by Alan Cumyn
He looked soft all over. Not a hard angle to be found.
“Do we have to have twelve points?” he said. “Ten was good enough for God and Moses.”
He looked like a pillow you could mush into any shape and it would just lie there on the bed, inert. Shiels had woken forty minutes after her alarm, coverless, soaked in sweat, thinking of angles, hard edges, hot tangents a body might want to lean into.
“Hey, you look nice,” Sheldon said, lifting his glasses. “What’s the occasion?”
Without his glasses, his face had a washed-out vagueness to it. His eyes looked weak. They were weak—that was why he wore glasses. But to really see something, often he took his glasses off.
“I don’t have to wear the same thing every day,” she said.
They were walking now. They hadn’t kissed. It would’ve been perfunctory anyway. Roseview and Vine was semi-public. She’d have smudged her lipstick if they’d kissed, and Sheldon would’ve said something—he was unused to the taste of it. Anything he said would have made her feel uncomfortable about wearing it.
Was this what it was like to be married? she wondered. To know exactly what your partner’s reactions were going to be twenty chess moves later?
“Let me see the list.” She took his phone out of his hands. Despite his strong fingers, she couldn’t help noticing how easy it was to steal the thing.
“NCA—New Cultures Accommodation.”
Was it good to lead with an acronym? Not everyone was in love with them.
“Vista View High is an open-atmosphere school welcoming to students from all cultures and backgrounds. Diversity is our strength, and as representatives of new cultures arrive, we strive to foster the rich inclusiveness . . .”
Sheldon was walking with her as she read aloud, shambling in his way, as if exhausted somehow, old. She had noticed it before, but it had never bothered her.
“I’m falling asleep already,” she said, “and this is just the preamble.”
“Well, maybe we don’t need the preamble.” He was giving in, as he did so often. “It was your idea.”
“It can’t sound United Nations. It’s got to be relevant, punchy. And we can’t say things like, ‘arrive, we strive.’ ”
“What?”
Shiels read him the passage again. “I can fix that,” he said, and he took back his phone and happily thumbed in new text.
She wasn’t used to walking in heels. She had to step carefully along the rough sidewalk to avoid ruts. She found herself scissoring her legs like fashion models do, and swinging her hips, just a bit. Sheldon paid no mind. His nose was in the phone. The coolish breeze made her legs feel more alive than they had felt in . . . forever.
She was wearing zebra-patterned leggings, and a short dress she’d bought months ago but had never actually worn before. Of course Sheldon didn’t notice. Hey, you look nice.
Practically didn’t see her.
She let him talk. He read the whole thing to her, but as they neared the school, she felt her heart swelling until it seemed to engulf her chest. Sheldon hadn’t noticed, but others would. People would comment. “Shiels, my God, look at you all of a sudden!” As if she’d been a librarian most of her life.
Nice. She didn’t look nice. She looked something else. She felt something else.
She felt herself gazing at the sky, quite naturally, even while Sheldon was glued to the text as they walked along. She had brain compartments too. She could comment on point number five—All students must recognize the fundamental rights and dignities of others, regardless of physical forms and differing species backgrounds—while scanning the horizon for any sign of those angled, dark-reach wings.
She wanted to see them again.
She was twisting inside, like a wet towel, with the discomfort of the yearning.
• • •
And who should meet them on the way to Manniberg, but Rebecca Sterzl? The hall was its usual jostling cacophony—voices, smiles, bobbing backpacks, lockers clunking open and slamming shut, some girl cooing on the phone—“Oh my God, scissors?”—some guy muttering, “banana face.” And Rebecca cut through it all. “Triumphant Agony!” she exulted outside the office. “We finally got to demo them last night, and they are . . . Shiels, are you listening?”
Shiels was listening, but the words weren’t gelling. She was looking for a sign of him—for Pyke, for those hard-bent wings, for his hop-hip gait—in the hallway. He hadn’t been in the sky outside. He must be in the building. She wanted to see him before she got to Manniberg, who naturally had not set a time for their meeting. He never did. He just waited for things to happen, for her to come to him.
“You have my full attention, Rebecca.”
Sheldon was still fiddling with the text. It had to be ready to go in the next couple of minutes. But Sheldon was a rock under pressure. It freed up Shiels to deal with everything else.
Rebecca caught her breath. She was birdlike, vibrating with urgency even over small things.
“The band. For Autumn Whirl. We’ve found it. Triumphant Agony. They played a demo for us last night at Maggie’s. . . . I mean, there’s turbulence. And the bass player is gorgeous. I can share some files if you want. They fit our price range—”
“Is it danceable?” Shiels asked. A hesitation. “Did Maggie say she thought it was danceable?”
Shiels had a way of just waiting, standing still and looking unimpressed. Rebecca began to come apart. “They’re absolutely in our price range,” she said finally. “And they have a girl. She’s a drummer. They’ll show up on time.”
“Did Maggie actually dance to the music?”
“It’s just . . . we’re almost out of time!” Rebecca’s chin quivered.
“It’s Autumn Whirl. The music has to coagulate. Yes?” Shiels wrapped the frail girl in her arms. “You’re going to be great. I know you are. We’ve got plenty of time. Keep looking!”
Rebecca pulled herself together, but her eyes still seemed frightened. “Is there really . . . Do we really have a pterodactyl in the school now?” she asked in a low voice, as if afraid to be heard.
“He’s a boy,” Shiels said. “A pterodactyl-boy, and I’ve met him. He’ll be fine. Believe me, I’m dealing with the issue!”
Shiels spied Manniberg heading around the corner to the south wing, away from his office, as if he’d seen Shiels and Sheldon yet instantly had found something else to do.
Shiels had learned so much from him already about worst possible management styles.
When Rebecca was gone, she said, “Who else have we got to find a steaming band?”
Sheldon put his phone away. “Morris is on it.”
“Seriously? Morris?” Morris could barely crawl out of his parents’ basement most days.
“Morris knows music,” Sheldon said.
• • •
A quarter to nine, and Shiels felt herself growing calmer, felt time slow down in that familiar way when seconds, words, actions became important. Manniberg had headed into the south wing. She could practically smell him. He wouldn’t elude her.
She was moving so fast that Sheldon could not keep up, but she felt it as slow—every dip of her body to miss someone else in the jammed hall, every footfall perfect, focused, right. It wasn’t what she had felt the day before, racing after Pyke—that had been outside her usual realm of experience. But this—tracking down Manniberg, getting the NCA into his hands, into his brain, as the seconds drained before the bell—this was her arena.
She belonged here.
And there he was! Hiding in the science room with Ms. Glaskill, crowding her against her desk with a green sheet in his hand, engaged in phony conversation. He betrayed himself—he turned to see Shiels just as she sailed into the room—because he must have known at some cellular level that he could not escape.
Shiels Krane was about to change the course of yet another of his days.
Besides, he was the one who’d called this meeting.
“I need a minu
te of your time, sir,” she said, dropping her voice the way she had figured out how to do years ago, when she’d been student-body chair of her elementary school and at first no one—no one—had taken her seriously.
Manniberg had a fattish face—portly, to use an old word—and his mouth twitched. On the bald stretch of his high forehead, tiny white hairs were growing, almost as fine as Pyke’s fur. His eyes took her in, neck to toes and coming back to rest finally at chest level. So she remembered what she was wearing.
Good. She had stunned him as an opener.
“We have a situation developing that you need to address right away, before it gets out of hand. It’s about the new student, Pyke. I don’t know if you’ve met him yet. But we have real reason to fear—”
Where was Sheldon? He had the NCA text; she was going to need to quote from it in less than a minute. Had he really not been able to keep up?
“—a backlash against him, sir. I can’t put it more plainly than that. He’s new, he’s foreign, he’s a different species, and students here are not used to dealing with—”
“Ms. Krane,” Manniberg said. He was trying to do nothing. It was in his nature. Principals avoid proactive decisions whenever possible. They—
Where was Sheldon?
Sheldon was not there, but his message arrived just as Shiels’s hand touched her phone. In a blink she had the NCA text in front of her.
“It’s my most urgent recommendation, sir, that you convene an immediate assembly. I happen to have a text of procedures we need to present to the Vista View community.”
Manniberg squinted at her screen. Why did he not carry his glasses?
“Point number two is crucial,” she said. “Privacy and protection of students from all walks of life, including different eras of evolution, must be promoted and maintained so that a normal atmosphere conducive to learning and rich cultural exchange is safeguarded at all times. Photographs, video, and other digital records of private students, regardless of species, should be banned from social media unless express consent has been—”
He squinted at her doubtfully. The science teacher, Glaskill, had not left, but she might as well have disappeared.
“He’s a freak and he scares people!” Shiels blurted. “We attack what we don’t know. It was my initial response, and I’ve seen it already with the football team. So we need a protocol”—wrong word! but she pushed on—“a code of understanding, coming right from the top, from you, today I believe—this morning, if possible—that will outline acceptable behaviors and help all of us deal with what is, I think you would have to admit—”
Sheldon, at last! There seemed to be a commotion in the hallway. He’d fought his way through the crowd.
“Are you talking about the pterodactyl-boy?” Manniberg said.
“Yes! He’s going to get beat up. He looks different. People are not going to know how to behave around him. . . .”
“It’s a school board initiative,” he said. “We were lucky to get him. We’re taking a low-key approach.”
Naturally! If it was ever possible to do nothing . . .
“I pitched it, actually,” he said, “and the board went for it precisely because of your whole campaign last year to build up Vhub, do you remember?”
Did she remember? What kind of absurd question was that? But Manniberg was an educator. He liked to hear himself talk.
“It was in response to the whole issue of bullying and online predators. You got the students doing all their socializing on the school network. Brilliant! What was it you said about Facebook?”
It was just a slogan. He was going to remember it himself in a—
“Your parents are on Facebook! Perfect. It’s not reasonable to expect people to stop talking or to not take videos. But let’s keep everything about Pyke on Vhub, which you and Sheldon can influence through your own posts. Don’t tell people to do it directly. That never works. But you know what I’m saying?”
Shiels felt her jaw go slack. Really, Manniberg, principal of the dead, was coming up with this kind of approach?
“Nod your head, tell me yes,” he said. “I think I have to look after this . . .”
Manniberg slid by her to investigate the commotion in the hall. Shiels paused for a moment to give Sheldon her look—What in the rotting compost bin were you doing when I needed you right beside me?—then pushed past.
Was it a fight in the halls? Already?
“Break it up! Get to your classes!” Manniberg yelled. He had a thin voice for a heavy man, and none of the verbal heft that a good vice principal would normally bring to crowd control.
Where were the vice principals?
The hall was a squash of bodies, of people straining to see something hopelessly hidden within an ever-contracting mass somewhere in the middle of the crowd. Manniberg had to push people aside to get anywhere.
Was it too late? Had the football team, slow to action yesterday, decided to dismantle Pyke now, this morning, before anything could be announced, before the NCA could be put in place? Shiels had moved as swiftly as she could have.
She and Sheldon waited on the outside of the crowd. The situation was beyond them now. Whatever was developing was developing. Shiels had raced to the rescue yesterday, but this was the principal’s turf. His solution? To try to finesse something through Vhub when already it was coming down to a lynch mob?
Manniberg was a big guy. He was pretty good at pushing kids this way and that.
What could she have done? She could’ve called him directly in the early morning, perhaps, roused him from bed, and pressed upon him the urgency of the situation.
A life was at stake.
An endangered life, a rare spirit, newly arrived from the great beyond. People couldn’t deal with that, could they? They had to destroy what they couldn’t understand.
(Shiels didn’t understand it either, but at least she hadn’t tried to destroy it. She had confronted it up close, when it had looked like Jocelyne Legault was in trouble. But she’d seen the wings fold up, how small the boy actually was. And what did Manniberg want to do? Just keep everything off Facebook?)
“Clear out! Break it up! Everyone to your classes now!” Manniberg roared. Shiels imagined the battered body, how scrawny it would look, like a mauled bat, a rat with wings . . .
“I said move!”
They moved. Reluctantly, like crowds gawking at guillotines in the French Revolution. How were people any different now? They weren’t. They were just as depraved, just as base, just as . . . human.
Humans being human.
How we love to watch . . .
What?
Pyke emerged from the core of the seething mass . . . very much untouched. Sort of erect, and dignified, and shining almost (his hide had a luster even in the dull fluorescence of the high school corridor). He saw her—those magnificent, ancient eyes locked on Shiels in her short dress, her zebra leggings, her high-heeled shoes—and then he passed on. Hop-hip. Hop-hip.
His long curved mouth hung open just a little, relaxed, as cool as shade.
He was walking with Jocelyne Legault.
Together. They were leaning against each other.
The crowd in the hallway had nearly rioted, out of pure curiosity, just to see Pyke and his girl . . . together.
Pyke and his girl?
When they had a bit of space, the pterodactyl snapped open his wings in a sort of shoulder shrug—whoosh!—that caused a rush of wind, a palpable oooohhh swirling through the crowd. Anyone trailing too closely would have been hurled against the lockers, it was such a powerful movement, but over in a heartbeat, and then he was folded again, next to Jocelyne.
Shiels felt it as a kind of sinking inside, like when something you’ve been holding finally gives way and you never even knew, until suddenly it’s difficult to stand where you are, and your stupid high-heeled shoes hurt your toes, and your knees don’t want to work all of a sudden, like they have gone on strike, and your boyfriend has to clutch you. (Boy
friend? She felt his strong hands suddenly supporting her elbows, and her instant thought was, Who are you?)
But if not for Sheldon she might’ve ended up sitting in the middle of the hall, a puddle of mush, while Vista View High’s new royal couple passed by.
VI
Jocelyne Legault! Why was it so galling to see her, tiny, in her warm-ups and running shoes, her loose athletic top, walking beside Pyke, nestled under his wing—literally—demure and safe-looking and obviously besotted?
Why should Shiels have cared? It should have been a relief that Pyke was not battered and bruised, that the NCA would not, after all, be needed. Who could have anticipated such a reception for a flying beast now enrolled at the school?
Overnight the beast had followers.
Of course, suddenly Pyke was all over Vhub. All over! But when had it happened? When had Pyke and Jocelyne ever had time to get together? Since last night? Really? Twelve hundred and eighty-four students, and now countless conversations about the great running champion and the only boy in the school who could fly. Of course they were together! Hadn’t Pyke been smitten ever since he’d seen her from high above the track—that bouncing blond ponytail, those tireless legs? And hadn’t he cradled her in his arms, and hopped her over to the nurse after his bruising landing?
And wasn’t he different in every way from every other boy? Those muscles. Those wings. His eyes. The things he must’ve seen.
Of course Jocelyne had fallen for him. No other boy could keep up with her. But Pyke—
Pyke had something extra. Everyone felt it. Yesterday Shiels had thought they were all making fun of him. Had she completely misread the situation? Clearly the whole school now pulsed in a new way. Crowds gathered around the door in Mr. Saint-Croix’s math class, and not because of fractional polynomials. Pyke sat in the last chair in the far corner, his little tail tucked under, wings in check, his crest pointing backward like a shark fin. He was not taking notes but nodding his head, clicking his beak like he was paying attention.