Wild Bird

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Dax is already blindfolded.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  The truck is fired up. Rumbling.

  Mr. Gorgeous is looking at me. Waiting. “Campsite locations are secret,” he explains. His eyes are jewels, deep, clear, hypnotizing.

  “I hate you!” I tell Michelle.

  And then she wraps me in darkness.

  I’m blindfolded for what feels like an hour, jostled around on a dirt road, breathing in dust, feeling like I’m on a sketchy version of Disneyland’s Raiders of the Lost Ark ride. Like in another turn we might go crashing down a mountain.

  Then I remind myself.

  We’re in the desert.

  The flat, ugly desert.

  So why does it feel like we’re going uphill? Doing switchbacks? Teetering on the edge of the earth?

  “How much longer?” I ask. I sound so pathetic, but I’m hating every bump and turn and not being able to see.

  “Remember the rules we went over?” Michelle asks. “We don’t discuss the future.”

  “It’s not the future. I just have to pee!”

  The driver laughs. “Right out of the Rabbit playbook.”

  I can’t see him, so, gorgeous or not, I hate him now, too. “You’re a terrible driver!” I tell him.

  He laughs again. “You want me to slow down?”

  I sink deeper into my seat and shut up, but there’s an angry beehive buzzing in my head, and the longer I sit in the dark, the more I poke at it. One thought flies into another, swarming around until I want to attack everyone and everything. My mother, my sister, my father, my so-called friends, my school, these hippie-dippie shrub huggers and their dilapidated truck.

  Then we come to a stop.

  I go to take my blindfold off, but Michelle grabs my hand. “Not until I tell you.”

  “We here?” Dax asks from the backseat.

  “Wren is,” John tells him. “You’ve got a little ways to go.”

  “Fabulous,” he says like he’s spitting nails. Then, as Michelle’s leading me out of the truck, he calls, “Bye-bye, birdie. Be a good little chickadee!”

  I tell him to shut up in a way that will have consequences in the field.

  After the truck drives off, John’s voice says, “We’ve got your pack.”

  “Michelle?” I ask, feeling weirdly panicked.

  “Right here,” she says. “Nash is with Snakes. John and I are with Grizzlies.” She grabs my arm. “Let’s go.”

  “Why do I still have to wear this blindfold?”

  “We do it to minimize runners.”

  “Runners?”

  “If you don’t know how to get out of here, you’re less likely to run away.” She pulls me along. “We don’t exactly lock you up, you know.”

  “Unless you call five hundred square miles of land being locked up,” John adds.

  Five hundred square miles.

  Five hundred square miles of sand and scrub and wind. Because what I’m feeling is not a breeze. I can actually hear it howling.

  I stumble along, blind, linked to Michelle by the arm, thinking that walking the plank for some cutthroat pirates would be better than walking across Utah for these guys.

  I picture the Peter Pan ride. Flying through the air with my brother next to me, shouting, “There he is! There’s Captain Hook!” as we sail through the dark.

  Mowgli loves the Peter Pan ride.

  Suddenly we stop, and Michelle grabs my shoulders and turns me. And turns me again. Like I’m seven and about to pin the tail on the stupid donkey.

  Finally she takes off my blindfold. “Okay,” she says with a big gust of air. Like she’s the one relieved. “Welcome to the field. Time to start carrying your own supplies.”

  John hands over my tarp pack and helps me wrestle into it. I notice right off that the earth around us is different. It’s not flat—we’re walking between two sandy cliffs, maybe thirty feet tall—and the dirt is a pale orange.

  John sees me looking around. “The cliffs are made of sandstone,” he says. “And what we’re walking in here is called an arroyo. Also known as a wash.”

  Michelle adds, “Flash floods can tear through here, but we’re not in danger at the moment.” She eyes the sky, which is the color of steel. “Although we are supposed to get some rain tonight.”

  The plants are bigger, too. There are even some that might’ve grown into actual trees if they weren’t trapped in the desert. We walk by a small grove of them and they smell like pine, but…not. And they’re not pines because they have berries. Berries that look like hard gray peas.

  “Those are junipers,” John tells me.

  Like I care? I want to tell him to shut up and quit watching me.

  I put my head down and keep walking so he won’t see me noticing anything else, but he still has plenty to say. “You’re in Paiute country,” he tells me.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, and I don’t care. I just keep my head down and hike, feeling the seat belt straps cutting into my shoulders, wondering when this nightmare of a day will finally be over.

  But can the shrub hugger take a hint?

  No.

  He starts spewing random facts about junipers. How the “Paiute” used them for everything. The bark for roofing and weaving, the wood for building and fuel, the berries for food and fighting asthma, the twigs for coughs and colds…

  Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  When he finally takes a breath, I ask, “How much farther?”

  At the same time, John and Michelle sing out, “Are we there yet?” and laugh.

  “You’re hilarious,” I tell them. “And what’s the deal with not talking about the future? Aren’t we supposed to plan for the future? Isn’t the future what everyone’s all about?”

  Neither of them says anything.

  “Why can’t you just tell me how far I have to hike? I’m dying, you know that? It has been a really long, awful day.”

  They don’t say anything for about twenty steps, and finally Michelle sighs and says, “I know it has, and you’re doing really great.”

  “I am not. I’m dying.”

  We keep hiking.

  Even more than a toke or a drink, I’m jonesing for my phone. Jonesing bad. “Can you at least tell me what time it is? I hate not knowing what time it is.”

  Michelle looks at the sky and finds the sun, glowing behind the steel sheet of clouds. “Around six. Maybe six-fifteen.”

  “Sunset’s around eight,” John says. “But I think we might get that rain before then.”

  “Yup,” Michelle says. She looks at me. “You’re going to want to get your tarp up before it starts. We probably should pick up the pace.”

  “Pick up the pace?” I practically break down crying. “Noooooo.”

  “No fun sleeping in a wet bag,” John says.

  I trudge along, exhausted and hungry and hurting, thinking, My parents got suckered.

  Suckered bad.

  “Gullible,” Meadow had said. “Parents are so gullible.”

  She meant hers, too.

  Actually, she meant every parent she’d ever conned, even the ones who were teachers. Although with teachers it was harder. “You can only use the puppy-dog eyes and beg for understanding so many times before a teacher’s onto you,” she’d explained once when we were having a quick blaze in a Wing-7 bathroom. I was still in sixth grade, but Meadow insisted on rotating bathrooms from her wing to mine, dodging kids who might narc if they knew where to find us. “What you’ve got going for you with parents,” she said, “is that they want to believe.”

  And she was right.

  The proof started one night at dinner when Anabella looked at me across the table and said, “Are you really hanging out with that girl Meadow?”

  It was only a few days before winter break, and Meadow had been on me to spend nights at her house, but I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen. There was no way my mom would let me spend the night at someone’s house if s
he hadn’t met them.

  And I sure didn’t want her to meet Meadow.

  “Her name’s Meadow?” my mom asked, perking up.

  “She’s a seventh grader,” I said. “We met in the Commiserating Club.”

  My mother gave me a confused look, so Anabella explained. “Their names?”

  My father studied me. “You’re still grousing about your name? So it’s a little different. So what? It makes you unique.”

  “I’m in middle school now, Dad.” I looked back and forth between my parents. “Did you two ever think past the nest phase of my life?”

  Mom completely glossed over her responsibility in the naming thing and said, “Well, I’ll bet Meadow is a unique individual.”

  Anabella snorted.

  In a prim and proper ladylike manner, of course.

  “What’s wrong with her?” my mother asked, zeroing in on Anabella.

  “She looks…” My perfect sister gazed at the ceiling, searching for the perfect word, then shot her perfect diction directly at me. “A bit trashy.” She took a bite of Panda Express chow mein noodles. “And that’s being charitable.”

  “She is not trashy!”

  “Can you say eyeliner, hello?”

  “Eyeliner?” my mother gasped.

  I leaned in and frowned. “She’s a seventh grader, Mom! Kids wear makeup in middle school.”

  Anabella was quick to cut in. “I don’t. And neither do my friends.”

  I gave her a sneer. “Well, goody for you.”

  My mother was really looking at me now, studying me. “Do you wear makeup?”

  “No!” It was almost the truth. The two times Meadow had pushed her black pencil on me, I’d put on a little but worried the rest of the day that I might run into Anabella in the quad. My sister didn’t seem to notice if I was eating alone or looking lost or lonely, but she’d sure notice a little smudge of black around my eyes. After I told the almost-truth, I blurted, “And Meadow is really nice! And makes time to talk to me—” I glared at my sister “—which is more than I can say about some people.”

  “What is going on?” My mother raised her eyebrows at Anabella and me. “Are you two okay?”

  “We’re fine,” we both muttered.

  I kept my head down and ate orange chicken until my mother said, “Why don’t you invite her over sometime?”

  I quit chewing. Yes, she was looking at me. “Meadow?”

  “Of course.”

  I tried to smile. “Sure, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course it’s okay,” Mom gushed. “Where does she live?”

  “I have no idea.” That was all truth.

  “Well, it can’t be too far. How about this weekend? We could pick her up.”

  I frowned. “You might want to stop making playdates for me, Mom. I’m in middle school.”

  Mom frowned too. But it was a confused frown. Like she wasn’t sure what to do.

  Then my father gave me one of his dissecting looks. “Or maybe you don’t want us to meet her?”

  Anabella did a subsonic snort and I just couldn’t take it. “Quit judging!” I snapped at her. “You don’t even know her!”

  She gave me a wicked-queen smile. “So bring her over.”

  “Is she nice?” my brother asked.

  His little first-grader voice was so innocent and sweet, I just wanted to wrap him in a bear hug. “Yes,” I said. “She’s very nice.”

  “Will she play Jungle Book?”

  “Maybe. I could ask.”

  “I get to be Mowgli,” he said.

  “You always are,” I told him with a smile.

  “And you be Baloo!”

  I kept smiling. “Of course.”

  He wiggled in his seat a little. “So bring her over!”

  Anabella smirked. “Yeah. Bring her over. She could play Kaa.”

  I slammed down my fork. “You’re the snake, not her!”

  “Girls!” Mom cried, looking at us like we were strangers.

  My face was flushed hot, but I tried to stay cool, telling my mother, “I’ll ask Meadow if she wants to visit.”

  It was a lie. There was no way I could have Meadow over. One look at her and my parents would freak out. But I did tell Meadow about it at school the next day—not asking, just telling—and then she went and said, “Perfect! Once they get to know me, they’ll trust you to hang at my house. I’ve got this. I’ve totally got this!”

  “No! I—”

  “Trust me, Wren. I know how to work this!”

  The whole thing made me really nervous. But she showed up at our house on Saturday with her hair tied back in a bow, riding a bicycle with a lidded basket in front that had a cat latched inside it. She had little pearl earrings in, and there wasn’t a trace of makeup.

  My brother went nuts for the cat, my mother went nuts for her and actually let her play her precious piano—an heirloom most people don’t get to touch.

  Even Anabella broke down and admitted she was wrong. “I don’t think that’s the person I was thinking it was,” she whispered to me.

  Meadow stayed for three hours, using lots of pleases and thank-yous, and when she left, she told my mom, “Thanks so much for inviting me over to your beautiful home, Mrs. Clemmens. I had a wonderful time!”

  Outside, she got on her bike and waved back at the house like she was starring in some fifties movie. Then she gave me a wicked grin and pushed off, whispering, “We are going to have the best winter break ever!”

  She wasn’t lying.

  The walk along the bone-dry arroyo goes on forever. I’m hot. Sweating. Little flies buzz around my head. My pack must weigh fifty pounds. I keep stopping to drink from the canteen they gave me, until Michelle warns, “That’s your ration of clear water for the week.”

  “For the week?” It’s a big canteen, but not enough for a week. And there’s another empty one wrapped up inside my big blue tarp—why didn’t we fill both of them?

  I’m about to ask when she says, “You’ll be purifying local sources for most of your water needs.” She gives me a stern look. “My advice is save that for when you need good-tasting water.”

  “I need it now!”

  She shrugs and keeps moving. “Use as you see fit.”

  Her attitude makes me mad. Like she doesn’t care if I’m dying of thirst or if I run out of water. So I ignore her and take a drink. And another. And another.

  Michelle and John both know what I’m doing, but neither of them says a thing or even raises an eyebrow. They just keep walking.

  “Do you remember the achievement levels?” Michelle asks me.

  “You mean that I’m a Rabbit?” I ask back.

  “Right. So Rabbits are kept separate from the students on other levels.”

  “We’re called students?”

  She shrugs. “Campers seems to misrepresent a bit.”

  “So does students,” I grumble. “Just get real and call us inmates.”

  From behind me, John says, “Guess you’ve never been to jail.”

  I look back at him. “Have you?”

  He just smiles.

  “Oh, great,” I cry.

  My parents are definitely idiots. Gullible idiots. Ones who don’t think twice about sending their daughter off with convicts.

  “Back to achievement levels,” Michelle says. “Once you’re able to do certain tasks, you’ll be moved up to Coyote and can work with the other girls. Until then, the Grizzlies won’t be interacting with you, and that includes talking.”

  Sounds like starting middle school all over again. Not that I care. The only thing I want—the only thing—is to collapse somewhere and be left alone. My head aches, my feet are killing me, and I feel like I’ve got a big, sweaty boulder strapped to my back.

  “You got that?” John asks.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “The other thing,” Michelle says, “is counting. If you’re going to use the latrine and don’t want someone watching over you, you need to count so we
can hear you.”

  I perk up a little. “There’ll be a bathroom?”

  John laughs. “Metaphorically speaking.”

  “It’s a hole,” Michelle explains. “Dug by the girls.”

  “And when you use it,” John says, “you count until you return to camp.”

  “You can sing instead,” Michelle says.

  “Or tell a story,” John adds. “Anything loud enough for us to hear.”

  “But why?”

  Michelle trudges on. “So we know you’re not running off. Once you advance to Coyote, you can stop counting.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “A few days? A week? Depends on you.”

  “So for the next maybe week, I’ve got to count out loud every time I have to go? What if I get…you know…constipated?”

  John chuckles. “It happens. You keep counting.”

  “This is a nightmare,” I mutter.

  We keep trudging along, and just when I’m sure I’m going to keel over dead, we cut out of the arroyo and go through a grove of junipers. The path is narrow—barely even there—and leads us up, up, up.

  My pack feels like it’s doubled in weight since I started hiking, and I’m so exhausted, I can barely walk. Then my nose picks something up. “Smoke!” I whisper. “I smell smoke.”

  Michelle turns. “That’s my girl,” she says, and she seems…proud. “Congratulations. You made it.”

  “We’re at camp?”

  She nods as we crest the rise. “Welcome home, Wren.”

  “Home” looks like a homeless camp, with blue tarps strung up between scraggly trees, anchored with rocks, wide open on both ends. There’s a fire in the middle of camp with half a dozen girls sitting around it on rocks, scarfing food from tin plates with…sticks?

  Yes, sticks.

  The girls are all sorts of shades and sizes, but the thing that binds them together is a layer of dirt. They all look grubby.

  Dusty, dirty, grubby.

  “Grizzlies!” Michelle announces. “This is Wren, our new Rabbit.”

  I stand there dazed by the surrealness of what she’s just said.

  In what universe does this make sense?

  And yet they all act like it’s normal. “Hey, Wren!” a few of them call out while the rest of them turn back to their tin plates.