The second night of being grounded, Patricia started to go nuts and she was choking on the red-hot super-spicy turkey and mashed potatoes Roberta had carried up. She was coughing and rasping and wheezing. The sound of the television downstairs—too loud to ignore, too quiet to make out what anyone was saying—peeled her skull.
The weekend was the worst part of being grounded. Patricia’s parents put their own weekend plans on hold so they could keep her locked in her room. Like they had to miss an exhibition of vintage door knockers that they’d read about in one of their design magazines, which they’d been looking forward to.
If Patricia could do magic, then she could fly out her window or communicate with witches in China and Mexico. But no. She was still just boring, and bored.
Sunday came around. Patricia’s mother made a pot roast. Roberta poured Tabasco over Patricia’s portion before bringing it upstairs. Roberta unlocked the door and handed the tray to Patricia, then stood there in the doorway to watch Patricia eat. Waiting to see Patricia freak out and turn bright pink.
Instead, Patricia calmly loaded a big forkful into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. She shrugged. “It’s too bland,” she said. “I would prefer it to be spicier.” Then she handed it back to Roberta and closed her door.
Roberta took the tray back down and found a bottle of Texas extra-spicy five-alarm BBQ sauce. She splashed it onto Patricia’s pot roast until it gave off a pungent aroma.
She carried the food back up to Patricia and handed it over. Patricia chewed a bit. “Hmmm,” she said. “A little better. But still not spicy enough. I would really like something a lot spicier.”
Roberta went and got a jar of Peruvian hot pepper seeds and dotted them all over the pot roast.
Patricia felt as though her mouth was on fire after just one bite, but she forced a smile onto her face. “Hmm. I would still like it spicier. Thank you,” Patricia said.
Roberta found some chili powder on the top shelf of the downstairs pantry and put a generous scoopful onto Patricia’s dinner. She had to pull her sweater over her nose and mouth to carry it back upstairs.
Patricia considered this screaming piece of beef, which was way spicier than the spiciest thing she’d ever eaten (a five-alarm chili that had been billed as “forbidden by the Geneva cooking convention” by the roadside diner where her family had stopped last summer). She forced herself to take a big bite and chew slowly. “Sure. That’ll do. Thanks.” Roberta watched Patricia eat the whole thing, slowly—but like she was savoring it, not like she was in pain or reluctant. When it was all gone, Patricia thanked Roberta again. The door closed and Patricia was alone. She let out a fiery gasp.
Patricia’s stomach was being eaten from the inside. Her head was boiling away, and she felt faint. Everything was blinding white, and her mouth was a toxic disaster area. She was sweating red-hot oil through every inch of her skin. Most of all, her forehead hurt from pushing against the ceiling.
Wait a second. Why was her forehead up against the ceiling? Patricia could look down and see her own body, flopping around a bit. She was flying! She had left her body! Something about so much chili powder and hot oil all at once must have put her into a state. She was astral-projecting. Or something. She no longer even felt her stomach pain or any tingling in her mouth, that was for her physical body. “I love spicy food!” Patricia said with no mouth and no breath.
She flew to the woods.
She raced over the lawns and driveways, swooping and lifting, amazed at the feeling of the wind pressing through her face. Her hands and feet were pure silver. She rose higher, so the highway was a stream of brightness underneath her. The night felt cold, but not in a painful way, more like she was filling up with air.
Somehow Patricia knew the way to the place where the Parliament had met when she was a little girl. She wondered if she was dreaming all this, but it had too many funny details, like the highway construction closing one lane in the middle of the night—who would dream that up?—and it all seemed totally real.
Soon she was in front of the majestic Tree where the Parliament had met, its great wings of leaves arching over her. But there were no birds this time. The Tree just fanned in the darkness, the wind animating its fronds a little bit. Patricia had wasted a trip out of her body, because nobody was home. Just her luck.
She almost turned and flew back. But maybe the birds were in recess somewhere nearby. “Hello?” Patricia said into the darkness.
“Hell,” a voice said back, “o.”
Patricia had been standing planted in a patch of ground, but at the sound of that voice she jumped, and rose four feet in the air because she still weighed nothing. She remembered at last how to come back down to earth.
“Hello?” Patricia said again. “Who’s there?”
“You called out,” said the voice. “I answered.”
This time, Patricia could tell somehow that the voice was coming from the Tree itself. Like there was a presence there, at the center of its big trunk. There wasn’t a face or anything, just a feeling that something was watching her.
“Thank you,” Patricia said. She was getting cold, after all, in her panda pajamas. She was barefoot outdoors in the autumn night, even though this wasn’t her body.
“I have not spoken to a living person,” the Tree said, forming the words syllable by syllable, “in many seasons. You were distressed. What is wrong?” Its voice sounded like the wind blowing through an old bellows, or the lowest note playing on a big wooden recorder.
Now Patricia felt embarrassed, because suddenly her problems felt tiny and selfish, when she placed them in front of such a huge and ancient presence. “I feel like a fake witch,” she said. “I can’t do anything. At all. My friend Laurence can build supercomputers and time machines and ray guns. He can make cool things happen any time he wants. I can’t make anything cool happen.”
“Something cool,” the Tree said in a gust of vowels and a clatter of consonants, “is happening. Right now.”
“Yes,” Patricia said, ashamed again. “Yes! Definitely! This is great. Really. But this just happened on its own. I can’t make anything happen when I want it to.”
“Your friend would control nature,” said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. “A witch must serve nature.”
“But,” Patricia said, thinking this through. “That’s not fair. If nature serves Laurence, and I serve nature, then it’s like I’m serving Laurence. I like Laurence, I guess, but I don’t want to be his servant.”
“Control,” the Tree said, “is an illusion.”
“Okay,” Patricia said. “So I guess I really am a witch. Right? I mean, you called me a witch just now. Plus I left my body, that counts for something. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I know it must be hard work being a tree. Especially a Parliamentary Tree.”
“I am many trees,” the Tree said. “And many other things besides. Goodbye.”
The journey back to Patricia’s house went much faster than the outward trip, perhaps because she was much sleepier. She passed through the ceiling of her bedroom and into her body—which was twisted with horrible stomach pain, because she had eaten enough hot peppers for a hundred thousand curries.
“Aaaaaaaaa!” Patricia shouted, sitting up and clutching her stomach. “Bathroom break! Bathroom break! I need a bathroom break NOW!!!!”
* * *
ON MONDAY, SHE sat across from Laurence at lunch at the far end of one of the long tables, next to the slop cans, where the kids who had no clique of their own were stuck.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.
“Sure,” Laurence said without hesitating. He was poking holes in his gray, clammy hamburger with a knife. “You already know all of my secrets.”
“Great.” Patricia lowered her voice and covered her mouth. “So listen. You probably won’t even believe any of this. I know it’s going to sound crazy. But I have to tell someone. You’re the only one I can tell.” She told the whole stor
y, as best she could.
6
EVERY TIME LAURENCE showed Patricia another one of his inventions, he felt a crick in his neck. Sort of a charley horse, that only happened when he pulled an experimental device out of his knapsack. He wondered about this for days until he realized: He was instinctively flinching away from Patricia and lifting one shoulder. Braced for her to call him a creep.
“Here’s something I’ve been working on,” he would start to say—and then his neck would spasm. Even when he realized he was doing it, he couldn’t stop. Like part of him always flashed back to his sixth-grade Show-and-Tell disaster, the Laserscoop.
But if anything, Patricia just seemed endlessly curious. Even when he showed her the remote-controlled cyborg cockroach kit he’d ordered from the internet, one day after school. “Here’s where you connect it to the roach’s central nervous system, so it will obey all of your fiendish commands,” Laurence said, pointing at the little wires on the tiny metal wedge, fresh out of the box. A truck belched underneath the pedestrian overpass they were sitting on, so neither of them could talk until it had passed.
“Roach-borg.” Patricia looked at the roach-saddle in Laurence’s palm. “That is nuts.” She started to do a Borg voice from Star Trek: “Doritos are irrelevant.”
“So you’re not grossed out?” Laurence put it back in the box it came in, and the box back in the knapsack. He looked at her: still kind of giggling, though with a nervy edge to it. A car pulled a boat down the road. Probably the last chance for sailing this year.
Patricia considered this. “Sure, it’s kind of yuck. But not as bad as when we dissected a cow brain in Biology class. I just don’t feel sorry for a roach.” Her legs kicked against the metal underside of the bridge, through the slats in the railing. Right now, as far as Laurence’s parents knew, he and Patricia were halfway up the Crystal Lake Trail.
They both just watched the cars for a moment. Patricia had taken to rolling up the sleeves of her uniform cardigan all the time, so people could tell at a glance that she wasn’t cutting herself—she really wasn’t, okay?
“Just remember,” Patricia said in a suddenly grown-up voice, “control is an illusion.” He could see the unscathed veins in her bare forearm. He realized she was quoting the magic voice she’d talked to. “And yet,” she went on, “I’m still jealous of your toys. You just never give up. You keep on making stuff. And whenever you show off something new to me, you have this look of joy on your face.”
“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.
She shrugged. “Well, you look joyful. You get all excited. I envy that.”
Laurence wondered if he could possibly cringe and be joyful at the same time. He rubbed his sore neck, first with one hand, then with both.
For some reason, Laurence believed Patricia’s story about talking to some birds and having an out-of-body experience. He was still kind of a gullible person, which had made him easy to prank at summer camp—but also, he rebelled at the idea of starting to close off possibilities in the world. If Patricia, who was sort of his friend, believed this stuff, then he wanted to support her. Also, she was suffering for her “witchcraft” and it would offend some basic sense of fairness for Laurence to think she was being punished for nothing. And really, was her story any crazier than other stuff, like the way Laurence’s body seemed to be rolling out new, totally unrequested features with alarming speed? Not really.
Plus Patricia had become pretty much the only person Laurence could talk to at school. Even the other so-called geeks at Canterbury Academy were too chickenshit to hang with Laurence, especially after he’d managed to get himself banned from the school’s computer lab (he wasn’t trying to hack anything, just make some improvements) and the school workshop (he was doing a carefully controlled flamethrower experiment). She was the only one he could laugh with about the Saarinian Program’s weird test questions (“Faith is to religion as love is to ____”), and he liked how she people-watched in the cafeteria, how her gaze turned Casey Hamilton’s student-council campaign into an amusing pageant taking place on the outskirts of fairytown.
Patricia pulled her legs out of the railing and got to her feet. “But you’re lucky,” she said. “There’s a difference between your type of outcast and mine. If you’re a science geek, people give you wedgies and don’t invite you to their parties. But if you’re a witch, everybody just assumes you’re an evil psycho. It’s kind of different.”
“Don’t try and lecture me about my life.” Laurence had gotten to his feet as well, and now he dropped his rucksack on the ground, so it nearly tumbled off the overpass. He felt both sides of his neck tighten up. “Just … don’t. You don’t know what my life is like.”
“Sorry.” Patricia bit her lip, just as a tanker rolled underfoot. “I guess that was out of line. Just trying to warn you that if you’re going to be my friend, you have to be prepared for worse stuff than just people thinking we’re girlfriend-boyfriend. Like, you might get some of my witch cooties on you.”
Laurence rolled his eyes at this. “I think I can handle a little peer pressure.”
* * *
BRAD CHOMNER GAVE Laurence a Dumpster swirlie after fifth period a few days later. Laurence looked up, head soaked with slime, rusty walls tearing at his uniform shirt, and Brad was grabbing Laurence by the lapels and hauling him up so they were almost face-to-face. Brad Chomner’s neck was thicker than Laurence’s whole torso. Worse yet, when Brad let Laurence fall to the cement walkway he saw that his indelible forever crush, Dorothy Glass, had been watching the whole thing.
“I don’t know if I can take four more years of this place,” Laurence told Patricia when the two of them were sitting at one end of the lunch table, uncomfortably close to the garbage cans so soon after his trash baptism. His head still itched. “I keep thinking maybe I could transfer to the math-and-science high school in town, instead.”
“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “You’d have to get up early every day and take the bus alone. You’d be spending so much time on the bus, you’d probably miss out on all the after-school stuff.”
“Anything’s better than this,” Laurence said. “Mr. Gluckman, the math teacher, already wrote a letter for me. Now I just have to get my parents to sign the form. I have a feeling they’re going to be weird about me going to school so far away, though.”
“They just want you to have a real childhood. They don’t want you to grow up too fast.”
“They worry about me too much, ever since I ran away from home this one time, to go see a rocket. They just don’t want me to stand out.” While Laurence was talking, a Tater Tot hit him in the head, but he just kept talking as if nothing had happened.
“I think it’s good that you have parents who care what becomes of you.” Patricia seemed to have a soft spot for Laurence’s parents, maybe because they weren’t scary overachievers like hers were.
“My parents are cowards. They’re always terrified someone will notice them and they’ll have to explain themselves.” A second Tater Tot impact. Laurence barely flinched.
Lunch was almost over, and then they had separate classes. Laurence changed the subject. “Hey, do you want to talk to my supercomputer?” He was gathering up all his stuff into his book bag. “I think it needs more interaction with different people, to help it learn how humans think.”
“What would I talk to it about?” Patricia said.
“Just whatever you want,” Laurence said. “Think of it as a friend to confide in.” He pulled a scrap of yellow lined paper out of his bag. “This is the computer’s IM account, on all the main services. Its name is CH@NG3M3.” He spelled that. “It’s a temporary name, just like it sounds. When CH@NG3M3 becomes fully sentient and starts thinking for itself, it can choose a new name. But I like that name. It’s like I’m challenging the computer
to grow and change and find an identity for itself.”
“Or maybe you’re asking the computer to change you,” Patricia said.
“Yeah,” Laurence looked at his own handwriting on the notepaper. “Yeah, maybe I am at that.”
“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll try talking to it.” She took the paper from Laurence and stuffed it into her skirt pocket.
“Anything you tell CH@NG3M3 will be between you two,” Laurence said. “I won’t ever read any of it.”
“Speaking of which,” Patricia said, “I hear the new guidance counselor is actually pretty okay. Maybe you should go talk to him about your Brad Chomner problem.” The bell rang, and they ran their separate ways.
Laurence decided to take Patricia’s advice, since he’d heard other people say that the new guidance counselor was cool. He’d only recently taken over, after the previous school counselor got run over by a meat truck. The new guy did have an easy, talk-show-host vibe about him as he told Laurence that he could share anything inside this boxy office, with its antidrug posters and bookcases instead of a window. Theodolphus Rose was a tall man with a shaved head—no eyebrows, even—and grotesque, knobby cheekbones and chin.
“I just,” Laurence said. “The bullying. It is interfering. With my ability to achieve academically. When I get locked in a Dumpster, it causes me to miss Social Studies class, which is going to drag my grades down. I am not an escape artist.”
All the Birds in the Sky Page 5