The Meaning of Birds

by Jaye Robin Brown

  Vivi’s sparkle faded for a split second. Then she laughed. “That is funny!” She nudged me with her elbow, then in a stage whisper to Cheyanne, “Jess gets so tongue-tied around me.”

  Uh-oh. If Cheyanne had actual claws they’d have just switchbladed out of her fingertips. How the hell did I deal with this? If I took them to the tracks they were liable to throw each other either off the overpass or under the train.

  I’m not sure when my sister had joined our threesome on the tiny front stoop but she chose this moment to save me. “Are y’all walking to the tracks? Can I come?”

  She was annoying but occasionally golden. Right now was the latter.

  “Yes.” It came out eager. “Please come.” At least with Nina there, we’d have a referee. Plus, Cheyanne thought my big sister was way cooler than she actually was.

  On the way, I cast shy glances at Vivi. She watched the dusky treetops as she walked, cocked her head for the sound of birdsong, and moved fluidly, like some kind of primal goddess. The anger I’d felt earlier dissipated in her presence.

  Nina kept up a running patter about her first year at community college and Cheyanne filled her in with details about a mutual friend from band. I was glad to have the focus off me and be able to walk next to Vivi.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said.

  She smiled and bumped the back of her hand against the back of mine. “I’m glad you asked me.”

  I lowered my voice even more. “Sorry Cheyanne’s in a mood.”

  Vivi winked and smiled. “I’ll win her over.”

  Warmth filled me. Cheyanne was the best kind of friend a girl could have but I was geared toward romance and Vivi seemed like the best kind of girlfriend a girl could have. I’d figure out a way to make them like each other.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  “You lived in Raleigh?” Cheyanne leaned back against the railroad tracks and thunked her legs over the railing.

  “Yep.” Vivi laughed. “Loved it. We lived in Glenwood South. Tons of coffee shops. Record stores, artist lofts, even a great vintage store.”

  Cheyanne pffted. “Please. There’s no way it could compare to San Francisco.”

  Vivi shrugged. “Probably not, but we’re both here now, aren’t we?”

  Cheyanne ignored the comeback and went in for another dig. “I remember Madame Goodman from French III had called your name at the beginning of the year—but somebody said you’d gotten downgraded to Mr. Deworde?”

  Vivi lifted a shoulder. “He may not have as good a reputation but I only needed a place to sit while I take my French Literature class online. I placed out of the levels available at Grady.”

  Nina stifled a laugh and I tried to push my hair back, forgetting that Cheyanne had loaded it up with sculpting wax. This was not going well. Before they could jump into another round of who’s better than whom, I stood up. “We better go, I hear a train.”

  Cheyanne scrunched up her nose and brow and placed a hand on the steel rail of the track. “I don’t feel anything.”

  Nina knew exactly what I was up to, but I guess she was enjoying the show because she sided with Cheyanne, her hand brushing across the metal. “Nope, me either.”

  Time for another tactic. “Well, I’m starving.”

  “I could eat,” Vivi added.

  “I bet you could.” It was a stone-cold blow on the part of Cheyanne made obvious by the way her eyes skimmed up, then down, Vivi’s figure.

  Vivi didn’t let it slide. “Are you body shaming me?”

  Cheyanne lifted her chin into the air. “Why would I do something like that?”

  Vivi’s confidence faltered, so I grabbed her hand. It was a clear line drawn in the sand. Cheyanne looked at our joined fingers and frowned. Then she stood up. “Fine, let’s go to your stupid diner.”

  9

  Now: One Week, One Day After (Later That Same Night)

  “Onion rings.” I stand at the go-counter of Stan’s Diner.

  “Since when do you eat those?” Cheyanne cocks her head. “All I can remember is you and Vivi griping about it when I ordered them that first night we all hung out.” She pauses. “I was such a bitch to her back then.”

  I shrug. That’s water long under the dam. Cheyanne had apologized. Vivi had accepted. But the onion ring reality is I don’t want to do anything I used to do. I don’t want any of the things that were of me and Vivi. Thinking about ordering our favorite milkshake hurts. Memories become missiles and no amount of vodka can divert them.

  The line waiter pushes our bags across the counter and wipes the trail of grease as he turns away from us.

  “Come on. Let’s eat outside.” I lead them out the door away from the nighttime fluorescents.

  Tonight’s lucky. Stan’s can be crowded with kids from school and hands, hearts, and hugs are definitely not what I want. Just food. Gross, greasy onion rings. We crawl on top of a picnic table, Cheyanne and Levi sitting back-to-back creating support for each other. I sit cross-legged and pull a ring from the waxed paper packet. The taste surprises me. Salty and savory and not the awful thing I’d convinced myself it was at age ten when I’d refused to eat them at a summer meal with Mom and Nina. “Bag.” I hold out my hand for the vodka bottle, the rush from breaking the van’s glass waning with the coating of grease.

  We eat and I sip and eat and I sip and the buzz rebuilds. A car pulls into Stan’s lot. A group of kids pile out, among them the mousy girl from the locker fight. Something familiar rises inside me, the urge to wound, to hurt, to hurl rocks. My hand twitches, a reminder to pick up the drawing pen not the sword, but lucky for me, my pens are at the house.

  “What’s up?” Levi asks, his doglike instincts detecting my shift in frequency.

  “Nothing,” I say, then jump off the picnic table. “I’ve got to pee.”

  I should stop. I should turn around. This is the point when I can keep the anger volcano from erupting. But all I want is to let my dormant mountain blow and my body trembles with the need for it.

  I push open the glass door. The group turns. The girl rolls her eyes at one of her friends and mouths something. My balance is the slightest bit unsteady but I hold it together and pass them on my way to the bathroom. I know their kind. Curious. Gossipy. Cruel.

  No surprise at all when the bathroom door opens a minute after me. I wait in the stall, listening.

  “I heard she had AIDS.” The words are for my benefit.

  “The world’s better with one less of them. Although she was the nice one. The pretty one,” another voice says.

  “I bet having that dyke as her girlfriend is what did her in.”

  It’s the comment I need. I bust out of the stall and am on the girl before my coping mechanisms can grab hold of reason. I pull back my arm and let it fly, feeling fist on skin, and hair in hand. Her friend starts yelling and opens the bathroom door. “Fight!”

  There are fingernails and shoes on shins but I punch blindly, sometimes making contact, sometimes not. Whispers of sanity try to get at me, but my rage is louder and this girl said awful things and my hand is bouncing her skull against the door like it’s that rock against windshield. It’s only a couple of minutes, if that, before strong arms pull me off and other arms carry her away.

  The line cook keeps me in the back and then I hear sirens blaring in the distance. I hope Cheyanne and Levi have the good sense to ditch that bottle and get the hell out of here. My goose may be cooked but no reason for them to go down with me. Cheyanne will get that. She’s a self-preservationist. But Levi, that kid is loyal to a fault.

  After they’ve made sure the girl I punched is okay and they’ve taken her statement, the line cook leads me out to the front of the diner. It’s always great fun to be taken down in front of an audience. The cops, a guy and a woman, aren’t exactly kind. “Do you want to explain what happened here?” It’s the guy cop and he’s in-my-space close.

  Though I want to be a smart-ass, the sting of my knuckles and
the pounding of my kicked shins remind me to play it smart. The last thing I need is for my mom to have to call in her lawyer bosses on behalf of her troubled youngest.

  “That girl said some crap in the bathroom and it pissed me off and we fought. I’m not sure who hit first.” Vivi hated me trying to put off my bad behavior on other people. She always said blaming was for the unintelligent. But I’m not that intelligent and I’m not in a hurry to go to jail.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “No, sir.” Another lie for self-preservation. I doubt the vodka will overpower the onion rings.

  He twists his lip into a kind of “sure” response, but doesn’t push.

  It’s at that point I notice Levi talking to the lady cop near the cash register.

  She walks over and says something to my interrogator, who stands and motions for me. “Come on, we’re going to give you a back-seat ride to your mother’s house. And call your school’s resource officer.” He hands back my license. “A few more months, kid, and this ride would be straight downtown. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I glance at Levi as I walk by and lift an eyebrow.

  He waves at the lady cop. “See you, Aunt Rose.”

  Ah. I guess it’s good to have friends in high places, or they might have taken me downtown anyway.

  At home, Mom is grim disappointment and Nina is high hysteria. The officers are explaining that the SRO and the school will be notified, because both me and the skank I fought are at Grady, and in these types of cases there are school-imposed consequences. Emma Watson sits at the head of the hallway and watches it all go down with not so much as a tail-swishing hello. The vodka is starting to hammer my brain and the grease is roiling in my stomach. The bruises on my shins are starting to swell and throb and to be honest, I kind of like it. Anger wakes up my senses. Anger gives me excuses.

  “Jess.”

  “Mom.”

  “Jess!”

  “Nina!” I yell back. At some point, my sister’s caring nature stopped being cool and started being overbearing and annoying. It was like she used an intense interest in me to avoid her own life and inability to have any sort of lasting relationship. Plus, she was twenty. Didn’t most twenty-year-olds want to move out and have their own place?

  “I thought we were finished with this.” Mom.

  “Seriously, what is the matter with you?” Nina.

  “What is the matter with you?” Me.

  How can I explain the anger and how it soothes? It’s how I imagine heroin might be to someone after years of being clean. It’s more than the burn of vodka. The anger volcano can go dormant but it never disappears. Especially now that Vivi is gone. Especially since my pens only pour out pain.

  “Go to bed.” Mom points to the hall.

  I start toward Emma Watson, who rises as if to lead me on a path to redemption.

  “Wait.” It’s Nina, rushing after me with a hastily poured glass of water and two aspirin.

  “Thanks.” My sister is always there. Even when I’m hateful to her. Even when I’m hateful to myself. But she doesn’t see me. Vivi was the only one who saw me the way I wanted to be seen. Interesting. Artistic. Something more than a middle-class, if that, suburban girl. But now? I’m nobody.

  10

  Then: Doves in the Pine Trees

  “I’ve talked nonstop, it’s your turn. Tell me something interesting.” Vivi sat across from me on the teeter-totter at the park near school. She’d just finished making me listen to the doves in the pine trees above us, then recited every dove fact known to her and the entire internet.

  “There’s not much to say.” Which was true, but also true was if I started talking, then I’d have to stop staring and think. And if I had to think, I wouldn’t be able to focus on her lips and my dream of kissing them.

  “Please. I think there are deep wells beneath that fetching exterior.”

  I forced myself down and she raised in the air, sticking her legs up as she went. I’d forgotten how much fun a teeter-totter could be.

  “How about I ask you ten questions in ten seconds like that magazine does with celebrities?” Vivi pushed herself back toward the ground.

  I groaned, but smiled at the same time. Her enthusiasm for life was infectious. It was hard not to smile around Vivi. “Fire away.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Easy. Fort Bragg.”

  “Favorite television show?”

  “Game of Thrones.”

  Vivi wrinkled her nose. “So violent.” Then she shrugged. “But there are dragons.”

  I made a note not to invite her for pizza on Sunday nights when Nina, my mom, and I stopped everything for the show.

  “M&M’s or Snickers?”

  “Skittles,” I said.

  She bounced me down for that.

  “Ouch.”

  “Are you okay?” She gasped.

  I loved that her face went from devious to concerned in a flash. “I’m teasing. Fine. Next question.”

  “How old when you started your period?”

  “Twelve. No drama. I was at home on a weekend with Mom and Nina.”

  “Lucky. I was in math class wearing khakis. It was horrible.”

  “Poor thing.” Then I pretended like I was looking at a nonexistent watch. “Ticktock.”

  “Right.” She looked at her four extended fingers and opened out her thumb. “Celebrity you’d most like to hook up with?”

  “Emma Watson.”

  “Nice.” She held up a finger on her other hand. “Worst nightmare?”

  “Dolls.”

  “Oh my god, me, too.”

  I shuddered. She lifted another finger. “Favorite animated movie?”

  “Coraline.”

  She laughed. “Thus the doll phobia. Those button eyes.” She paused and thought for a second. “Dream college?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  She stopped and stared. “What? Seriously? Isn’t that what high school is about? Counting the days until we go somewhere amazing?”

  I shrugged and shuffled my feet. This is where things got embarrassing. My grades were in solid C to B- territory with the occasional D back in my messed-up middle school days. I was not college material. Community college, maybe, but what was the point of dreaming about out-of-reach things when you’d only be disappointed. “Fuck,” I whispered under my breath, worried I’d inadvertently stumbled upon the thing that would set us apart. I knew she was into getting good grades and super smart, but I’d hoped the difference between us wouldn’t be the wedge.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Nope what?”

  “F-bombs. Can’t stand that word. Or cursing in general.”

  My eyebrows raised.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “It sets me apart from the rest of the heathens, but there are so many other creative ways to curse. Like instead of saying that, say ‘flibbertigibbets’ or ‘six sharp sheep’ instead of the word that means going number two.”

  “Number two? You’re serious?” It was ridiculous and adorable.

  She laughed and bounced herself up again. “Try it.”

  “Um, farkelsnark?”

  She laughed harder and hopped off her end of the teeter-totter and clapped as I ploomped to the dirt.

  “Hey!” I jumped up and brushed the sand off my butt. “That was kind of mean.”

  She skipped toward me and took my hand and pulled me in for a front-to-front hug. I grew statue still.

  “Is it still mean if I did it because I had to hug you for your effort?”

  “Right here?” I asked.

  “Right here.” She looked around. “There’s nothing untoward about a simple hug.”

  But it wasn’t a simple hug. She pulled me in so close that I could feel her breasts flatten against me and her thighs push against mine and her hands on my back were like twin pulses of fire. Lightning coursed in my groin and if I’d ever had a doubt about my sexuality ever in my life, this mome
nt cinched it. I pulled her closer and my leg wrapped around her calf in an attempt to get her close enough to crawl inside of her skin. My hands spread against her back, feeling soft flesh and bra straps, and if we weren’t in a public playground they’d try to find their way to be skin to skin. We stood there hugging, if that’s what you could really call it, until I audibly groaned.

  It broke the spell because Vivi started laughing, but her face was flushed and her eyes glittered and her breath was coming faster than before when she pulled out of my embrace.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  We stood in awkward silence for a second until Vivi shook herself into the present moment. “I have two more questions.”

  “Pretty sure your ten seconds expired.”

  “You distracted me.”

  My face lifted further into the smile that wouldn’t disappear. God, she was cute. I wanted to kiss her. Instead I nodded and looked at my fake watch. “Go.” I held up two fingers.

  “Do you ever dream about turning your doodles into something more? Like calling yourself an artist?”

  This was not a Pepsi or Coke question. This was serious. But how could I answer, because allowing myself to imagine that I could be an actual artist was like having a dream. And dreams died. Like happy families, and fathers, and never moving from a house that was your parents’ dream and a neighborhood you knew and loved. Calling myself an artist would make room for hope and I’d lived so long relying on my anger to make sense of things. My anger was comfortable and valid, and hope seemed weak and dangerous. Hope seemed like the kind of thing that would widen the cracks inside of me and let in way too much light.

  “No.” Even saying the word I knew I’d disappoint her. Maybe the idea of Vivi was stupid. She was so cheerful and happy and upbeat. She seemed to have an amazing life and knew nothing of hurt.

  But she didn’t even pause. “Wrong answer. I’m going to work on that and you’re going to let me. You may think you’re too badass to be a creative, but that’s the thing, creative people are badass. It takes balls to put yourself out there in the world. Ask my mom about what it’s like to be a chef. Not easy.”