Wild Bird

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  “It’s more a wipe down,” she says, leading me over to our tents. “Get your washcloth.”

  “I have a washcloth?”

  She laughs. “An eight-inch square of blue cloth?”

  “That’s a washcloth?”

  “Yup. Or you can use a bandanna.”

  “They’re filthy!”

  She ducks inside her tent. “Well, find something or you’ll miss out on your weekly bathing opportunity.”

  Hannah waits for me while I find my washcloth. Then we line up with the others to get water from Michelle. “It feels like we’re the Seven Dwarfs, getting inspected by Snow White,” I whisper to Hannah. She gives me a puzzled look, so I add, “Remember that scene before dinner when Snow White checks the dwarfs’ hands and she asks Grumpy when the last time he washed was, and Grumpy says, ‘Recently. Yeah, recently!’?”

  Hannah laughs. “It’s been a long time.” Then she asks, “So…what dwarf are you?”

  I don’t need to think twice. “I’m Grumpy. Definitely Grumpy. You?”

  “Hmm,” she says, then decides. “Hungry!”

  “There is no Hungry!”

  “There is now!” Hannah laughs.

  Ahead of us, Shalayne says, “And I’m Sore!”

  Ahead of her, Mia calls, “And I’m Tired!”

  “We’re Grumpy, Hungry, Sore, and Tired,” Shalayne calls forward, trying to include Felicia and the Elks. “What are you guys?”

  They won’t play along, though, so we secretly decide for them—they’re Angry, Moody, and Snotty. By the time I get to Snow White—the water-rationing Michelle—and put out my washcloth like the others have done, I’m in a weirdly good mood.

  Michelle pours on just enough water to wet the cloth, but that small amount I spread as far as I can. I rub down my face, my neck, my arms, and my hands. It feels cool and smooth and fresh, and I’m amazed by how one small handful of water feels better than any shower I’ve ever taken.

  All of us are quiet, reveling in it, and in the silence, Michelle’s words from earlier trickle through my mind. The ones about springtime in the desert. About a little water going a long way when the land is parched.

  My eyes are suddenly stinging and I turn away, hiding it from the other Coyotes.

  Hannah, though, notices. “What’s wrong?” she whispers.

  I shake my head. It was just a glimpse, one I don’t know how to put into words. But I saw it. Felt it.

  How parched I really am.

  Peacekeeper pie. Wow. We’re like dogs scarfing down dinner, licking the dish, begging for more. “How?” I ask, taking a second to breathe. “I want to know how.”

  “To make this?” John asks.

  I nod and stick out my plate for seconds.

  “You need a Dutch oven. We share this one with some of the other camps,” he says, clanging the side of the kettle with the serving spoon. “First you sauté chopped onion and ground beef until they’re cooked through. Add a couple cans of beans—kidney or black—some salt and pepper and whatever spices you want, and stir it all together. While that’s cooking, mix up some corn bread, then spread it over the concoction like thick frosting. Cover the whole mess with the lid, surround it with hot fire coals, and let ’er rip.”

  Felicia sighs, “It is so good!”

  “I’m definitely feelin’ the peace,” Mia says, stretching forward for seconds. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah,” we all murmur. “Thank you.”

  So peacekeeper pie has done its job. But as we finish eating and turn to watch the fire send sparks up into the darkening sky, I notice an uneasiness. An anxiety. It feels alive. Like a dark presence moving around the campfire.

  I don’t know what it is or if I’m just imagining it, and then Brooke says, “So? When do we get our letters?”

  Letters! I’d completely forgotten. I feel a quick jolt of excitement, doused right away by reality. And now I understand the anxiety. None of us came here because we wanted to. We were sent here. Forced here. Abducted and brought here kicking and screaming. And the people who sent us here? They’re back home. Reading letters from home is probably the same for all of us—like walking through a minefield in your heart.

  Suddenly I don’t want any letters. I don’t want to hear attacks and excuses and expectations and disappointments. I just want to be left alone with the fire and the stars and the peacekeeper pie humming in my stomach.

  I flash back to the letter I wrote my second day in the desert. The things I said about being abused and tortured. The way I tried so hard to guilt my parents into bringing me home. And now, even after the washcloth wipe-down, I’m filthy and I’m full of blisters from walking five thousand miles through the desert and digging a hole for a toilet. My clothes, my everything, smell like smoke, my hair is matted to my scalp, and I have never been so sore or tired in my life. So I’m even worse off than I was a week ago, but now…I don’t want to go home.

  It’s a shocking realization.

  I really don’t want to go home.

  Dvorka delivers the letters, reading the names by firelight, bringing them to us while we sit waiting, our dinner dishes put aside.

  Everyone gets at least one letter and accepts it like a death sentence. Nobody tears open their envelope like they can’t wait, but nobody chucks their mail into the fire, either. They just stare at it, turn it over and over, sigh, or hold their breath.

  “Tara will be here tomorrow,” Dvorka says. It takes me a minute to remember she’s the therapist. The Aussie with the carrot hair. “But know the three of us are here if you want to talk things through tonight.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Felicia announces.

  “Me too,” the Elks say.

  They stand up, dust off, collect their things, and dissolve into the darkness without another word.

  The rest of us stay and read by firelight. Inside my envelope are two letters. One from my mother, and one from my brother. My mother’s is a page and a half, typed in the usual Lucida Handwriting font. My brother’s is on notebook paper, written in pencil, decorated with doodles and drawings. He doesn’t have much to say. It rained on Tuesday and he has to be a bunny in a school play. There’s a No Bunny picture, but what’s inside the circle and line looks like a rat with oversize ears. “I hope you’re having fun camping” is followed by drawings of a campfire, trees, and a stream. He signs off “Your brother, Morris.”

  Morris? When did he start going by Morris?

  It about breaks my heart.

  Then I read Mom’s letter.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting, what I’m hoping for. Something different than what I get, that’s for sure. She’s arm’s length. Clinical. Telling me how they won’t be “fetching” me from “therapy camp,” how she’s spoken with the director and knows that I’ve “greatly exaggerated” the situation and “need to stop overdramatizing every little thing.”

  Easy for her to say from the comfort of her ergonomic chair, typing at her high-speed computer inside the weathertight walls of her climate-controlled house. Wonder just how clinical she’d be acting if she was the one getting flooded out of a tarp tent, if she was the one squatting over a hole, if she was the one digging for water.

  She goes on to say how she, Dad, and Anabella are attending therapy sessions twice a week to “better understand our family dynamic and our evolution forward.”

  She doesn’t even sign the letter by hand. She lets Lucida do it for her, writing, Never doubt we love you, Mom.

  “What a crock,” I say to the letter, and head for my tent.

  Next door, Hannah is crying. It’s sobby but soft, the sound of pain buried in cotton. I’d barely noticed her leaving the fire ring while I was still reading. Obviously her mail wasn’t all hearts and flowers either.

  At first I think I should leave her alone, but after hearing her cry for a while, I scoot halfway out of my tent and peek into Hannah’s. “Hey, whatever they said, forget about it.”

  She sniffles and wipes her face
. “My mom finally wrote me. And guess what? Her being an alcoholic is all my fault. She can’t be around me anymore. She wants me to go live with my dad. In Kansas.”

  Oz and poppy fields and yellow brick roads spring to mind. “Kansas?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  I don’t, and I know I don’t. So, after a little silence between us, I mumble, “Sorry,” and start to scoot back into my tent.

  She lunges forward, grabbing my arm. “Wren? I’m sorry. Was your letter good?”

  I shrug. “Not exactly.”

  I want to go, but even in the dark I can see that she’s tortured by something. Like she’s dying to say something.

  “What?” I ask.

  She shakes her head super fast but then comes out with it. “Thanks for your help in the poppy field today.”

  “They were daisies,” I remind her, even though they weren’t daisies either. “And there is no Oz. Not in Kansas or anywhere else.”

  She says something, but it’s so quiet I can’t make it out.

  “What did you say?”

  “I can’t remember the last time someone’s hugged me, is all. Yours really got me through my freak-out. I’m glad you’re my friend.”

  Her friend.

  The last time I made a friend, it was Meadow. I’m not even sure what the word means anymore.

  “Me too,” I tell her, and pull back into my tent.

  Meadow is not my friend. I know that. I don’t really know what she is, and that confuses me. I want her to be my friend. She’s fun and smart and daring, but she hides her heart.

  Or maybe she has no heart.

  I forget that sometimes. I slip up. Let her in on something. Give away too much. In the moment she’s sympathetic and understanding and totally on my side. But later she cuts me open with the things I’ve told her and leaves me alone to bleed.

  I tell myself not to trust her.

  I swear I’ll never tell her anything personal again.

  And then I slip up, get cut up, and bleed.

  After we had the big blow-up in her room during spring break last year, I really tried to make new friends. My problem is I don’t seem to know how. I tried when I started middle school and couldn’t break in anywhere. Which is how I wound up with Meadow. Almost three school years later, when I tried again, things were even worse.

  I didn’t just try. I really tried. I was so mad at Meadow and wanted to show her I didn’t need her, didn’t want her in my life. I started smiling at people at school. I said hi to everyone around me in class. I tried sitting with different groups at lunch.

  But it was awkward. For them, for me, for everyone. All through middle school, I’d been sitting in the back of the class, phone in my lap, texting Meadow. All through middle school, I’d either been holed up with Meadow or hiding out at lunch, texting Meadow. All through middle school, I’d been running off after school to meet up with Meadow. And now I wanted to talk?

  Plus, I had no weed, and I didn’t know how to get it. I was testy and antsy and thought about it a lot. A lot. Once I’d made it through, “Hi! Mind if I sit here?” I’d zone out. Or fidget. I took up biting my nails. Biting them until they bled.

  I tried scoring some weed from an eighth grader who had the reputation of being a stoner, but he shut me down. “Dude, seriously? You need to stop judging people. This,” he said, doing the game-show prize display thing all up and down his grunge look, “is the result of self-sustaining lifestyle choices. I stress the word choices.” He sneered at me. “Smoke that.”

  He sure sounded stoned to me, but I was now freaking out thinking he might tell someone I’d asked, so I said, “Just testing,” and took off.

  “Narc!” he called after me.

  So yeah, I didn’t try that again.

  I was so desperate to break free from Meadow that I even worked at getting my grades up. And they did come up. A little. But the whole time I was miserable. Miserable and invisible.

  I passed the one-month mark. A month that felt like ten years. I made it six weeks. Seven. And then one day, there she was, waiting for me after school. “You made your point,” she said, falling into step beside me.

  I was shocked to see her. And unbelievably happy. I didn’t let on though, snarling, “Why are you here?”

  She smiled. “Goofy girl, I miss you!”

  I kept walking, not saying a thing, not looking at her, not letting on that my heart was pounding.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I got greedy. It wasn’t cool. I should’ve just been straight with you.”

  I had worked so hard at building a fort around me, protecting myself from all things Meadow. I’d put every trace of her in a box in my closet. I’d been clean for almost two months. By now I should have been bulletproof, but instead I felt lost. Empty. And so incredibly alone. My fort turned out to be a wobbly house of cards, and the soft breeze of Meadow’s voice knocked it over. “Really?” I whispered.

  She laughed. “I was an idiot, okay? Can we please be friends again?”

  I told myself that this is what friends do—forgive and forget. I told myself I’d done things wrong too. I told myself things would be different.

  We got stoned in the park that afternoon, and in no time she was back to slicing and dicing me with things I’d tell her.

  She wasn’t a friend.

  I knew that.

  But I pretended she was, because without her, I had nothing.

  I fall asleep thinking how strange it is that at home I was desperate to make friends and couldn’t, and out here in the desert I made one without even trying.

  I sleep like a rock. No dreams. No tossing and turning. Just deep, heavy sleep.

  I wake up in mummy position—on my back with my ankles crossed and my arms folded over my chest, the sleeping bag like a sarcophagus around me.

  It’s barely light out and there’s a bird twittering. I stay in mummy position, listening. It’s a friendly call, followed by silence. Another call, more silence. It makes me wonder—what’s it saying? Is it lost? Lonely? Why doesn’t another bird answer?

  After a few more calls, the bird goes quiet. I wait, wondering if it’s flown away or just given up. It makes me remember eighth grade, when our psychology teacher, Mr. Wexler, asked, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  Hollister Keegan, the class brainiac, said it didn’t, so most of the class went along with him. He lined out some complicated reason that made Mr. Wexler exclaim, “Excellent!” Then Mr. Wexler buzzed around the front of the classroom asking, “Who agrees? Okay! Okay! Who else?” while one hand after another popped up.

  I kept quiet, thinking they were all idiots, glad Mr. Wexler didn’t notice me slumped in my chair at the back of the room.

  But now I wonder if maybe I was wrong. What if a bird sings in the desert, and there’s no one there to hear it? Does it make a sound? And if it does, and no one answers, is it really just the same as silence?

  I start to think that maybe I’ve imagined hearing a bird. Maybe I was dreaming. I go to roll over. To get up. To shuffle out to the latrine and maybe see my phantom bird. But the minute I move, I discover I’m stiff as a board, sore beyond anything I’ve ever felt from gym class. Every little move causes pain. “Ohhhh,” I groan, falling back into mummy pose.

  I give it a minute and try again, but another groan comes out, even louder.

  I hear Hannah moan, “Me too,” from next door.

  It takes a while, but we stagger out of our tents at about the same time. She looks wild, her pixie hair sticking out randomly, her bootlaces dragging, but she’s the one who points at me and laughs, “Help! Zombie!”

  I laugh, too, and we shuffle, moaning and groaning, toward the latrine.

  On our way back, I ask, “Did you hear a bird this morning?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “That was a warbler.”

 
; “A warbler? How do you know?”

  “John took us birding last week.”

  “Seriously? While I was dying in my tent?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” She shrugs. “Everyone’s first week is awful.” We shuffle along, quiet, until she says, “Anyway, we saw a yellow warbler, a nutcracker, and a creeper.”

  “A creeper?”

  “It’s my favorite, actually. Nothing like its name.” She grins. “Or guys at school. Creepers out here are cute, with a long beak and a high, tweedly song.”

  The thought of all these birds in the desert is messing with my head. Crows and vultures, sure. Eagles, maybe. But songbirds? And enough of them to go out birding?

  “Hey,” Hannah says, nodding over to the fire ring, where John is adding wood and stirring last night’s coals back to life. “You want to surprise everyone and make pancakes?”

  “Out of what?”

  “Community supplies. John’ll be all for it.”

  “Sounds good, but really, you don’t want my help. They’ll come out terrible.”

  “Sure I do!” She’s wide-awake now, all excited. “I’ll teach you! Come on!”

  John is all for it, and Hannah…I don’t know. She’s nice. Patient. Happy. She walks me through every little step—mixing the batter, making a bed of coals, prepping the griddle, testing the temperature, pouring the batter, gauging when to flip by the bubbles forming in the batter, and then, finally, flipping.

  I’m really nervous about the flipping. I’m suddenly eight again, back in the kitchen with Anabella, making pancakes on Mother’s Day.

  I didn’t know how to do anything in the kitchen. I was always invited to go do something else when Mom was busy cooking. And since Anabella was bossing me like crazy and told me we didn’t have much batter, so I wasn’t allowed to flip, I grabbed the spatula when she was taking down plates and tried turning over the pancakes she’d just poured on. By the time she saw what I was doing, the pancakes were pretty much scrambled.

  When we served breakfast to Mom in bed, Anabella, of course, explained that the pancakes were ruined because of me. Mom smiled through it all and said that it didn’t matter and that they were delicious, but after that I never wanted to cook anything ever again.