The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly

by Sybil Lamb

  Eggs’s eyes looked hurt, but her mouth was a single expressionless line. “It’s my life to fly around and fly away,” she told him. “It’s been my life for longer than I can remember.”

  And with that, she fluttered up the nearest fire escape and disappeared.

  Hours later, the very second that the sunset touched the horizon, Splendid Fairy Wren appeared next to Grackle McCart. Grack remembered her from when she’d lived at the punk hotel. She was dressed in a tangled pile of unfinished knitted sweaters with her head wrapped in extra-long scarves, lugging a coarse burlap sack of hammers and rusty tools.

  The overdressed Wren said, “I’ve come outside for the longest time in a year specifically to see you, because I know you are closer to Eggs than anybody.” Grack was half-delighted, half-suspicious. “Does Eggs really talk about me and stuff?”

  “She thinks you’re the biggest deal in town!” Wren said. “Running your hot dog stand and giving her food and jobs to do and always knowing stuff. Tons of people go to your hot dog cart every day. She’s in awe of you because, since she landed here, you’re the first and most consistent friend she’s had. She said a bunch of times that without you she’d have wound up a freaky garbage bird roosting under the highway off-ramp.”

  Grack’s heart did a backflip, but he tried to play it cool. He said, “I thought Eggs just slept at your place now.”

  “Kind of,” said Wren. “She nodded off on top of my fridge. But she never laid down, or even sat. Anyway, would you help me build her a house?” She reached into her satchel and pulled out an ancient rusty saw.

  Grack laughed and shook his head. There was no way he wanted to be enemies with Splendid Wren. She didn’t come out much, but whenever she did, even if it was just to get a hot dog, it was like spotting a special rare bird. She was always sitting off by herself, looking at picture books and knitting. Grack had always wondered about her.

  And he wasn’t mad at Eggs either, not really. How could a girl who was not a bird but did bird stuff ever be chill and “grounded”? She couldn’t even just hang out on the couch. Unless maybe it was a couch in a tree? Some kind of birdhouse or girl nest? A bed in the sky?!

  Grack’s clever mind was starting to have ideas.

  “Flying girls!” he exclaimed.

  “Flying girls,” agreed Splendid Wren, with a sideways smirk and an extra-big shrug.

  8

  THE EGG FACTORY

  Grack and Wren both later thought they miiiiight have noticed Eggs spying on them from the rooftops, but they couldn’t be sure. So the next morning, when Grack brought Eggs to the roof of the abandoned carpet factory just around the corner, it was hard to tell if her delight was because she was surprised or because Splendid Wren was already hammering forklift pallets into a shape that kind of looked like a box.

  Only a few hours of hammering, unhammering, and rehammering later, Wren had built a half-decent rectangular Eggs-sized coop, while Grack climbed down and up the dozen flights of rotten stairs like twenty times, lugging wood from the alley.

  Eggs hopped about on top of the chimney, chirping about how much she loved Wren and Grack for being so sweet to her. She was 100 times more excited than a non-flying person would be, because hammers and forklift pallets were so heavy, and heavy stuff was just really not her thing. To Eggs, these two weren’t just doing her a favour. They were doing the unthinkable impossible for her. Now Eggs would have her very own carton in which to ride out the winter.

  That night, the three of them threw a nest-warming party, with Grack grilling non-stop every possible kind of hot dog. And Wren brought her enormous jug of homemade potent fruity flower juice. She said her juice was full of vitamins and energy. It had tiny flowers floating around in it and was super sweet. Wren claimed it didn’t have any sugar, but all three of them still got all hyper and ran around the roof.

  “Show me how to do that!” Splendid Wren squeaked when Eggs launched herself off her new rooftop, bounced off a metal catwalk, and fluttered up onto an old blank billboard.

  Eggs looked deep in thought for a second. Like, really deep in thought. Then she said, “Flap up on top of that air conditioner,” pointing to a big metal box on the roof, just a bit taller than Wren.

  As an experiment, Wren tentatively jumped up and down, getting not even half as high as the air conditioner. She decided to climb up on top of it. Eggs and Grack watched her struggle, and then swing her feet up to get on top.

  Wren stood up straight and proudly announced, “There!”

  Eggs looked sideways at Grack. He couldn’t tell, but he was pretty sure she winked at him.

  “Now you are up one Wren high,” said Eggs. “Launch yourself from there toward my egg carton and see how far you can get.”

  Wren flew about thirty centimetres forward, and then two metres straight down onto the asphalt roof. She then lost her footing, wiped out, and fell on her butt. Grack almost laughed, but then he concentrated really hard on not laughing and played it off cool.

  “Okay,” said Eggs. “Now do that again, but this time, don’t climb onto the air conditioner, flap up there.”

  Splendid Fairy Wren closed her eyes and hopped up and down in place for a minute, seldom going higher than her own knees.

  “Oh, whatever,” Wren squeaked, kind of laugh-crying. The look on her splendid face showed that she was laughing because she was sad that her plan to do something impossible by just hoping that she could hadn’t worked.

  Grack took this as his cue that it was okay to laugh, too. But then Wren gave him a mean look.

  “Eggs and I have hung out together for like a million hours.” Grack shrugged into a smirk. “I’ve watched her jump off roofs and jump up onto roofs more times than anybody, and I still have no idea what she’s doing.”

  “I’m flying,” chirped Eggs with a grin. She jumped over a ledge and glided over the tip tops of half a dozen factory skylights.

  Wren ran after her, daintily climbing up and down every kind of thing that might be found on a factory roof, chasing Eggs but with no thought of actually catching her. Grack followed—sort of off to the side—along normal stairs or the occasional ladder that he deemed acceptable. Carrying scrap wood up here all day was one thing, but he wasn’t about to run through broken glass to roll in some tar on the roof. Plus, he was a cook, and cooks like stuff clean. He could appreciate the giant mechanical fan chimneys that the girls kept climbing as awe-inspiringly monstrous without getting un-wash-off-able robot juices all over his hands and semi-nice pants.

  Wren and Grack got the workout of their lives chasing after Eggs as she pinged like a rubber ball from one otherworldly building to the next. After they climbed, or refused to climb, every single tower, turret, vent, shaft, elevator, water tank, skylight, and satellite dish, Eggs finally let them both collapse laughing in the big pile of old yarn and clothes they’d used to make her nest.

  They all lay back and looked for stars, but it was so cloudy they only saw three. What they could see, from the carpet factory roof, was all kinds of dark shapes in the buildings. Little rectangles of sixty-watt amber light in every direction.

  Just then, fifty Canada geese flew above them in one big honking, flapping formation. Eggs fluttered to the top of the tallest smokestack and honked back at them. Grack joked that they were probably all off to work the night shift at the pillow-stuffing factory. Wren giggled, her mouth full of chili dog and flower juice.

  The three friends hung out all night long in Eggs’s carton, wrapping themselves in sweaters and blankets and eating leftover hot dogs. They talked about a bunch of random stuff, and they all agreed that Eggs’s new house was really great and hanging out together was pretty fun.

  Eggs softened her skittish bird nature. She relaxed. She said all of them being friends was great ’cause they were all alike in this way that wasn’t about flying or hot dogs or growing plants. Maybe it was about eating stuff on the roof—maybe that was it, that they all liked being on the roof together? Whatever it wa
s, them being friends was really lucky and neat and great.

  That late-fall nest-warming party, and how fantastically happy Eggs was, is both Grack and Wren’s favourite memory. It was early winter, not even New Year’s, when they lost her.

  9

  BORROWING STUFF

  Despite a wandering life scavenging for leftovers and living outside on roofs, Eggs was a good-natured person even before she met Grack and Wren. Eggs refused to ever become a burglar or thief, as she disliked carrying any kind of bag or purse, or even having things in her pockets. Nobody is perfect, though, and because of her impulsive, airheaded, fluttery bird brain … Eggs had one … tiny … persistently unmanageable personality flaw. She would borrow people’s stuff without asking, and then forget to give it back.

  As the threat of winter turned to the certainty of snow, Eggs would fly around keeping an eye out for coats and hoodies to wear for a few hours while resting and shivering on a phone pole. Then she’d ditch the jackets to fly off in search of adventures and snacks.

  The cold snap had escalated so suddenly that, one night, there was freezing rain. Instead of fluttering into the city for a coat, Eggs took one off the roof of the nearby housing project. She lucked into a bright red jacket made of ultra-soft material that had been seemingly abandoned and forgotten, draped over the back of an aluminum and blue plastic lawn chair that looked like someone had set up for suntanning twenty degrees ago. She briefly wondered if the jacket had been there for weeks. Score!

  And so it happened that Eggs was spotted perched on the phone lines above the auto body shop, slowly dirtying up the quite recognizable $400 golden-red silk bomber jacket of a local bad guy named Robin.

  Robin was infamous in the neighbourhood. He was a semi-grown-up bully, always mean and always angry. He stole bikes, got in scary fights, sold pirated DVDs and video games, as well as these outlawed insane-o pills that tasted like jelly beans but had some weird chemical sugar that made whoever ate them go out-of-control hyperactive for three hours, barf, and then pass out wherever they stood. He was always trying to get people to eat them, even though they were kind of horrible.

  He was the type of guy who walked up to people and stole the hot dogs right out of their hands, and then laughed at them while he ate it. The worst part? Lots of people thought he was a badass, cool bad guy. It made no sense, but it was still true.

  Robin eventually got word that the weird girl had been seen climbing smokestacks and getting grime all over his jacket. He was super upset ’cause he wasn’t about to let a crusty busker, or whatever she was, pull one over on him.

  It was easy work to intimidate gutter punks. Eventually, Robin threatened to punch some dumb kid, who then tipped him off that the girl’s name was maybe Eggs, and maybe she could be found in her winter hideout—a sort of pigeon coop that the hot dog guy and the sock-knitting girl had built for her on the roof of the abandoned carpet factory, just next to the big freight train yard.

  10

  EDGE-OF-THE-ROOF NIGHTMARE AT 100 FEET

  Robin found Eggs up there in her carton on the roof at 10:59 p.m. She was bundled up, hiding cozily from the last of the freezing rain. Without even thinking—which wasn’t really his kind of thing anyway—Robin started whacking Eggs repeatedly with a thin piece of lumber he found on the roof. The golden-red silk bomber jacket absorbed the worst of the blows, but it also got torn, ripped, and punctured. Robin was ruining his jacket way faster and worse than Eggs had.

  Before Eggs could even blink herself awake, she was jolted by sharp multi-pointed pokes of pain from all the bent nails and screws in the board. She leapt out of the coat and, in one continuous, smooth motion, threw it over Robin’s head. Robin stepped back—and realized he must have taken too many insane-o pills. He had a ridiculously hard time just trying to get the jacket off his head.

  Meanwhile, Eggs kicked the main back wall of her pigeon coop hard, which caused the heavy forklift pallet roof to fall on Robin. He threw it off, too powered up on insane-o pills to care or properly notice that he got poked bad by a dozen nails in the wall’s collapse. He furiously kicked her stupid house over and picked up a yard-long splintered pine board with several twisted nails curled around the edges.

  Robin swung the board at Eggs, and she almost dodged it in a feat of wildly improvised trapeze-act-like tumbling. But then she registered that she had been cut painfully across her cheek. This was a good time to be scared ’cause Robin was going all wild and out of control and screaming and lashing out at random. He had no plan but rage. If he got close enough, Eggs realized, then he might really hurt her.

  Suddenly, Eggs fell back on a piece of hard, lumpy canvas. It was Wren’s sack of hammers! With no time to think, she swung the sack at Robin, just to push him back, but it ripped open in motion and pelted him with a rain of mismatched old rusty tools. He fell down, yelling curses and screaming wild nonsense, while Eggs scrambled up the ledge of the closest factory wall.

  It was the worst wall, too—the side of the factory next to the train yard. Below her was just ten storeys of window-less, balcony-less, ledge-less, nearly seamless limestone, and then miles of freight trains and locomotives, all swapping cars back and forth like a big dangerous robot worm fight.

  Robin got up, wobbling goofily, waving his arms for fear of more hammers hitting him. But he found himself stuck to the spot! He tried and failed over and over again to lunge at Eggs. Robin realized he was looking really foolish trying to fight a not-very-big girl. Working extremely hard to force his brain to figure out what was going on, Robin located and then studied his foot. Nails! Somehow, between Robin kicking her house down and Eggs throwing a dozen hammers at him, his foot had gotten nailed to the roof.

  Robin bellowed a wordless ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH and grabbed for any wood scraps in reach, throwing them in random directions, hoping to hit Eggs by chance.

  Eggs sneered at him, clinging by just her toes to the roof’s long ledge. She rose up, puffing herself up, and squawked mockingly at Robin. Then she scratched the ground definitively with her foot, spread her imaginary wings to their five-foot-eight grandeur, fluttered her long fingers, and dove off the side of the factory. She plummeted more than 100-something feet to the train tracks, with absolutely nothing at all to break her fall …

  11

  IF EVERYONE HATES HIM, DOES HE TELL THE TRUTH

  No one has seen or heard from Eggs in months. A bunch of punks talked big about throwing Robin off a roof, but no one did. He’s still a bad, mean, criminal dumb guy, his only satisfaction being his new painful-looking limp that he actually seems kind of proud of. No one thinks he’s cool anymore. His rep is completely trashed now.

  Some negative people would try to convince you that Eggs dropped 100 feet right into a speeding junk train pulling 200 gondolas of twisted scrap steel, and any identifiable scrap of her went to the foundry, her soul now diluted among 1 million tons of construction rebar.

  Grack, Splendid Wren, the hotel punks, and all the rest of us who can’t bear to part with our very own folk hero can only find solace in the ranting mumbles of the loathsome jerk who chased her off a building.

  According to Robin, fighting down an overpowering urge to throw up and pass out, he pulled the nails out of his foot and collapsed in agony at the edge of the roof, just in time to see Eggs still falling. Still falling … though it had been a while, long enough, he thought, that she should have hit that speeding junk train by now.

  She was falling horizontally, at the speed of a Frisbee, maybe riding the air current above the freight train, surfing on one of Wren’s old hoodies that she’d been half-wearing under Robin’s jacket to keep warm as she slept. She’d drifted down twenty feet, thirty feet, forty, fifty—and suddenly, she was also half a mile away. Then Eggs shook her arm out of the hoodie sleeve, shot up, caught some complex air pattern above a train and truck crossing, and was flung into a recessed highway.

  Robin claims he saw her bounce off the roof of an eighteen-wheeler hauling chicken guts
to the pet food factory. Then she bounced and rolled like a clumsy cartwheel onto the roof of another truck doing twice her speed and was thrown backward and forward at the same time.

  She launched over the big green sign announcing the turnoff to the harbour. Then, she seemed to soar above the traffic before the road turned one way and Eggs just kept riding the air in a straight line. She cleared the top of a billboard advertising discount holiday flights, and then because of the downward curve of the highway, she was almost eighty feet up in the air again.

  Just before she finally disappeared behind the billboard, she was flapping her arms as hard as she could, angled just slightly upward, eyes locked on the horizon, aimed toward the harbour with all the different boats and giant ships coming and going to who knows where in the world.

  12

  THE MOST LEAST REASONABLE THING

  Grackle McCart and Splendid Wren spent the whole next week scouring Eggs’s alleged flight path as best they could, though it meant searching train tracks and a truck highway and a container shipyard filled with mostly unhelpful, antagonistic, disbelieving security guards. They never found a ragged T-shirt or red jeggings or socks with holes or anything at all.

  Grack said all this was proof she’d escaped. He said that regardless of whether she has any actual ability to fly, what is known for sure is that Eggs is impossibly, perhaps supernaturally, lucky at falling and has walked away from falls that high before.

  But that just upset Wren. “Well, if she’s okay, then why hasn’t she come to us?! Wouldn’t that be the most reasonable thing to do if a bad guy was after you?” “Eggs has never had anything to do with reason.” Grack went on using his smart-guy voice, “Therefore, the most reasonable thing to have happened to her is also the least reasonable.”