by Alan Cumyn
Where’d u have to shove yur gob to purple it up like that?
Her laptop fumed with the fallout.
Wrangle dance with him all u want. Yur just acting like slutshit!
Shiels sat on her bed with her knees drawn up, holding herself. Trying not to shake.
One brief text from Sheldon: Sewer vermin? Lizard brains?????
When she texted him back, he did not respond. When she called him, she didn’t even get his service. It just rang and rang for nothing.
Her mother knocked softly on the door, and when Shiels did not answer, she let herself in carrying a hot mug of cocoa and an oatmeal cookie.
“You’re working so hard these days.” Her mother put the tray beside Shiels and sat on the edge of the bed. “Taking a break for a moment?”
Shiels’s face felt as gray as a wrinkled sky.
“I wanted to follow up on our conversation from a few days ago, before all the . . . pterodactyl business,” her mother said. “I have made an appointment for you to see Dr. Russell—”
“There’s no need,” Shiels said, keeping her eyes down.
“There’s no need . . . you have made your own arrangements, or there’s no need—”
“There’s no need,” Shiels said slowly.
“I see. Well, as you know—” What was it in Shiels’s eye that made her mother stop talking, swallow slowly, shift gears? “Well, then. I also wanted to remind you about the Stockard application. I don’t want to nag or anything, but it’s due in a matter of weeks. I have heard that they look more favorably on the early applicants. Joan Lumley, who is on their board of directors, said this to me recently. You have met Dr. Lumley before?”
Shiels’s mother was chewing her lower lip, just the corner. Holding back. Shiels had a vague sense of Dr. Lumley standing eagle-eyed on three-inch heels at one of her parents’ parties.
“I know you will do a fabulous job on the application. Stockard is small and elite, but with your record I think you’re a lock, although you will have to apply yourself once you’re there. They have a phenomenal record of placing people at Johns Hopkins. I know you might prefer Harvard, but if you look at the research possibilities now at Johns Hopkins—”
If Shiels did not say anything, her mother would just keep talking.
So Shiels said, “Stockard sounds good.”
“I’d be happy to look over your draft. Your father as well. The essay is key. A lot of people don’t have your . . . experience and interesting take on life. Maybe . . . maybe Sheldon could help you with the writing? I mean just to get your thoughts together? He is good with words.”
The dam held, somehow, a last membrane behind Shiels’s welling eyes. “Sure,” she said.
It was a war, practically, to keep important things from her mother. Shiels had to change the subject. So she said, “Walloping Wallin,” and forced a smile. “It’s going to be great, don’t you think?”
“I saw the pterodactyl,” her mother said. “We all did. That’s lovely that he plays a sport.” She squeezed her daughter’s shoulder. “But you, you must focus on what’s important. That’s the challenge now. There will be time for all kinds of fun and games after your applications are done!”
• • •
The next morning Shiels was back on the track in her yellow shoes. Earlier than before because sleep had not visited, not at two a.m., not at four, not at five thirty.
Not a disaster. She needed to stay conscious. To think it all out in tighter and tighter circles, like Pyke flying around the track while Jocelyne Legault churned out her countless laps.
Her mother had said to focus on what’s important. Not football. But maybe not applications, either. Shiels’s spinning thoughts kept coming back to this essential truth: Jocelyne was Pyke’s real girlfriend. He’d been smitten with her from the beginning. Everyone knew that. He might have wrangle danced with Shiels, but his wings flapped for just one girl. And who knew, really, why his crest had turned? Maybe it was just his age—pterodactyl puberty or something. He had wrangle danced with both Shiels and Jocelyne. Maybe both of them had set him off.
Yet Shiels donned her yellow shoes before sunrise and settled into her steady, reliable low gear around and around the track. Cool air, blue-gray skies. Almost foggy. The crows were out again to watch her. Should they not be escaping south for the winter? Did crows escape south? Why not? Ugly weather was coming. Bitter winds, frozen ground, snow upon ice upon more snow. Months and months of it.
The dictator of the Anti-Paparazzi Foreign Student Protocol settled into a chugging, quiet rhythm. Small steps, arms pumping, breaths regular. This was the stride her shoes wanted her to take. Slowly, slowly . . . just keep running.
Why had Pyke not yet come to watch her? She was in full view of his spies, wearing her yellow shoes (he had practically commanded her to wear them). Running.
Learning how to run.
She needed him to seek her out.
She had engineered him a role in Walloping Wallin.
She was doing everything right, as far as she could see. And yet . . . And yet . . .
Sheldon was gone.
There was no loyalty left amongst her team.
The students hated her.
Stride, stride, breathe, stride . . .
Maybe . . . they were right.
Maybe . . . she had no legitimacy left. Maybe she’d never had any. Who was she fooling? She was not going to get into Chesford to study with Lorraine Miens. Not as an undergrad. Maybe not as a grad, either. She couldn’t even write an Anti-Paparazzi Foreign Student Protocol without landing a ton of crowshit on her head.
Where was Sheldon when she needed him?
She rounded the bend at the north end of the track, and Sheldon was not there—she had no right to expect him to be—but suddenly Pyke was. He landed so abruptly, with so little grace, she felt the fear jolt through her the way a field mouse must experience the instant before the grasp of a hawk.
“Crowshit!” she said, because that word was on her mind.
He was standing just a few paces away, his wings opening and closing, looking huge, as if he might take off again any moment.
He stared at her now, visually pulled her to him. Lowered his beak as if he might use it.
For what?
“You came to see me,” she said.
Again, a certain heat surrounded him. It wasn’t just the running. She felt so close to him. How far had he flown just to be with her? She put her hand on his heaving, purple hide. It just felt like the thing to do. She remembered now the moment of first touching him in the wrangle dance—not just a video memory, but a real one. This pulsing through her body. Boiling her oil.
“Run you,” he said—a whisper, really. He wasn’t learning much English, despite the classes he sat through day after day.
Maybe he didn’t need it. He seemed to have a whole other way to communicate.
Where . . . where to kiss along the beak? Is that what pterodactyls do?
The crows started to clamor then. Shiels was going to ignore them—who ever paid attention to crows?
Pyke snapped around. It was a miracle Shiels was not disemboweled by the slashing beak.
Shiels strained to see . . . Jocelyne Legault arriving at the track in her warm-up gear, an athletic bag on her shoulder. Her nose so dark, like Shiels’s. She carried her shoes.
Her yellow shoes.
Jocelyne stopped when she saw Pyke, the two of them. What are they doing? she must’ve been thinking. Pyke and the new girl.
The new girl with the purple nose wearing yellow shoes too.
On Jocelyne Legault’s track.
“I better . . . I have to get going,” Shiels said to the pterodactyl. And she started running—clip-clip, clip-clip—in her slow way. It was just down the home stretch. It had to be toward Jocelyne Legault.
That was where the only exit was.
But by the time she got there, Jocelyne had already pulled on her own shoes and taken off around the be
nd. Uncatchable.
Unstoppable.
Shiels had no idea what she might want to say to Jocelyne Legault anyway.
“I love Sheldon but I covet your boyfriend too.”
“I can’t describe what he does to me.”
“I’m like this river that cannot stay within its own sensible banks.”
• • •
Already waiting at the school when Shiels arrived to begin her academic day was the real paparazzi—news vans, photographers, journalists with video cameras, staking out the front doors of the school. Shiels wanted to charge into them (that instinct reared its head whenever Pyke was concerned), but she held back. Had her own foolishly worded protocol summoned the press, unwittingly leaked the news of Vista View’s most extraordinary student?
Unlikely. Those non–Vista Viewers yesterday had already found out about Pyke. The wonder was that the school had been able to keep a lid on so far. And this scrum . . . was not her responsibility. Manniberg was already holding court, looking grim and leader-like in his overcoat and not letting anybody in. Shiels kept her distance but could hear clearly.
“I have a duty to protect the privacy and person of every student under my care,” he said. “There can be no photographs, no interviews, no video shot without permission, and the student in question has not granted that—”
“Is he playing in the football game, Principal Manniberg?” a woman yelled, leaning in with her microphone.
“Those decisions are Coach’s responsibility,” Manniberg said. “What we are most concerned with here at Vista View is providing safe, challenging, appropriate education for every student who—”
“Is it true that he’s a pterodactyl?” another reporter asked. “Where does he come from? Have paleontologists been alerted?”
“Vista View is a school, not a circus,” Manniberg said smoothly. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“We’ve heard reports that some of the girls of the school have been sexually marked by the pterodactyl—”
Shiels turned and headed for the side entrance, her face down. They needed to bar the doors, call the police!
But it wasn’t her responsibility. She’d already authored the APFSP. Manniberg had gotten the drift and knew his lines. Maybe they should call in the National Guard!
Or maybe it wouldn’t be such a big thing. It hadn’t taken long for most of the Vista View students to get used to having Pyke around. Maybe the whole world was going to fall in love with him too.
Maybe Shiels didn’t have a lot of time.
• • •
But, with the world slowly turning its eyes, with the press at the door, hungry, how to think about anything else? Pyke had not shown up for practice yet. The football team was in disarray. Was he going to play or not? How would they do it? Where was he now? He seemed to drop into classes only occasionally, a period of urban geography, a session in Spanish (which he seemed to speak better than English, although that was not saying very much).
Pyke is a game-day performer, Shiels posted on Vhub, to try to calm people down. He didn’t even show up for the sound check at Autumn Whirl. But everybody knows . . . he sure came to play!
U 2! some troll wrote back. U played wrangle dance till ur nose turned blak!
She didn’t look at any other comments.
Another issue of the Leghorn Review was due soon, and Shiels was dreading it. Normally she and Sheldon would’ve been watermashing the topics all week—texting, emailing, calling, gabbing. They would have already hashed out something on People Who Text Too Much, and Why Watching Music Videos without Sound Should Become an Olympic Sport, and on Seven Unusual Facts about Sober Dating. They would have talked it out. And then in the stuffy control room off the library, they would have sat together and pounded out the articles, concocted the graphics, mixed the music.
Until now it had always been a Shiels-Sheldon coproduction.
And the new issue was supposed to go live in a matter of hours.
Hours!
Life seemed to be conspiring. Shiels’s stomach felt wobbly. Her palms itched. Her scalp seemed to channel a rogue electric current, not strong enough to burn, not weak enough to ignore.
Her breath felt like it was going in her nose and then directly out of her mouth, missing her lungs; her chest was too tight to let in fresh air.
There was Sheldon now, walking away from Gendered Society. Talking with Rachel Wyngate. Again! So tall and leggy. Her forearms permanently red from volleyball. Shiels picked them out with her gaze across the whole length of the eastern corridor. A moment later Sheldon turned, as if he could feel in his cells that she was watching him.
A naked stare. She would not look away. Not this time. Even across that riotously populated hallway, that stupid distance, she saw the hurt still in his eyes. Then Rachel Wyngate turned to see what—who—Sheldon was looking at. And others, too, turned to look.
Though not at Shiels. The commotion was behind her. The fire doors opened. Shiels, too, turned. Pyke burst through, tottering as he walked, leaning upright with Jocelyne Legault beside him and the usual mob trailing them both. Pyke halted when he saw Shiels. He stretched his wings so that Jocelyne had to step away. He waggled his crest at Shiels, and made low squawking noises. He hop-hipped toward her.
“Stop it,” Shiels said, but without conviction. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”
He waved his beak. His shriek sent a roar of approval from the crowd up and down the hall.
“That’s too loud. That’s not appropriate,” Shiels said, too softly to be heard.
Pyke circled, he warbled. Where was Jocelyne? Standing back. Watching the display. Where was Sheldon? Sheldon should step between them. Knock the pterodactyl flat on his back and say—
What could he say? Nothing. He wasn’t there anymore, and neither was Rachel Wyngate.
It was Jocelyne who said, “Pyke,” in her quiet, cutting voice. Who yanked that bird back by his invisible leash. “Go to class.”
The pterodactyl slunk away. Leaving the two purple noses to face each other. With about eighty onlookers still crowded in.
“This is no one’s business but ours,” Jocelyne said in a voice taut enough to hold an ocean liner stiff to a dockside. When Shiels added a glare, the other students melted off.
“He can’t help himself,” Jocelyne said finally. But you can, her eyes were saying.
“I have no interest in a freshman,” Shiels said. What a relief to hear her own voice, more or less normal-sounding, to have a sense that her life was not over. (Her life as herself, Shiels Krane, the self she had built so consciously over the years and thought she knew so well.) “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not out to steal Pyke. We need him for Wallin. Why isn’t he going to practice? Tell him he needs to go.”
Those shallow blue eyes. Jocelyne Legault would never have thought of Pyke for the football team. She had no ambition for her boyfriend. Forgive me for seeing the big picture, Shiels thought.
Forgive me for not being like everybody else.
Jocelyne shook her head in tiny, jiggly movements, as if her neck were a spring. “They can’t practice on the field. Everyone’s watching. So they’re doing it in secret in the gym. Behind closed doors.”
“And Pyke is actually showing up?” Shiels said.
“He will,” Jocelyne said. Her eyes narrowed. She was staring at Shiels’s shoes, brighter even than her own. “Why are you . . . Why are you running?”
“I just want to get in shape,” Shiels said. “Don’t worry. I just like to jog around. And,” she repeated, “I’m not after Pyke. My nose to the contrary, he doesn’t affect me the way he seems to affect everyone else. You can have him as long as you like.”
Shiels felt the corner of her mouth turn into a little smile. A trace of fear passed Jocelyne Legault’s eyes, like the brief shadow of a bird flying overhead. “Really,” Shiels said then, and touched the other girl’s arm lightly.
It wasn’t a lie. Was it? It felt perfectly tr
ue in this moment. “We all have the will and means to reshape reality,” Lorraine Miens had said. Shiels was just thinking of the good of the school. Wasn’t she?
• • •
Then, later, there was Sheldon already sitting in the office off the library, in their little space, working away on the Leghorn Review. Shiels had the door key in her hand when she gazed through the glass and saw him in his dingy blue cable-knit sweater—his holey garment, he called it, because of the patches—his rounded shoulders leaning toward the monitor, his jaw thrust forward, fingers dancing across the keyboard. Composing. The words flying on-screen. If she opened the door, she would distract him. She wondered if she should walk away, let Sheldon have Leghorn.
Clearly he could do it himself. She was prepared to do it all by herself as well, and she knew his Leghorn would be miles ahead of hers. He was the writer. She was the . . . facilitator.
Those fingers were flashing. Facilitating just fine without her.
She pushed open the door anyway. He turned, startled out of his thought. She could see in his kind eyes—his dear, gray, lovely eyes—that he’d been far away for a moment, even in the middle of something funny, and that the something evaporated the moment he saw her.
No, no, not precisely. The moment he saw her, his eyes lit more, but then something seemed to leak out of him, obviously with the realization, the memory, of where they were now, who they had become.
“We don’t have much time,” Shiels said, just to say something, to get them past the awkwardness. She took her seat beside him. They could do this. “What are you writing on?”
His fingers were still poised above the keyboard. “I’ve been horsing around with flying dreams. Ever since Pyke got here, I’ve been having them. I have this sense of lifting off, floating above the ground with every step, like I’m walking but not walking. It turns into flying, only it feels completely normal. Like walking on the moon, maybe.”
“It’s running for me,” Shiels said. “In my dreams. Same as you.” She hesitated. Were they really talking like this, as if everything were normal? “It turns into flying. But often I’m naked, except for my yellow shoes.”
“Really?” Sheldon glanced down at those shoes, his fingers tapping something out.