Of a Feather

by Dayna Lorentz

  “And even Red’s not a pet,” I add. “She’s just used to the attention.”

  Aunt Bea smiles approvingly.

  Jamie nods, a little sulky but not angry or mean. “I get it.”

  “This was awesome,” Jaxon says, handing the glove back to Aunt Bea.

  “I totally see why you wanted to do falconry,” Jamie adds, slipping off hers.

  “It’s pretty cool,” I say, trying to not be too obvious about how much it means to me that they get it. It’s like they weren’t fully my friends until they also knew about this—my Rufus half. And like Rufus wasn’t fully real until I shared him—all this, with them.

  Aunt Bea puts Red back in the aviary and goes to introduce herself to Jaxon’s mom. I hang on to Rufus while Jaxon and Jamie grab their stuff from the house. I wave with my free arm as they hop into the waiting car.

  “See you tomorrow!” I shout.

  “Bye, Rufus!” Jamie replies. “See you tomorrow, Reenie!”

  Jaxon gives me his signature single wave.

  As the car pulls onto the road, Aunt Bea walks back to where I’m strolling with Rufus through the grass.

  “Those are some nice kids,” she says.

  “I know,” I say, feeling full up with happiness and afraid of spilling any by talking too much.

  Aunt Bea gets it. She doesn’t say anything more, just takes Red out. Rufus and I watch her soar over our heads across the brilliant blue sky and pink-tinged clouds.

  * * *

  At school the next day, while we’re putting away our laptops in the library, Jaxon sneaks up beside me. “You’re not training that owl for falconry, right?”

  “Rufus?” I say. “Well, not officially.”

  “But you’re going to let him go back to the wild?”

  Weird—why does he care? I mean, we’re friends now—there’s no way he’d turn me in to his dad. “That’s the plan,” I say.

  Jaxon’s face relaxes. “Cool.”

  Jamie slides her laptop into the slot. “If I had an owl like that, I could never let him go.”

  Jamie gets it.

  “But that owl’s a wild bird,” Jaxon says. “No one owns the wild.”

  Jamie shrugs. “I’m just saying, having an owl in your house is too cool.”

  Jaxon shoves his hands in his pockets. “It’s not about what’s cool, it’s about what’s best for the owl.”

  “I would never do anything to hurt Rufus,” I say. Which is true. But there’s a part of me that’s with Jamie—how is living with me hurting him? And why does Jaxon care?

  “I know,” he says. “I just . . . it’s nothing.”

  It’s weird for a second, but then Jamie whips out her phone and shows us this crazy video she found of a deer jumping on a trampoline and everything is okay again.

  * * *

  When I get home after school, I’m greeted by the alien song of the phone ringing. Aunt Bea got a super basic cell phone that she leaves in the house for me in case of emergencies. Who even knows the number?

  “Hello?” I ask, like this is the first phone call in the history of the world.

  “Reenie?”

  Mom.

  “Reenie! It’s Mom. I arranged for phone contact. Is this time okay?”

  “Uh.” It takes me a second to catch up. We’ve done this before. During the other times. I just have to reshuffle my brain, my life. Readjust. “Hey.”

  We chat for a couple minutes. She’s good, getting help. I’m happy for her—I say so.

  “The social worker, Randi?” Mom says. “She’s been really supportive. When I get released, I’m going to start looking at apartments.”

  “Oh?” I say.

  “We can visit again. I miss you, Reens. I miss us.”

  “I miss you too,” I say. And I do. But her doing well is also the beginning of the end of my time here. I’ve been through this cycle enough times to know. And though I’ve been reminding myself—I say it every night like a prayer but opposite: this life is temporary—it’s stopped feeling temporary. This isn’t Gram’s junk room; this is a whole life. It’s stopped feeling like something I can live without.

  When we hang up, I say, “I love you too,” and I do. But there’s also this icy feeling inside, like loving her means I’m halfway out the door of this place, and I can’t leave. Not yet.

  I sit down to do homework, but my foot starts jiggling, sending mini earthquakes across the kitchen table, which only causes the foot jiggling situation to get worse. By the time Aunt Bea comes in, I’m practically vibrating myself out of the chair.

  “Is everything all right?” she asks, face quirked as if questioning a bear sampling her butter straight from the fridge.

  “My mom called,” I say.

  Aunt Bea gives a nod. “You okay?”

  I shrug.

  “She say something?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Don’t get yourself worked up until you know what it is that’s coming,” she says, slipping on her falconer’s vest. “We have to feed the birds.”

  The mention of a job helps to pull me back into myself. “I’ll get the mice,” I say, relieved to know what to do, that there is a right thing to be done.

  “I’ll get the mice,” Aunt Bea says. “You can head right out and hook that owl onto a creance.”

  Just the word sends shivers over my skin and the foot jiggles packing. “We’re going to try flying him?” I ask.

  She nods. “I think you’re both ready.”

  This warmth spreads through me. We are ready, I tell myself. And I can feel that it’s true. Because even if he doesn’t fly to my fist tonight, even if every attempt is a failure, I can always just put him back on my glove. Every failure is just a step in our process. Some night, even if not tonight, Rufus will fly to me.

  16

  Rufus

  “Finally!” I screech as the Brown Frizz opens the web on my nest. “I’ve been hooting for food since the last drop of the sun.”

  “I told you the hooting wouldn’t make them come any faster,” Red squawks from her nest.

  “How do you know it didn’t?” I chirp back. “The Brown Frizz may never have returned if not for my hooting.”

  “The Brown Frizz is your partner.” Red rouses, stomps on her perch. “Partners always come back.”

  I consider the Brown Frizz. She has on her Good Feelings face, but her heart is not in it. She holds up her big paw and makes her tweeting noise, and I swoop down.

  “I can hear that there’s something wrong with you,” I hoot to her softly, trying to keep Red from listening in. “If it’s about what I hooted yesterday, I will make more of an effort to hunt things other than roots.”

  The Brown Frizz’s heart becomes less jumbled in its rhythm, smoothes out, and the Good Feelings face deepens. Perhaps that was all she needed to hear.

  “Not that I’m promising anything,” I add.

  The Brown Frizz remains content. Maybe this is a part of our partnership arrangement. Maybe the only promise she needs is that I’ll try.

  She puts the odious tails into my leg sparkles, and that just about gets me fluffed because truly those tails are the worst, but then she does something new. She attaches a long, thin vine to the end of the tails. Outside of my nest, she holds her fist near one of the dead trees.

  “Hop onto the perch, Hatchling,” Red squawks. She’s perched right near an opening in her nest. Spying on me.

  “I was about to,” I snap back. Though I was not. This partnership thing is confusing. One moment, the Brown Frizz wants me on her paw; the next, she wants me on the perch?

  Once I’m on the perch, the Brown Frizz takes a step away from me. I glance at Red, check if she’s still spying. Of course she is.

  The Brown Frizz whistles. Shakes her paw. She wants me to get back on the paw? But I just got off the paw! Is there meat? There’d better be meat.

  I flap off the perch and onto the paw, and thank the thermals, there’s meat for my effort. I gob
ble it down. The Brown Frizz is all atwitter, hooting and trembling like something important is happening.

  The Gray Tail appears from the furless creatures’ nest. She seems excited by the Brown Frizz’s hoots. She hurries toward me and the Brown Frizz, and I see she has a small pile of delicious mice in her wing-toes.

  “Give me those mice!” I command. I am the great horned owl around here. I should get first pick. Certainly before the Brown Frizz.

  I attempt to lift off the paw and—PELLETS! I’m tufts down again and swinging like a bat.

  “I just cannot get enough of seeing you hanging from your talons,” Red twitters from inside her nest.

  “Go stuff your beak in the sap.”

  The Brown Frizz dutifully sits me back up on the paw. But now I’m fluffed. I’m hungry and Red’s a bumble-footed booby and these leg-tails are worse than a midsoar cloudburst. The Brown Frizz tries to get me to go back onto the perch, but I’m not having it.

  “There will be mice or there will be no flapping from this owl!” I screech. I stomp on the paw and look everywhere but at the stinking perch and finally the Brown Frizz makes her growling-sigh noise and grumbles to the Gray Tail, who nods her head.

  The Brown Frizz takes me back to my nest, removes those terrible tormenting tails, and lifts her paw, and I fly up to my favorite spot, way high near the top of the nest. The Brown Frizz then holds out her paw again, whistles, and—Great Beak, she has a whole mouse?

  I swoop down, crash into the paw, and gobble that mouse.

  Once I have it down, I notice that the Brown Frizz is staring at me. She is quite fascinated by me. Of course she is, seeing as she is an ugly furless creature and I am quite the great horned owl specimen.

  “Yes, fine, admire away,” I hoot, stretching my ear tufts and rousing my feathers. She did just give me a whole mouse. I should give her something in return.

  “This is another part of partnership, you dud,” Red screeches. She’s outside now, gliding over the grass and then swooping up onto the Gray Tail’s paw. The Gray Tail feeds her a scrap of meat. “The small human is trying to connect with you.” Red flaps away and lands on one of the perches and turns her head, basking in the twilight.

  So that’s what partnership is? Flapping from paw to perch? How is this helping me learn to hunt?

  The Brown Frizz grumbles something to me. I turn my head to pay attention. She lifts the little patches of fur that grow above her eyes.

  I decide to look at her the same way. Perhaps this is what Red means when she chirps “connect”?

  I raise my ear tufts and then sink them down and out, flattish, the way the Brown Frizz has her face furs. I stare deep into her brown eyes, the way she’s staring deep into mine. It does give me a bit of a buzz in the gizzard, being this close to a big animal like a furless creature, listening to her heartbeat pound in my ears.

  She whispers something to me. Her breath ruffles the feathers along my beak. I don’t even need to look to know she’s wearing her Good Feelings face; I hear it in her heart, can feel it coming off her in waves.

  “I feel it too,” I chirp back.

  She spreads the pink edges of her beakless maw across her cheeks in a smooth, curving line, wrinkling the skin around her eyes.

  I try to make my beak curve, but it’s no good. Instead, I do what Mother used to do to me. I knock my forehead against the Brown Frizz’s skull and nibble the bridge of her soft nostril tube.

  She chirps again, rubs her forehead against my beak. The world feels as safe as when Mother used to tuck me beneath her wing in the nest. This partnership is for more than just learning how to hunt. I get that now. What Red means by partnership is what I call family.

  The Brown Frizz’s heartbeat is all aflutter and she’s cooing like a mourning dove. And I realize my heart is pounding along with the Brown Frizz’s pulse. Just like with Mother and First when we were in the nest together. I’ve missed my family so much—is a great horned owl allowed to admit that? I don’t think I’m supposed to feel lonely . . . but I do. I can’t wait for night to pass so I can get in a few hoots with Red at daybreak, so I can fly with the furless creatures. I wonder if I’m maybe not cut out to fly alone in the world. I think that maybe I need this partnership as much as the furless creature.

  It may not be what I imagined when I thought of hunting in a pack, but maybe family doesn’t always look just one way.

  “We can be a family, Brown Frizz,” I chirp to her.

  She growls back softly, our hearts pounding together, and I feel it from talons to tufts: a connection, strange but strong.

  17

  Reenie

  Rufus is like a different bird this morning. I wake up Aunt Bea at the crack of dawn again and we are out with him on the creance and he flies from the post to my fist not once but four times! He starts getting squawky after that, so we feed him and put him back in the mews.

  “We can try flying him from across the yard when you get home from school,” Aunt Bea says, whistling for Red, who swoops down from the trees.

  Every time Aunt Bea says we’re ready to move forward, this double stream of panic and excitement burns up from my belly. “You think he’s ready?”

  And a part of me knows he is. I knew giving him that pep talk last night would work. I told him that he was a good bird, and more, that he was the best owl ever, and that if he didn’t want to flap around on posts, he didn’t have to, because we were working on his schedule, and when he was ready, I knew he would fly.

  But this other part of me is terrified that the minute I step even halfway across the yard, he’ll disappear into the shadows.

  “He’s ready,” Aunt Bea says, closing Red in her aviary. “It’s you who needs to know that, though. It’s you he’s trusting. If you don’t believe in him, no way he’s going to believe in himself.”

  “You really think all it takes is my believing he can fly to my fist?” That sounds like a load of manure fresh from the cow.

  She takes off her gauntlet. “Not all,” she says. “But it’s not nothing.”

  Rufus chirps, sounding more like a chick than a full-grown owl—then again, he might not even be full grown. I keep forgetting he’s just a baby bird, not even a year old. Maybe the last piece of his recovery is just believing he’s recovered?

  The sun crests the trees. “You’d better run if you’re catching that bus,” Aunt Bea says.

  I leg it inside and clean myself up, then grab a Pop-Tart from Aunt Bea’s hand as I pass the kitchen on my way out to the bus. I look back through the bus windows toward the house, sending good thoughts to Rufus through the misty strips of sunlight, half knowing that’s insane and absolutely not a real thing, but also sure that he hears me and feels loved.

  * * *

  Jaxon shows up late. “I had an overnight with my dad,” he says, sliding into his desk just as Ms. Thomas begins shuffling papers and clearing her throat to signal the beginning of the day. His backpack is bulging—the cuff of a pair of pajama pants dangles from where it’s caught in the zipper. He literally had a sleepover with his dad. I guess that’s what divorced kids have instead of “visitation.”

  Not that I’ve had visitation in a while . . .

  Ms. Thomas blathers on about Dicey’s Song. It’s about these kids who go to live with their grandmother because their mom is sick, and they have to start over with this stranger—it’s a little on the nose for my life right now. I think Ms. Thomas is trying to connect with me: every few pages, she gives me these puppy dog eyes.

  Halfway through the period, we break into groups to talk about last night’s reading. Jaxon, Jamie, and I turn our desks together. Jamie has this whole theory going about the grandmother and some secret plot to keep the kids from their mom. I let her go on. It’s easier to believe the grandmother is the bad guy. It’s harder to know that sometimes your mom just can’t be your mom anymore.

  “I bet the mom was the one who sent that letter,” Jamie says, her finger pointing at the book like she’
s solved the case and everything’s going to be all better now—Mom’s going to swoop in and take the kids back to some big house complete with playground in the backyard and golden retriever on the porch.

  “It’s from the hospital,” I tell her, because I’ve seen those same kinds of letters in the mail. “The mom’s not coming.”

  “You read ahead?” Jaxon asks, flipping to the end of the book.

  I shrug. “I have a feeling.” I know.

  “I’m sticking to my version,” Jamie says as the bell rings. “I believe Mom’s going to show up before the end.”

  I jam my copy of the book down into the bottom of my backpack and zip it closed.

  In art, the teacher, Ms. Whipple, has set out on the tables some pieces of paper and coffee cans stuffed with colored pencils. “I’m going to give you the period to draw mandalas,” she announces to the class after everyone’s perched on stools. There’s a circle on each paper.

  “A what?” I grumble.

  As if answering, Ms. Whipple walks over to one of the posters on the wall. “This is a Tibetan Buddhist mandala.” It’s a cyclone of color exploding out in patterns and lines, squares inside squares with tiny figures nestled in between. “It means ‘circle’ and traditionally was meant to represent the universe. I’d like you to think of it as a way of symbolically capturing your personal universe at this moment. If you’re looking for where to start, think of it as having a center out of which the rest of the drawing sprouts, like a sunflower or a spinning galaxy.”

  What a ridiculous project. This is exactly the kind of touchy-feely garbage that guidance counselors always give you.

  But whatever. I have nothing else to do.

  I pick up a yellow pencil. All I can think to draw is Rufus’s eyes. Two big yellow circles inside the black line of the printed circle. Two black pupils at the center of each eye. Then brown fanning out from those circles like scales, like the whorls of fingertips. A sharp jag of beak between them, screaming out red. Red, red, red, like lightning cracking through the circle.