“Nan, wait up,” Mina hissed, when she entered the hallway and couldn’t find her friend.
“Over here!” Nan called out, as she poked her head out of the unlocked biology classroom.
Mina entered the class and sat on the stool at one of the lab stations while Nan redistributed their lunch. She was angry, and kept squishing and damaging their food as she tried to separate their lunches. Mina ended up with two broken cookies, a crushed bag of chips, and a very shaken up carton of two percent milk.
“The nerve of him!” Nan fumed. “Doesn’t he realize how lucky we are to have you here? There was no reason whatsoever for him to glare at us like that.” She tried to pull the wrapper off of her straw and stab it into her own carton of milk before she realized she had Mina’s chocolate milk.
Deftly Mina switched their milk cartons back as Nan continued her rant. “I mean, for goodness sake, Mina! Your face could have ended up on a milk carton if you weren’t found!” Nan held up the carton an inch from her face.
“Nan,” Mina soothed. “It’s fine. Brody’s only angry because we had an argument. I think he is just confused. He actually came to the hospital and visited me.”
When Nan’s eyes went wide in disbelief and her mouth dropped open to comment on Brody personally coming to see her, Mina quickly changed the subject. “And besides, they don’t put kids’ faces on milk cartons anymore.”
Nan’s blonde eyebrows furrowed in speculation, and she began to scrutinize her own milk carton. “Are you sure, I thought I saw it in a movie somewhere.”
Mina laughed out loud, “I’m sure, if anything, it would have been an amber alert.”
“Oh,” she said somewhat dejectedly. “I would have liked to see your face on a milk carton.”
“Nan Taylor!” Mina guffawed and shook her head. “What is wrong with you?”
Nan’s face lit up with a mischievous grin. “That’s what you get for not telling me about Brody! You don’t think you can avoid the question that easily. How come you didn’t tell me that the prince of hotness visited you in the hospital? Where was I, by the way?”
Mina fumbled a bit. “I think you were out looking for a magazine.”
“But I’m your best friend. Don’t you think you should have told me? It’s not like I would have teased you about it--much.” She did a beautiful pout, and Mina couldn’t help but apologize to Nan.
“I’m sorry; I was surprised and caught off guard.”
“It’s because you like him, I know.” Nan sighed and leaned her head on her hand. “He has almost as many hot points as Valdemar. Well, I think they are tied, for hot points. On a one to ten, they are a definite twelve.”
Mina took a bite of her cookie. “But the scale only goes to ten?” she mumbled through the crumbs.
“Not with hot points,” Nan explained. “You get an extra bonus point for being rich, and one for being a celebrity. And since that covers both of them that would make them a twelve.”
“Well, that doesn’t do us much good, since we are not a twelve.”
Nan began to pick all of the M&M’s off of her cookie and popped them into her mouth one by one. “Nonsense. We rank high in cute points.”
Mina raised her eyebrow in disbelief. “Cute points?”
“Duh, the cute points are better than hot points. We rate high in cute points. We are funny, quirky, have great personalities and are extremely charming.” She batted her eyelashes comically. “These are way more important than hot points.”
“How so?”Mina asked dumbfounded.
“Well, girls that rank high in hot points will eventually get old and will no longer be hot, so their hot points lower. If you have cute points, they last forever, even when you are old. So they are definitely way more important.”
Mina almost choked on her cookie, she was laughing so hard. Nan always had a different way of looking at the world. They finished their lunch discussing the hot versus cute point ratings for all of the kids in their class.
It wasn’t until Mina caught movement over her best friend’s shoulder that her smile died on her lips. Every muscle in her body tensed as a familiar tingling raced up her spine, her only warning that something magical was at work.
The movement came again, and she tried to pretend indifference to the fluttering movements coming from the locked Biology cabinet. She knew what was stored in that particular glass cabinet. She had seen the preserved bodies of the chickens, frogs, and even a two-headed pig. Year after year, they had been floating lifeless in their jars of formaldehyde.
The Kennedy students had even nicknamed the two-headed pig Twinky. Mina never gave credit to the names and preferred to ignore the creatures suspended in the liquid glass coffins. But she could no longer ignore them because the dead specimens were moving. Twinky himself, with both heads, started to struggle in the jar. His mouth opened wide, and she could almost hear the silent squeals echoing in the classroom.
She faltered mid-sentence with Nan, and quickly began to gather up her uneaten lunch. Mina glanced out of the corner of her eye to see one of the frogs swimming happily back in forth in his jar.
Nan complained, “Hey, I’m not done with that.” She tried to snatch another chip from Mina’s tray.
“No, we are definitely done,” Mina shot out hurriedly. She tried to pick up the tray and turn Nan toward the door and away from lab cabinet that was now slightly shaking from the frenzied movement coming from within.
But Mina wasn’t able to carry the trays and both crutches and she began to lose the tray and all of the food on it. Nan caught the trays and dumped them into the nearest trash can. “If you really wanted to get out of here, you could have just told me,” she answered somewhat annoyed.
Mina was proud of her recovery. “I just remembered. I overheard a senior saying that they were dissecting various brains on these tables today.” It was an obvious lie, but one that seemed to get Nan moving in the direction of the door.
“Oh, that is disgusting! I should have never even brought our lunch in here. I’m surprised we could eat with all of those Frankenstein animals in the cabinet anyway.” Nan began to turn her head and point to the aforementioned cabinet, when Mina heard a distinct clicking sound. Without looking, she knew it was the chicken tapping his beak on the jar, desperately trying to break free.
She pushed Nan bodily through the door as the clicking sound grew louder.
“Did you hear something?” Nan turned and tried to crane her neck back into the classroom.
“Nope,” Mina answered quickly, too quickly.
“I thought I heard tapping?” Nan looked at Mina.
“Uh, you did.” Mina began to tap her fingers impatiently against the metal support of her crutch.
Nan’s head tilted to the side. “No, I could have sworn it sounded like glass.” Nan couldn’t press the argument further because the first warning bell rang.
Mina closed the lab door firmly behind her and started a frenzied hopping toward her next class, hoping Nan would follow her lead. She didn’t. Mina stopped when she realized Nan wasn’t behind her. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her blonde best friend who hadn’t moved from her spot outside the Biology lab door.
