by Melissa Hart
“Michael!” Mom hollered. “Can you help us with the groceries?”
Dad appeared in the hallway. He just watched as we heaved the shredded bags up to the counter. “What happened?”
“What happened is the man who sold us the VW is a liar and a crook.” Mom grabbed a green apple from the fruit bowl and chomped a vicious bite. Her face soured. “Looks like we’ll be riding the city bus for a while.”
I unloaded groceries into the fridge. Dad sat at the table where he’d apparently been shelling peas. He tore open a pod and popped a row of peas into a bowl with his thumb. “The city bus, huh? Public transportation seems like a reasonable aspect of Voluntary Simplicity.”
“Easy for you to say.” Mom glared at him. “You don’t have to leave the house.”
I shot her a shocked look. We weren’t a yelling family. My parents never fought, not even after Dad tried to leave us.
But now, my mother closed her mouth in a hard, tight line and began to shell peas like her whole life depended on it.
My father shrugged, turned to me. “How’s the screenwriter? Busy examining your existential angst?”
“Uh … I guess.”
Did everyone’s dad talk this way or only the ones who were writing a book? “You … you wanna read one of my screenplays?”
“Put it on top of my to-do pile in my office.”
I didn’t tell Dad I had thirty notebooks filled cover-to-cover with screenplay scenes. “Mr. Davies—he was my teacher, remember—he said I’m pretty good. I haven’t written a whole one yet … I’m still looking for material. But if you’re too busy …”
Dad’s head lowered over the bowl of peas. “I’m taking a break from my novel. Writer’s block.”
My mother stopped shelling and scowled at me. I scowled back. In a movie, the audience would see that we were both freaking out about the same thing.
Is he suicidal again?
I went to the sink and ran hot water over my hands, scrubbing hard to get rid of the death smell. I’d fixed meals for forty-two birds that morning—mice and fish and even a whole chicken for the red-tailed hawks to share—Minerva’s orders. Now I was glad my parents didn’t cook meat. All that carnage would turn anyone vegetarian.
“By the way,” I muttered, “the bus doesn’t go to the raptor center. It stops a mile before.”
Mom heaved another huge sigh. “Well, you’ll just have to walk until the VW’s fixed.”
“But it’s a hundred degrees outside!”
“Well, I’m sorry, Solo, but I just don’t know what else …”
I turned and stalked down the hall. Halfway to my room, rage exploded inside me like a shook-up Coke. “I told you we should’ve kept the Corvette!”
I slammed my door so hard the trailer trembled.
•
The next morning, Dad’s writer’s block must’ve unclogged. In his room, he hunched over his typewriter, pounding the keys. They exploded like gunfire.
“Normal writers use a computer,” I muttered and walked to the kitchen for a banana and a bagel.
From the living room, Mom looked at me upside down, twisted into a yoga pose. “Have a good day, sweetheart.”
“Yeah, right.”
Already, the sun beat down on the gravel driveway. I pushed my sunglasses onto my face and rode my skateboard on the narrow shoulder to the bus stop. One other person waited on the bench—an elderly woman with bright purple hair that matched her sneakers. I tried to picture my grandmother digging in her Beverly Hills garden with her straw hat tied over purple curls. Impossible.
The bus pulled up, and I headed for the back so I could keep an eye on Granny, plus a girl with pink braids and a man with a Mohawk striped black and white like a skunk.
I leaned toward Mr. Mohawk. “Know where I could find a computer? I’ve gotta email someone.”
He squinted, and his eyebrow ring caught the light. “Try the library, man.”
“Thanks.”
“No problemo.”
The bus let me off at the bottom of the steep road to the raptor center. I tried to ride my skateboard up the last mile, but it ended up riding me. I hauled it under my arm, quads and hamstrings shrieking.
“Ha ha ha ha!” Edgar laughed from her enclosure.
“What’s so funny?” I stomped past the crow and dropped my skateboard on the lawn.
“You’re late.” A guy with a curly blond ponytail marched toward me, armed with a bucket and hose. “I’m Lucas. I work with at-risk kids at the center.”
So this guy knew I was a criminal, too.
Lucas didn’t look like a typical jail warden. He was maybe twenty-five. Torn jeans, stained with bleach. Green bandana on his head and a silver feather on a black beaded necklace. His nose curved like a hawk’s beak. One long eyebrow stretched over it. A hawk tattoo rode his bicep. A real weirdo.
He looks like he’s part bird.
Hermes hooted from the office. WHOO-hoo-oo-oo-oo-WHOO-WHOO!
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Lucas called back—a perfect imitation: WHOO-hoo-oo-oo-oo-WHOO-WHOO!
The injured great horned owl in the treatment room added his two cents. The three of them were a regular feathered choir.
“Get some rubber gloves,” Lucas ordered. “You don’t want to clean enclosures with your bare hands.” He jerked his chin toward the office. “They’re in there.”
“Can you … can you put that owl in its mew first?”
Lucas’s eyebrow shot up, but he stepped through the screen door, pulled on a leather glove, and guided Hermes into the mew. I edged in behind him and grabbed the box of rubber gloves.
“We’ll start with the spotted owls.” Lucas talked fast. I had to listen hard to catch his words before they flew away. “Watch me from outside the enclosure, and then you can help with the falcons. Always keep enclosure doors locked.” He waved the key attached to a wooden eagle head the size of my fist. “Never leave this in a padlock. Minerva’s number-one rule.”
I rolled my eyes. Locked doors were nothing new. After my father tried to kill himself, Mom locked the garage door and threw away the key.
I followed Lucas to a tall wood and wire enclosure. He unlocked the door, pulled in a hose and bucket, and latched the door behind him. “Never let the birds out,” he ordered. “They’ve got permanent injuries and they can’t hunt. In the wild, they’d die.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” Right then, I came up with the perfect name for Lucas. Sergeant Bird Nerd.
Two brown and white owls stared down at him from a perch. I ducked, sure Lucas was a dead man. But the birds stayed put, blinking round dark eyes. “What do you know about northern spotted owls?” he asked while he cleaned the mew.
“I know they have spots … Sergeant.” I whispered the last word.
“Obviously. Also, they’re endangered. Their territory’s shrinking, and barred owls are moving into what’s left.”
“Barred owls?” I echoed. “What the heck are those?”
“They look like spotteds, only they have brown stripes—bars—across their chest instead of spots. Their hoot sounds like someone saying, ‘Who cooks for you?’”
“Hilarious,” I muttered.
“Not really. Now that they’ve migrated west, the old growth forest’s getting pretty crowded.”
Like the ocean. Once, Manhattan Beach got some heinous riptides, and their surfers moved in on Redondo Beach waves. The ocean was so packed I could barely surf.
“Daydreamer, huh?” Lucas stretched rubber gloves over his hands. “Listen up. First, we pick up all the parts.”
“Parts?”
“Chicken feet, mouse heads, rat tails. Anything the birds don’t eat.”
“Gross!”
Lucas dropped a pair of orange chicken feet into the bucket. “Hey, kid—raptors can’t live on vegetables and tofu. They eat meat. Ours are too damaged to hunt on their own, so we give them food that’s already dead.”
My left hand reached to cover my banda
ged wrist.
“Here.” Lucas poked an inch-long grayish white thing through the wire.
I jumped back. “What is that?”
Not a paw. Please, not a paw.
“Owl pellet. Owls eat their prey whole. But they can’t digest some of it, so their stomach makes a pellet. Indigestible bones on the inside, fur and feathers on the outside. They cough it up. Break the pellet open—you’ll see what these owls had for dinner.”
I looked down and saw a tiny skull embedded in the pellet. My stomach went belly-up. Somewhere on my parents’ acre, there was a pellet full of kitten bones. I hurled the thing far into the forest.
Lucas narrowed his eyes. “Gotta understand the birds if you’re gonna help them.” He pushed through the door with his bucket and turned the key in the padlock. “There’s the hose. Wash the feathers off the sides of the enclosure and spray the poop into the gravel.” He handed me the bucket. I couldn’t look inside.
“We’ll do Artemis next. She goes quickly because we can’t go into her enclosure.”
“We?” No way was I getting within ten feet of an owl. Sergeant Bird Nerd could pick up rat tails by himself.
Lucas shrugged. “It’s this or juvenile corrections, kid. You make the choice.”
“Whatever.” I locked my jaw and stomped after him to the mew half covered with a blue tarp. It looked empty.
“Has Minerva told you about Artemis?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Raised illegally by humans. She’s an imprint—too much contact with people when she was a baby.”
He scratched his scalp. A white feather fell out and drifted to his shoulder. “She thinks we’re her species. Can’t go into her enclosure because she’s scared we’ll steal her territory. Only Minerva’s allowed inside—Artemis thinks she’s her mate. If anyone else went in, she’d try to kill them.”
He unlocked the door to the entryway between us and the mew. “Once, a volunteer thought he was tough and went into her enclosure. I’ve never heard anything like his scream. His arm was shredded.”
The scabs on my wrist ached. “So where is this killer bird?”
“Sitting on eggs.” Again, Lucas studied me, then picked up a hose. “I’ll call her out so you can see her.”
“I don’t want …” I began, but he aimed a spray of mist through the mew door toward the perch.
“Solo, meet Artemis.”
There’s a moment in The Birds when Hitchcock pans in on crows swarming a schoolyard. A group of crows is actually called a murder of crows. You can tell from the terror on actress Tippi Hedren’s face that she knows just why they’re labeled with that name. I felt her same panic when an enormous great horned owl rose up to the perch in front of me.
She stood twice as big as Hermes. Vengeful, yellow eyes locked onto mine. She unfurled her wings—they were almost as wide as I was tall. I stared at her feet—tawny feathers led to curved black talons, each two inches long and poised to kill.
The world spun. Again, I heard my kitten mewing, the hideous screech … I saw the furry gray and white body. My breath tangled in my lungs, threatened to choke me.
“She loves to get a shower,” Lucas said.
Oblivious to the fact that his latest at-risk youth was about to pass out, Lucas continued spraying cold water over Artemis. Slowly, the owl’s ear tufts dropped, and she stretched out her wings. With one wing tilted up, Artemis looked like a woman ready to scrub her armpit.
But she was the enemy—my sworn foe. I glared at the bird. She blinked back at me.
“If she can fly, Minerva should let her go.”
Lucas snapped to attention. “She never learned to hunt. She’d die in the wild.”
His eyebrow lowered in a furious V, just like the black feathers over Artemis’s eyes. “Never raise a wild animal as a pet. Tame it, and you hand it a death sentence.”
I thought again of my kitten and swallowed hard against the tightness in my throat. “I’m never gonna have another pet.”
Artemis ruffled up her feathers and clacked her beak—the same beak that she used to rip apart small, helpless animals. “Especially not a bird.”
Lucas turned off the hose. Three long scars gleamed white against his tanned arm. “Yeah? We’ll wait and see.”
I dropped the bucket and stalked away toward the clinic. You’ll be waiting a long, long time, Sergeant Bird Nerd.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FREEDOM OF MOBILITY
Solo, fold the laundry! Mop the floors! Weed the butterfly garden!”
Now I knew why Lucas supervised at-risk kids at the raptor center. The guy put the D in dictator.
“He’s a fantastic artist,” Minerva told me. “When I first met him, he was a teenager spray painting graffiti on buildings. Now he’s getting an art degree. Have you seen his sketches?”
I shook my head. No way was I getting friendly with Sergeant Bird Nerd. He jabbered on and on about raptors like there was nothing else in the world. We’d be knee-deep in bird poop and suddenly, he’d bust out with a lecture.
“Peregrine falcons can fly two hundred sixty miles an hour, straight down. They ball up their talons and knock their prey out cold in midair,” Lucas told me once.
“Good for them,” I’d mutter.
I’d have my head in a water trough, scrubbing out green algae at Lucas’s command, and he’d start up again. “Know why vultures don’t have feathers on their heads, kid? They pick at flesh inside rotting carcasses. Bald heads are easier to keep clean.”
“Then maybe you should lose the ponytail,” I whispered.
But I had to do what he said. It was this or juvenile corrections … kid.
Friday afternoon, Lucas ordered me to water Minerva’s butterfly garden while he fed the pygmy owls. Lucas gave them each a thawed chick, then turned to me. “Owls can tell the location of their prey in total darkness ’cause they have lopsided ears.”
“Good thing they don’t wear earrings,” I retorted.
That day, I swiped another postcard from the office and taped an inch-long pellet to the back.
Hey, Raj—
Check out this screech owl pellet. They hack up stuff they can’t digest. Wish I could hack up my mom’s tofu.
Stay cool,
Solo
Rajen would freak when he saw it. No owl pellets on the beach.
Lucas looked up from cleaning Hermes’s mew. “Hey, kid, how’d you get here?”
My stomach lurched. Hadn’t Minerva told him? “Uh … an owl murdered my kitten, and I accidentally shot …”
“No, how’d you get to the center today? Parents drop you off?”
I jerked my chin at my skateboard propped next to his red road bike.
He whistled. “That’s a wild ride down the mountain. Potholes, rocks … pretty dangerous way to travel.”
I shrugged. “Four wheels is better than none.”
“I’ve got an extra bike,” he said. “It’s yours if you want it.”
“For free?” I squinted at him. “What’s the catch?”
Lucas scowled. “No catch. It’s not my bike. Carrie—my ex-girlfriend—was about your size. I’ve gotta drive my truck Monday to load up the garbage, so I’ll toss the bike in the back and bring it here.”
A used bike. I’d never taken someone’s hand-me-downs. If I wanted something, my parents bought it new. But Voluntary Simplicity, according to my parents, meant reduce, reuse, and recycle. I knew they’d never buy me a new bike now.
“D’you give stuff to all the at-risk kids?” I asked Lucas.
“Look, if you don’t want it, just say so.”
I studied my skateboard. One of the wheels wobbled like a loose tooth. “Doesn’t Carrie need her bike?”
Lucas lowered his eyebrow. “She moved to Florida.” He slammed out the door with a plate of fish. “I’m gonna be up feeding the eagles.”
“See you next week!” I yelled. He didn’t answer.
Inside his clean mew, Hermes ruffled his feathers and clacked his beak.
“Betcha Carrie broke Sergeant Bird Nerd’s heart,” I whispered.
The owl bobbed his head. Obviously, he agreed.
•
There’s always a catch when something’s free. On Monday, Lucas pulled up in his truck with a blue mountain bike—knobby tires and a black lightning bolt streaking across the frame, just a little rusty. I didn’t mind the rust. But I sure minded the pink plastic pig’s head welded onto the handlebar. I pushed its nose. It squeaked.
“Well …” Edgar said from her mew. “Ha ha ha ha!”
“What’s up with the pig?” I asked Lucas.
“It’s a horn. You squeak the pig to tell people you’re behind them.”
“I know that. How do you get it off?”
“You don’t. The bike comes as is.”
I stared at him, sure he was joking. But Lucas never joked.
“You’re telling me I can’t have the bike unless I keep the pig?” I said.
“Correct.”
“You put that pig on there to make fun of me.”
Lucas pulled on a pair of leather gloves. “Lighten up, kid.”
Minerva met us in the driveway. “Good morning, Solo. Lucas is helping me trim beaks today. You can clean the down off the mews.”
“All of them?”
The fluffy down feathers clung to everything, stubborn as beach tar on bare feet. No spraying it off with the hose—it just stuck worse.
“Can’t we leave it there? It’s not hurting anything,” I argued.
Minerva looked at Lucas with a little smile twisting on her lips. He nodded and turned to me. “That would look pretty sloppy. Visitors need to see clean enclosures and birds that are well cared for.”
“Whatever.” I snatched up a bucket and stomped off. “Thirty freakin’ mews. This is worse than jail.”
It took me hours to clean all the mews. I finished all the hawks and falcons, the vultures and the osprey. Finally, I moved on to the owls. Artemis rustled on her nest behind the tarp. Lucas told me her eggs wouldn’t hatch. Artemis had never been with a male great horned owl. “But females automatically lay eggs once a year,” he said. So here she was trying to coax babies out of a bunch of lifeless shells, like a surfer trying to ride flat water. I almost felt sorry for her.