by Alan Cumyn
“Why are you calling me?” he said.
“I’m starving, but I can’t go down to the kitchen right now.”
“What, you’re home?”
“Don’t waste time. I’m famished.”
“You’re at home and you’re calling me to go get you food?”
“Just do it, all right? I’m not going to explain. Did I not just organize the best high school social event in the history of the universe?”
The boy was silent. As much agreement as she was ever going to get from him.
“You know it was beyond scalding. Please, Jonathan. I will owe you. If there are any olives—”
“I hate olives. I can’t even touch them. They smell like rotting puke.”
“Forget the olives. Please. Anything. A plate of food. I will owe you.”
She closed her eyes and willed her impossible brother to connect with some remnant of humanity left in his pubescent body. Leaders got things done. She was a leader . . . still.
When at last the boy had given his burping, grudging acquiescence, she called Sheldon. “You didn’t tell me!” she said as soon as he answered.
“I’m sorry—”
“You let me leave your house without telling me. Not a word. You let me . . .”
“I’m sorry. I just—”
“You let me sail into town looking like, like . . . a purple-beaked white bird. You didn’t say one word. You didn’t . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
“You are. You are very sorry. You were going to march me down to have breakfast with your parents looking like this. Now, what is this shit on my nose, and how do I get it off?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t sound like himself. Sheldon wasn’t an “I don’t know” kind of person. He always had an opinion, a bright idea. He always . . . “Did you try soap and water?”
“Of course I tried soap and water! I almost peeled my skin off! Now tell me!”
“Well, I didn’t put it on you,” Sheldon said. “It was after you went up and wrangle danced with Pyke. You came back, and your nose was done. I didn’t see—”
“I never wrangle danced with Pyke. What are you talking about?”
“Everyone saw you. You and Pyke. You have to remember that.”
“I don’t remember two molecules about what happened for a lot of last night, Sheldon. You’ll have to tell me. I’m sorry. I wrangle danced with Pyke?”
Someone rattled her doorknob then—Jonathan. “Just leave it outside the door. Thank you!” she called. “Back away and don’t look.”
There was half a microbe’s chance that Jonathan would look away. She pulled on a hoodie and cloaked her face, then opened the door and grabbed the plate he’d left. She didn’t even glance to see where he was.
Slam! Safe again.
He’d made her a peanut butter sandwich with a tired purple grape on top. Did he know already? She bit into the sandwich, chewed dryly, threw the grape into the wastebasket.
“Are you there?” she said again into the phone.
“The most important bit about the whole thing,” Sheldon said—he sounded an odd mix of himself and some gravely serious person—“is what happened at the end of it. You do remember that?”
“Yes,” she said dubiously. “I think. I’m sorry, I’m just going to say this,” she said, because he was Sheldon, after all. It felt like the world had righted itself somehow, slightly at least, to simply be talking to him. “I’m just going to say it. I know we woke up together. Did we . . . Did we . . .”
“Say that we loved each other? Yes, we did.”
It didn’t sound like he was joking.
“But did you . . . Did we . . .”
“Fall asleep in each other’s arms? Yes. Wake up together . . . yes. Have breakfast with my parents . . . no. You would have been fine. Even with your nose. Mine was still lined, and I would have kept it that way.”
“Sheldon!” She bit more of the wretched sandwich. The peanut butter tasted like it had been buried by ancient Egyptians. “You know what I am asking.”
“You mean did we swim the English Channel together? Did we walk on the moon?”
“Any of those things.”
Silence, as if he were reveling in this occasion to be indignant. Of course he wanted her to remember. Ordinarily she would. This was not an ordinary situation.
“After you wrangle danced with Pyke,” he said slowly, “you practically dragged me into my own bed. I’ve got scratches still from where you ripped my clothes. What do you think we did?”
Was he breathing anymore? She couldn’t tell. He stopped talking, and the silence stretched between them like an eight-lane highway.
She couldn’t think of what to say. She didn’t want to hang up. She wanted him to be right there. She wanted to be alone with him, in his bed again, skin to skin, as they must have been, after the storm had passed. They must have been lying together, cobbled, breathing. He must have wrapped his arms around her. She must have felt his strong hands, the thrum of his heart, the heat of him. She must have said it first. I love you.
She could almost, almost remember.
“Sheldon?” she said. But the boy was gone, gone, gone.
• • •
Shiels gazed hard into the bedroom mirror at her tender, purpled, rubbed-raw nose. The color wasn’t going to come off. The skin would not heal quickly.
She had wrangle danced with Pyke? How could she not remember? Yet, somehow the mention of it brought back a niggle of a memory. She remembered Pyke, gesturing with his beak, looking at her. When she’d been dancing with Sheldon. When they hadn’t been entirely grappled together. Had she gone onstage then? Had she moved her own feet, or had the crowd propelled her? Was that what everyone had been shrieking about?
Shiels and Pyke, onstage, coiling and uncoiling.
She had a terrible thought—that it was all on Vhub. At this very moment. That people had videoed it—of course they had. What important moment went unvideoed these days?
Sleeping with Sheldon. Doing it finally with him. Apparently. Maybe getting pregnant. That all had gone unvideoed.
Why had she no memory of these seminal events?
(An unfortunate choice of words. What would Lorraine Miens think?)
“I will not interview any young woman with an unintentionally purple nose,” Lorraine Miens said then in some basement corner of Shiels’s mind.
Unintentionally purple.
God, it looked enormous like this, like it was growing into a beak in front of her eyes. (Literally. “That’s where a beak would grow, Ms. Krane.”)
She had a thin tube of concealer. For little spots, sun-caused things. She almost never used it. She spread some now with her tiny, soft brush. Had some unbelievably cute furry animal died so she could try to brush over the scaling of her face? (What if her face turned to purple scales?)
“Makeup is the hardening over of the human face,” Lorraine Miens had said. “It’s the iron grip of patriarchy flexing within your own fingers.”
Beigy dust, like fine desert sand blowing in, caking in the humps and hollows.
Shiels would have to buy this stuff by the crate load to do this every day.
A mottled beak. She looked like some space creature now, an invading species attempting to look human.
Her hand stayed steady, despite the free fall inside. She changed brushes and powder. Flesh tone. Cakey in spots, but she could smooth it out.
Some of it.
Better.
How to erase the borderline, to smooth it all out? Just keep going. A multitude of sins can be plastered over.
Not plastered. Powdered. She tried to keep a light, light touch.
She started breathing again.
Turned on her computer.
“Shiels—Shiels dear, are you hungry?” her mother called. Shiels glanced at the digital time in the corner of her screen. How could it be dinner already?
“In a minute, Mom!” she called.
She was stil
l starving, actually. But first things first . . .
“We’re eating a little early because your father and I are going to the thing,” her mother said.
Shiels logged into Vhub. Crackers!
“You go ahead then, Mom! I’ll be down in a bit.”
Blurry shots and video of Pyke at the microphone, Pyke blaring out at the crowd, Pyke and Jocelyne Legault entangled, doing their own wrangle dance.
“I want us all to eat together tonight!” her mother called. “It’s family dinner night!”
A cluster of videos. One still shot of Shiels climbing up onto the stage, Pyke’s beak angled right at her . . . right between her legs.
Her nose distinctly non-purple.
“Now, please, Shiels. I insist!” Her mother was standing just outside her door.
But she wasn’t coming in.
• • •
Shiels put on her headphones and watched as the blurry figure in the yellow shoes—with the white nose—stumbled onto the edge of the stage then righted herself. She lowered her shoulders and shimmy-hopped—how had she learned how to do that?—and cradled in close to the pterodactyl. The noise was unbearable, but she didn’t turn down the volume. The camera jumped and jostled, making it look like the two of them—the girl and the beast—were folding together. He raised his beak and screamed something out, and she had both hands on his glistening chest, and his wings fanned out and he shimmy-hopped against her. She was holding him, holding him up.
She was burning in her seat, watching herself. The whole boiling crowd seemed to be out of its mind.
She was whirling him, whirling him around the stage. What was she holding? His little legs. When he folded his wings, he was a handbag with handles. When he opened them, she was pulled off her feet as if attached to a kite in a high wind.
Her body twisted. He circled and thrashed, and she was limp and laughing, and when he caught her, in his beak, it looked . . . it looked like she was impaled. Like she was riding him.
Oh God.
It looked like sex.
It looked like she was having pterodactyl sex onstage in front of the entire student body. And now on video for the whole leering . . .
He set her down. He leaned against Jocelyne. Shiels was staggering off. . . . She looked drugged. She looked . . . gloriously, stupidly happy.
She staggered into somebody. The camera was on Pyke and Jocelyne. Shiels was almost out of the frame. But she remembered something. . . . She remembered . . .
. . . staggering into Sheldon.
Last shot—yes—staggering into Sheldon’s arms. All of her molten. Hardly able to breathe for laughing, for feeling it.
She paused the video. Was that a shadow . . . or an unusually dark nose?
• • •
It took about three seconds, after Shiels had sat down at the table, for Jonathan to shoot off his mouth. “What’s happened to your nose?” he squealed, and then—“She was wrangle dancing with Pyke last night!”
“Shut up!” Shiels said, as if the words could be withdrawn. As if the horror on her mother’s face could be peeled away.
“I didn’t say to cover it with makeup . . . badly,” her mother said. “Just wash it off! Won’t it come off?”
Her father was staying neutral, as he often did, looking on but remaining cool. Knowing, probably, that anything he said now would be superfluous, and maybe harmful.
“I’m having trouble getting it off,” Shiels said in a small voice. Dinner was linguine with cream sauce and lightly fried tofu squares, with a five-lettuce walnut salad bought from a specialty store her mother worshipped.
Her father raised his glass of white wine. “To family harmony,” he said. Her mother shot him a look, but eventually raised her glass as well. Shiels drank her water. The toast was sacred.
“Why did you ever agree to having your nose colored?” her mother said. “I just don’t understand it.”
Shiels kept her voice modulated. Dinner was good. She needed to eat. “I didn’t agree. I don’t remember how it happened.”
“How can you not remember how it happened?”
“She was wrangle dancing with Pyke!” Jonathan blurted again. “That’s how it happened!”
“I don’t understand anything about that statement,” her mother said.
“It’s wrangle dancing. It’s all over the Internet. Shiels was up there, alone with the pterodactyl, in front of everybody for, like, ten minutes. Maybe more!”
Jonathan didn’t seem to understand the enormity of his statement—the spilling of the secret!—until he noticed Shiels’s eyes drilling into his skull.
Her mother twisted linguine on her fork but did not glance away from Shiels. “You were dancing . . . with what? A pterodactyl?”
“He’s a pterodactyl-student,” Shiels said. “The school board approved it. It’s no big deal.”
“A pterodactyl?” her father said.
“He’s cool,” Jonathan said hastily. “He speaks English . . . sort of.”
“Our principal brought him in,” Shiels said. “We’re a pilot project. It’s all right—there were adult chaperones last night. It was completely organized.”
The PD exchanged glances—how much of this could be real?
“He’s actually quite shy and . . . very talented musically,” Shiels said, trying to keep her voice normal.
Her father said, “And he thinks he’s a pterodactyl?”
Shiels exchanged glances with Jonathan, then seized the moment. “We’re trying to create an open and accepting environment for all kinds of students,” she said.
Her mother looked at her watch. The PD were going out. This dicey questioning was not going to last forever. Shiels stood up and began to collect the dirty plates. Her mother took a quick sip of wine. “So you were dancing with this . . . pterodactyl-boy,” she said to Shiels. “And somehow you blacked out. What were you drinking?”
“Nothing! I had nothing to drink. Maybe I became dehydrated!” Shiels’s tone sent her mother leaning back in her seat.
“No one gets dehydrated after dancing for only ten minutes.” Her mother glanced over at her father, and he cleared his throat, ready to take over the interrogation.
“Somehow something happened to your nose because you danced with this fellow?” he said.
Her mother sprang up then. Shiels had no time to react, and knew better than to try to defend herself. In an instant her mother had dipped the cloth napkin into Shiels’s water glass and was dabbing, wiping the makeup off her face.
“That’s what happened!” her mother said. “Look!”
Shiels sat as still as a burning mannequin, being stared at.
“It does look awfully dark,” her father said. He approached too, and took out his glasses. “It doesn’t look like ink,” he said. “There are raw patches. . . .”
“I scrubbed myself pretty hard,” Shiels said. Her father touched her nose gently with the tips of his fingers. “Fascinating. So you think it happened . . . how?”
“Every girl who wrangle dances with Pyke gets marked,” Jonathan said. “Everyone knows that. It happened to Jocelyne Legault, and now it’s happened to Shiels.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” her father said then, but patiently, echoing his partner in parental unity. “How did this . . . Pyke . . . mark your sister?”
“He just did. It just happens. Nobody knows how. It’s part of the wrangle dance!”
“The what?”
Shiels would not wait around for complete humiliation. “Whatever it is, it’s my problem. I’ll deal with it,” she said.
“Do you . . . Do you have feelings for this . . . this boy?” her mother said.
“She’s totally in love with him!” Jonathan called out.
“I am not!” Shiels slammed her hand onto the table and spilled the water glasses.
Everyone gaped at her, shocked out of words.
“I’m in love with Sheldon Myers. I slept with him last night. That’s where I wa
s. All night. And now I’m probably pregnant. Are you satisfied?”
And then a personal wind was blowing her, blowing, out of the room and up the stairs and safely behind her slammed, locked bedroom door.
XIV
She loved Sheldon Myers.
Shiels Krane, student-body chair . . .
No: Shiels Krane, girl, woman. She loved Sheldon Myers.
She loved the tiny black hairs on his skinny forearms. She loved the points of his elbows when he leaned over, on the desk, and left behind whatever it was he was immersed in—an explanation of how black holes affect the literary theory behind graphic novels—and held his face inches from hers. Cell-widths. And how the molecules he breathed seeped into her lungs and she could see the heartbeat pulsing in his baking red ears.
She loved that he had baking red ears.
She loved the smell of him. He was pears and apricot and . . . shoe leather. Not new, slightly old. He fit her nose. He was clean—he showered most days—but he wasn’t antiseptic. His mother did his laundry, but she didn’t iron and neither did Sheldon, and Shiels loved the rumpled charm of him. If his socks matched, it was serendipity. Maybe a mistake.
But no, no. It wasn’t just all the superficial things. She loved the boy. She loved him for his skin and for what he was underneath. He stood by her. He was steadfast. He was . . . quietly Sheldon, anchored while she flew off with her usual this and that. She needed him. Obviously. Tethered to the ground meant just that, not flying, not going anywhere fast.
They needed each other.
She could see that now. She was not just . . . Shiels Krane, person. She was one half of Shiels and Sheldon, the untethered half. The half that would simply let herself blow onstage and wrangle dance with the first pterodactyl boy she came across. No wonder Sheldon was angry.
He was jealous.
Jealous and upset and . . . put out by her untetheredness. She had stayed on the string—she’d come back to him—but she had gone too far. With Pyke, and then with Sheldon himself. She’d gone too far and hadn’t honored it—how could she have? She hadn’t even known. She hadn’t been conscious.
She had sleepwalked through the most important moment of her life so far.
She needed to apologize. To make it up to him. She still was on his string. Of course she was! And he was on hers.