Amp'd by Ken Pisani Page B

barely knows me!”
    â€œYou’re in love with her but you never met her?” Mom finds this unusual.
    â€œI love everything about her. Her voice, her dry humor. And she’s smart. Is she cute? I think I’d like to marry her.”
    â€œIf she’s so smart, she’s probably not into guys who drunkenly tattoo sea serpents on their stumps,” Mom suggests.
    â€œReally, ‘guys,’ plural? Like there’s more than one of me.”
    â€œIt does seem pretty unlikely,” Dad muses.
    â€œMom!” Jackie shouts, desperate. “Do something!”
    â€œThis is exactly what I’m talking about, sweetie. You’re letting the dinosaurs make you crazy.”
    *   *   *
    My sister knows Sunny Lee my sister knows Sunny Lee MY SISTER KNOWS SUNNY LEE! Fuck, my nub hurts.
    I’m smoking Somnambublast and plugged into podcasts of The Sunny Side archives—about Viking sunstones, mummy prosthetics, molecules that make music, and cocoons made of mucus—so I don’t hear Steve as he clomps up the attic stairs. But when I see him, lugging blanket and pillow, it’s not hard to figure out he’s been banished.
    â€œThe basement might be more comfortable. We can lay a mattress on top of the pool table.”
    â€œI slept in a bathtub last night; you think the floor’s gonna bother me?”
    â€œBathtub! We have one of those. Why didn’t I think of that?”
    â€œGive me some of that,” he says, groping for my pipe. “If I’m gonna be accused of being stupid, I might as well be stupid.”
    He takes a long toke before I tell him, “That won’t make you sleep. It’s designed for alertness and may cause anxiety.”
    â€œThanks for the fucking warning!”
    â€œYou didn’t even ask. I could have been smoking angel dust laced with a laxative for all you knew.”
    â€œAnything else I should know?”
    â€œIf you find blood in your stool, call your doctor immediately.”
    I go back on earbuds and the botanically engineered alertness kicks in, heightening my appreciation of Sunny—the silkiness of her voice, the deep timbre that perfectly expresses intelligence and wry humor, the wonder of discovery:
    Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a … grasshopper? Because the physiological constraints of muscle power are limited per kilogram of muscle, a grasshopper should not be able to hop nearly as far as he can—which is roughly the insect equivalent of leaping tall buildings! Researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered that Orthoptera caelifera overcome this limitation with an elastic apodeme, or tendon, anchored to the leg muscle. The use of elastic storage allows as much as seven times that of equivalent muscle—which is like a human throwing an arrow by hand instead of using a bow … and even Robin Hood couldn’t make that work!
    I can visualize it all perfectly: the super-enlarged image of the grasshopper under observation, its explosive slow-motion leap, the white-coated researchers in their white Cambridge lab … Sunny in a recording studio, headset on, lips wet from the bottle of water she sips to lubricate her voice, content smile from her little joke at the end. The audio engineer—as much in love with her as I am—gives her a thumbs-up, and she smiles warmly back, dark almond eyes sparkling with intelligence as she removes her headset and tosses her thick black hair, taking a final sip before recycling the bottle.
    I want to run to wherever she is and take her in my arm.
    Instead, I’m in my father’s attic with Steve, who’s videotaping me on his cell phone.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œCool room … taping it … maybe we can get you on one of those home-makeover shows.”
    â€œIf it’s so cool, why would I want to make it over?”
    â€œNo, you’d be