I Crawl Through It

by A.S. King

Genres: YA Contemporary

Synopsis

Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.

So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.

The genius of acclaimed author A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience--and find the way out.

Release date: October 8, 2024

Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 288

Sample

1. Place frog in tray, ventral side up.

2. With forceps, lift the skin of the lower abdomen. Cut with scissors.

3. Slide scissors into the opening and cut to below the lower jaw.

4. Cut the sides just posterior to the forelimbs and anterior to the hind limbs.

This is my seventh frog dissection this year. Mr. Bio lets me help with the freshmen if they’re dissecting. I am the best frog surgeon he knows. That’s our joke. I bet he’d make me a name tag that says BEST FROG SURGEON if he could, but he’s not very artistic. I’m his assistant, and I help hand out the forceps and scalpels while the students get into their lab coats and put on their goggles. I can’t actually hand out the frogs, though, because I’m always surprised by how dead they are.

Lifeless.

Gray-green.

Bred so we could cut them open and find their livers and draw them for points in a notebook.



Mr. Bio told me in ninth grade, “You’re going to make an excellent doctor one day.”

“That’s the plan,” I said.

“It’s a good plan.”

“I want to help people,” I said.

“Good.”

“I know I can’t help everybody, but even if I can help just one person, you know?”

“Yep,” he said.

“I’m thinking about going into the army,” I said.

Mr. Bio made a horrible face. “Why?”

“Did you ever watch M*A*S*H?” I answered. M*A*S*H is a late-twentieth-century TV show about a mobile army surgical hospital unit during the Korean War. It reruns on cable a lot. The main character is Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce. He’s a surgeon from Maine.

“Of course,” Mr. Bio said. “I grew up with M*A*S*H.”

“That’s why,” I said. I didn’t tell him Hawkeye Pierce is my mother. No one would understand that. Hawkeye Pierce was a man. A fictional man. Most people would think he couldn’t be anyone’s mother. Except he’s mine. He puts me to bed every night. He makes my dinner. He teaches me about the world and he’s always honest.

Mr. Bio put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You should stay away from that recruiter.”

“It wasn’t the recruiter,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “There are better ways to pay off med school loans. We’ll talk about it once you get closer to graduating.”

We did. Talk about it. I am now sixty days from graduating. Mama and Pop don’t think going into medicine will be good for me. They think I should be a forest ranger. I have no idea why, especially on days like today when my scalpel knows just where to go. Especially on days like today when I don’t even have to refer to the drawing to locate the heart, the stomach, the liver, the urinary bladder.

Mama tells me that being a forest ranger will be quiet.

That I will be safe.

She says, “Trees help us breathe, you know.”



This morning, the school administration got a letter. The letter claimed to be from a student who was going to blow us all up before testing week. Nobody is supposed to know this, but I know. You want to know how I know, but I can’t tell you that yet.

The point is: Somebody sent a letter and nobody knows who it was.

But I might.

He or she could be here with us today, scalpel in hand, and from here behind your plastic goggles you’d never know he or she could write that and send it.

He or she is not what you think.

I don’t think they ever are.

Do you know what a tetragametic chimera is?

We learned about it during a genetics discussion last fall.

It’s some crazy thing that happens to you between when you’re conceived as cells and when you’re a zygote. Somewhere between sperm-meets-egg and embryo. Somewhere between the one-night stand and the trip to the drugstore for the test kit. Somewhere in there you used to be fraternal twins. And you blended. Two into one.

It is not murder or homicide. Even though there were two and now there is one, you are only cells. Even though one of you is missing—really none of you is missing. You are all there. All two of you. But not at all two of you.

You belong this way.

Only no one knows it except your DNA. And nobody goes around looking at DNA—not unless they need to. Most tetragametic chimeras never know they’re tetragametic chimeras. Except you have to know, right? You have to feel that somewhere. That twoness. The split. The schism.

I feel it.

I’m part leader and part follower. I’m part good and part evil. Part complicated, part simple. A human yin-yang. Where are you going? Where am I going? Why are you following me? Why am I following you? Why are we doing any of this?

Test week makes me ask questions. It splits me in two just as much as it always did. Last year they made me do makeup exams because the first time around, I filled the dots in according to how I was feeling when I read the question. A = Annoyed. B = Bored. C = Choleric. D = Disappointed. E = Empty. When I was done with makeup exams, I broke all my number two pencils in half so they could feel how I feel every day.



I’ve dissected so many things—from eggs to a bull’s eye to a mouse, a snake, and a bird. Small animals seem easier to me. Once I hit senior AP biology, my emotions kicked in or something. Or maybe it was the summer trip to Columbine High School that lingered. I don’t know. The larger animals seemed… different.

A fetal pig. I thought I would draw the line there. I thought I’d be grossed out dissecting a fetal pig. I thought about where we got it. Where did we get it? Where does one even get a fetal pig?

A cat. I knew I’d draw the line there. I couldn’t cut open a cat. I have a cat. I feed it. I try to keep it alive with water and food, and I bought it a scratching post.

But I’d cut open a cat.

The scalpel didn’t know it was a cat. The scalpel did what I told it to do. My hands—my hands are not mine some days. They belong to the other DNA. They are my twin’s hands. They’re capable of cutting open a cat and removing its liver. I’m not capable of doing that.



After frog dissection #7, I go to the library and do my homework. I’m the only one there. It’s as if the bomb has finally exploded and I am the only survivor.

Then I go home and cuddle my living cat and watch M*A*S*H. I watch three episodes before I go to bed. The last one is “Love Story,” season one, episode fourteen. Hawkeye Pierce says, Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents. Eighty-nine cents’ worth of chemicals walking around lonely.

I think of what love must feel like. I’m not sure I know. I look at my cat. I ask it Hawkeye’s question: Without love, what are we worth?



Did you know that the liver is the only organ that can regenerate itself? I bet Hawkeye Pierce knows this. I know Mr. Bio knows. I think Gustav knows, but because he might not, I turn off the TV and go out the back door toward his house. It’s late, but I know where he’ll be. He’s always there. He’s focused on one thing only… and it’s not me.

Half of me is okay with this. The other half is not okay with this. Half of me would follow Gustav anywhere. Half of me would lead. For now I want to tell him about livers.

As I walk, I feel the rift in my cells. I don’t know if everyone can feel their cells. I can feel every one of mine.

China says she can feel her cells. China is my best friend. China is inside out, so I bet she knows more about her cells than anyone.

Gustav doesn’t care about cells. Gustav understands physics. He likes electrical engineering. He’s building a helicopter.

Halfway to Gustav’s house, a man steps out from behind a bush and asks me if I want to buy an H. I say I do not. “I don’t need an H,” I say.

“How about a K?” he asks.

I keep walking. When he yells something and I look back, he has his trench coat open and it’s almost dark, but I can see the details that tell me he is an animal.

There is very little room in the suburbs to build a helicopter, but Gustav does it anyway. There is very little room in my heart for Gustav, but I let him in all the same. We watch the movie Amadeus together sometimes, and I know he feels like the main character, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and I know I feel like Mozart’s wife, Stanzi. Those nights when we watch Amadeus I don’t get a lot of sleep. I always dream biology operas in my head. The dead frogs dance. The dead cats sing. The fetal pigs play a perfect show on tiny fetal violins. They curtsy when the emperor acknowledges them.

I wonder if Gustav dreams operas of helicopters. Rotors and motors and stick shifts and altitude meters.

I’m not even sure if Gustav sleeps.



“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.”

“What’re you doing tonight?” I ask.

“Building my helicopter. Can’t you see it?”

I can’t see it. It’s Thursday.

Sometimes when I look at Gustav, I can picture him twenty years from now with a wife and kids—all of them flying around in his helicopter. I write them letters. The whole family. I write them postcards from my parents’ creepy trips.

Hi, Gustav and family! Hope you get this okay! I still think about you every time I see a helicopter. I saw one today as I stood in front of the WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS sign. Do you know that line from season one, episode fourteen of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye said “Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents. Eighty-nine cents’ worth of chemicals walking around lonely”? It’s my favorite line. I always wanted to know if that was true. Are we really only eighty-nine cents’ worth of chemicals? Can you tell me that one day? I miss you. Love, Stanzi.

I never send the postcards. I keep them in a box.

They make me mad sometimes.

Maybe had we not joined as mere cells, my twin would have the guts to send them. Maybe she’d have the guts to see Gustav’s helicopter the other six days of the week. Maybe she’d have the mettle to just kiss him on his chapped lips.

For now, she seems to only know how to cut apart cats and fetal pigs.

“Livers regenerate themselves,” I say to Gustav, who is still standing there looking at me with a monkey wrench in his hand.

“Do you mind if I go back to work?” he asks. “I have to get under the chassis, and I can’t hear you from there. Tell me more about livers tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I say.

I walk home again.

The man jumps out from the bush and asks me if I want to buy a letter F and I jump behind the bush with him and kiss him like I mean it. He tastes like sawdust.

I ask him for a letter.

“You have to pay me,” he says.

“I just did.”

I begin to walk away and he grabs me by the back of my collar and yanks me back into the bush. I fight him, but then he hands me a finely sculpted letter S and thanks me.

“No one has kissed me like that since I moved back here,” he says. “You’re very good at it.”

I walk home smiling, pretending like I kissed Gustav, and I hang the S on my bedroom wall. I think it’s some sort of high-tech papier-mâché; it’s blue like limestone, but not heavy enough to be a real rock. I look at it and say, “Stanzi, you are a good kisser.” Fact is, the S reminds me that I didn’t kiss Gustav because I’m too scared to kiss Gustav. I don’t know what I’m scared of. I know I’m scared of everything.

I open a random spiral-bound notebook and I draw a human body and I chop it up with lines. Hands. Feet. Head. Heart. Nose. Eyes. Lips. I draw an arrow to each and label it. Me for me. Her for her.

She gets hands, lips, and nose. I get the rest.

It’s Monday and I got off at Gustav’s bus stop because I felt like it. I still can’t see the helicopter, but I try anyway by squinting at the empty space inside his garage.

“Mortality doesn’t scare me,” Gustav says. “Living scares me. People are like insects.” When I don’t answer, he continues. “Hive mentality. They don’t challenge themselves. They don’t want to learn pi or build a house from scratch or do anything different. Who wants to live like that?” Gustav scratches his balls as if I’m not standing right here. “Insects,” he says.

I want to say something about him scratching his balls, but I don’t know if that makes me an insect or not. I don’t want him to notice how wet I am from the rain and how dumb I look standing here in my lab coat, dripping. So I ask, “How can mortality not scare you? Isn’t it sad that we’re all going to die?”

“Not really,” he says.

“Have you ever been to a funeral?” I ask him.

“Nope.”

I think Gustav is spoiled.

He looks impatient for me to leave so he can go to work, and I do, without even a good-bye. I just walk toward my house in the rain with no umbrella.

When I pass by the bush, the man isn’t there selling any letters. He only works that bush at night. During the day he works at the kitchen factory making cabinets. I see him drive there some mornings on my way to school.

I think about what Gustav said about dying. I’m scared to die. I’m only seventeen. I think I have something to do in the world, but I don’t know what yet. I just think I deserve a chance to find out or something. A chance to test my DNA and see if I’m right about her—about me—about us—about the split. I want a chance to do more than what I do now.

When I get home, I strip off my wet clothes at the back door, hang up my lab coat so it won’t get wrinkled, and have a bath while staring out the window into the limbs of the big maple tree in our backyard. We have a new bathtub—the fiberglass kind. When I take baths, I wish we had an old bathtub—the claw-foot kind. Iron. A tub that would make me feel safe in case anyone drives by shooting or blows something up.

I’ve been thinking about things blowing up since I was in fourth grade. I used to want to wear my bike helmet all the time. I wanted an army helmet like they have on M*A*S*H. Except blowing up isn’t always external. It’s not always easy to hear or see. Synapses fire every day in my brain. Thinking is just like exploding until it eventually scars you and you can’t interact with people anymore. It’s like one big, final detonation.

Gustav’s is coming any day now. Mine, too.

The man who sells letters from behind the bush blows up every single night.

Kaboom.

Can’t you hear the ticking?

I look around the bathroom as I soak in the bath and my skin turn. . .