Wild Bird

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  As I’m scraping out my billypot with the wooden spoon Michelle helped me make, I realize how smooth the spoon has become over time. It seems normal, even comfortable, in my mouth, in my hand. I don’t think of it as being a stick anymore. It’s been my only utensil for four weeks. One spoon, one pot, one cup, one plate. I’m used to it now. I don’t really need anything else.

  My mind drifts to what the other girls are doing. I wonder if Mokov returned to camp, if he’s telling the story about Eagle and Wren. I get mad at him all over again. Why tell me that story if he didn’t think I was the Wren in the legend?

  It’s strange how you can hear other people’s voices in your head. Not just their words, their voices. I’ve always thought it was spooky—like there’s a ghost inside your brain, whispering, nudging, haunting. And right now, I hear Mokov’s: It’s wise for all of us to respect the wings that beat hard to lift us.

  “Shut up,” I say out loud. “You have no idea about the wings that have beat me down.”

  Now it’s Tara’s voice haunting me. So tell me, she whispers. Let it out. Let it go. Stop poisoning yourself with hatred.

  “You can shut up too!” I shout. Then I rub out the billypot with sand to clean it, dump the sand into the fire, add a tight heap of new wood to the middle of the fire to keep it burning, and go to bed.

  I wake up with a start. A nightmare about my parents, my texts, my brother hating me.

  I don’t know where I am at first. It’s dark. My nose is freezing. There’s something hard next to me. It feels like…bones?

  I scream and jolt away.

  And then remember.

  Firewood. Tent. Quest.

  I have no idea what time it is. I know that sunrise happens around six-thirty, but it feels nowhere near that. And it’s so quiet. I look out at the fire ring to see if it’s still burning. That would tell me something.

  What I see instead is…snow?

  Yes, snow!

  It’s drifting down from the sky, dusting the ground and the rocks of the fire ring, melting on the mound of ash.

  I reach out to catch some, to feel it. It’s so light, so silent, and it melts the instant it touches my hand. It feels more like a mirage than something real, so I stick my head out of the tent and catch flakes on my tongue. More flakes land in my hair than in my mouth, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve tasted snow!

  I try to make a mini-snowman from what’s landed in front of the tent, but there isn’t enough. And it makes my fingers as cold as my nose. I laugh at how surprised I am by that. Of course it’s cold. It’s snow!

  Finally I dry off with my bandanna and snuggle deep inside my sleeping bag, grateful for its warmth. And as I watch the silent show outside, I giggle. I’m camping in snow! Wait ’til I tell Mowgli!

  A sudden dose of reality douses me.

  Mo.

  I try not to let my mind go there, but it won’t go anywhere else: My brother must know. How could he not? Kids talk. Parents “explain.” Sisters narc.

  And there’s a swastika gouged in the piano.

  My heart races. I can’t breathe. Then I’m shivering and crying and just falling apart inside a cocoon of arctic insulation. How could I have gouged a swastika in my mother’s piano?

  I remind myself of my list of reasons.

  My litany.

  Everything that led up to that night.

  I close my eyes and go over it and over it and over it like counting sheep until somehow I fall asleep. But when the sun wakes me in the morning, the snow has vanished, and what’s running through my mind is the horrible truth.

  I gouged a swastika in my mother’s piano.

  I force myself to get up, to get moving, to shake off the thought of the piano.

  The air is chilly, but the sky is clear and the sun feels great on my face. I wonder if the snow was a dream, but then I see evidence of it. The upper steps of the staircase walls across the canyon are dusted with it. Powdered sugar on gingerbread.

  I poke around the pile of ashes looking for an ember, a coal I can blow back to life like John does some mornings with the big campfire. But the fire is cold.

  Dead.

  For some reason, this makes me want to cry. I think about Michelle telling me that if I could start a fire out here, I could start one inside myself. That makes less sense to me now than it did then. I didn’t need to start a fire inside me. I’ve been burning mad at everyone and everything for years. And at this point I’ve started lots of fires out here. So why does it feel like the fire inside me is going out? Why is the ember I could always fan into a raging flame with just a few puffs now lying there, still?

  And why, after going through my whole list again and again and again, why do I have this throat-choking urge to tell my parents I’m sorry.

  After breakfast, I sit in my tent with the notebook in my lap staring at a blank page, petrified. I can’t make myself write “Dear Mom & Dad.”

  I just can’t.

  I also can’t write to my brother.

  It hurts to think about writing him.

  I know I have to write my parents. I know I have to explain about the texts. I know that means I have to explain about other stuff, too. I know, I know, I know.

  But facing this piece of paper is terrifying! It makes me want to hide. Lie. Deny.

  It’s worse, way worse, than starting a new school.

  It’s worse, way worse, than having no friends, no one to talk to.

  It’s worse, way worse, than not being seen. Even I don’t want to look at me. I just want to disappear.

  I think about the first time Meadow invited me to “celebrate.” It went against everything I’d been taught, everything my parents had warned us about. And it went against what I thought I should do.

  But I caved.

  Just like that, I caved.

  What would have happened if I’d walked out of that bathroom instead? Where would I be if I’d been brave?

  When I finally touch my pen to the page, what comes out is: Please just listen.

  Writing that sentence feels like letting out a breath I’ve been holding in for years. Maybe because my parents’ eyes aren’t on me. Maybe because they can’t interrupt me. Maybe because I don’t have to defend myself against their words, or watch them turn oxygen into large dark clouds of disappointment.

  I promise to tell you the truth, my shaking hand writes. Please, just listen.

  And then I let it out. About the move. About feeling so alone. About Anabella and her having no time for me. About feeling lost in a new city, a big house. About losing the gears of our family. We all spun off. Anabella had her new friends, Mo had after-school club, you guys work-work-worked, and I was alone in a corner, dying.

  Then I tell them about the day I met Meadow. How happy it made me to find a friend. How I didn’t know how to say no.

  Once I get started, it pours out. It’s jumbled, and I know I put in too much drama, too many underlines, too many exclamation points, too many things that probably don’t make sense, but I almost don’t care. I just want it done. I want them to hear my side and know what’s true and what’s not. And once I’ve confessed about the weed and the whiskey, I tell them about delivering packages for Nico; how I didn’t know what I was doing at first; how I feel sick about it now because of Hannah.

  I really want to leave the heroin part out, but I have to tell them the whole truth so they’ll believe that the texts to Meadow were not true; that I said those to get back at her for things she’d done to me.

  All I can hope is that they do.

  My letter winds up fourteen pages long. I don’t cry a drop until I get to the end and write, I’m sorry for so much, especially the piano. Please forgive me, Wren.

  I have fought those words for so long. Dug in hard against them. Battled them with all my might. It feels so strange to be saying them now.

  And even stranger, that saying them is such gut-wrenching relief.

  Most of my firewood is already gone. While I wander from
camp to gather more, the sun grows sharp and hot, the air warm and windy. There are clouds, but they’re white and puffy instead of blankets of cold steel. And it takes me quite a while to believe it, but there are no flies. Maybe the cold killed them off? I don’t know. I don’t care why. I’ll take it.

  I think about home. About my family. About Meadow. About Nico. One thing’s for sure: I’m done with Meadow. It finally feels one hundred percent real. She’s not my friend and has never been. Hannah has taught me that. Not just by the things she’s said, but by the way she’s cared.

  Meadow never actually cared.

  I can see that now.

  An anger rises up when I think about Meadow and the things she’s done. A good anger. One that makes me feel strong.

  And Nico…? I’ve felt a lot of things for him—the thrilling high of just being near him, the electricity of his look, his touch, even his voice. I’ve ached for him in a way that could only be love. And yet now…

  Now I feel weirdly still inside about him. There’s no churning. No racing heart. If anything, I feel a little nauseous.

  Maybe that’s also because of Hannah. She’s tried to describe her addiction to me. How it sweeps back into her mind like a force she can’t stop. How using heroin had become the focus of her entire day. How she’s so glad, so relieved, to be clean now, but can feel this claw in her brain, shaking the bars of its cage, scheming for ways to get out.

  She sounds scared when she talks about it. Like there’s a boogeyman in her head all the time, not just under the bed at night. And even though she’s clean now, even though she said it was torture to detox and she would rather die than go through that again, she’s afraid of falling back into using. “If I slip up just once,” she whispered last week when we were supposed to be doing curriculum, “it’s over. I’m dead.”

  “So don’t slip up,” I whispered back.

  “You don’t understand!” Her eyes turned into oceans again. “It’s in there! And it wants out!”

  So thinking about Nico now, I don’t picture his dimple or his smile, the style of his hair, or his smoky kiss. I think about being his delivery girl. I think about heroin. And I wonder how many people have a claw in their brain because of me.

  Because of him.

  I try to blame the way I’m feeling—the guilt I’m feeling—on Nico, on Meadow, on Anabella, on my parents. I try to fan the ember in me into rage against someone, anyone. But as I face into the wind and walk back to my camp with another armload of wood, what I see is me.

  Guilty me.

  I pushed myself on Nico. I was spineless around Meadow, and Anabella warned me about both of them. And my parents…my parents just believed my endless lies for way too long.

  I dump the load of wood. Dirty, gnarled, ragged wood. And as it tumbles down, I realize there’s another letter I need to write. One to Anabella.

  I cook lunch, thinking about Anabella. Cursing how this wide-open place traps you inside your thoughts. Once there’s wood and fire and food and shelter, you’re left with your thoughts. Even when you’re collecting wood and building fire and cooking food and making shelter, your body goes into autopilot while your head gets hijacked by your thoughts.

  And even though Anabella is still on my hate list and the things I want to say to her have everything to do with how she abandoned me, other thoughts won’t stay out of my head. Sentimental thoughts. About us as kids before the move. Thoughts about secret games of crazy eights after bedtime and her painting my fingernails before my seventh-birthday party. Thoughts about the way she held my hand when she walked me to my kindergarten classroom. Thoughts about piggybacks and popcorn parties and her teaching me to tie my shoes. “One rabbit ear, two rabbit ear, cross, tuck, pull!”

  I try to push these thoughts out, but they keep wiggling back into my head, infiltrating my heart.

  When I finally sit down to write her, the letter does start out angry. But it deteriorates into how hurt I am, and winds up talking about card games and kindergarten and how much I adored her when we were little.

  It turns completely pathetic.

  The whole thing hurts. It hurts to remember. It hurts to forget. I don’t know what’s better, blocking it out or bringing it up. But there it is now, down on paper—three years of hate and hurt and heartache.

  I don’t reread it. I don’t rethink it. I just sign off: One rabbit ear, two rabbit ear, cross, tuck, pull!

  Then I take a deep, choppy breath and cry my heart out.

  By dinnertime I’ve collected enough wood for a bonfire. I was going to get by with what I’d already gathered, but after I finished Anabella’s letter, I needed to walk around and clear my head, and while I was walking around, I found coyote poop. Or, as John wants us to call it, coyote scat.

  I’d never even heard scat used that way, but for one of our “curriculum challenges” John took Mia, Shalayne, Hannah, and me on a full-day hike “scouting for scat.” He promised it would count as a biology unit.

  The whole idea seemed so gross, especially since John was weirdly into it. He was like a little kid on an Easter egg hunt. The rest of us were not, but what we did get into was joking about it. Shalayne started things off by calling John “Doo-doo Daddy,” which made everyone—even John—laugh. So as we hiked along, we riffed on that, joking back and forth, laughing our heads off. John was cool enough to ignore the names that should definitely have had consequences in the field, and maybe it was him being cool that got us to back off and settle on our crew’s final name: Deputy Dung and the Scat Trackers.

  So we made it fun, but the day turned out to be interesting, too. John would take us off the trail and nose around until he found droppings. Most of them were pellety—round or longer and different in size and color, but definitely pellety. John could tell what animal the droppings came from—kangaroo rat, marmot, porcupine, prairie dog…he even found some he said came from bighorn sheep.

  We were all stunned.

  “There’s bighorn sheep out here?”

  “Where?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to see me some bighorn sheep!”

  John laughed. “Well, one’s been standing right here.”

  “Are you sure?” Shalayne asked.

  He pointed to the pellets and grinned. “Positive.”

  We were at a wide spot after coming up a steep, rocky hill that had been more like mountain climbing than trail hiking. There weren’t plants or water anywhere near us, and the sun was beating down hard. “Why would it come up here?” I asked, squinting around at the hot, barren rockiness.

  John shrugged and moved on, saying, “Maybe the view? Great place to survey the surroundings.”

  We hiked and climbed and detoured all day, and every scat John showed us was some variation of generic pellet. Even with the joking around, scouting for scat got old after a while.

  And then we came upon what looked like a mangled piece of furry gray rope sitting right in the middle of the trail. John put up a hand and got super excited. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Here we go—coyote scat!” We circled around as John picked up a stick and started poking at it.

  Mia frowned. “You’re really doing this right now?”

  “He’s Deputy Dung,” Shalayne said, and the rest of us snickered.

  “See this?” John said, prying into it. “There’s bones, fur…this is definitely coyote.”

  “Bones?” I asked.

  “They eat everything, toe to tail,” John said, and he seemed so pleased.

  Mia snorted. “Pretty rude to plant it on the trail.”

  John stood and tossed the stick aside. “Coyotes do that on purpose to communicate.”

  We all stared at him. “To communicate?”

  “It’s a way to mark their territory. They want other predators to see it.”

  “Taggin’ the trail with what comes out the tail,” Shalayne said, and we all laughed.

  I hadn’t thought about being a Scat Tracker since that day, but when I was out trying to clear Anabella’s let
ter from my head and came toe to turd with a big, gray, furry pile, I knew right away what it was, and it stopped me in my tracks.

  The scat was fresh, and less than twenty yards from my tent. I scanned the whole area, looking for coyotes lurking behind the pinyons and junipers or rock formations, or in the shadows. I listened for footsteps, panting, the crunching of bones, anything!

  All I heard was the wind.

  So I started searching for something I could use to protect myself. A spear. A club. Something that would ward off a pack of hungry coyotes looking to turn me into furry turds.

  “HOW CAN THIS BE LEGAL?” I shouted up at the sky, but the sky just kept its burning eye on me and huffed in my face.

  I found a pinyon with a dry branch still attached near the base of its trunk. I tried pulling it off but couldn’t get it to budge, so I stepped on it like a ladder rung, held on to a higher branch, and jumped. I had to bash down on it over and over and hard before it finally cracked, then broke off enough so I could twist it from the trunk.

  I snapped off all the little branches and used a sharp rock to smooth down a section where I could get a good grip to use it as a club or a battering ram. I liked the way it felt in my hands, and after I practiced swinging and jabbing, trying it out, I laid it in front of my tent like a threshold.

  After that, I collected rocks that were big enough to hurt and small enough to throw and piled them up outside the tent. Then I went back to collecting firewood, because John’s told us over and over that the best thing to protect you in the wild is fire.

  So now I’ve got a huge heap of wood—I hope it’s enough to burn all night. It takes way more than you’d think, but I just have to make it through one more night alone.

  Maybe I’m worrying about nothing. I’m not even sure a pack of coyotes would try to take down a person, but there’s not exactly someone here I can ask. And coyotes have teeth. And eat bones. If I had a choice, I’d trade the coyote problem for another night of rain like that. At least with rain I know what I’m dealing with and when it’s happening. With coyotes, I’m looking over my shoulder all the time, wondering if they’re out there stalking me, scheming up ways to take me down.