by Laura Ruby
“Yeah,” said the boy. “Doesn’t everyone?”
The students started whispering, much to Miss Dimwiddie’s annoyance. “I admire birds,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “They are the true Wings.”
Mantis Boy scowled. “I still think Nathan Johnson is the best Wing we’ve ever had.”
“Let me guess,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “You’re going to be just like him one day.”
The boy’s scowl got even deeper. “So what if I am?”
“We’ll see about that,” Miss Dimwiddie told him. “At Wing practice you can show everyone at Hope House that you’re better than birds. I’m sure you’ll put on a spectacular show.” She clapped her hands together. “Now let’s turn to the next chapter. Can anyone tell me why crows like shiny objects so much?”
The boy crossed his arms across his chest and stared at Miss Dimwiddie as if he wanted to take a shiny object and thwack her in the head with it. Gurl wished he would, as it could keep them both from talking about birds and about flying. Gurl was so sick of hearing about flying. What was so great about it anyway? What was the point?
She looked down at her hands and tried to convince herself that she was more special because she couldn’t fly. Being a leadfoot made her watchful and patient. It had got her out of Hope House. It had got her a fabulous dinner. And, most importantly, it had got her the cat.
The cat!
After class, Gurl rushed back to the girls’ dorm. She got down on her knees and pulled the box out from under her bed—just enough so that she could see inside, but not far enough that any of the other girls could. The little cat was still there, curled in a tight ball. Gurl breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that the cat hadn’t disappeared.
No, you’re the one who disappears, she thought. But of course that couldn’t be true.
The cat rolled over and stretched, letting Gurl scratch its belly. She didn’t even know this cat and it wasn’t hers, but she already loved it more than she had ever loved anything else. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around, she thought, does it make a sound?
And then she thought: Yes. It purrs.
Chapter 3
The Chickens of Hope House
DAYS PASSED AND GURL WAS more and more convinced that though the cat was real, vanishing had been a trick of the light or of her imagination. Every morning, Gurl got up, put the little cat in the box under her bed and warned her to stay put. Remarkably, she did stay, sleeping all day only to wake up to the bits of food Gurl had saved from that night’s dinner. (For some reason, the cat never seemed to need a litterbox and never left a mess. Gurl was too grateful to think about it.) Every night, the little cat sprawled across Gurl’s feet, purring strongly enough that Gurl felt the vibrations all the way up into her heart. Though she felt guilty that the cat was trapped under the bed all day, Gurl told herself that it was only for a while and that eventually she would let the cat go.
Eventually.
Meanwhile, she daydreamed and people-watched through her classes, trying very hard not to be noticed—especially at Wingwork practice. There Coach Bob led the children in their flying exercises, walking back and forth between the rows of kids, his whistle bouncing up and down on his big round belly. “Crouch!” he shouted with his great trapdoor mouth. “Spring! Up!” He watched the kids attempt to get themselves into the air, then took his hat off and threw it to the ground. “Ruckus!” he said. “Do you call that a spring? I call that a wobble. Hogwash, when I told you to use your arms as levers, I meant use them as levers. Are you an orphan or an air traffic controller? And Blush! This is not a game! This is Wingwork! You kids will never be Wings with all this goofing around! Now, all of you, again!” He pointed at two kids who were jumping up and deliberately crashing into each other. “Lunchmeat and Dillydally, see me after practice!”
Gurl followed Coach Bob with a yardstick and a notepad. After the specialist had declared her hopelessly landlocked, Mrs Terwiliger and Coach Bob had excused her from Wingwork and given her a job: record the heights of everyone’s practice leaps. It wasn’t much of a job because the children of Hope House could fly about as well as chickens could, which is to say not very well at all.
Gurl stopped next to Ruckus and measured his next leap. Though he did everything that Coach told him to do—crouched as low as he could go, used his arms for levers—Gurl got a measurement of two feet. Ruckus always got a measurement of two feet.
Ruckus dropped to the ground. Beads of sweat gave him a frosty moustache that gleamed against his chocolate skin. “What was it?” he asked her, breathing hard.
“Two,” she said.
“It was more than two!”
“No, it was two.”
“It was at least three.” His squinty eyes darted left and right, and he dragged a hand through his crazy caterpillar hair.
Gurl sighed and wrote “2” on her notepad.
Ruckus did what he usually did: grabbed the notebook from her hand, tore off the top page and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing defiantly. After he swallowed, he said, “Who’d believe you? You can’t even get your toes off the ground.”
“Neither can you,” said Gurl, under her breath.
“Leadfoot!” Ruckus yelled.
“Ruckus, stop making such a ruckus!” said Coach Bob. “And Gurl…” he began, then trailed off. Coach Bob didn’t like to shout at her. Coach Bob felt bad for her. At least the other kids might fly one day.
She didn’t hope to fly. In her daydreams, no one could. The whole city was rooted as firmly as she was. She imagined a life for herself in her non-flying world, a nice life—not amazing, but nice. A girl who lives with her parents in a tidy brownstone walks to her after-school job as an ice-cream taster. She says the rum banana is good, but the huckleberry swirl needs more swirl. “You can never have enough swirl,” she tells Mr Eiscrememann, the manager of the ice-cream store. “You’re right,” Mr Eiscrememann says. “What a smart girl! What an observant girl! Here, have a sundae!”
Just then, Mrs Terwiliger, the matron of Hope House, flew out of the main building, her skirt so tight in the knees that she looked like an airborne eggwhisk. For a long terrible moment Gurl worried that the cat had been discovered in the box under her bed.
“Coach Bob? Is there trouble? I heard shouting from my office.” She noticed Gurl and smiled. “Oh, hello, Gurl. I didn’t see you standing there.”
Gurl frowned. Mrs Terwiliger had been saying that ever since Gurl could remember, but she’d never thought about it before.
“Gurl, I said ‘hello’.”
“Hello, Mrs Terwiliger,” Gurl said.
“That’s better,” said Mrs Terwiliger, while Coach Bob inspected the brim of his Wing cap. Mrs Terwiliger had been the matron of Hope House for more years than anyone could count. With her tight skirts, poofy blonde hair, drawn-on eyebrows and facelifts that stretched her toffee apple-red lips so wide that the corners nearly grazed her ears, nobody knew how old she was. Somewhere between forty and eighty went the guesses. It was she who started the tradition of naming the children who came to Hope House after their personal characteristics and temperaments. Thus, the baby boy who threw tantrums became Ruckus, the boy with the slick, ruddy skin became Lunchmeat, the boy who was full of excuses became Hogwash and the girl who couldn’t keep her fingers out of her nose became Digger. “It’s just like how the Indians used to name their children. Those Indians were so colourful! Running Bear, Clucking with Turkeys, Little Pee Pee.”
Gurl thought it was lousy to blame the poor Indians for the dumb stuff Mrs Terwiliger called the kids of Hope House. Gurl got her own name because Mrs Terwiliger kept losing her as a baby. “I would turn around and poof! You were gone! And I would say to myself: Self, where is that GURL? Where has that GURL gotten to? And then I’d open the linen closet, looking for some towels, and there you’d be. I suppose I should be grateful that you have no talent for flight. You would have just floated away and no one would have been the wiser. Like a little cloud. Hmmm…Little C
loud would have been a nice name too, wouldn’t it? No?”
Now Gurl wondered about her name, about getting lost all the time. Was it possible that what happened in the alley had happened before? And would it happen again?
Mrs Terwiliger lowered her voice. “How are the children doing today, Bob?” Each syllable uttered by Mrs Terwiliger was enunciated in the most exaggerated fashion, as if the world were populated entirely with lip-readers. “How are they flying?”
Coach Bob shoved the cap back on his head. “What do you think? It’s like they’ve got bowling balls stuffed in their underwear.”
“Oh, dear. I had hoped…” said Mrs Terwiliger. She always hoped that the kids would do better, maybe one day make their way on to a Wing team and make Hope House the talk of the town, but they never did. Gurl looked through the chainlink fence, out on to the street. The people buzzed by, on foot, on flycycles, on rocket boards, in cars, flitting off to wherever they had to be. Some wore business suits, others wore chains and nose rings, but most didn’t notice the kids of Hope House jumping, straining, failing. If they did happen to look, they frowned in concern and pity or giggled in amusement. Even the crows that gathered in the single tree on the grounds seemed to laugh at them: “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Gurl wondered if that was why Mrs Terwiliger made them practise outside. She kept a metal donation box bolted to the gate, which was often stuffed to the brim with dollar bills. What, thought Gurl, did she spend all that money on? She certainly didn’t spend it on the kids at Hope House. The clothes were tattered, the shoes too small, the food inedible and the dorms freezing. The few times that they got to go out on field trips, Mrs Terwiliger took them to Times Square, gave them each a can full of Hope House pencils and told them to sell the pencils to passersby for a dollar each. She said that it was a character-building exercise.
“Hey!” bellowed a voice. “What are you looking at?”
Mrs Terwiliger, Coach Bob and Gurl turned, expecting to see Ruckus causing a ruckus again. But it wasn’t Ruckus; it was the nameless new boy. He was shouting at a woman who had stopped her flycycle long enough to tape some sort of notice to the front gate. “I said, what are you looking at?”
The woman, dressed in a neon-pink sweatshirt that fell off one shoulder, glanced behind her, as if she assumed he was talking to someone else.
“Yeah, I mean you!” shouted the boy. “What are you looking at?”
The woman held up a hand. “Are you talking to me? I don’t think you’re talking to me, ya little snot.”
Bug Boy laughed. “I think I am tawkin’ to ya,” he said, imitating her thick city accent.
Mrs Terwiliger egg-whisked over to the boy. “Stop that! Since when do we accost people who are walking down the street?” She pursed red lips. “Never, that’s when. Now apologise to the young lady.”
The boy crossed his arms. “She was staring. She was watching me fly.”
“Ya call that flying?” shouted the woman. “I seen better lift on a block of cement!” She got on her flycycle and took off.
“I’ll show you!” the boy yelled. He turned away from the woman and from Mrs Terwiliger. He crouched, then jumped. Gurl winced, seeing that he barely made it a foot off the ground. He tried again, his face twisted with the effort, and got about six inches off the ground. Then four. Then two. It seemed that the angrier he got, the heavier he got. Soon he looked as if someone had glued the bottoms of his sneakers to the pavement. The other kids, whom you might expect to make fun of the boy, said nothing. His failure reminded them of their own and who wanted to think about that?
Mrs Terwiliger put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think that’s about enough for today. We’ll try again tomorrow, Chicken.”
“What did you call me?”
Mrs Terwiliger sighed and brushed a bleached strand of hair from her thick, fake eyelashes. “You can’t fly. Neither can chickens. In ancient times the Indians who used to roam these lands liked to name—”
The boy cut her off. “Nobody calls me ‘Chicken’.” Redcheeked, his light brown hair lank with sweat, the boy shook free of her and shuffled from the tarmac, kicking rocks so hard that they rang against the chain-link fence.
“ZOOT!” Dillydally said. “Boy needs to pop a pill and chill.”
“Right on,” said Coach Bob, who knew that Dillydally was obsessed with old TV shows and his speech was littered with peculiar slang.
“Chicken is having a bad day. We all have bad days, don’t we, Ruckus? Lunchmeat? Dillydally? We have to be understanding at times like these.” Mrs Terwiliger looked thoughtfully at the gate, where the notice the woman had hung flapped in the wind. “Gurl, be a dear and fetch that notice for me, would you?”
“I’ll get it,” cried Ruckus, preparing to leap.
“I asked Gurl to do it, Ruckus.”
“Awww,” said Dillydally. “That’s so establishment.”
Gurl walked over and pulled the notice off the fence. She nearly tripped and fell when she saw what it said:
MISSING CAT!
Very rare! Grey, with white belly. Green eyes. Answers to the name “Laverna” (but only when she feels like it). Owner frantic! Reward offered! No questions asked! Call 555-1919!
“Gurl,” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Bring it over here, dear.”
Gurl reluctantly handed the paper to the matron.
“A missing cat!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “My stars! I haven’t seen a cat in years!” Her eyes scanned the notice. “Nasty animals.”
“They’re not nasty!” said Gurl before she could think about it.
Mrs Terwiliger patted Gurl on the head. “I know you children fancy yourselves worldly and sophisticated, but I daresay I know a bit more about wild animals than you do. Cats are bird-killers.” She tapped a long red fingernail on her teeth. “Though I wouldn’t mind finding this one. I wonder how big this reward is.”
“Can I go to my room? I’m not feeling too well,” said Gurl, doing her best to sound ill. She had to get inside the dorm; she had to check on the cat.
“Oh, of course, Gurl,” Mrs Terwiliger enunciated, her plump lips shining like slugs. “I know how hard these Wing practices must be for you, with your condition. Fly along, then. Oh! I mean, run along.”
Gurl turned and walked slowly to the main building, holding her stomach, sick for real with the thought of having stolen someone else’s pet. Gurl could not bring herself to give the cat back, not yet. For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had made a friend (even if it was a fuzzy, nonhuman friend). Just a little while, she thought. I’ll just keep her a little while. That’s not so bad, is it?
Once she got inside, however, she ran down the hallway to the girls’ dormitory and raced to her bed. “Please be here, please be here,” she whispered, pulling out the old sweater box and opening the flaps.
But she knew what she’d find even before she opened the box because it was what she expected each and every day.
Nothing.
Chapter 4
Bugged
THE BOY BOUNCED DOWN THE corridor, punching the wall every few feet or so. Feline Face. Bug Eye. Lizard Man. Any of those names would have been all right with him; he knew his eyes were so big and far apart they were practically on the sides of his head. So, fine. Bug. Bugs were cool. Bugs could fly. Some, like praying mantises, even had those sweet backward scythes for arms. He wondered why grown-ups had operations to have their eyebrows pasted up on their foreheads or fat vacuumed from their butts but never got anything practical. Like antennae. Or fangs. Or scythes for arms. The boy would have enjoyed having scythes for arms because then he could slash through the fence around Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless and fly away for ever. Instead, he was stuck here with Mrs Terwiliger. Mrs Terwiliger looked like a flying Pez sweet dispenser.
He stopped and jumped as high as he could, but his feet were so heavy. It was like he had been chained to the ground. Wham! He punched the wall so hard he bloodied his knuckles and had to stuff his fist in
his mouth.
She named him Chicken. Chicken! Chickens couldn’t fly. Why chickens were even considered birds was a mystery. They were more like walking cushions or fat clucking possums or something.
He tried to jump again, his feet sticking to the floor. Wham! Wham! Wham! He didn’t cry out at the pain in his hands; he welcomed it. It kept his mind off everything else. This stupid place. His stupid new name. The stupid food, worse than monkey chow. The fact that he could hardly get his feet off the ground when in his mind and in his dreams, he could soar.
If only he knew who he was. Who he really was. The other kids said that no one ever remembered much about who they were when they came to Hope House, not even their own names, that your memories faded as soon as you crossed the threshold. Bug did remember crossing the threshold, sitting in Mrs Terwiliger’s office and being snarky when she asked for his name: “Mary Poppins! Harry Potter! Stanley Yelnats!” He also remembered hearing music—maracas or cymbals or something—and whispering in someone’s ear. But whispering in whose ear? And whispering what? His real name? His address? His favourite colour? He just didn’t know. But it was better that way, the other kids told him. Otherwise, you’d spend all day crying over the fact that your parents died or your Aunt Lucy gave you away like a pet parrot who talks too much and poops all over the floor. And who’d want to know that? Better to forget. Better to jump up and down like an idiot in the playground at Hope House, wishing that one day you’d make it more than a couple of feet.
“Meeow.”
Bug—if he had to have a name, that was the one he wanted, thank you very much—swung around, bloody fists high. Something small and fuzzy was sitting at the end of the hallway, near the entrance to the girls’ dormitory. What the heck was that, he thought. A rat? City rats could grow big, he knew. The subways were overrun with them. Hairy, dog-sized things with long yellow teeth, all the better to gnaw you with, my dear.