Salmonella

Chapter 1

🫧One🫧

"That's the SPLEEN, Cerulean! Not the PYLORIC CAECA—the SPLEEEEEEN!"

Every time someone mixes up two different body parts, Professor Offing convulses so hard that I start to worry her shell will fall off her back. At the table across from me, 'Cerulean' surrenders his fish to let his more reliable lab partner take over with dicing. Today is our sardine dissection, which is less of an experiment, really, and more of a test to see who lasts the day without losing their minds. Around the room, other partnerships start on their own sardines. Then Istio Mist, 19, leaves his table, gagging loudly.

Hearing the laughs spreading infectiously across the laboratory, Offing whips around so hard that her shell knocks somemer over. The unfortunate student's head crashes into a table, one of his front teeth whipping across the room, scalpel zooming out of his hand and nearly slicing the side of someone's face. Half the class pull out their phones to record the chaos that our professor is too busy chasing after Istio to notice.

"Where are you going?" she howls. "You're just going to leave your partner to do all the work?"

"Sorry, Prof!" he calls in his famous foreign accent that makes all the ladies go crazy— "I'm about to spew like a blowhole!" And like the mighty sailfish he was named after, the great Istio sails out the door.

Adjusting the goggles on the bridge of my nose, I count on my fingers. Seven. That's the seventh time I've seen him wreaking havoc this week and it's only been two days. First he passed out when our mermanities professor assigned a nine-page essay, then he swam out of the gym so fast he crashed into someone in the hall and destroyed the student's project, then the culinary club had to cancel their meeting after his spoiled lunch stank up the whole room... The list goes on. My best friend Bloom says she heard that the school tried to ban him from a couple clubs, but all the members threatened to quit if he was kicked, so they had to let him stay.

The person beside me snorts loudly: Gene Effervescent, 18. My lab partner. I don't know him that well and we really have nothing in common, but I still feel obligated to be nice to him since he's close to Bloom.

"Can't handle a little dissection, what a guppy," Gene laughs, and I can't tell if he's really talking to me or just thinking aloud again. I follow his eyes to the doorway that Istio has vanished behind.

Right.

The table feels rough in my hands; looking down, I realize I'm gripping it so hard I almost get a splinter. Sigh. I should just loosen up and laugh along. Istio's a class clownfish. He's just being dramatic. But when you think about it, is it so wrong to feel squeamish at the sight of a dead animal? We all have our fears and discomforts. It's our instinct. Our morals. It's what makes us merman. Sure, we're only dealing with sardines today, but I know I'd be the one puking outside if they were...

"Ella." I wince as two gloved fingers snap themselves in my face, then point at the tabletop. "Ella! You're distracted. Eyes on the prize, my friend."

I stare dryly at him. "By 'prize', you mean that dead corpse?"

Gene doesn't respond, because now he's too busy chanting organ names like they're some sort of black magic incantations and matching his bloody puzzle pieces to the drawings on our diagram. All I can do is watch as this previously untainted young adult gradually loses his sanity. The once collected, driven, well-informed kid I knew has vanished, replaced with a psycho spilling blood, giggling at organs, loving the gore of it all... His neck is craned, his lips upturned, his trembling fingers pinching a sardine stomach up to the light by a pair of forceps...  I stare at the maniacal smile creeping over his shadowed face, my eyes twitching in pure terror. If this doesn't scream supervillain, I don't know what does! If I'm not imagining, I think the lights dim a little. One of them even flickers. It's practically storming in here!