Stage three?
My dad shot me a confused, frightened look.
"Wait, what?" I stammered. "That can't be the right sample."
"It's definitely the right sample." Chris looked again into the lens. "But, Ash, I've never seen this before. There's something . . . different. Really different. I can't explain—"
Suddenly, he looked up, his eye wide as if he'd just had an epiphany.
"What?" I cried.
"Holy Fukkadillo," he said. "He grabbed my dad's sleeve. "You said your mom stuffed your dad's parka with extra feathers from the farm, right?" He pointed at my dad's coat. "This parka, right?"
"Chris. What the hell do parkas have to do with anything right now?"
My dad gave me a stern look. He said, "Ashley, language!" This distracted him while Chris used a scalpel to cut open one of his parka's extra puffy panels.
A few chicken feathers tumbled out.
Chris grabbed one feather and slapped it under the microscope.
"Ho–ly crap," he said. "I knew it!"
"Chris! Tell me what you're talking about! RIGHT NOW!"
"These feathers are from the chickens on your farm right?" Chris asked.
My dad nodded. "Yes. We always saved them, until the Home Guard exterminated every last one."
"And these chickens. They're where you got your eggs from, right? You ate their eggs?"
"Yes!" I screamed. "We ate their eggs! Of course we ate their eggs. Before the Home Guard incinerated the whole brood, anyway. Why?!"
Chris sat back against the stone wall. He smiled.
"I bet you and your dad like your eggs sunny-side up, don't you?"
It was true. My dad and I were the only ones in our entire family who liked our eggs sunny side up. Everyone else thought it was gross. Haley thought it was gross, my mom thought it was gross, even Ian thought it was gross. Everybody. This was one of the first things I'd bonded with my dad over, in fact. When I was a kid, the two of us were the only ones who liked our eggs practically raw, so we always got to eat ours first and gloat about it while everyone else had to wait for their breakfast.
My dad and I shared a glance.
"Yeah," I said. "Just the two of us. Sunny side up. Nobody else. . . How did you know? And, way more importantly, what does this have to do with anything . . . ?"
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