Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend

by Alan Cumyn

  The boy stared down at his own running shoes, hopelessly inadequate against the ice and snow, before finally raising his eyes again. “You didn’t give me time, Shiels.” His ears were red. He looked like he might blow up, but his voice stayed quiet. “You’re just a tornado. You carry everything in your path, and you don’t stop to think about anyone but yourself.”

  “I’m thinking about Pyke! That boy is close to death. When I saw him on Friday night—” Her fists were balled, her voice filled her neck, oh she wanted to just blast at him!

  But his quietness somehow got through to her. Maybe too it was that Jocelyne was also standing quietly, looking at the both of them.

  “I know he’s in rough shape,” Sheldon said. “You told me. But even if I get a scholarship, college is still going to be expensive. We don’t have a lot put by. I just can’t risk it.”

  Shiels bit her lip. The jab about the tornado—well, of course it was true. That was who she was. That was how she got things done. If Sheldon didn’t love her for that—

  If Sheldon—

  (Sheldon kissed her on the cheek then, unexpectedly, as she was standing. The taxi entered the curving driveway of the school.)

  If Sheldon—

  “I’m going back inside,” Sheldon said. “Sorry.”

  He walked away.

  The taxi smoothed to a stop in front of the girls. The driver kept the engine idling while he lowered the window. Maybe it was too icy for him to get out? “Where to?” he said. He was blurry until Shiels wiped her eyes. Then he was a Middle Eastern man who looked like he had been up all night, driving around, waiting for calls.

  The school door closed, and Sheldon really was gone.

  “I think maybe we don’t need you after all,” Jocelyne Legault said uncomfortably.

  “Yes. Yes we do!” Shiels said suddenly. She opened the door and forced herself inside. To hell with him. To hell with Sheldon. “Haven Heights Hospital!” she said.

  • • •

  A young woman had been hit by a bus. She’d been riding her bicycle in the ice and snow, and obviously the bus driver had assumed no one was out on skinny tires in such weather, and had cut across the poorly designed bike lane. . . . It was a cascading disaster of bad choices, according to the nurse in surgery, who explained this all to Shiels and Jocelyne, presumably because Shiels was, after all, the surgeon’s daughter. The nurse had a blood spot showing on her left elbow, just below her pink short sleeve, and was formidable in a down-to-earth way. Any thoughts Shiels might have had about barging into the operating room to plead with her father one last time to bail out a young pterodactyl melted into the same puddle that was forming on the floor below her soaked yellow shoes.

  “How . . . how long do you suppose he’ll be?” Shiels asked.

  “The leg is broken in four places. It could be hours,” the nurse said. “Do you want me to tell him you’re here?”

  Shiels hesitated, then said no. But where else to go? Time was running out! They needed to just stop for a while and think things through. She and Jocelyne took seats in the small waiting room. A thick-necked man with white curly hairs heading down into his collar sat staring at the floor, his huge hand clasping that of the birdlike woman beside him with a clenched jaw—the parents, presumably, of the cyclist.

  On impulse Shiels leaned over and touched the man on the knee. “You couldn’t have a better surgeon working on her in there,” she said. The man stiffened, and then his eyes narrowed when he saw her face. Her nose.

  “Please take your hand away,” he said coldly.

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  The mother, too, looked at Shiels in alarm.

  “It’s our son,” the man said finally. Jocelyne pulled on Shiels’s arm. But Shiels still didn’t understand . . . until she glimpsed the boy through the partially opened door of exam room A, with her father’s assistant, Kelly Brogue.

  The boy with the bandaged, limp arm that Pyke had slashed and poisoned.

  “Oh!” Shiels felt sick suddenly, roasting from within. “I’m so sorry!”

  “What have you done to your faces?” the mother said to both of them. “Shame on you. You’re supporting that . . . that . . .”

  “Mary—” the father said.

  “That beast attacked our boy!” the mother said. Shiels sat like a statue, unable to move. “We’ll never be able to afford the physical therapy. He can hardly move his fingers now. His muscles are wilted.”

  Jocelyne pulled Shiels to her feet. “We’re terribly sorry, ma’am, sir. We’re just leaving. Please excuse us. Please.”

  The man squinted. “You’re those girls we saw on the video. You were cheering on that damn bird!”

  “I’m sorry!” Shiels sputtered, over and over, on her way out.

  • • •

  Shiels allowed Jocelyne to pull her to the hospital cafeteria. On the way ghostly patients in drab blue gowns wandered by wheeling IV stands, or shuffled with walkers, or looked up from their tilted beds to see who was passing by.

  A menace, that’s who, Shiels thought.

  A young woman cavalierly setting plans into motion with no idea what the actual outcome might be. And for what?

  To salvage her own standing.

  To appear a certain way to others.

  To “win,” whatever that meant.

  What did anything mean?

  At a table, in front of a plate of french fries, her chest constricting, Shiels flipped through the world on her phone. Melanie Mull’s crowdsourcing effort had raised $117 so far. “She’ll never get there,” Shiels said. “And we have to raise money for the Wallin boy, too. For his rehab.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Jocelyne asked quietly.

  She was such a slight girl when she was not outrunning everyone. With her winter coat resting on the chair behind her, she looked like she was twelve.

  She had no trouble downing french fries, though.

  A simple question, but the usual constant flood of answers was not available. The cafeteria was a sorry excuse for a refuge: dismal plastic trays, muted colors, gloom-stricken faces of relatives and friends masticating mediocre food in a windowless prefabricated room trapped in the depths of a massive edifice of illness.

  This felt like the culmination of many things. Shiels hadn’t had to touch that father on the knee and try to say something genuine and human. But she had, just as an instinct, with the best of intentions. She had tried. And even that had gone terribly wrong.

  Why was Shiels doing this?

  “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Shiels said. “I’m not the same person at all since Pyke arrived. I don’t know who I am anymore. I think I love him. Whatever that is. I think I love him profoundly. But I don’t know why. And I know you love him too, I know he is fixated on you. I know I have no right or expectation. I just feel he’s cracking me open, and I can’t do anything about it. I don’t want to. I want to see so much who I might become after all. And I absolutely don’t want to see him suffer and die in prison. I don’t think I could bear it.”

  Jocelyne had left only two french fries on the plate. Shiels ate one of them, Jocelyne took the last. “You scare me,” Jocelyne said. “You always have. Everything is perfect with you, and if it isn’t perfect, you make it so, no matter what.”

  “That’s not who I am. That’s who I used to be. Right now I am out of ideas. I don’t know how to save Pyke.”

  “I used to be afraid of a lot of things,” Jocelyne said. “I was so afraid of losing a race, I would run through my own puke to win. But when Pyke arrived, all that fear just fell away. Now I just run to feel like I’m flying.”

  “Yes.” In her own pokey way that was how Shiels felt too.

  “So we’re sisters, you and me,” Jocelyne said. “We’ll leave it at that. Pyke is big enough for a lot of ways to love him.” She checked her phone. Her eyes flattened in disappointment.

  “What?”

  “The fund is at $243. They’re never going to get
there.”

  Shiels took out her parents’ credit card and tapped it, nervously, on the table.

  XXV

  “The movement spreads like a virus,” Lorraine Miens had written in Animal Man. “It doesn’t even have to be a good idea, it just has to be infectious. We are built to mimic our neighbors—to covet their lawns, their cars, their hula hoops. One in a million of us sees the world fresh; the rest watch with cow eyes and then copy as if our lives depend upon it.”

  And an infusion of cash usually doesn’t hurt to start the ball rolling. Anonymously—she needed to buy the time from her parents’ wrath—Shiels sent a good round number, ten thousand dollars, which she would pay back in February. Her parents would forgive her. Maybe. Possibly. Shiels imagined Melanie Mull staring at her screen in shock when the huge donation came in. Minutes later Melanie purpled her own nose and sent round a selfie with news of the groundswell. By the time Shiels and Jocelyne were heading back to Vista View in a taxi, the Free Pyke crowdsourcing fund was at more than twelve thousand dollars. And the number kept climbing as the pictures rolled in from across the city and all over—kids, mostly, sending in a few dollars and purpling their own noses now with markers, with paint, some even getting themselves tattooed.

  He’s the sexiest pterodactyl high school student ever, one girl wrote from somewhere. We can’t let him die in jail just because of some stupid football game.

  The fund hit seventeen thousand dollars as the taxi was pulling into the school drive. A dark-skinned boy painted his nose white. Just because he has wings doesn’t mean he can’t be real! the boy wrote. That issue became an odd part of the debate. A whole contingent of people sent in money apparently to prove that Pyke really did exist, because another contingent insisted he was a hoax and that people were investing in a fiction.

  He is not the Loch Ness monster, Melanie Mull wrote. He is not the yeti or the Sasquatch. His name is Pyke, and he will die soon if you do not help!

  It was twenty-two thousand dollars as Shiels and Jocelyne pushed through the large front door of the school. A handful of students were sporting purple noses—no, more than that, everywhere Shiels looked she saw dark noses.

  Don’t just color yourself in! Melanie Mull wrote. Five dollars will save a unique life, so do it!

  Jonathan glided by on his longboard, his nose darker than Shiels’s. Even Sheldon had joined in. Shiels saw him by his locker, looking stupidly at Rachel Wyngate. They were sporting couples’ purple noses. How much had they given? After Sheldon had pulled out of his agreement with Shiels?

  “Can you believe this?” Shiels said to Jocelyne.

  The fund hit forty-eight thousand dollars by the start of the first afternoon class.

  • • •

  What was the feeling all through Postlethwaite’s distracted discussion about the decline of literature in the digital age? We don’t read the same on-screen, he was trying to say; we flit about following one idea and the next, using a residue of brainpower while the rest of our minds anticipates or yearns for the next fillip of entertainment. No one knew the word “fillip” except for Shiels, who did not raise her hand. She quietly felt as if one flick of the finger from Melanie Mull, and her insides would shatter into fragments.

  Why so suddenly brittle? It was her ten thousand dollars—her parents’—at just the right moment that had given the fund liftoff. Yet all anyone could talk about was what Melanie Mull was doing, what she was achieving in the fight for Pyke.

  But no, it wasn’t simply Melanie Mull having usurped her—effortlessly, it seemed—as the prime mover in the Vista View galaxy. Shiels would be graduating in a matter of months; it was (theoretically) good to know someone was poised to fill her shoes.

  How quickly Shiels felt left behind in the pull of events. That was it. She had marshaled significant forces, but in an instant it was all beyond her. Melanie Mull’s movement was going to free Pyke—what was left of Pyke to free—if not in the next few hours, then soon. Pyke would not stay with the Kranes for rehab. Despite all her donated parental money, he would go wherever Melanie Mull wanted, that much was clear.

  Shiels would not be near him.

  That was the thing, she realized as she sat taking in nothing of what Postlethwaite was saying. (Her pen dashed notes quite independent of her brain.) Some important part of her had been longing to be close to Pyke, day in and day out. To be at his bedside in the morning with hot tea (if that was what he wanted). To sit with him at night while he rested and healed—perhaps reading to him excerpts from the works of Lorraine Miens. How much would he care about or even understand? Somehow she felt it would be enough for him to hear the sound of her voice. It would be enough for her to sit close by, to wipe his brow, change his dressings. (Would he have dressings? Would they need changing?) To soak up his energy.

  He had energy. He radiated. She had quietly been hoping to have him to herself for a time, and now she knew it wouldn’t happen.

  Why hadn’t Shiels tried crowdsourcing herself? She knew that if she had asked kids to purple their noses for Pyke, she would have been the butt of countless jokes. But Melanie Mull was making the most of the money that came in. She was purpling noses all over the place, using Shiels and Jocelyne as examples, and people couldn’t join in fast enough.

  • • •

  At dinner that night Jonathan could barely stay seated. “You should’ve seen it! You should’ve seen it! One minute she had two dollars in there. Then suddenly everybody was doing their noses. There was, like, one purple marker in the whole school, but it got passed around.”

  Shiels’s mother shuddered, possibly at the gross lack of hygiene.

  “There was a big donation,” Shiels said carefully, chewing her bean salad.

  “No, it was everybody!” Jonathan said. “Kids everywhere sending in a couple of dollars.”

  “What donation?” Shiels’s mother asked sharply.

  “I just heard it was large,” Shiels said in a neutral tone. “Maybe some thousands of dollars. I heard it made a big difference.”

  “But you weren’t behind this stunt,” her father said. He was leaning forward in his chair, paying too much attention.

  “It was all Melanie!” Jonathan said.

  Shiels chewed quietly. She wondered: Is this what they call soft power? Achieving results without leaving fingerprints?

  She was good at this at least, she thought. At starting things off.

  Her mother was staring at her. This was all going to explode as soon as the credit card bill came due.

  But hopefully Pyke would be free by then. And still alive.

  “It was mostly Melanie,” Shiels said quietly. “And everybody else who chipped in. Amazing to watch, really.”

  She chewed, chewed, had a drink of lemon water.

  “How great that you didn’t have to be involved,” her mother said finally.

  • • •

  In bed that night, in her sleep, Shiels found herself wandering a dark cobblestone alley. The water was dripping down rock walls, soaking and chilling her bare feet, which had outgrown her boots. She had to keep an eye on every footfall. The stones were rounded and slippery, and she had to grip with her toes. It was like being blind. She ran her right hand along the wet rock wall, which was just as soaked as the cobblestone but rougher. It hadn’t had thousands of years of feet wearing its surface smooth.

  Soon she would look up, and see what cross street she’d arrived at. She would know where to go.

  Wings would be nice, she thought. Wings would let me straight out of this state.

  It might be one of those obsidian-black nights when the stars pricked the velvet by the billions. She’d heard about those nights, had seen the photos on nature programs.

  But for now she was feeling her way along.

  • • •

  In the morning: sun. More glorious than had been seen in many days. Light sparkled off the new snow like a prettied-up calendar photograph, and Pyke was at the door, unexpectedly.

/>   Shiels had wandered into the front room, breakfast toast in hand, to look at the snow on the windowsill in the eastern light, when the doorbell rang and there he was, standing on his own, wrapped in a cloak of sorts, with galoshes on—galumphing brown curiosities keeping his toes from the ice. His eyes shone as ever, but he looked wilted beneath his cloak, and at first Shiels saw no one else, only him.

  He wore a strange, fluorescent synthetic thing—it looked like a security bracelet that had been modified to fit around his neck.

  Melanie Mull stood behind him, her nose still purple, her hands out as if he might fall, and some paces behind her stood Jocelyne Legault—was her nose even more beak-like?—looking concerned. And on the drive was a police cruiser, with Inspector Brady slouching by the open door. He didn’t look like he was going to approach.

  No photographers, no reporters. Somehow the media had been duped.

  “We sprung him early this morning,” Melanie said. “He’s eighteen, legally responsible. He asked for you. I hope that’s all right.”

  Shiels’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. For a moment her teeth felt unnaturally sharp; her tongue faltered in forming words.

  “He’s not allowed to leave your house,” Melanie said, “except for court dates and such. That’s a locator ring that can’t be taken off. Your parents are doctors, right? They said they would take care of him?”

  Pyke was trembling in the cold; Shiels felt like she should engulf him in an embrace, but could not make herself move.

  “You’re going to have to say something, Shiels,” Melanie Mull said.

  “He asked for me?” Shiels blurted finally.

  “Yes.”

  Melanie Mull was going to make a tremendous student-body chair. Shiels could see it all clearly. The example of the younger woman helped her regain a semblance of balance. “When the bail is returned,” Shiels said, “when Pyke is freed for good, that money needs to go to the Wallin boy who hurt his arm. For rehab, for whatever he needs. Understood?”

  XXVI

  So Shiels did get to carry the pterodactyl-boy up the stairs in her arms. She was alone in the house. Both her parents had left for work, and Jonathan was already on his way to school. She had been thinking of perhaps just taking the morning off anyway. She worked so hard, normally. School could wait.