looked at the covered mirror. All of it together confusing.
    Anyway. How casually the boys wrapped their arms around the girls’ shoulders; how easily their bodies buried into each other, the girls twining around the boys like fast-growing vines. The comfort. Must be nice. From above, a Lyle blues chord trembled my heart. Enough! Buck up!
    “I stood next to Victor King today; the most handsome hunk of a man . . . a real Adonis. He’s a nix, he’s that beautiful. Everyone wants to get next to him, even the guys. Funny to watch, like everyone’s jockeying for position. I just stood there, right next to him. It’s like none of them see me as real, like I’m not in the room. But I am! Vic King, what a dream.” A front row seat. Better than nothing.
    “And it’s going to payoff, because you know what I heard the other day?”
    Michael Landon and Andie MacDowell were mute.
    “Okay. So I’m sitting at the end of the bleachers and I hear that rats have been found in Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know, they fell into the vats. But that isn’t why they’ve changed their name to KFC; it’s because their chicken isn’t a regular chicken —it’s genetically engineered, and I think I understand what that means. Somebody’s trying to create the perfect chicken! Using human-engineered genes. Isn’t that cool?”
     

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    My days sheathed in The Beaver lasted only five years. By senior year, when the library and the rest of the school got computers, the Internet became my new encyclopedia. Scientists were manipulating genes, adding and subtracting them to optimize everything from enzymes to animals! That meant I could alter genetic make-up if I could understand what nuclease and homologous recombination meant. Which meant I had to get grades and a job to go to college. Momma laughed.
    In class I learned to sit up front because my grades suffered when I couldn’t see the blackboard: the albinism. I quickly grew uninteresting, which was better than terrifying . I was better forgotten.
    I barely altered my routine. I swam, I did my homework, I cleaned the farmhouse and I performed in The Beaver for my high school classmates almost every week of every school session and at every sport, even hockey, where Carly was beginning to be a star. Yet not a single person ever asked my name or even spoke to me. Actually, that’s not true. Twice, visiting students asked the way to the bathroom. I pointed.
    I appreciated that my schoolmates didn’t talk to me. I took it as respect for what The Beaver represented, a kind of fairy-tale life force,