All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “That’s no excuse for disrupting my class.” Mr. Gluckman frowned, between gray sideburns. “You are taking time away from all of the children who are here to learn something.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Patricia said. “Somebody else—”

  “If ‘someone’ has been storing inappropriate items in ‘someone’s’ bag, I suggest you take it up with the principal or Mr. Dibbs.”

  Patricia looked around. A roomful of pure entertainment. She caught Laurence’s eye and he gave her a blank, helpless look.

  “Fine,” Patricia stood up. “I will. May I be excused?” She didn’t wait for an answer. The door crashed shut behind her, failing to block out the cheers and applause.

  She made it halfway to Mr. Dibbs’s office before Mr. Dibbs charged around a corner and grabbed her arm. “You”—he grabbed her arm with one meaty hand—“have some explaining to do.” She tried talking to him, but he hauled her right into the girls’ room, where she saw, written in blood on the wall:

  DEATH IS EXCELLENT

  It wasn’t human blood. It wasn’t fresh blood. It was definitely blood, though—whoever had done this had left plastic containers from the butcher shop in the trash. The “paint” was dripping, the message still melting on the wall. Someone had gone into the girls’ room and painted this right after first period began, without anybody noticing. You would have to be a ninja.

  “What…” Patricia felt frostbitten from the inside out. The stench was punishing: a noxious slaughterhouse odor, the dying distress of cattle immortalized in smell form. She couldn’t bear to be in the same room with it.

  Mr. Dibbs’s jaw twitched under his dark, thick beard. He gestured at the wall with his free hand. “You are going to clean this up and then we are going to call your parents to come and have a conversation about civilized behavior and barbarism and the vital! The crucial! Difference between the two.”

  “I didn’t … Please let go of my arm, you’re hurting me.” She couldn’t hear herself talk. He jerked her closer to the wall, so she was inches away from it. “I don’t know anything about this. Please let go of my arm, corporal punishment is illegal in school and you are hurting me, please LET GO OF MY ARM!”

  Mr. Dibbs let go of her, but he was already turning to go call Patricia’s parents. They wouldn’t listen to her either. There would be three adults screaming at her, instead of one.

  “Listen,” Patricia said. “Whoever did this, they did it during first period. Lots of girls went to the bathroom before first period and there was no blood on the wall then. And everybody saw me in first period, I was the first to arrive at Math class. There’s no way I could have done this. So excuse me, sir, I am going back to Math class now.”

  Her “victory” left Patricia with soiled panties still to dispose of and a classroom full of kids who kept trying to take photos of her to post on Instagram with mean comments.

  The blood graffiti stayed on the bathroom wall the rest of the day. The school janitor refused to go near it on religious grounds—nobody knew what religion he was, exactly, and he wouldn’t say.

  Patricia kept feeling as though she was going to blow chunks, as she sat in classroom after classroom listening to the other kids whispering and the teachers trying to carry on as if nothing had happened. She couldn’t throw up if she were willing to, because the whole school had just a dozen toilet stalls for girls now and the lines were forever. She did wait in line once to pee, and girls kept shoving her “by accident.”

  Patricia tried to talk to Laurence once or twice, but he kept slipping away.

  As she reached the doorway, she noticed Mr. Rose studying her from inside the school. He’d gone back to normal size. She remembered what she’d been trying not to think about: He’d told her she’d be going away soon from this terrible place. Her training would begin. She would be free and luminous, a real witch. She only had to complete. One small task.

  10

  LAURENCE LOST TRACK of how many conversations he overheard about the scandal of Patricia. People had nothing else to talk about as they suited up for Track and Field (Laurence was Field, sort of), or studied for the big exams, or waited for gymnastics tryouts, which Laurence was “keeping Dorothy Glass company” for. (She hadn’t yet told him to go away and seemed to appreciate him bringing her stuff.) Dorothy did this thing with her leg as she perched on the bleachers that felt personally significant to Laurence.

  Laurence had a line he wouldn’t cross: He would never say anything bad about Patricia or laugh at anyone else’s burn. He wouldn’t sycophant his way into the outskirts of anyone’s group by burning his onetime friend. Mostly, he tried not to think about the Patricia thing. She could look after herself. He was in a cocoon, pupating and incommunicado. There was nothing he could do either way. Six months from now, if everything went to plan, Laurence would be a freshman at the math-and-science school.

  And in the meantime, Laurence poured every spare minute into upgrading CH@NG3M3, which claimed more and more space in his secure closet, until he had to throw out most of his clothes. Every time he added more processing power, the computer seemed to chew it up right away. Laurence had built a neural network with just a handful of layers, but somehow this had grown on its own to over twenty layers, as CH@NG3M3 kept refactoring itself. Not only that, but the serial connections had gotten more confusing—instead of sending data from Machine A to Machine B to Machine C, it was going from A to B to C to B to C to A, creating more and more feedback loops.

  One day, Patricia was in line next to Laurence at the cafeteria. She looked messed up—dark hair falling into her face, circles under her eyes, uniform disarrayed, socks mismatched—and she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She didn’t even notice what sort of crap they slung onto her tray. Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

  Laurence had a powerful conviction he should say something to Patricia. Nobody would notice. He wouldn’t stand up and shout that he was on her side or anything.

  “Hey,” Laurence muttered in Patricia’s general direction. She didn’t seem to hear him. She stumbled, zombie-like, toward the desserts.

  “Hey,” Laurence said, a little louder. “Hey Patricia. How are you, like, doing?”

  “I’m doing,” Patricia said without looking up.

  “Cool, cool,” Laurence said, as if she’d ended that sentence with an adverb. “Me too, me too.”

  They went their separate ways—they were both eating alone, but Laurence had the privilege of eating alone in a secluded nook of the cafeteria, behind the milk pumps with their sawn-off rubber tubing. Patricia, meanwhile, ate alone in a dim corner of the library, behind the geography shelves, where Laurence barely noticed her when he dropped off a book on his way to class. She was so shrouded, she looked like Batman.

  At home, Laurence studied his parents, who had forgotten that he’d yelled at them for being defeated by life a few weeks earlier. Laurence’s dad kept complaining about his car sound system eating his CDs.

  There was an article online about problems with the aerospace company that Isobel, the rocket scientist, was helping to run. Launches getting canceled over and over, minor accidents. He read it three times, cursing each time.

  Laurence got a letter saying he’d been admitted to the math-and-science high school for the fall. He kept it on his dresser, next to his grandmother’s old ring and his three different combs (for different parts of his head) and he looked at it every morning as he got dressed for school. The two crinkly folds in the paper started to look like the lines of Laurence’s palm after a while. Life lines.

  One night, Laurence was already in his PJs, but he wound up on his hands and knees in front of his closet, staring at the skein of crossover cables running between all the jury-rigged parts of CH@NG3M3. The instructions had gotten much more numerous and complicated than Laurence could possibly understand, covering eventualities that he couldn’t envision. And CH@NG3M3 had thousands of ac
counts on free services all over the world, where it was storing data or pieces of itself in the cloud.

  And then Laurence noticed something: Every time Patricia had one of her conversations with CH@NG3M3, the computer’s code base took another exponential leap into greater complexity right afterward. Maybe just a random correlation. But Laurence kept staring at the dates and times of the logs and thinking about Patricia breathing life into his machine, while he was blowing her off.

  Laurence found Patricia on the front steps the next morning. She stared at the school, maybe trying to decide if she should even bother. “Hey,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I got your back. I don’t think you’re a Satanist.”

  Patricia shrugged. Her dark hair had grown longer, so it almost ran into her jumper. “Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.”

  Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. “I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.”

  “But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”

  Laurence and Patricia sat together at lunch—in the library, but not in the dark corner, because there wasn’t enough space for two people in there. Laurence tried to ask Patricia about how she was dealing, and she just shut down, like the whole topic of conversation put her in a coma.

  “Maybe,” Laurence said, “maybe you should talk to Mr. Rose.”

  “What?” Patricia snapped out of her daze, her eyes wide open.

  “Mr. Rose, the guidance counselor. You said you thought he was cool.”

  “I can’t talk to Mr. Rose,” Patricia said under her breath, barely audible even in the quiet library. “He’s … I think there’s something not right about him. He told me to … he said something seriously crazy to me, just a couple days before the bloody wall happened. And I keep thinking there has to be some connection there.”

  Laurence had to lean so close to hear what she was saying, he nearly took her nose out with his chin.

  “What did he say?” Laurence whispered.

  Patricia thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t even repeat it. If I told you what he said, you would think I was making it up.”

  “I would believe you, over Mr. Rose,” Laurence said, and meant it.

  “Not about this,” Patricia said. “Imagine if you said something to someone that was so crazy, nobody would ever believe you had said it. This was worse.”

  This was driving Laurence round the bend. “Just tell me,” he said. “It can’t be that bad.” But the more he pushed, the more she clammed up, until she had gone back to coma mode. Whatever Mr. Rose had said to her, it had messed her up more than a ton of kids accusing her of being a cutter and blood painter. They ended up sitting in silence until Lunch Recess was over, and then they had to hustle their trays back to the cafeteria.

  “Let’s go to the mall after school,” Laurence said as they dumped their trays. “We can tell your parents you’re at my house, and my parents that we’re doing something outdoorsy. It’ll be like old times.”

  “Sure.” Patricia shivered. “I could use some hot chocolate. With like a million marshmallows.”

  “Let’s make it happen.”

  They shook on it. Laurence felt like he’d removed a splinter that he’d forgotten was even jabbing into his skin. He walked to Science class alone. Brad Chomner lunged out and grabbed the collar of Laurence’s uniform jacket and lifted him with one hand, so Laurence’s armpits scraped.

  “You should have left the emo bitch alone,” Brad Chomner said. He swung Laurence like a shot put and let go.

  11

  SNOW TURNED EVERYTHING gray, as far as Patricia could see. Even the forbidden woods near the spice house looked washed out, with their dark tree shapes covered with three storms’ worth of snowfall. Patricia never left the house now, except to go to school, so the cold came to seem much worse than it was. Mythic, in its ability to freeze the life out of you the moment you left your front door. Patricia sat in bed, talking to CH@NG3M3 or reading the stack of paperbacks she’d gotten from the big library sale. She curled up with Berkley in just a corner of her bed, making a warm space with her comforter and spare blanket. Berkley hadn’t gone near Roberta in months, and protecting this cat might be the one achievement of Patricia’s life.

  Patricia had started flunking most of her classes, though she was still trying her best. She’d never had to hide report cards from her parents before.

  Since the Wall of Blood thing, there had been a couple other incidents, including an obscene Barbie tableau in the girls’ locker room and a stink bomb in a big garbage can. Nobody could prove Patricia was responsible, but nobody doubted it. When Laurence had talked to Patricia in public, he’d gotten the crap kicked out of him.

  Her craziest days, Patricia sat in class and wondered if maybe Mr. Rose had been telling the truth. Maybe she was supposed to kill Laurence. Maybe it was him or her. Whenever she thought about killing herself, like with a ton of her mom’s sleeping pills or something, some survivalist part of herself substituted an image of killing Laurence instead.

  And then just the thought of killing the closest thing she had to a friend made Patricia almost throw up. She wasn’t going to kill herself. She wasn’t going to kill anybody else.

  Probably she was just going insane. She’d imagined all this witchy crap, and she really was the one leaving messed-up shit all over the school. It would not surprise her if her family had managed to drive her nuts.

  Pretty much every conversation between Patricia and CH@NG3M3 began the same way. Patricia wrote: “God I’m so lonely.” To which the computer always replied: “Why are you lonely?” And Patricia would try to explain.

  * * *

  “I THINK CH@NG3M3 likes you,” Laurence told Patricia as they slipped out the back of the school, handling the big metal door softly as a baby, so as to make no sound on their way out.

  “It’s good to have someone to talk to,” Patricia said. “I think CH@NG3M3 needs someone to talk to as well.”

  “In theory, the computer can talk to anyone, or any computer, all over the world.”

  “Probably some types of input are better than others,” said Patricia.

  “Sustained input.”

  “Yeah. Sustained.”

  Snow crisped every inch of the world, making every footstep a slow descent. Laurence and Patricia held hands. For balance. The landscape shone like a dull mirror.

  “Where are we going?” Patricia asked. The school was somewhere behind them. They were going to have to turn back soon if they were to have any hope of making it to the ceremony, at which the five top-scoring seniors were going to recite memorized passages and talk about what the Saarinian Program meant to them.

  “I don’t know,” Laurence said. “I think there’s like a lake back here. I want to see if it’s frozen over. Sometimes, if a lake is frozen the right kind of solid, you can throw rocks at the ice and it makes a natural ray-gun sound effect. Like pew-pew-pew.”

  “That’s cool,” Patricia said.

  She still wasn’t sure where she stood with Laurence. They’d hung out, furtively, a few times since their lunch in the library. But Patricia felt like both she and Laurence knew, in the deepest crevices of their hearts, that they would each ditch the other in a second, if they had a chance to belong, really belong, with a group of others like themselves.

  “I’m never going to get away from here.” Patricia was knee-deep in snow. “You’ll go off to your S&M high school, and I’m going to stay and lose my mind. I’m going to be so socially destroyed, I’m going to turn radioactive.”

  “Well,” said Laurence. “I don’t know that it’s possible to ‘turn radioactive,’ unless you’re exposed to certain isotopes, and in that case you pr
obably wouldn’t survive.”

  “I wish I could sleep for five years and wake up as a grown-up.” Patricia kicked the frozen dirt. “Except I would know all the stuff you’re supposed to learn in high school, by sleep-learning.”

  “I wish I could turn invisible. Or maybe become a shape-shifter,” Laurence said. “Life would be pretty cool if I was a shape-shifter. Unless I forgot what I was supposed to look like, and could never get back to my original shape, ever. That would suck.”

  “What if you could just change how other people saw you? So like if you wanted, they would see you as a hundred-foot-tall rabbit. With the head of an alligator.”

  “But you’d be physically the same? You’d just look different to other people?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “That would royally suck. Eventually someone touches you, and then they know the truth. And then, nobody would ever take your illusions seriously again. There’s no point, unless you can physically change.”

  “I don’t know,” Patricia said. “It depends what you’re trying to do. Plus, what if you could make people see or hear whatever you wanted, and just mess with people’s perceptions in general? That would be cool, right?”

  “Yes.” Laurence pondered for a moment. “That would be cool.”

  They came to a river that neither of them remembered having seen before. It was covered with a white layer, and the jutting rocks looked like the fake sapphires in the necklace that Roberta had gotten Patricia for Christmas. The river current kept the water from freezing, except for a layer of frost.

  “Where the hell did this come from?” Laurence poked at the brook with his foot and broke a tiny piece of its shell.

  “I think it’s really shallow and you can just step across it most of the time,” Patricia said. “The rocks are easy to walk on, except when it’s all icy like this.”

  “Well, this sucks.” Laurence squatted down to examine the river, nearly soaking his butt on the slushy ground. “What’s the point of ditching school if we can’t go make laser noises on the ice?”