I slung my duffel bag into the back seat. “Can’t believe this thing is still running.”
Sebastian stood next to me, his umbrella over my head. “Do you want to drive?”
“Not allowed,” I said. “My brain pills say so on the bottle.”
“Brain pills.” He opened the passenger door for me. “Is that the technical term?”
I gave him a shrug. “No science on the way home, remember?”
Sebastian and I didn’t talkmuch as we drove—not to each other, anyway. But I felt him next to me, his hand almost brushing my knee when he changed gears.
“When they cut your brain up, were you asleep?” Mary asked from the back seat.
“They didn’t cut me up. The car crash did that.”
“But they had to fix stuff in your head. Uncle Cyrus said you had a fit—arms and legs going in all directions, and your eyes almost exploded!”
I watched Mary demonstrating in the rearview mirror.
“Yes, I had a seizure. But they used drugs to treat it, not scalpels. I take pills to keep my brain from swelling again.”
“Would you get smarter if your brain got bigger?”
“I think you’d die. Is your seat belt on?”
“Yes,” she said, and I heard theclick.
“Skulls are crowded,” Sebastian said, looking at Mary in the rearview mirror. “If your brain gets too big, it squishes out. A herniated brain is not ideal.”
I thought about the crow skull he’d given me, now gray ashes in Garrett’s furnace. The brain case had been tiny—birds’ skulls, even the clever corvids’, were mostly full of eyes.
“Are there poisons that make brains swell up?” Mary asked, lifting one of Trotsky’s floppy ears, peering inside the rabbit’s head.
“Bongkrekic acid,” Sebastian said.
Mary laughed. “That sounds made up.”
He only shrugged. Had he been reading about brain injuries? Or was this knowledge from those long hours in Grandpa Dwight’s library?
He’d also known about my nonmagnetic staples.
The strings that connected us had pulled him here through the rain, all the way from Albany. I could see them in the car between us, bright enough to touch.
“Can brain trauma make you hallucinate?” I asked Sebastian.
“In every way. Visions, delusions, weird smells.”
I breathed in. He smelled like camphor and granite.
“Does that happen to bunnies too?” Mary asked.
“We don’t know,” Sebastian said. “Rabbits can’t tell us what they see.”
“They’re so dumb,” she said with a giggle.
I looked over my shoulder—Mary was staring into Trotsky’s pink-lined eyes. The rabbit gazed back at her in silence. Long months of Mary’s companionship had left it imperturbable, perhaps fatalistic.
“What about emotions?” I asked.
