Beatrice bit her lip. “Yeah, but I’ve already gotten three demerits for dress code violations.” Evidently wearing Doc Martens in gym class was demerit-worthy, which, in her opinion, was ridiculous. The girl who sat beside her in Earth Sciences spent most of her time making TikToks; the boy next to her in Advisory wore a T-shirt with the Confederate flag on it, completely visible through his button-down; and she was the one getting in trouble.
“Come on,” Cade said. “Don’t be like the rest of the sheep!” His baaa-ing noise made Beatrice giggle. She looked up at the door. The bell was ringing, and unless she sprinted and risked disarranging her hair, she’d be tardy. If she was already in trouble, she decided, it might as well be for something fun.
She climbed into the passenger’s seat, pulled her seat belt in place, and said, “Where are we going?”
Cade seemed a little startled by her assent, but he made a smooth recovery. “Uh, my place?”
Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Uh, no?”
She wondered if this was a plan to get her up to his bedroom and out of her clothes. The night she’d met him at the movies, Cade had held her hand, for a few minutes, when Beatrice was sure none of the other kids were looking. There’d been three other people in the car when he’d driven her home, and he’d walked her to the door but hadn’t tried to kiss her. When she sat with him at lunch, he asked her lots of questions, and she’d caught him staring at her a time or two in class, but lots of kids stared at her at Melville. What did Cade Langley want with her now?
“Are you bringing me to your house so you can have your way with me?” she asked.
“Have my way with you?” he repeated. “Do you always talk like you’re in a book?”
Beatrice smiled. She was remembering a recent talk she’d had with her mother, about how she should never change herself, or dumb herself down, for some boy’s benefit. Beatrice assumed her mother had gotten the speech from some article or expert, given the fact that she herself had dropped out of college and moved to Pennsylvania for some boy—namely Beatrice’s father. But Beatrice had decided not to say so.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
She thought for a minute, leaned forward, and punched an address into the mapping app on her phone. “Follow my directions,” she said, and pointed toward the road.
Twenty minutes later, they pulled up in front of a large, sober-looking brick building that took up the better part of the block on Twenty-Second Street. It would be a test, she’d decided as they drove. If Cade laughed, or told her it was weird, or refused to go inside with her, she’d have nothing more to do with him. But if he could appreciate it, or even just keep an open mind, then he had potential.
She led Cade through the wrought-iron fence, up the stairs, and right to the entrance of one of her favorite places in all of Philadelphia. By then, he’d figured out where they were.
“The Mutter Museum?”
“Moo-ter,” she said, correcting his pronunciation. “There’s an umlaut. Have you ever been?”
He shook his head. “It’s, um, medical oddities, right?”
“The only place in America where you can see the preserved skeleton of conjoined twins,” she said happily. “And a cross section of Albert Einstein’s brain!” Beatrice bounded inside, flashing her card at the guard at the front desk.
“You’re a member?” Cade asked, then, shrugging, answered his own question. “Of course you are.”
Beatrice grinned at him. Her sneakers squeaked on the marble floor. This was one of her happy places. Her mother had brought her here when she was a toddler, with her friend Zoe and Zoe’s mom, Hannah, so the girls could run around the big upstairs ballroom on rainy days. As Beatrice had gotten older, she’d become more interested in the actual museum, the exhibits of bodies and brains, tumors in jars and the rows of 139 skulls, collected by a single Viennese doctor when phrenology was all the rage. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see some dead things.”
She grabbed Cade by the hand and half-walked, half-dragged him into the atrium, which was sunny, and empty, and had a kind of indefinably museum-ish smell. To their right was an exhibit of the history of spinal surgery, complete with spines. To the left, up the stairs, was the Soap Lady, a woman whose body was exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875 and whose remains were encased, per the sign by her glass coffin, in a fatty substance called adipocere. That, she decided, was a good place to start.