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his T-shirt. “The Professor. I ran into him last night. He says he’ll be getting back to work this morning.”
    Jameson groans. “God, I was hoping he’d disappeared for good.”
    Charlotte, on the other hand, cackles and then rubs her hands together. “This,” she says, sinking back into the couch next to me, “is gonna be fun.”

CHAPTER 8
    By the time I get dressed and head over to the labs, everyone else has already left, presumably to entertain themselves by messing with the Professor en masse.
    Back when I was a kid, I don’t know, maybe eleven? Anyway, I had this friend, Krissy. I liked hanging out at Krissy’s house because she lived with just her dad, who was one of those benignly negligent parents who just sort of assumed Krissy’d let him know if she needed anything, but otherwise left her alone. There was never any food in her house, but her dad was good about leaving cash. Whenever we got hungry, we’d walk over to the neighborhood convenience store and load up on all the junk food we could carry. That’s one of the great things when you’re a kid—you can stuff your face full of ten pounds of Pop-Tarts and licorice and whatever other high-fructose un-food you can find on the shelf that’s never come within a hundred miles of any naturally occurring substance, and you never even get sick. You just stuff that processed shit in your face until you can’t, and then you lie in a stupid, happy little sugar coma until it’s breakfast time the next day, and then you just start it all over again, but this time with syrup on top. It’s awesome to be a kid sometimes. Or at least it was awesome to be a kid at Krissy’s house.
    Anyway, we used to take a shortcut to the convenience store, because otherwise it was a really long walk. We’d crawl under this chain-link fence someone had cut through at the bottom, jump over a muddy ditch full of used condoms and empty beer cans, and then walk along the railroad tracks for about a quarter mile until we got to the rear of the store. This one time we were heading back right around dusk, and as usual we weren’t paying attention to much of anything, when all of a sudden we heard a guy’s voice calling out to us,
hey, girls,
or something generic like that.
    We turned around, and there was a man standing there on the tracks behind us with a weird smile on his face—not threatening or anything, just more like he was waiting for us to hurry up and get the joke. I remember I was staring at him, trying to figure out what he wanted, when he started moving a tiny bit—not walking toward us, but just sort of fidgeting where he stood—and part of my brain started to catch on that something wasn’t right. I kept staring at him, but another few seconds ticked by before my attention finally zoomed off of that weird smile on his face and panned out enough to realize exactly what it was that was strange about him. It was his pants. His pants were off, or at least unzipped, and he was grabbing at himself, tugging and jerking a little, and then a lot.
    I was still young enough that I didn’t even really have the words to go along with what I was seeing. I mean, I
knew
what he was doing, but I’d never seen it actually happening right in front of me. So I was staring, Krissy’s staring, and the guy was grinning back at us, jerking himself off even faster, and it was like we were in some weird time warp for what felt like hours, until finally I snapped out of it. I grabbed Krissy by the arm, and ran like hell.
    We ran as fast as we could, at least I thought we did at the time, but maybe not, because when we got back to Krissy’s house, she still had the two-liter bottle of Hawaiian Punch tucked under her arm, and I still had the Cool Ranch Doritos and the Double Stuf Oreos. I mean, you can’t exactly say we were running for our lives if we managed to hang on to the precious goddamn snacks, can you? We shrieked about it for a couple of minutes,
oh my God, did you see