by Alan Cumyn
Pyke was glancing backward at the doors to the school. He seemed to be worried—for Jocelyne?
But then he hunched forward again—he really seemed quite small when he was on all fours—and exploded upward. Shiels, Jeffreys, everyone staggered backward in the shock of the moment, as if they had been standing too close to a geyser.
Shiels’s phone throbbed again. Manniberg. He never texted her, yet there it was. New arrival soon, test case. Let’s talk tomorrow a.m.
She performed a sanity check. In the dirt in front of her—claw marks. The crowd around her—gaping. In the sky—Pyke, once again a speck in the distance, a sharp and zigzagging head followed by a riotously twisting tail of crows.
Eighteen? He didn’t look a day less than sixty-five million.
III
Shiels met Sheldon by the mailbox on Ridgeway, on her route home, as usual. With their busy after-school schedules, they could not always depart the building together. He was wearing the secondhand tie she had found for him, with colorful garden gnomes set against a black velvet background.
“What were you thinking, running out into danger like that?” he said. He was fingering his phone. Vhub, the social site that was the whole collective cranium of Vista View—she and Sheldon had helped popularize it on her way to becoming chair—was erupting with news of Pyke’s unusual arrival. The little purple vein (or was it an artery?) in Sheldon’s left temple was pulsing.
Her parents, both doctors, would kill her (metaphorically) for not knowing the difference.
(They didn’t know anything about Vhub, not really. But they certainly knew all about veins and arteries.)
“It looked like he was going to fly off with her or something,” Shiels explained. “Hello to you, too.” And she stepped right up and kissed him, in part because Sheldon—who could be urgent in private, in his parents’ den in the dead of night after homework and organizing—was uncomfortable showing affection in public.
She also kissed him, though she could hardly admit it to herself, because she desperately needed to kiss someone then. Her body was surging with something—extra adrenaline, maybe, or pheromones or dopamine or something scientific she might’ve known about if she had paid better attention in biology (and to her parents’ chatter), but maybe not. Maybe this sort of thing was not covered in biology or by parents at all.
She kissed him hard and deep on the mouth and wanted him to put his stupid phone away for one minute and wrap his arms around her and feel muscular for once. Like . . . an animal.
She felt like an animal.
But the kiss stayed mostly one-sided for too long, and then finally she backed off and pulled herself together.
“What was that for?” Sheldon asked.
He was not normally dim. Even emotionally he could be quite knowing. Like that first session three years ago over the Leghorn “Things That Rot My Mind” issue when he’d pulled back from his keyboard, when they had been alone in the same airless cubbyhole off the library for fourteen consecutive hours (or so it had felt), and he’d just looked at her—he’d looked the very same kiss she had just given him.
Most of the time, in private, he could drop anything to look a deep kiss at her and lean over to her so they could throb together.
But now he was asking: “What was that for?”
She didn’t . . . didn’t know. She took his hand (soon, with the cold winds building in the days ahead, they would need gloves), and they walked in uncharacteristic silence down Ridgeway and across to Thorniton Avenue. He had large, warm hands for an unathletic guy, the kind of hands that can instinctively find and knead out a knot under a shoulder blade or squeeze life into quietly exhausted feet propped on the sofa.
They felt strong and sure, those hands.
Finally, when they were close to her embarrassingly large house, he said, “So—what’s he like?”
And those things she was going to say to him about the flying monster—mostly they stayed inside her.
“Everyone’s going to hate him,” she said instead. “I’ve seen it starting. Jeremy Jeffreys, the whole football squad, practically attacked him! He can barely talk. His beak looks weird. And those flapping wings—what’s he supposed to do with them in class? He won’t be able to sit without bonking someone. I don’t know what he’s thinking, coming here. He already injured poor Jocelyne. I don’t know if she’s going to be able to run anymore.”
How injured was Jocelyne really? Shiels had no idea. She didn’t know why she’d said it.
“Did he go straight for her?”
In this moment, disappointingly, Sheldon looked ordinary to her. His curly brown hair, so fine to run fingers through, just seemed limp. Had he even washed it today? Well, it was true, they had been up much of the night working through the details of the committee configuration for Autumn Whirl. And she didn’t like a boy who was too fastidious about his appearance. Sheldon wasn’t naturally interested in such things—appearances, or committee configurations. He was much more of a writer/observer type than a planner/doer/looker. But he did it—plan, organize, wear the ironic tie that she’d bought—for her. To be true to her.
She didn’t like this feeling of hiding things from him. What was she hiding? That worm, whatever it was.
“Shiels?” He’d asked a question. What was it?
“It sure looked like he went straight for her,” she said. “But he didn’t mean it, not at all. He’s actually pretty helpless, if you think about it, in a sort of adorable way. He seems to have no idea what he’s doing. That beak—it’ll be like someone carrying a sword around in the halls. Maybe he could get a sheath or something.”
Sheldon was waiting for his kiss now that they were not on a main street. He was leaning in—listening to her, but waiting, too.
He almost never initiated a kiss. He just sort of . . . made himself approachable, and waited for her to bridge the gap. Why did he do that?
Shiels could never imagine the pterodactyl doing that.
And then she burst out laughing—poor, confused Sheldon, they almost always laughed together—but she couldn’t help herself. Such an odd thought—kissing a pterodactyl!
“What—what is it?”
All right, the world was changing, a pterodactyl had more or less dropped out of the sky. But a real kiss, with Sheldon, at the end of the day . . . a real kiss, with eyes closed, and his boy breath, and the smell of him, his quiet urgency and the softness of his cheek and the little prickly bits he still needed to shave . . . could still make the whole rest of the world fall away.
IV
Jonathan came roaring down the stairs two, three at a time as soon as Shiels made it through the door. He had the feet of a man—clump, clump, clump!—but the gangly body of a boy. Too many limbs to know what to do with them all, that was the impression her brother made these days.
“What was he like?” Jonathan croaked, his voice breaking as it did when he was excited. (But when was he ever excited? Never. The boy usually had the cold sludge of adolescent attitude in his veins.)
“Who?” Shiels asked, just to be annoying.
“Pyke! Pyke! You were right there when he arrived. I saw the video and everything!”
So someone had caught and posted it after all, which made it far more real and important for Jonathan than, say, if he’d been there in person when his older sister had raced across the sports complex to confront a supposedly extinct monster.
“Nothing special,” she said. “He’s not very good at landing. Poor Jocelyne Legault. She must have been scared out of her skin.”
“So . . . so . . . like, you saw him? Up close?”
“I had to,” she said simply.
“And his wings—like, what are they, about thirty feet across?”
“Good God no. They’re maybe, I don’t know, six feet. Eight? And he’s not very tall, really. Shorter than you. Unless he stands really straight. Which he seems to hate to do.”
Jonathan was going to be tall, like their father. Shiels
was patterned more after their mother, in the compact fireball mode. Even with exquisite posture she was still—
“But he looked enormous on Vhub!”
“Well, maybe somebody stretched the truth or something. I guess mostly his wings were folded up when I got to him. He was holding Jocelyne.”
“So he’s going to . . . He’s coming to our school?”
This was the longest conversation Shiels had had with Jonathan in years, it seemed. Over the pterodactyl, naturally.
“Looks like it. He’s probably in your class.”
Jonathan did a funny little hop-flip motion with his feet, as if he were on his skateboard. His face was all flushed, and his pants, as usual, were nearly falling down. As she watched him, Shiels started to feel uneasy. “I didn’t . . . I’m worried about how he’ll be treated,” she said. Clump-flap, clump-flick went her brother, from one imaginary trick to the next. He could not stay still . . . unless he was in front of a screen. Then he couldn’t get up to save his life. “A lot of kids might be mean.”
What more was she going to learn from Manniberg in the morning? Probably not much. When was Manniberg ever prepared for anything?
“Pyke looks like a scalded dude,” Jonathan said.
“But he doesn’t know anybody, and he can hardly string together two words.”
“Sure got to know Jocelyne Legault pretty quick!” Jonathan said. Clump-crash. He wobbled on the carpet, as if about to lose his balance. He dropped to one knee, then bounced up and twisted nonchalantly. “The man’s got wings,” he said.
• • •
Wings indeed. It was almost too much to think about. The interlude with Sheldon was draining away, and other thoughts came rushing back. Shiels had reacted instinctively to what had seemed like a dangerous situation, but now it was something else. What was it? Her mind was churning over. She didn’t know what to make of it, or how she felt, or what to do.
The PD—parental dynamo—were dining out, so Shiels fixed herself an arugula salad with almond slivers and then baked organic corn bread from a simple recipe she found online. Jonathan finished the corn bread but also ordered a pizza. He had a shocking disregard for his own health and for the PD’s express wishes. Yet they had left a credit card on the busy tray in the kitchen island for so-called emergencies, and Jonathan knew—and Shiels knew that he knew—that they didn’t look closely at the monthly bill. Better pizza than drugs.
Normally Shiels would conference in the evenings with Sheldon, if he wasn’t physically with her in her room. They would go over the half dozen or so joint efforts they always seemed to have on the boil. She had an English project due in the morning—she was preparing to create a fan blog for the crippled poet Alden Eldon, whom she had personally discovered (along with about seven other “fans”). Weeks ago, when she had happened upon his work, she’d been struck by the evocative streak of lameness shading so many of his poems (“morning now, and I am just a cup of coffee”). But somehow, on the verge of creating the blog, she had trouble summoning her earlier convictions. She needed to feel more, to get back in the mood, but first . . .
. . . She just sat going over it all again: the dark speck in the sky getting larger, the way her feet had taken off when she’d seen that Jocelyne was in trouble, how the monster—Pyke—had stood semi-glowing with pterodactyl heat close enough to spear her through if he’d wanted.
The muscles in his rib cage trembling, rippling.
Those eyes.
(Was he afraid of her?)
The frail blond runner draped in his winged arms. (Why hadn’t he landed on Shiels, knocked her down, picked her up like she was the most precious thing in the modern world?)
Sheldon vibrated her four times in the course of the evening, but she didn’t pick up. She had the Alden Eldon blog to do. Which took a lot of thinking.
It took a lot of thinking to get around to thinking about Alden Eldon.
Finally she texted Sheldon back. He called immediately. “Where are you? I’ve been at you all night.”
“We need an emergency assembly over Pyke,” she blurted. “He’s going to be a completely ostracized circus act. I mean, think about it—that beak! It’ll be against the code of conduct for him to walk down the hall. Manniberg is going to have to address the school, and we’re going to have to get briefing notes together for him to do it or people simply won’t know how to act. I’m worried about the football team. I think I told you they would have torn his wings off if I hadn’t been there. . . . I have a meeting with him in the morning, but don’t tell me he’s prepared. You know he isn’t.”
“You have a meeting with Pyke?”
“Manniberg! Don’t be dense.” He could follow her thoughts perfectly well, even when she was being scattered. If he was offended, he would’ve said something, but he didn’t. She felt him pause for a breath.
All right, she could be brusque with him, especially in moments of intensity, but she was hard on everybody, including herself. And he knew that, didn’t he? Didn’t he love her exactly for who she was?
Being able to kiss the way they did meant they could say anything to each other.
“How is any of this your responsibility or concern?” he said finally.
“I’m student-body chair. Everything is my responsibility!”
“Even the pterodactyl?”
“He has a name! He has rights! All we need is one ugly incident, and Vista View is going to be tagged as anti- . . . as anti- . . .” As Shiels was talking, she could almost feel Pyke next to her again, surrounded by the hostile crowd. She wasn’t tired anymore. It was a rush to be decisive. “Anti-diversity! Not on my watch, Sheldon. It’s my reputation too. We need to do this.”
“It’s after two in the morning,” Sheldon said, in that voice of his that, fundamentally, agreed with what she was doing. He always agreed, finally. He had no defense against her energy, Shiels knew. He just gave in.
“We need to hammer out a charter, a sort of code of conduct, for dealing with pterodactyl-students,” she said. She would frame it out loud, the way she was doing—letting the rush happen—and he’d start to take notes and then ask pertinent questions, and that was how it was going to get done. Like they were two brains connected by the grid—almost the same person.
“Are we really calling him a ‘pterodactyl-student’?” Sheldon asked. Brilliant! To focus on the language from the get-go.
To get the language right.
“He’s not a pterodactyl-student.” She paused, breathed, waited for the rush to continue. “He’s a . . . New Cultures Arrival.”
“We could make a New Cultures Accommodation Protocol,” Sheldon said.
“Not a protocol. That’s so—”
“Okay. It’s just a . . . New Cultures Accommodation.”
“It’s the NCA,” she said. “We’ll have it in place by nine a.m. for Manniberg to announce. It’s all about . . .”
“Trusting the welcoming spirit,” Sheldon said. His dear, dear voice in her earbuds (practically an implant!). If he were here beside her, she would pull him to her. They would . . .
Well, if he were here physically, they might not get the NCA done. And that was the most important thing right now.
• • •
Normally Shiels collapsed in a heap at the end of busy days, and slept, oblivious to the world, until her alarm jolted her back to her obligations, sometimes as early as five in the morning, if the project list of the particular day were snarly. Early-morning thoughts were clearer, bolder, more focused yet more likely to range toward fresh solutions. She counted on rising anew, strong and able in the head.
But now sleep was slow to come to her. She thought again and again of the play of those dark wings, and now, somehow, felt like she could smell him right next to her—an earthy, potent, wild aroma. And when she did finally drift off, she dreamed of Sheldon, of all people, who had improbably just bought new yellow running shoes like Jocelyne’s and was eager to try them out. And so Shiels was running with
him, but without shoes herself—her feet were slapping the grass as they might have ten thousand years ago, racing across some rocky meadow (but her feet were tough; nothing hurt). Sheldon appeared in the distance, then, naked except for his yellow shoes (free of any logo) and an old pair of underwear so battered and ripped, they looked more like a loincloth than anything else. His body was hard. He had changed. He was just as lean as ever, but she could see the movements of his back muscles, the lovely tight shape of his thighs . . . and his hair was longer, and he had shoulders (he looked good with shoulders). She wanted to be closer, to see for sure. So she sped up, her strong bare feet shaping themselves to the ground so that she hardly felt any hard stalk of grass, any shard, any little spiky shrub she happened to . . .
She happened to be able to jump over most things, quite easily in fact, effortlessly, her body was so . . . She jumped so well, she only had to touch the ground now and again, bouncing like a moon walker . . . flying.
She was flying. Not high, barely off the ground, but with just the power of her mind she was able to do it. Quietly. No need to tell anyone. What a fuss they would make! She looked down at the ground passing beneath her, how smoothly it all worked.
Power of mind. Anyone could do it. Keep the right pressure—no sudden thoughts or mental movements—and she would stay afloat.
Aloft.
Flying.
And here was Sheldon. Turning to her. With his new body. He was darker, harder, like he’d been carved from purplish ebony . . .
What was ebony? A hard, dark wood.
Piano keys.
Oh, those shoulders!
He didn’t seem surprised to see her. He had to turn his beak—such a long, sharp, dangerous weapon! And then she was breathless in his arms, soaking in his heat, his soft fur, his pungent . . .
Why was she breathless? This had all been so easy. Practically effortless.
V
It was silly, and she knew it was, yet just for a moment the dream changed the way she looked at Sheldon. There he was at the pickup spot, the corner of Roseview and Vine, in his slouchy pants and worn old faux-ironic trench coat and the faded black canvas running shoes he wore unthinkingly, even through the worst winter storms (which would surely be coming soon). His hair was rumpled, as usual. He was looking at her with those puppy-dog eyes.
