by Sybil Lamb
Grack was getting frustrated they only hung out while he was working, even if he did kinda work from dawn to dusk with no days off. He wanted to just hang out for real, so one day he tried to tempt Eggs back to his apartment with the promise of a whole box of melt-proof ice cream sandwiches he got by mistake and therefore needed her help eating.
Eggs followed Grack home, bouncing along the street lamps and no-parking signs until Grack rode his bicycle hot dog cart into an old boxy stone building. The open door looked at least 100 years old, from a time they would have parked horse-drawn stuff in there.
But instead of carriages and wagons, inside there were rows of food carts, both motorized and pedal-powered. They ranged in size from a little tricycle with two buckets for ice cream to a bell-and-whistle-covered school bus wienermobile with an allstainless-steel mobile kitchen grill. The warehousesized room even had four separate walk-in coolers, holding enough meat, veggies, buns, and fixin’s to feed a full baseball stadium for a month.
Eggs flutter-wriggled under the stone arch of the big door, then fluttered regularly across the metal beams of the ceiling.
She was surprised and impressed. “Wow, hot dog bicycles must make a lot of money,” she said, kind of like a half question.
Grack beamed proudly. “Yes, they do,” he said, and then grinned at her and did his cool-guy eyebrows.
The carts and trucks and stuff weren’t all specifically his. This building and everything in it was the family business. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents, and their brothers and sisters and all that—more family than he could count—lived in this building, and everyone had their own hot dog cart.
Grack turned to Eggs, who was dangling from a support beam. He took off his glasses, looked her in the eye, and said: “I am Grackle McCart, and you are standing in the McCart family hot dog empire built by over 100 years of hot dog sales. My great-great-grandfather Elijah Snipe McCart is the original inventor of the hot dog cart. I am the youngest heir to the McCart Empire, and I am inviting you into it.”
“What are you talking about?” Eggs said.
She was confused about what the heck was going on and felt afraid and confused from all this being indoors. She tried to jump out a window to clear her head, but embarrassingly, she mistook a clean window for an open one and slammed into it face-first. Stunned, she fell on her butt on the garage floor.
“Welcome to Earth,” said Grack. It was the first time he’d ever seen her actually land. He motioned for her to follow him down the cold dark stone staircase that went underground. “I’m talking about you pedalling one of these carts. We could work the market and do my route in opposite directions. Forget working for hot dogs—you could have money, Eggs.”
Eggs shook her head, confused and in pain. Then she looked down and realized she was on the ground.
She started to panic, as if she had seen herself on fire or getting eaten by sharks. With an explosion of energy, she spun her arms and legs wildly, scrambling to get off the floor as fast as she could. She very seriously acted like the floor was made of red-hot lava. Delirious, she managed to claw her way on top of an old BBQ bicycle cart, messily knocking several buckets of corn relish and hot peppers off the cart’s fixin’s shelf and sloppily spilling them all down the side.
“I can’t sell stuff! I don’t know how! I just like watching you do it and helping,” she blurted. She was getting more and more agitated. “I promise I’ll clean that mess up. Why are we in this giant garage?”
“Don’t worry about cleaning it up!” Grack said. “Come down to my apartment, and you can clean yourself up.”
Since he was the youngest McCart, Grack lived in the basement with his three older sisters and two cousins and a few dogs. The first floor was for his three older brothers and his mom, the second floor was for his aunts and uncles, all the way up to his super-old great-uncle on the top floor.
“Living with tons of family isn’t bad at all,” Grack told Eggs. “My apartment is actually pretty big and you absolutely have to see my awesome all-steel kitchen. The two of us could cook stuff I don’t even have in my cart! Like sandwiches maybe, or how about roast chicken? Or what if we baked a cake together? With all of my family’s food cart supplies, we could make literally anything you could ever want to eat!”
But Eggs, still completely panicking about touching the ground, wasn’t listening. She climbed up the wall again and was clattering her fingers on the window over and over, like she was trying to dig through it.
“I WON’T GO ON THE GROUND AND I DEFINITELY WON’T GO IN THE GROUND,” she bleated.
Grack pleaded for her to listen to his reasonable reasons. He promised she’d learn how to do money and sales, like his sisters and brothers. And he promised to teach her everything he knew about cooking, not just working the grill and deep fryer but fancy chef stuff, too. If nothing else, she at least had to check out his room? He had a cool rare music collection and some movies and his own mini fridge with every kind of cola and a goofy, fun pet dog he’d named Bunny ’cause he ate carrots and could do jumping tricks.
He said, “I have a postcard collection and a foreign coin collection and two goldfish, and I really do have that whole box of ice cream sandwiches. I have a spare bicycle that you could use, and we could ride bikes together—if you can ride a bike?” Grack thought Eggs must be able to ride a bike if she can stand on a phone wire for hours every day. With her powers, she could probably instantly master all the bike tricks there are …
What Grack was trying to say was that he’d give Eggs anything if it made her hang out with him more.
But Eggs was still clawing at the window, with her toes locked in a white-knuckle grip on the old brick wall.
Then Grack lost it. She was supposed to hang out at his house! Grack would be in big trouble with his dad if he found Eggs in the garage, and she was hardly listening to him while he tried to think of anything to impress her. He felt hurt and insulted, like Eggs was acting extra weird so she wouldn’t have to talk normal with him.
“Why can’t you get your head out of the clouds?” Grack snapped. “Why do you have to be such a bird-brain?!” His voice carried as much angry meanness as he could muster.
Eggs started to cry, making sounds like the ugly squawk of a seagull. She finally fumbled the window open and shot out so fast she was a block away by the time Grack could poke his head out to look for her.
5
SPLENDID FAIRY WREN’S SPACE BOOK
Eggs skittered to the top of Grack’s building, where she launched herself from rooftop to rooftop in random directions. Direction was of no importance as long as she kept getting farther away. The old brick and stone buildings of the market faded into the cement, barnwood, and steel of the mill district.
Then she found herself surrounded by odd lumpy buildings with not enough windows and more exterior pipes and ductwork than could possibly be usable. The lumpy buildings went for blocks in every direction.
Eventually, she flew between two rows of tall concrete silos, then disappeared into a clutter of old textile mills cut up and repurposed as tiny apartments. Eggs was suddenly charmed by the rickety, cobbled-together buildings. They were connected by narrow courtyards, and it made for a fascinating place to fly.
It was no secret that Eggs delighted in sneaking into places. She never got in trouble because she was more harmless than an actual bird. She wouldn’t put anything in her pockets because she refused to take on extra weight.
The local bad guys had long ago given up trying to recruit her into their dumb bad-guy gang. She was utterly disqualified as a cat burglar, or even as an egg burglar.
Tonight, her airheaded harmlessness was charmingly apparent as she tumbled into the tiny triangular attic room of Splendid Fairy Wren.
Splendid Fairy Wren was a semi-grown-up punk rocker who was also really a hippie. She had left the five-dollar punk hotel a year ago to move into this tiny room, which she paid for by knitting socks for a buck a pair. She had
picked the highest room in town on purpose, so she could hide and knit and read books and grow plants in old cans.
Eggs had chosen this window because it was the highest and looked like a challenge. She crashed through a dozen of Splendid Wren’s plants on the window ledge. Eggs dangled upside down from the sill and almost caught every single plant she’d knocked over.
Wren smiled uncertainly up from a big picture book about outer space. “Oh, hey,” she said, trying to hide the confusion in her voice. Splendid Wren figured that maybe she was supposed to know a flying girl would crash through her window tonight and she’d better pretend she remembered.
“Heya!” Eggs smiled big and upside downly.
Splendid Wren seemed friendly but was also super anxious about her plants. “Hey, you knocked over one of my cacti! She has to get back in her little pot or she’ll turn into a sad little spiky raisin.”
Eggs apologized repeatedly and nervously. She volunteered to clean up the mess she’d made.
“Actually, I fly everywhere all the time, but I don’t always fly in such complicated, cluttered building mazes,” Eggs humblebragged, and in the same breath despaired, “so technically, as a flying girl who spends most of her time flying, I have no idea how to garden or anything to do with the ground, but I still want to do the right thing and help.”
Wren pointed at the uprooted cactus on the floor. “I would rather do the gardening myself, but you can pick up the cactus and place it in the can while I spoon in the dirt.”
Eggs overeagerly and overconfidently grabbed the cactus, and then immediately dropped it again, squawking in pain from the spikes.
Wren laughed and gave Eggs some Band-Aids, and they promptly decided to be friends.
Eggs wound up hanging out at Splendid Wren’s all night. They replanted the cactus, and Wren excitedly told Eggs the names of all her plants and which ones she thought were dating and which ones she thought didn’t like each other. She even had special unusual plants like a teeny-tiny apple tree growing in a coffee cup. Eggs didn’t see any apples, but Wren said they were too small to see. Then she showed Eggs the two dozen different kinds of socks she could knit, including pom-pom heels, stripy, polka-dot, argyle, Xtreme cold cable-knit, and rainbow toe socks.
Splendid Wren was wound up like a triple-size rubber band, so grateful for company after her year of self-imposed hermitting. With contagious bubbling mirth, she continued to show Eggs around her place, starting with her well-worn pile of picture books. They were all weirdly specific because she had bought them at the Weirdly Specific Market: books like The Fish of the Southern Hemisphere, Post Office Airplanes, 250 Years of Robots, and Garbage Cans of the World. And Wren had made up backstories for every single picture in every single book.
“Say,” said Wren suddenly, “it’s just about time for pancakes!”
Wren had a huge sack of pancake mix, as it was her favourite food and the only thing she ever ate. (Sometimes she’d snip one of her flowers and put petals in the pancakes.) Eggs could stay all night and hang out in Wren’s giant understuffed beanbag chair, as it was her only piece of actual furniture. And they could eat pancakes and look at pictures of planets and fish!
Eggs thought Wren was indeed splendid. Her silly playfulness was a delightful and much-needed change from most non-flying people. When you’re the only one who flies, limits the number of fun things you can do with other kids. And Eggs’s talent for gravity (or problem, depending on your point of view) had always coloured her ability to make and keep friends.
Eggs’s only topic of conversation was all the cool, weird things she’d seen while flying. Like chickens and goats in people’s backyards, and boats hidden on their roofs for the off-season. She’d seen secret terraces, secret radio stations, secret flying-machine landing pads, and all kinds of giant contraptions, rooftop greenhouses, and messy private patios on high ledges.
And she’d seen all the curious people in strange apartments. So many people think no one can see through their windows because they’re high up. There are people who live in piles of cats and dogs, and people who live in piles of pizza boxes and newspapers. There are poor people with luxury houses and rich people who treat their condos like barns. Eggs could list off strange characters for hours without stopping—and she did, until Wren fell asleep.
The whole time, Eggs balanced on top of Wren’s refrigerator, refusing to touch the ground, even fourteen floors up.
6
FOURTEEN FLOORS IN FORTY-TWO SECONDS
The next morning, Eggs snapped awake with the sun. She stretched and fluttered to the window ledge, announcing that she would fly away now.
Splendid Wren pleaded with Eggs, “Just let me make you some tea—or maybe some eggs, if that’s not weird—and then maybe stay and live with me forever?”
But before Wren could finish her racing words, Eggs disappeared. She plummeted out the window while Wren was mumbling, “See you later …”
Wren stared uncertainly at the empty window, her brain a tangled mess of dropped stitches. Had the most unusual girl she’d ever met just flown in her window, told her all kinds of impossible stories, and then flown out again? Or had Wren been alone so long she was seeing things?
Now that Eggs was gone, Wren wasn’t sure if she’d been real or a waking dream, or maybe Wren was still dreaming. Maybe she’d had one of those flying dreams that dream doctors are always talking about.
Wren was mostly sure Eggs was real and had probably just flown off to go sit on a statue or get some worms or something. “That’s just what flying girls must be like,” Wren reasoned to herself.
She opened up a secret box of cookies and lined three of them along the window ledge, carefully positioning them so they could be noticed from a few metres away in any direction. Then she flopped into her beanbag chair and picked up her space book where she’d left off. So lost was Wren in her thoughts, she didn’t think to run to the window to see where Eggs had gone after that fourteen-storey drop.
Eggs’s dawn flight out the fourteenth-floor window took a spectacular forty-two seconds. She hit everything possible on the way down. Eggs plinkety-plonked down through the random outcroppings, bouncing every which way, ricocheting off phone wires and clotheslines, deflecting off a fire escape with a mortally perilous CLANG, and propelling herself forward and sometimes upward by randomly pinwheeling her limbs. The alleys, shafts, and courtyards of the mill apartments were just as jagged and maze-like as the buildings they belonged to. In 100 completely unalike rooms, apartment dwellers were waking up and sipping coffee and chewing on toast, gazing out their windows, when a live thrashing girl shot noisily past. Everyone blinked and rubbed their eyes and involuntarily yawned. They presumed they must still be more than half-asleep.
In the end, Eggs landed in a tree. She was covered in scratches and bruises but otherwise absurdly unharmed. Exhausted from her pinball-machine tumble, she hung out in the tree for hours, watching the tiny odd-shaped apartment dwellers straggle off to their jobs ten feet below.
Eggs had certainly messed herself up way worse a bunch of times. She’d even broken both arms, each on a different flight. So many times, it seemed like Eggs had finally used up her impossible luck. Someone would find her smashed-up body crumpled over a parked car or a mailbox and drag her to the hospital, and it’d seem like that was it for old Eggs. But she healed inhumanly fast every time. She would leave the hospital by the window.
No one even noticed when Eggs disappeared from the tree in time for lunch.
7
NO MORE HOT DOGS
When Eggs reappeared at Grack’s cart, asking to distribute flyers in exchange for free hot dogs again, he said, “No. No way. I don’t need any flighty bird girl taking advantage of me like I’m a dumb sucker.” Several boys and a couple of girls whose houses she’d broken into had major crushes on Eggs. They were always poking around trying to find her. Grackle McCart knew that. He couldn’t help being a little bit jealous.
Eggs was surprised. �
�But, but, I only ate so many hot dogs ’cause I thought you liked that I ate any kind of hot dog you cooked,” she said. “I didn’t know you wanted to sell those. I thought I was just eating the spare hot dogs.”
Grack could see that Eggs really didn’t understand, and that just made him more upset. What, was he supposed to not get upset with her just ’cause she was a wild animal? Or because she thought she was a wild animal, or wanted to pretend she was a wild animal, or whatever?
He stared hard at her perched on top of a parking meter. “I heard you spent the night at Splendid Wren’s. But you wouldn’t even take one step down the stone stairs into my place,” he said. “I should have known anyone pretending to be a bird would make a pretend friend.”
Grack scrunched up his face because he didn’t want to cry in front of her.
Eggs got sad. She didn’t understand why Grack was upset. He was her closest friend. He fed her and he kinda took care of her.
Grack just stayed hunched over his grill, cooking fish-stick-sized hot dogs. He wanted her to apologize, or maybe tell him she liked him best? Or … he didn’t know what. “I don’t know what to think,” he sulked.
Eggs got all jittery and started asking dumb questions too fast. She kept saying she would do flyers and he didn’t even have to give her any snacks and it’s all cool.
“No, it’s not cool,” he said. He told her she had the day off and tomorrow too and don’t call him and he’d find her if he decided he needed flyering by carrier pigeon again but probably not.
Grack wanted her to go away soon because he couldn’t make himself not cry for much longer. And he could tell that Eggs was also trying not to have feelings inside of herself.
“No, for real. Go on, get out of here,” he said. “Go break into somebody else’s house or whatever.” And then he picked up an undercooked corn dog and threw it spinning down the length of the block. “Why don’t you do a cool trick and disappear?”
