by Alan Cumyn
You don’t just bury a kite because of one wrangle dance in the clouds.
• • •
“Shiels honey,” her mother said, knocking gently. “Can I come in?”
Solicitous mother. Gentle mother. A careful inquiry. Shiels could’ve said no. She crossed the room and unlocked the door because certain things were now clear to her.
She was not going to let her mother—or anybody—put her off Sheldon Myers.
“Oh, that nose!” her mother said, but quietly. Without rebuke. Shiels returned to her bed, surrounded herself with pillows. Her mother sat on the edge, squeezed Shiels’s shoulder just the way she used to when Shiels was young and it was bedtime.
Oh, that nose. What was Shiels going to do about it? Sheldon would never love her—could never—while she was marked this way by a . . . a pterodactyl.
Who would’ve thought this could ever be a problem?
“So . . . ,” her mother said, and smiled sadly.
“Yes, so,” Shiels said.
“You and Sheldon have in fact . . . become closer.”
Closer. Shiels supposed that was one way to look at it. Closer, yet it also felt like they had become oceans apart.
“You know I was trying to anticipate this,” her mother said gently. “It’s hard, as a parent. You want to respect your child’s autonomy, her privacy.” Her mother had tears in her eyes! Shiels was not going to be able to keep it together. “And yet, some things need to be said—”
“Mom, I know about birth control!”
“Yes, and I’m a GP. I have this chat every day with young women like you who know all about birth control, and yet, when it comes down to it, they have not used it. And they’re smart, they have every advantage, they know the statistics.” She set her jaw, wiped her eyes. “Shiels, I’m sorry, I’m not good at hiding my disappointment. In myself as well as in you. I have failed to prepare you—”
“Oh, Mom!”
“No, no, hear me out. I tried to tell you, but I didn’t actually say the words. I want you to think seriously. If you’re going to be sexually active, there are so many better options than just closing your eyes and hoping. And there are STDs to think about—”
“Mom, I know this. I know!”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking of you still as my little girl. I should’ve headed this off months ago.”
“It’s not your fault, Mom. And I’m not sure how getting fixed up now is going to help me if I’m already pregnant!”
Her mother shook her head, apparently still stuck on figuring out how any of this had come to pass. Well, it had. Sometimes a pterodactyl just lands in your neighborhood and everything goes wrangy for a time.
“I’m pretty sure you’re not pregnant, dear,” her mother said. “You slept with him once, last night, yes? Probably that means it’s going to happen again. So I would like to make an appointment for you—not with me, I can’t be your doctor for this—but with one of my colleagues.”
“If I am pregnant, then I’m going to have this baby!” Shiels blurted. “I love Sheldon, I love him! I can get a job, I can put off school, Sheldon and I can do almost anything together—”
Shiels’s mother let her run out of steam; it didn’t take long.
“I know, I know, you’re a passionate young woman, you have a formidable will. I have no doubt you would make an amazing young mother, and we do love and respect Sheldon. I have said that before too. Certainly your father and I would support you in every way that we can. You know that, yes?” Shiels’s mother was holding both her hands now. “But having a child now, at your age, is not a great strategy, is it? Ideally, so many other things ought to be in place before you can even think of starting your own family. Anyway, it’s highly unlikely that you actually are pregnant, dear. Just because there’s a big wind, it doesn’t mean a tree is going to fall on your house.”
“How can you possibly know? We did it, we did it! Are you just hoping that because it’s your daughter, everything’s going to be all right?”
Her mother was staying extremely still, even smiling slightly. “We have talked about your cycles, yes?” she said softly.
“My cycles!”
“If I’m not greatly mistaken, I believe your period is due in the next day or two. So if you slept with him last night, and that was the only time so far, then you weren’t really fertile. Your eggs are ready, as you know, in the middle of your cycle—”
Shiels stood abruptly. “How could you possibly know when my period is due?”
Her mother pressed her lips together, sort of frowning but not really. “I buy the supplies, dear. Our cycles have been pretty well synchronized for the last couple of years. It’s not uncommon. It’s a well-studied phenomenon, though not proven definitely. But once you move away to college, if you’re living in a girls’ dorm, you’ll probably find everyone gets in more or less the same rhythm.”
Shiels put her hands to her face. Was she really hearing this?
“When you’re really trained,” her mother said, “when you start to approach life in a more scientific way, you just might find there’s all kinds of heartache and confusion you can avoid by keeping a simple grip on the facts.”
• • •
A simple grip on the facts.
She wasn’t pregnant. Probably. She had lost her virginity—probably—but had no clear recognition of any of it. And her nose was . . . definitely . . . still purple.
Why could she not remember any of the details? She did remember, in Sheldon’s house, the clumsy, gasping, half-laughing passage up the stairs. Having seen herself wrangle dancing on the video, she felt she could now remember part of what had happened in his bedroom. Or was she fooling herself, creating false memories?
How could she have been so absent when clearly she had been right there? After scrambling up those stairs, she must’ve thrown him into bed. He must’ve been beside himself trying to shush her so his parents wouldn’t hear.
Why had he not texted her, or called her, in all these long hours that she’d now spent lying on her bed, staring at her phone, willing him to notice her?
He must have forgiven her.
Forgiven her?
Forgiven her wrangle dance with Pyke.
When he had woken up, he hadn’t been angry with her. He’d been loving. Drowsy. Stubbled. He’d wanted her to have breakfast with his parents.
He’d thought . . . God knows what he’d thought.
It wasn’t like him to not call.
She stared at her phone and stared. She felt cold all over, shivery and light, as if her bones had been hollowed out.
Maybe her mother was right, maybe she wasn’t pregnant. But she was still going to have to show up at school tomorrow with a purple nose and no Sheldon, and everyone knowing . . . or thinking that they knew . . . that in the course of just a couple of days she’d fallen from the heights, in plain view, with her entrails hanging out for all to see.
XV
Monday morning. Snow falling. The first of the season, like little lost flakes blurry against the steel-gray sky. The ground cold and hard underfoot. Bitter wind. Students without hats and gloves, in sweaters only or light Windbreakers, undone, open to the elements, trudged into the brown-brick buildings of Vista View High clutching backpacks and cell phones and black umbrellas.
Shiels was intensely conscious, as she approached the school, that no one was staring at her purple nose. Sheldon was not with her. That was expected. She had not even taken the route past Roseview and Vine. She had staged, as it were, a preemptive strike against the loneliness of that moment when he would not be there.
He had already skipped out once before when they’d been still officially together.
Had they split up? She felt in her bones that they had.
She could feel the blood throbbing in her nose. She looked like Cyrano de Bergerac. ’Tis a rock—a crag—a cape— A cape? say rather, a peninsula!
She would not look at the ground. She would not melt unde
r anyone’s pitying or gawking gaze. . . .
But no one was looking. Yet. With the snow and the biting winds, they were all just trying to get indoors to start their Monday in the prison of high school.
She pulled open the heavy doors, stepped inside. It smelled like elementary school, like wet wool and sweating mittens.
(Where were all the woolen mittens of elementary school? There were none here.)
Now her eyes fell. She did not want to wipe out on the slippery floor in front of everyone. She just wanted to blend in, be any anonymous senior student, hurrying to class and—
“Ms. Krane.”
Manniberg. In the middle of the hall, hands on his hips—“Akimbo,” Sheldon would have whispered, had he been there—looking at her. Her body turned toward the stairway, as if she might pretend . . .
“Ms. Krane, what the hell happened this weekend?”
Now, there was a question. She could not possibly begin to explain anything that had happened over what was probably the most extraordinary weekend of her admittedly so far fairly short life.
“Uh—”
She was stopped now in front of him in the crowded hallway. They were a spectacle for others to eye-grope.
He was staring at her nose. “Promise me that is not a tattoo.”
“Not . . . as far as I know, Mr. Manniberg.” He liked to hear his name spoken with some reverence.
“Well, what in hickory happened to the gym? I thought you had the cleanup plan in place? In fact, I distinctly remember signing and approving the cleanup plan you and your committee presented to me.”
Oh. Oh. The floor felt uncertain beneath her feet. “Did Rebecca not stay and—” she mumbled.
“Whoever it was, they definitely did not. You are in charge, Ms. Krane. I hold you personally responsible. Athletics classes are going to have to be held outside in the snow this morning because the gym is not available. I’m going to have to make that announcement. Your name is going to be all over it. And before you set foot in any classroom, you are going to assemble your team and do the work you should have done Sunday morning. As planned. Understood?”
Rebecca Sterzl had been on cleanup. She’d had a whole crew of volunteers. All right, Shiels had said she would look in later on Sunday to do a final inspection. There had been slippage. She hadn’t done it. She had been managing her own crises. But still—
“Yes, Mr. Manniberg.”
Shiels whipped out her phone and began texting. For one day . . . one day . . . she had ignored the beeping and vibrating of others. That was all. One sniveling—
“Get moving, Ms. Krane!” Manniberg roared.
• • •
For a moment Shiels yearned to be back in the storeroom of the running-shoe shop. That was tiny, at least—chaos contained in a manageable space. This was an entire gymnasium, a vast chaotic scatter of plastic cups, puddles of stinking pop, overturned tables, fallen posters, even cobwebs of crêpe paper—hadn’t she dropped the crêpe paper while running back from the shoe shop? But here were cobwebs of green, blue, black, red, purple crêpe paper hanging from the walls anyway, sodden with drink, already looking like some ancient wreck.
And clothing. Twisted leggings, a shirt. Someone’s panties. Black jeans leaning back on an overturned chair as if—
—as if they’d been ripped off in some jet-thrust of a hurry.
Where to start? She picked up the first thing at hand—the panties—then threw them down again and righted the table instead. She nudged her toe into a puddle of sticky soda. She checked her phone. No response. Not from Rebecca, not from any of Rebecca’s team, not from Sheldon.
Not from Sheldon.
The mop was in the janitorial closet. That much she knew. And the paper towels. And the garbage bags.
Twist their noses, she thought.
They are going to ignore me.
They sign up for student government. They want the glory, they want the responsibility, they want to be on the inside of a major event like Autumn Whirl. . . .
She marched to the janitorial closet. Unlocked. She freed the ancient mop and tub set, ran fresh water, added liquid cleaner—righteously harsh. She would not wear gloves.
She would not check her phone again.
The bell had already rung for class. Now Mr. Manniberg was on the intercom. Shiels willed herself not to listen.
They had no loyalty, Rebecca and her gang.
He was not worthy—craven Sheldon.
Craven? Was that related to crows somehow? They were all as bad as craven crows.
“When the glacier groans, that’s when you know who is a mountain and who is a rockslide,” Lorraine Miens had written. As the mop squelched to the puddles, as the garbage—the panties; the leggings; the soggy, disappointing cobwebs of crêpe paper—cragged into bag upon bag, she pictured herself in Lorraine Miens’s office, leaning across her desk, eyes locked, matching her quip for quote. “You want students who are going to grow into mountains,” she said, out loud, alone, in the gymnasium. “I am student-body chair of Vista View High. Do you have any idea what I’ve had to do to make it the best year ever in the history of the institution?”
By herself, she started in a corner and worked toward the middle. A gymnasium, too, is finite. She would work all day if she had to. It was her watch. She could not afford weakness.
And if Sheldon showed up, she probably would not be able to unclench her jaw. It was a good thing he didn’t.
She heard the squeak of the heavy door opening. She would not look. What time was it?
The reverse-groan upon closing. Probably some snivelly kid looking in on the disaster.
More mopping. More crêpe and cups and stupid stinking paper wads. What had they been for?
She was nearly out of bags, would have to return to the closet. It was the end of some period—which one, she didn’t care to think about. She heard students crushing, cruising in the halls. She’d wait, wait before showing herself.
Another squeak of the door. Who this time? Across the gloom Pyke stood with his wings out—enormous, magnificent—clutching a carton of black garbage bags.
“No zelp here?” he said in his funny accent, like he didn’t know humans, didn’t understand at all what they might get up to.
Something about him was different. What? He looked gigantic. It was his crest. . . . His crest had turned scarlet. He was standing there . . . waggling his knifelike scarlet crest at her. When had it changed? At Autumn Whirl it had been purple. Her nose had been white. Now she was standing before him purple-nosed, and he was red-crested, waggling . . .
“You’ve got to be kidding!” she said.
When he folded his wings, he was smaller again, just a bedraggled kid really, short and dark. He picked up something with his beak, a sharp quick movement—someone’s jacket that wouldn’t be wanted back, not now.
He hopped a few steps toward her.
“It’s all right. I’ll do it,” she snapped.
Hop, hop, a few more steps. She happened to be holding a bag open, and he stuffed the jacket in with silvery quickness. She had a sense of him perched by a riverbank waiting, hunting, staying still and then exploding into movement.
Was this all some mating display? On her account?
He speared something else, and when he jabbed it into the bag, his lance of a beak rubbed against the outside of her thigh. It felt strong and gentle at the same time, precise somehow, as if he knew exactly how much pressure to use to graze her, rub her, without knocking her over. This close, a fierce heat radiated from him.
“Too long, juzt we,” he said. His voice was strange. It was a miracle he could talk at all, she thought. She remembered how stunned she’d been when he’d spoken on that fateful afternoon when he’d crash-landed on Jocelyne Legault.
Jocelyne—that was what he meant, Shiels thought. “Juzt we” had to include the other girl with a purple nose.
Pyke’s two girls.
Hop, step, hop, stab, and each time his beak rub
bed some part of her—her arm as he pulled out of the bag abruptly, her hip when she turned away, the inside of her knee when she spread the bag wide.
Two girls.
How had that happened? How did she become . . .
She tied shut the top of one full bag and bent to open another, and when she straightened up again, he had vanished. She hadn’t heard or felt the rush of his wings, hadn’t noticed the door open or close. Then she spied a window high in the far corner, the sliver of outside glistening on the tilted glass.
An opening big enough for a pterodactyl.
• • •
They came in waves, bursts of black spitting through that one open space and then scattering around the cavernous gym. Thousands of crows, Pyke’s gang, streaming through endlessly, it seemed. Shiels stood for a while trying to hold open bags here and there, but then she gave it up and retreated to a safe wall, out of the diving, veering, wheeling path. They squawked and squabbled, heckled, pecked, jabbered, screamed, but it was not all madness. They seemed to know what they were about, pecking at the clumps of mess, picking up the wads of crêpe, flying off with them. A mass of crows—a murder—seemed to start a war over some piece of clothing underneath the basketball hoop, but as soon as it started, it was over, with the winner zooming off with the pink, gauzy thing—a tank top? a bra?—in its beak. They pecked their way into the bags that Shiels had already tied shut, but soon she realized it would be all right. Pyke had grasped the essential nature of the problem and had implemented a solution.
They flew off with everything, and it did not take long. Pyke did not reappear, but it was all his doing. He had set his fellows to work . . . just as Shiels had completely failed to mobilize her own.
She found herself leaning against the wall, her back cold on the painted cinder block, watching the window where crows flew in and out like bats. She kept wishing it was just Pyke and her again, the two of them. She pressed herself where Pyke had pressed—placed her hand where his beak had been.
Like probing a tooth that is not sore but is not well either, that’s heading toward a greater awareness of pain.