by Alan Cumyn
They were boiling over to hear the actual words.
“Some of you might have heard that the first VV social of the year will be held this Saturday—”
And then it was like the roof blew off. All at once the whole student body was on its feet, howling, stamping, hopping about, and exploding black umbrellas over and over. Shiels glanced, nervously, back at Manniberg, who looked startled.
“And the band . . . ,” she screamed. She could not hear herself. She waited and waited, but they would not stop, so she shrieked as loudly as she could, “The band is Pyke’s!” Then the auditorium itself seemed to be bouncing in an earthquake. She held on to the mic, as if she might think of something else to say that could at all be relevant. And she glanced at Pyke—at where Pyke and Jocelyne had been sitting—but they were gone.
Sheldon stood at floor level by the stage, close to Shiels’s shoes, laughing and exclaiming and pointing at her, as if much of this glory somehow was hers. And maybe . . . maybe it was hers. It hadn’t been her idea, but she was the one who’d made the decision—the right decision—and now the shock wave was unleashed and there was nothing to do but hang on and ride the crest of it all the way to shore.
Wherever that might be.
• • •
The strange, silly, euphoric wave of Shiels’s announcement jaggered through the halls. It was hard to think. Everyone wanted to talk to her, congratulate her, ask her how she had come up with such a brilliant idea.
But there wasn’t much time to celebrate. Rebecca Sterzl dragged Shiels to the cafeteria, where the roar of the students sounded almost as loud as in the auditorium. Shiels pushed through the heavy double doors. The dull gray tables were the same as always, but the place was packed, everyone was on their feet. Where was Pyke? There—in the middle, on a table, grinning. Football players around him chanted, “Food fight! Food fight!” Jeremy Jeffreys, the VV quarterback, had a sandwich in his hand. Pyke was waiting. . . .
“They’re throwing food at him!” Rebecca said.
Shiels’s gut clenched. Was this, finally, the hazing of Pyke she’d cut short when he’d first arrived?
But no food was in the air yet. It was all potential, like a buildup of static waiting for the touch of a metal doorknob. The wrong word now, and the entire cafeteria would erupt in flying pizza slices and worse. Shiels didn’t want to be the one to call out. She didn’t want to be the heavy.
Jeremy Jeffreys might not listen, she thought.
I will look like a fool.
Jeffreys fired his sandwich. Not at Pyke at all but high above the pterodactyl’s head. Pyke stretched up, up, his neck, his beak—he spread his wings and snagged that sandwich in a flashing, stabbing motion that released a roar from the students half again as big as anything in the auditorium earlier.
Or that was what it sounded like in the crush of the cafeteria.
Then Jeremy Jeffreys had another sandwich in his hand. How long before the whole room would be smeared in projectile lunch bits?
Shiels knew she should say something. She should—
She turned, and there was Manniberg, standing beside her, his eyes squidged together as he tried to understand this new unfolding affront to order.
“Wait!” Shiels screamed, her voice suddenly bigger than the room.
(She knew it. She felt it.)
Jeremy Jeffreys turned. He looked like he would be just as happy to fire apple jelly and chocolate spread right into the middle of her chest.
He hadn’t seen Manniberg yet.
“There’ll be one more shot!” Shiels yelled. “And then it’s over!”
She picked up someone’s applesauce fruit cup and thrust it at Manniberg.
With her eyes she said to him, If you say no to these people now, the whole place is going to be flying food.
She held the fruit cup out to him.
“Mann-i-berg! Mann-i-berg!” the football team began to chant.
You can still salvage this moment, Shiels’s eyes said.
“MANN-I-BERG! MANN-I-BERG!”
The principal took the applesauce cup. The cafeteria froze into delighted silence. Pyke turned to Manniberg as if the pterodactyl might lance the cup from Manniberg’s hand if the principal didn’t throw it in the next few seconds.
“One throw,” Manniberg said in his strongest voice. “Then—lunch!”
Even as she stayed serious on the outside, Shiels could feel herself laughing. The wrong signal could still ruin it. But—
Manniberg brought his arm back awkwardly.
Leadership is about managing moments, she thought. The big and the small.
Manniberg threw it surprisingly hard and fast and straight at the pterodactyl’s face. There wasn’t time to duck or—
Zzsht!
Pyke snatched the cup in midair, then lifted his beak and shrieked in triumph. Shiels, like everyone else, watched the applesauce disappear down the elongated gullet, plastic container and all.
An explosion of cheers, applause, thunderous banging of tables. Even Manniberg was smiling.
“All right! Only twenty minutes left for lunch!” he announced. And the football players sat down, so everyone else did too. Thunderous chatter still, but the crisis was over.
Manniberg’s squidgy eyes sent Shiels a quiet Thank you. His first of the year.
X
Sheldon liked being pushed into the janitorial closet. He pretended he didn’t. He looked around nervously, to see if anyone noticed. He claimed he wanted the light on. He tried to pull at her clothes, to bite her lip, to be stronger than her.
But he wasn’t. Shiels was the one who said yes and no, whose glance fried his nerve ends, who directed where his hands might or might not stray and decided whether today was cold or hot or broiling or frigid.
She said whether there was time or not.
She knew what wind might blow where and how and if and whether.
She did not say why.
She was not sleeping much—she never did close to an event—but the dreams she had were vivid. In all of them her clothes seemed to fall away and her body yearned for wilderness—for the cover of trees, or tall grasses, the slap of broken ground on resilient soles (sometimes her feet were yellow, or she was wearing yellow shoes), or for fresh air gulped into deliriously freed lungs. In one, she was crawling out of a hole in the ground, her usual spot, close and warm and smelling of earthworms and black soil. She knew where the surface was, but it took a while to stretch herself, snakelike, far enough, and to pull up her hind body (slither, slide, sneak along). Her skin was . . . skintight, sexy. She liked the luster of it, its tautness, how silkily she moved.
Up finally into the air, out of the gap between two gnarled roots of a rain-soaked giant tree that stretched skyward beyond imagining. That little snatch of blue between the branches impossibly high . . . that was some other world she would never truly see. Unless she climbed it, slithered up its moss-soaked slippery sides.
Ooze-covered sides, dark with warm slime she did not mind touching. The bark was tough and soft at the same time, as warm as pungent sweat that seeped out of the tropical air. Higher and higher, but what was the rush?
The bark soothed her skin, and the higher she got, the slower she . . .
What did it matter where the sky was?
It was as if, in climbing the giant swaying tree, crowded in amongst its towering branches, she was also burrowing deep, deep again into the earth. Both at once, just as she was thinking of her dream yet also standing with Sheldon in their dark closet, all at the same time.
“Shiels,” Sheldon said, when a heavy roll of brown paper toweling fell off the shelf in the dark and clunked him in the shoulder.
“What?” she breathed.
“Do you think . . .”
She was like that snake in her dream, oozing deliciously with every slight movement.
“Do you think we should . . . find a room somewhere? Maybe . . . with a bed?”
She clamped her teeth on him, and
he yelped in his adorable way and a second roll clunked down, on his head perhaps, although she couldn’t really tell in the darkness.
“Don’t be silly,” she murmured, and slithered her tongue along him.
• • •
How to explain what was happening, especially explain it to Lorraine Miens. (If Shiels ever got to the personal interview stage. But she felt she would—surely, now, with all that she was achieving?) It wasn’t just that Shiels had instinctively followed Manniberg’s suggestion about keeping news of Pyke on Vhub, or had sensed a moment of crisis in the cafeteria and acted upon it, perfectly defusing a potential disaster. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the larger feat had been simply when she had changed her mind. It was how, by being wrong, but firm, and leader-like in the beginning—immovable, really, and completely in control—she could then overcome her own constructed mental garrison (to use a Lorraine Miens term, first coined, Shiels believed, in Motherlode, although she would have to look it up). She’d constructed barricades against the best idea, she could see that now. But that was only natural. All humans do it. We are creatures of habit; the world is too complex and too much in constant metamorphosis for any of us to ever be able to keep up. Better to think with your gut and your brain. (With both your brains; science had found the gut brain. Shiels knew that too from her explorations in the further reaches of the Internet.) Think fast, know, act, be firm—that’s what any good leader will do. Followers need to know that they are being led with energy. (She had followers, and she was just beginning to realize the implications of this. When she had stood before the multitudes about to announce what was already known—and so highly anticipated—she’d felt the quivering of the followers in the room. And then in that moment in the cafeteria, too—the vibration, the tremors . . . were for her, not just for Pyke.)
She’d changed her mind, and later in the cafeteria had even channeled power to Manniberg. A leader’s prerogative. To be firm and absolute and set on a course, and then to reverse . . . It’s the leader who can do that, straight-faced, without an eye-bat of embarrassment or apology (she imagined herself saying this to Lorraine Miens, who had written in Abandonment about how confused and apologetic and embarrassed almost on the cellular level most women were raised to be) . . . it’s those armor-plated leaders who whirled the tank around because of better data, a stronger hunch (both together) . . . those leaders whom people adore and follow anywhere. Off the cliff.
Into the next valley.
They adore the commander who changes course.
(Because she didn’t have to. She could have staged Autumn Whirl to a half-filled gym of socially damp types who hadn’t gotten the message that Pyke’s band wasn’t playing after all.)
“I felt the will of the student body,” she imagined herself saying to Lorraine Miens. “It’s hard to describe. It was like a gravitational pull. As a leader I have become intensely interested in tuning into the social, psychological, emotional, and intellectual pull of the mass of people around me.”
Would that be too insane a thing to say? Maybe not to Lorraine Miens.
Should Shiels write it in her application essay?
Better if Miens could see her as she said it—her shoulders set, her lips pulled down in a thoughtful frown (like Miens in most of her portraits), her eyes frank and humble.
She wasn’t congratulating herself. She had almost steered her student-body chair year into the ditch on the very first social of the season.
By fate or by luck, this was the year of the pterodactyl. She’d better use it, she realized, or else she’d be buried.
XI
Late Saturday afternoon, Shiels and Sheldon were downtown, running for a bus, leaking supplies—Sheldon was dropping plastic cups, and Shiels was trailing crêpe paper bought from the dollar store, last-minute acquisitions for Autumn Whirl. They had to get back to the auditorium for the sound check; they were the ones with the authority to pay the techies who were setting up the stage and installing the video feed to the sports field scoreboard. It had rained earlier, and the footing was still slippery. Shiels had a slippery sense inside her too—a sort of meeting between the fog of fatigue (there hadn’t been many hours of rest lately, given the avalanche of organizational responsibilities) and the bright sun of her own formidable will. Nothing was going to get in the way of Shiels making this an unforgettable social extravaganza.
Then Shiels saw it in a storefront window—a yellow running shoe just like the ones that had been popping up periodically in her dreams, on Sheldon sometimes, but more and more often now on her, whether she was climbing up through the undergrowth of pulsing rain forest or was alone on the savanna running, running.
She glimpsed the flash of yellow, turned . . . stopped. She was highly conscious of the tightness of her current stiff shoes, not meant for running, for anything wild. Sheldon ran on for another half block before he even realized she wasn’t with him anymore.
“What are you doing?” he yelled. He was carrying his black umbrella, along with the supplies, even though it wasn’t raining now. He went everywhere with his black umbrella.
“You just go on! I’ll catch up!”
She wasn’t looking at him but could feel him hesitate from a distance. He didn’t believe her. What was she up to now?
Keeping him guessing.
“I’ll be there on the next bus!” she yelled, and then she stepped into the shop.
It was not a place she would normally even notice. Darkish, in the gloomier part of town, with old wooden floors and distressed brick walls—from age, not design—lined with running shoes.
When was the last time Shiels had bought running shoes?
She saw white ones, blue ones, red, black . . . high tops, leather, synthetic, thick-soled, thin, for different sports, obviously; sections of the store were labeled for basketball, tennis, cross-training, gym, running, walking. . . .
She didn’t see the yellow shoes. Just the one in the window.
A thin old man shuffled out of the gloom in the back of the store. He was wearing some kind of sport shirt, but it was untucked in front. White wisps of hair would not stay in place on his mostly pink head.
“Something I can help you with?” he asked.
She mentioned the yellow shoe in the window, and he seemed surprised it was even there. “Don’t know if I have any of those left,” he said. “What size?”
Shiels allowed for an eight. Her feet were quite large, out of proportion to the rest of her. They seemed like duck flappers most of the time to her—her least elegant body part, she felt. But these shoes . . .
“Doubt I have any left,” the man repeated on his way back into the gloom.
Shiels was holding the window shoe now. It seemed to float in her hands, barely a slipper, a stretch of fabric that would mold to the foot, a wafer of rubber on the soul to keep the skin from bleeding. This particular shoe looked too narrow for her, but she cleared room on an old bench littered with shoes boxes and sat down anyway to try it. The fabric did stretch; the toes were cramped, but—
“No luck,” the man said, suddenly upon her again. “What kind of training are you looking to do, anyway?”
“This one fits,” she said. “Where’s its mate?”
He smiled in a frowny sort of way. “I had a pretty good look. What exactly are you—”
“I’m looking for this shoe’s mate, exactly,” Shiels said. “You have one. You must have the other. Unless you sell single shoes?”
His gaze seemed to take in everything: the shelves and shelves of shoes; the piles of shoe boxes; the benches with their worn fabric, purple once perhaps, now turned to gray; a rack of cobwebby shoelaces; a broom leaning incongruously against a pile of newspapers.
“Are you looking to run races or something?” he said.
She did not feel at all inclined to submit to interrogation about her motives for buying a simple pair of yellow runners. One was already on her left foot. Where was the other? This should no
t have been difficult.
“I’ve always wanted to take up running,” she said. “Do you mind if I help you search?”
“If you’re not a runner already, these aren’t the right shoes. They’re for people who’ve been running barefoot for a long time. Africans, mostly. If you’re not a barefoot runner already, you want more cushion, more arch support. I have a good selection. . . .”
Shiels was already pawing through the front window display again to see if the other shoe had fallen down somewhere, perhaps was lodged under the dismal turf-colored fabric blanketing the booth. “Where do you keep the mates of all these other display shoes?” she asked.
“Running creates a lot of impact,” the man said. “It’s hard on the knees, the ankles, the hips. . . .”
The old man looked pretty creaky. How long since he had run anywhere himself? “You must have a system,” Shiels said. “I can’t believe you regularly lose companion shoes like this. Where do you put them?”
He showed her to the back storeroom, lit by a single dull bulb, where leaning towers of boxes tilted high into the shadows. “Depends when I did it,” he said vaguely.
Many of the boxes were apparently unlabeled. But it was not a huge room. It would not take forever to look in every box. And maybe Shiels would get lucky. Certainly Sheldon could handle the last preps for the dance, or whatever Autumn Whirl was becoming. The Event. “I’m just going to have a quick look,” she said.
Her phone then. A text from Sheldon: Pyke awol sound chk need u now!
The old guy was moving shoe boxes from one temporary pile to another. She needed to warn him. “I have to leave in, like, two minutes,” she said. “But I am going to find this missing shoe. I’m asking for your pre-forgiveness.”