Volume 5: Instar
Issue 1: Viral
Florian Reyes Honeywell
By Roach
“My name is Grace Porter. I’ll be taking over biology from now on.”
Mrs. Porter stood rigid as she surveyed the classroom with a blue, almost gray, stare. The blank whiteboard behind her contrasted her black blazer and slacks, outlining her angular frame. Her pale skin and blonde bob cut contributed to the stark contrast.
“I’ve been informed that we’re some weeks behind the lesson plan. Considering this… setback, I prefer that we charge ahead with the schedule. I trust that you’ve had enough time to review any missed material, so there shouldn’t be any surprises when old chapters appear on the exam,” she continued in a matter-of-factly tone.
As Mrs. Porter paused, the classroom became so quiet I could have dropped a needle and heard it fall. From my seat in the back row, I had a view of my classmates and their reactions. Ahead of me, people exchanged alarmed glances; I saw Jazmine turn to Amber with her mouth hanging open. Amber, in turn, raised an eyebrow.
I sunk back in my seat. Of course, it was just like them to be offended by having to do any amount of studying. But in spite of my distaste for Amber, a part of me had to agree that Mrs. Porter’s entrance seemed a bit harsh.
Raegan, who sat on Amber’s other side, raised her hand lazily. “Umh, Mrs. Porter…” she started.
“Yes, what’s your name?” the teacher said.
“It’s Raegan…”
“Do you have a question, Raegan?”
“Yeah. So, don’t you think it’s a little unfair to test us on something we haven’t covered? I just mean, like, considering the circumstances…” She trailed off.
“Precisely which circumstances are you referring to?”
I supposed there could be a number of different things—the monster in the theater, the emergence of heroes, or Max’s empty seat… But I thought the answer was pretty obvious. Mrs. Porter was here to replace a dead teacher. Had no one cared enough to share this detail with her?
“Umh, Mr. Howells passing…” Raegan’s typically shrill voice fell to a whisper.
The swarm writhed through my insides at the sound of his name. Somehow, I thought I had gotten my nerves under control since Camilo and I took out the monster. We had dealt with the threat. Moreover, while we were busy investigating Spindle—not to mention our confrontation with Max—I had further distanced myself from the memory of Mr. Howells. His decapitated body, the welling blood. But, now that I was back in the classroom where it all started, for the first time…
It suddenly didn’t feel so far away, after all.
I avoided looking at the spot where I had seen him bleed out. It was like having a massive blindspot near the doorway—an entire space I didn’t want to acknowledge existed. Instead, I focused my attention on Mrs. Porter.
In response to Raegan’s comment, a faint smile crossed her thin lips—I thought she was trying to seem understanding, but it came off as strained. “I’m sure Mr. Howells would have wanted for you all to keep learning,” she continued in her stilted tone. At least, that answered my question—she appeared to be fully aware of the circumstances she had been hired under. “Other questions?”
Judging by the bewildered expressions of my classmates, there seemed to be a general consensus: how could the new teacher be so unsympathetic? It wasn’t like we had been ditching class on purpose. Someone had died.
I watched as Amber tapped away at her phone, concealing it under her desk. Next to her, Raegan and Jazmine were doing the same. I turned my gaze down to my notebook. Maybe I could create another blindspot where they sat—if I had to deal with Spindle, at least I didn’t want to deal with her alter ego.
“If there’s nothing else, we can get started on today’s lab assignment,” Mrs. Porter continued. “There will be specimens waiting for you in the lab. And oh, on your way out, please leave your phones by the whiteboard. You can have them back after class.”
Almost involuntarily, I looked up again. The trio of girls had stopped texting, instead frowning at one another. Amber mouthed something to the others, but—from my row in the back—I couldn’t quite make out what. Slowly, my classmates got up and filed out of the classroom. On my way out, I placed my phone on the little shelf at the bottom of the whiteboard. Although it was meant for markers, it was just the right size to balance my phone on—next to those of my classmates’.
I headed to the lab, just across the hallway. The different science classes shared the lab between themselves—hence, why it was separate from our regular classroom. Once inside, I found myself a corner in the back, next to a cabinet containing various jars of dead animals—salamanders, mice, frogs—and smaller anatomical models. A plastic eye stared at me, with its internal lens and muscles exposed.
My body felt lighter again, as the swarm’s unease sizzled out… It was a relief to get out of the classroom.
Mrs. Porter meandered between the desks, handing out a piece of paper to each of us. “I’m giving you your assignment sheets,” she said. “You’ll be turning them in individually, although I expect you to work in pairs. Once you’ve found your partner, please glove up. You can retrieve your specimens from the labeled boxes in the back.”
I stared blankly out across the room, searching for anyone I recognized. Amber paired up with Jazmine, while Raegan sat with a girl whose name I didn’t remember. Jay and Lucy teamed up, while new pairs continued to spread rapidly across the lab… I didn’t really know anyone, and as soon as someone appeared to be by themselves, they would switch seats to form a team with someone else. As most of my classmates appeared to already sit by their preferred lab partner, there was actually minimal moving around.
Mrs. Porter halted at my desk. She placed an assignment sheet in front of me. “Where’s your partner?”
“I don’t have one,” I replied quietly.
She quickly glanced around. “Look… What’s your name?”
“Florian.”
“Florian, go over there.” She nodded to the other side of the room, where a girl sat alone by the window. She studied the assignment sheet while twirling a pencil between her fingers.
The new girl, I realized. Hannah.
I picked up my sheet, and headed over. I felt her staring at me as I sat down in the empty seat next to her.
“Hi,” I said. I scanned through the sheet. I didn’t realize it until now, but we were doing frog dissections. There were some vocabulary questions, followed by a series of short answer questions on various anatomical functions.
Hannah leaned back in her chair a little as she looked me over. “Hey,” she replied, blowing a stray lock of black hair away from her eyes. She had tall cheekbones and a piercing stare, while minimal makeup—a winged eyeliner, and the hint of a lip gloss—complemented her light brown complexion.
“Umh, I’ll get the… stuff.” Without waiting for a reply, I went to the back of the room to collect all the equipment—a tray, tweezers, scissors, gloves, and the frog itself. I moved the specimen to the tray, placing it gently on its back. Its sprawling body still felt cold through the latex of my gloves.
By the time I returned to the desk, Hannah had already started filling out the vocabulary questions. I decided to catch up on them later, as I didn’t want to make her wait for me. I placed the tray between us.
“I can get started, and then we’ll switch?” I suggested.
She nodded. “We need to check the stomach content, then measure the intestine.”
I looked to the whiteboard, where Mrs. Porter had sketched out the rough shape of a frog with lines across it. As I burrowed the scissors beneath the skin of the carcass, I followed the diagram on the whiteboard—cutting open its chest in a pattern like a cross, before folding the flaps of skin aside. Its guts lay exposed in front of us.
I referenced the sheet to identify its different structures. The liver was easiest to find; shaped like three brown triangles, it lay above all the other organs. The heart rested on top of it, wrapped in threads like slimy cobwebs. I lifted the liver with my tweezer, revealing the stomach and intestines beneath it.
I probed at the organs, trying to make more room around the stomach. As I did, the intestines coiled themselves around the tweezers. I reached for it with my other hand, in an attempt to intervene with the scissors.
But, as its guts curled up around the blade, I flinched—instinctively retracting my hand. For a moment, the image of Mr. Howells’ pale hand flashed through my mind; his fingertips reaching across a floor specked in red, his intestines crawling out of his torso like fleshy snakes, squirming just like the guts under my tweezer…
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I stared at the frog. That’s all it was, I told myself. A frog. It had nothing to do with anything else except being dead and a frog. It didn’t even remotely resemble anything human… Dead frog, I told myself. Yet, the feeling of unease lingered as the swarm bristled inside me.
I didn’t realize how long I had been staring at the carcass until Hannah moved the tray closer to her side of the desk. “I’ll do it,” she said in a flat tone.
“Sorry, I guess I’m a little squeamish…” I said, with an awkward chuckle that came out more like a huff than an actual laugh. I couldn’t afford to be squeamish—not with thousands of bees living inside of me. But, now, the pit in my stomach grew. The swarm churned through my insides, a buzz building as they crawled through what remained of my intestines. I couldn’t shake the sickening feeling, or the image of Mr. Howells’ halved body bleeding out on the floor…
“Then take notes.” She didn’t look up from the frog as she replied, poking it with the scissors.
“Alright…” I replied, suppressing the swarms’ instincts.
I turned to the assignment sheet. After a few moments, Hanna informed me, “The intestines are 13.4 cm.” She re-adjusted the ruler. “And the frog is… 6.3 cm long.”
I noted the numbers, while she cut into the stomach. The change of focus helped me push away the thought of Mr. Howells. Meanwhile, Hannah reached through the slit with the tweezers, extending them to widen the gap. I looked away, turning to my notes. The next question addressed its stomach contents.
“Looks like it ate… a bee?” Hannah said.
Panic shot through me. It was irrational, but for a moment, I worried it was one of my bees. I reassured myself that it was impossible. The frog was dead—I didn’t know whether or not they were caught or bred for dissection, but either way, it had probably been stuck in a freezer for the last who-knows-how long. So the chances of it ever having been near me or the swarm was slim to none. Still, I couldn’t help but check.
I looked back at her. Now, pinched between the tweezers, she held something that was too small to be any of my bees. I leaned a little closer as I inspected it.
“That’s… That’s a fly,” I concluded.
Her button-shaped nose wrinkled slightly as she frowned. “But it looks like a bee.” She was right—its yellow and black stripes resembled a bee. But there was one telltale sign which told me otherwise.
“It only has one wing pair, not two. Like flies,” I said. And, while this particular fly may have been mimicking a bee, its disguise had apparently not been good enough to fool the frog.
She paused, setting down the frog’s last meal onto the tray. “Huh.” After a pause, she scribbled something down on her sheet.
I did the same, and we continued to work our way through the questions. We were methodical in our process; she picked apart the frog, while I documented her findings. All the while, I debated whether or not I should try to talk to her. I could ask her where she had transferred from, or what she thought of Chapel High. But so far, everything I had done—from my attempt to dissect the frog, to my remark about the fly—had come across as incredibly lame. I didn’t trust that I had anything interesting to say to her. Besides, the atmosphere had been so heavy in the classroom, that there didn’t really seem to be any light topics to talk about. She didn’t make any attempts at small talk either, so we finished the lab sheet in near-silence.
Class ended, and we turned in our respective sheets. She disposed of the frog in a separate trash container which Mrs. Porter had set out, then left the classroom. I exited shortly after.
I headed to my locker, where I searched for my copy of Camus’ The Stranger. I was pretty sure we were supposed to discuss it in philosophy today, but with everything going on it had more or less slipped my mind. Once I had the paperback copy on hand, I closed my locker.
I did so, only to discover that a figure had been concealed on the other side of the locker door. “Christ,” I muttered, nearly jumping in surprise.
“You’re skittish today,” Amber smirked. She leaned up against the locker next to mine. However, she looked different from when I had seen her only minutes prior in bio—she wore a pair of sunglasses, and a baseball cap with an embroidered pineapple motif on it.
“You snuck up on me,” I said, sounding more defensive than I meant to. “In a literal disguise. What are you doing?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
It seemed that my wish to keep my interactions with Amber strictly through Spindle had been in vain. I sighed. “Why do you look like you’re hiding from the paparazzi?”
“To avoid suspicion.”
Just then, my locker neighbor—a freshman, whose name I thought was Veronica or Victoria or something along those lines—appeared next to us.
“Sorry, but you’re blocking my locker…” she said quietly.
Amber adjusted her sunglasses, peering at the girl over the lenses. “So?” she said, not budging away from the locker.
“I need my textbook.”
“That’s cute. Too bad I’m extremely busy right now,” she replied. Then she turned back to me. “So, where were we?”
I looked between Amber and the freshman, whereas the latter had taken a couple of hesitant steps back. I furrowed my brows, remembering the conversation we had at my place. Before Camilo and I agreed to doing any kind of teamwork with Amber, we had told her to be less… well, less of an asshole.
“I think we were just about to leave,” I said, trying to mediate the situation.
Amber let out a dramatic sigh. She glanced at the freshman, then back to me—as if deliberating something with herself. “Fine,” she said, coldly. “Let’s get a move on.”
Amber started down the hallway. I followed after her. Behind us, the girl quickly retrieved whatever she had come to get from her locker, then scurried away.
“So… Umh, what suspicion are you trying to avoid?” I said.
“We shouldn’t be seen together.”
“Amber, you’re wearing sunglasses. Inside. If anything, you’re drawing more attention to us.”
“Oh, stop fussing,” she said. “You’re gonna want to hear this.”
“Okay?”
As we continued down the hallway, she fished her phone from her pocket. With a couple of taps, she navigated to Instagram. “Look,” she instructed, holding the screen up to my face—a little too close for my comfort. I squinted as a result.
It was our photo. Rather, it was Hive, Stagehand, and Spindle’s photo. “Umh… What am I looking for?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“Tell what?” I echoed.
Amber sighed in exasperation, as if I were missing something obvious. “Look,” she said, tapping the screen with a sharp nail.
Now that she pointed it out, I saw that our picture had gotten 753 likes and 43 comments over the course of the weekend.
“That’s… That’s, good?” At least, I thought that was the response she was looking for, but I wasn’t really sure what counted as impressive or not on Instagram.
“Good? We’re doing fantastic!” She scrolled through the comments section. Although she scrolled too fast for me to read properly, I was able to catch snippets:
> @penguin_of_d00m: OMGG, thank u guys for saving Chapel!! :D
> @chapelherofan1: About TIME someone did something about this school. Its just a bonus that one of them is really cute… <3 <3 Anyone know whos behind Spindle’s mask???
> @albatrossbro11: i saw them!!! IT WAS AWESOME. except for the bees. that was just freaky and weidr
> @gremlinhazard: This school is already a fucking mess. I just hope they don’t make things worse
My reading was interrupted by a voice from the hallway. “Hiii Amber!” a girl said in passing.
“Hi Becky!” Amber replied. But, as soon as Becky was out of earshot, Amber groaned. “I need to work on this disguise.”
“Is that so?” I muttered.
“Anyway, that’s not important right now. Don’t you see? We’re viral!” She said it louder than I would have liked, and I quickly glanced up and down the hallway to make sure no one was listening to us. “I told you guys my idea was good.”
Judging by the comments I had seen, a lot of them sounded like students. Which wasn’t necessarily what I would define as viral—at least not outside of the school, let alone San Francisco. But it was something. “I guess we are,” I said, not about to argue with her.
“We need to keep up this momentum,” she said. “We should think about other things we can do, or post about.”
“Like, you want us to go looking for trouble…?” I started to question if it had been worth it to team up with her, after all. While having another powered individual on our side made us stronger, I wasn’t sure that meant we should start picking fights.
“If we want this to work, we have to be proactive. You see, it’s all about…” She stopped mid-sentence, staring ahead. I traced her gaze. Camilo walked toward us, alongside two others—Jay and Gabriel, I realized. When I spotted Camilo, he grinned and waved enthusiastically to me.
“I can pick you up,” I overheard Gabriel tell his friends.
“Sounds good,” Camilo replied. Then, as they caught up, he exclaimed, “Hey Florian! How’s it going?”
“Fine,” I said—which was true, if I didn’t count the bizarre biology class or Amber’s weird behavior. As I tried to think of the next normal thing to say, Jay gave me a blank look before squinting at Amber. Although Gabriel had been smiling seconds ago, his expression was now hard and unreadable.
“Ah, cool. Umh, are you busy tonight?” Camilo said.
“Probably not,” Amber chipped in on my behalf, while inspecting her nails. Camilo shot her an annoyed glance, then turned back to me again. “Well?” he said.
I shrugged. While I would have liked to counter Amber’s comment, she wasn’t exactly wrong.
“Florian, you should come to the party tonight,” Camilo said. He looked straight at me, his head slightly turned away from Amber—as if she didn’t exist. Maybe he was creating a blindspot of his own, I wondered. Next to him, Jay scrunched up their face.
Meanwhile, Gabriel stared at Amber. “Umh, why are you wearing sunglasses inside?” he said.
Amber froze for a couple of seconds. She let out a sigh, and proceeded to take off her sunglasses, collapsing the frames before chucking them at the floor. They skidded across the hallway, one lens cracking on impact. A startled student side-stepped them, just in time to get out of the way.
Amber looked Gabriel dead in the eye, then said flatly, “I’m not.”
Gabriel pursed his lips together. While he had seemed more upbeat before the party was brought up, I couldn’t exactly blame him for being annoyed with Amber’s… antics.
“So, uh, you coming tonight?” Camilo continued, still seemingly ignoring Amber’s existence.
“I don’t know, maybe,” I said.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be there,” Amber announced with a smile.
Jay frowned, while Gabriel side-eyed Camilo.
“Umh, cool…” Camilo said, a little quieter than before. “I’ll text you the address, okay?”
“Guys, we’ll be late for class.” It was Jay who spoke. Camilo nodded slowly, and waved me goodbye before the three of them continued on their trajectory down the hallway, abandoning me with Amber once again.
I stood still for a moment, trying to process what had just happened.
“This will be fun,” Amber said. Then she looked me up and down. “But we have some work to do.”
“What do you mean?” I said, shifting uncomfortably as she measured me with her stare.
“Let’s meet at the mall after school.” Her lips widened into a grin. “I have an idea.”
I felt the swarm sink to my guts. Whatever she was up to, I had a suspicion I wasn’t going to like it.