Excerpt: A Girl, a Boy, and a Radioactive Isotope

When I was thoroughly bored and my left knee jiggled with inactivity, I stretched out on my belly and began to do push-ups. I’d done these at Angus’s all the time. Not to keep myself in shape, but to focus the sometimes-rage I felt directed toward my coworkers. A few push-ups and a red face later, I always felt if not more rested, at least a little more Zen. I could do twenty straight before my arms gave out on me.

Now, I began to count the push-ups in my head. One. Two. Five. Ten. Thirteen, fourteen. Fifteen.

I wasn’t even tired yet.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.

Arms felt fine. In fact, they felt great. With a little shrug to myself, I kept going.

Twenty nine, thirty.

Forty. Fifty.

Sixty.

I moved easily, my arms and shoulders working to lower and raise my body. I kept my back straight, like the instructor at the one exercise class I’d dragged myself to years ago had told me to do. But nothing burned. I was doing full, military-style push-ups, my feet shoulder-width apart, my palms biting into the ground right below my shoulders.

Seventy.

And I hadn’t even broken a sweat.

By the time I reached ninety without any signs of fatigue or shortness of breath, I began to panic. When I passed a hundred, my hands began to shake. Not from exhaustion. From the sheer fact that I was now freaking out. I dropped to the ground, my entire body quaking, my breath scraping against the insides of my lungs in terror. I’d just done a hundred full push-ups without breaking a sweat or losing my breath. When twenty was supposed to kill me.

Slowly, hand shaking, I pushed at my upper arm, where the flab normally has a lot of give. It was like pushing against steel. I yanked off the flannel shirt—the white shirt beneath was wet from my dripping hair to the point of see-through. In the wincing light, every muscle was defined in perfect, comic-book lines. Given that spending two weeks strapped to a table normally invites the muscles to break-down, I knew it wasn’t something I’d done.

Dr. Mobius had turned me into an addict with muscles.

Even though it was a truly freak-out moment of vast proportions, a part of me began to marvel. Not at the fact that my arms were now streamlined ropes of wiry muscle and sinew, not that I had washboard abs better than my ex-boyfriend’s (and he’d worked several hours a week on those abs). No, I marveled that I’d somehow missed out on all of this during my shower.

You’d think it would be obvious.