Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend

by Alan Cumyn

  Utterly different. Famous already. A star, a celebrity in the school on the day he’d arrived. The real danger was that news could not stay contained. The world was going to beat down the doors of the school to see the beast who clicked his jaws and hung around with a running champion. How to stop that feeding frenzy? How to contain it? How to—

  Our business is our business, Shiels posted, hardly thinking of what she was doing. Let’s keep it on the Vhub.

  Sheldon reverbed it immediately with his own twist. We know what we know, he sent. Our secret. Let’s let it happen here.

  Between them they had more than nine hundred followers in the school. The reverbs started, slowly, then came in more quickly. Someone wrote in: Let’s not tell our parents. Someone echoed: No one else needs to know!

  Fifty reverbs, then sixty-five. Then Pyke wrote in. When did he get a Vhub account—just today?

  Tezding. Tzting. Hllo u from me.

  And the whole thing went crazy.

  VII

  All right, all right. It happened more or less as Manniberg had figured—a few careful posts from Shiels and Sheldon, a word or two in the hallways to the right people, and soon it was all over. Everyone knew. The New Cultures Accommodation was simplified to a single focused idea: just keep what we know about Pyke within the school, no need to open him up to public feasting. Who knew what the world would do to him when he was discovered?

  He would be discovered eventually, of course, but Shiels had bought him some time and protection. Had it been her idea to rally the school this way? Not really, but some part of her knew to seize upon it. The most important thing was that she seemed to have acted in time. YouTube was not exploding with pterodactyl videos. Pyke was not trending anywhere but on the Vhub, safe inside the halls of Shiels’s own high school.

  Why didn’t she feel any better?

  (A damning confession: She didn’t even spend much time on Vhub anymore, having more or less popularized it with the Vista View world last year. It was for everyone else’s chatter, for her to use occasionally now when necessary. It was strange to see how robust it had grown, beyond anything she had expected.)

  Meanwhile, almost unaccountably, life went on. Rebecca sent the music files during physics, and Shiels forced herself to listen to one and a half songs, surreptitiously, during a string theory presentation by Chandra Xu—really, who could understand any of this?—and it just felt like noise, like her whole life had crapulated into a slow-motion train crash with car after car plowing in.

  Utterly undanceable.

  And not just because she was still steamed over Pyke.

  (Why was she steamed over Pyke? A new boy—a freshman. Almost beneath her notice.)

  He had walked straight past her, student-body chair, in the hall. When she’d been wearing her zebra leggings. As provocative as she got. Yet he was with . . . a cross-country runner?

  Really?

  Train cars upon cars crumpling and screeching. That was what this music sounded like.

  Rebecca and Maggie both wanted to hire them?

  (She checked Vhub surreptitiously—they weren’t supposed to use it during class, but of course everyone did—to see if Pyke had posted anything new. Nothing. One hundred and forty-one commentaries on his single post, but Shiels certainly was not going to read those).

  Delegation. What a farce. The most important things you had to do yourself.

  (Shiels imagined her Chesford University interview—months from now, if she got it. When she got it! Her mentor, who didn’t even know yet that she was going to be her mentor, Lorraine Miens, professor of political anthropology, leaning in, lifting her glasses. The same Lorraine Miens who had ventured into war zones interviewing musicians and playwrights. Cutting through the bullshit. “I see a lot of busyness in this CV, Ms. Krane—an awful lot of personal, shotgun-blast effort. But how do you work with others? How do you bring out the strengths in those around you?”)

  “So,” Chandra Xu said, “is the universe expanding or contracting? Or is it doing both at the same time? The further we get toward penetrating the mysteries of dark matter, the closer we come to the contention that pattern is paradoxically central to the nature of unfolding chaos—”

  (And Shiels was struck in her imaginary interview, stammering in front of Lorraine Miens—with her tragic face, the heaviness in her eyes—speechless. A real leader would say something at this point, perhaps about the very nature of humanity? Something simple yet profound that Shiels would clearly have to prepare beforehand. That was what these goal-fulfillment imaginations were about—putting herself in front of Lorraine Miens now, time and again, in a sort of endless rehearsal. So she wouldn’t simply blurt, “I’ve been wanting to go to Chesford ever since I read The Soul’s Wager when I was only twelve. It was the first book I actually sweated over, alone in the library, just me and the dictionary, about a page an hour. I would read sentences aloud and let them soak in. I have never wanted anything else so much . . .” She could not blurt out such sophomoric nonsense to the woman who had walked across Iraq in the worst of it reading poetry to maimed children. She would need to rehearse.)

  She would need to stop looking out the window, as if something might be there besides the storm of crows that had gathered suddenly, massing in the treetops near the green bulbous water tower, like a storm about to burst.

  She had one more month to complete her Chesford application. Then sometime in the new year—the universe willing!—she would be summoned for a personal interview before the board. They took only six freshmen per year in political anthropology, from about two thousand applications.

  But who else was going to be able to say that as student-body chair she had helped ensure a safe and nurturing educational environment for the first pterodactyl-student anyone had ever seen?

  • • •

  Pattern is paradoxically central to the nature of unfolding chaos. Something about Chandra Xu’s voice as she had said this—the extraordinary statement stayed with Shiels the rest of the day. What could it mean? How could chaos unfold in patterns?

  Maybe . . . maybe it simply meant that one thing led to another, no matter what. But she could have had a dozen concerns on her mind—not just the band choice for Autumn Whirl, but ticket sales, promotions, volunteer recruitment, communications coordination, parking regulations, security, meetings to call, texts to send, stages to plan, plans to stage—and still she found herself that afternoon, when the school day was done, drifting outside with others toward the sports field. It was a spontaneous mass-consciousness thing—unannounced, in the atmosphere somehow, not even on Vhub. Everyone just knew.

  They all wanted to see the pterodactyl flying around and around the track while Jocelyne Legault ran her crisp and steady laps.

  The day had turned cold even, and misty rain blew from the north into their faces. Shiels had not worn a jacket. Silly, really, to stand out like this exposed to the elements, getting wet. Shivering in her short dress.

  She let her phone vibrate.

  What was it about that dark form spearing through the air? When the crows flew—they massed in croaking billows high above, ecstatic—the act of staying aloft seemed simple, natural, as unremarkable as walking. But when Pyke flew, it was an athletic event. Those were muscles in his chest. As scrawny as he could seem close up, on high he looked substantial, heavy almost, like a man who had trained himself to move such powerful wings.

  He looked like he’d flown across the ages, like he’d personally climbed out of a melting glacier and, seeing the world both old and new, had just taken it for what it was.

  Was that where he had come from? Was he a cryogenic miracle? An ancient mutation? Some scientist’s idea of a cosmic joke? She took out her phone and thumbed him a personal message: Really, Pyke, where r u from? Y r u here?

  He wouldn’t answer right away. Of course not. He was flying around and around the track at the moment. Probably he didn’t even have a phone. He would have to reply from a computer in the libr
ary or something. If he bothered to answer at all.

  God, he was beautiful.

  Living in the suburbs, safe in an urban enclave, Shiels did not see large, nearly wild beasts very often. Once, years ago, a moose had wandered in from the bush and had trampled someone’s vegetable garden, and crossed against the lights at a busy intersection close to the entrance to the freeway. Shiels had seen the photos in the newspaper, and that night had dreamed that the moose was banging at their back door, demanding to get in.

  Until now, that had been her closest encounter with something truly wild and powerful.

  She stood in the rain with so many others, on the slight bank near the tennis courts, looking through the fence at the runners, the football players, the majestic prehistoric flying beast so obviously smitten.

  Around and around and around, his wings tireless, the crows screaming their adulation.

  Shiels’s phone was practically dancing out of the slim pocket of her clingy little dress, but it wasn’t Pyke. Obviously not. She felt no great urge to answer.

  • • •

  “When you have a moment, dear,” Shiels’s mother said, later that evening. Shiels was in her room, on her bed, a chemistry text on-screen before her unfocused eyes. Why had the world invented chemistry, anyway? Pattern and chaos. Maybe they were both the same. But where Ms. Caitlin-Phillips saw pattern in everything—Potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid. Add them together, what happens? Anybody? This is all about reactions, people!—Shiels saw only chaos. Those chemicals created whatever Ms. Caitlin-Phillips said they created.

  They created the need for brute memorization.

  How could a pterodactyl just fly into her school and start going out with Jocelyne Legault?

  “Shiels?” her mother said.

  “What?” Shiels did not move from her position, buttressed by pillows, the computer digging into her belly. Her mother, as sharp as ever, traversed the room, sat, crossed her arms and legs.

  Dark hair, severe bangs, newly dyed. Those calm, unwavering eyes. Why hadn’t Shiels gotten her cheekbones? She’d gotten a slightly lower grade of cheekbone. She had nowhere near her mother’s flawless skin.

  “How’s Sheldon?” her mother asked.

  It was a safe, pawn-to-queen-four kind of opening. But danger lurked in the next few moves. Shiels could sense it.

  “Busy, I guess,” Shiels said. She knew enough not to seem withholding. “We’re all busy. I think I told you we’re doing a lot of the editorial work together for the Leghorn Review. I’m sure universities are going to—”

  “You are spending an awful lot of time with him these days,” her mother said.

  “I guess.”

  “Is he coming over later?”

  “I don’t know.” Shiels’s phone vibrated that instant. She didn’t look. “He’s a really great homework partner. I mean, he understands chemistry.” Wrong thing to say!

  Shiels’s mother blinked, as if a patient had just admitted something incriminating—she hadn’t been taking her blood pressure medication; she didn’t walk ten thousand steps a day. “Chemistry is about the basic building blocks of matter, of life and health,” her mother said. “I know it’s difficult in the beginning, but it all becomes clear. Believe me. If you work hard enough, there comes a time when it all—” She leaned in, apparently to see what Shiels was reading, what problem in particular was stumping her.

  “I know. I know,” Shiels said in her defusing voice. She pretended to refocus on the screen. She would apply to all her parents’ choices for a university, sign up for all the science and premed courses they expected. But if she got into Chesford . . .

  If she got a chance to study with Lorraine Miens, as an undergrad—!

  “It’s just that your father and I have noticed that Sheldon is around a lot these days, evenings especially. And you’re both working so hard, so late.”

  Shiels blinked noncommittally.

  “You’re obviously very good together. You know we love Sheldon. He’s a gentle boy, he cares for you, he has a good future.”

  “We’re not going to get married, Mom!”

  The shadow of doubt floated across her mother’s face, and then she smiled. Relief?

  A suspiciously humorless smile.

  “No, of course not. Not right away. You’re both so young. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. You’re both so young. You have many, many years of serious effort yet, of real growing up, before you’ll be in any position to . . .”

  Undergrad, she meant. Then med school. Residency. Choosing a specialty, maybe more years after that. What did Shiels want to be—a surgeon? Psychotherapist? Ophthalmologist? A whole universe of unrelenting effort was out there waiting.

  (She hadn’t told them yet about studying with Lorraine Miens. Of course not. Why worry them until the possibility was real?)

  “Are you saying I should break up with Sheldon?” Shiels could blink every bit as passive-aggressively as her mother.

  “Of course not! Honey! He’s great. In many ways you’re like an old married couple. I mean, you do everything together. Do you know how long I’ve waited just to get you alone to have this chance to talk? He’s always with you. It’s like you’re welded at the hip.”

  Shiels’s phone vibrated again. Sheldon. She turned it off. Pyke was not going to reply to her, not tonight, if ever. Where was home even, some huge nest in a big tree?

  “See other people. Have some fun. This is your graduating year. After June everyone will take off to the four corners of the world. These days—literally. Keep your focus for what’s really important. You know you are not a natural for some things. But you’re really smart and you outwork everyone else. You always have. That’s your strength.”

  Shiels could see that her mother was feeling better the further she got into their chat.

  “I didn’t meet your father until Saint Luke’s,” she said. “I had boyfriends. Of course I did. You don’t have to be a nun. But stay on track.” Her hand was warm. She squeezed Shiels’s shoulder and then they were hugging, and Shiels felt herself brimming, brimming . . . then flooding right into her mother’s sweater. Stop it! Stop it! she screamed at herself, but she couldn’t. Her mother’s warm hand at her back.

  If things didn’t work out with Lorraine Miens, if she didn’t get into Chesford after all, then yes, of course, she could always be a doctor.

  VIII

  A pelting rain the next morning, wearying in the cold, and then, unaccountably, Sheldon was not waiting for her at Roseview and Vine. Shiels stood uncomfortably under her wind-tossed umbrella, looking down the street, waiting for him to come tearing around the corner, his worn treads slapping the puddles and his arms flapping, not quite like a girl—like a girl who couldn’t run—but maybe like a chicken surprised and alarmed.

  He had stopped texting her after midnight. That in itself was not unusual. Often when she became cataclysmically busy, she didn’t respond, sometimes for hours at a time, and he had always understood it meant nothing. Roseview and Vine was a given. They always met here in the morning.

  Now she fought with the wind and texted him and waited in growing unease as the gray sky, rain-lashed trees, the quietly shuddering shrubs and lawns gave her nothing. We have been here forever, they seemed to sigh. You are an insect gone tomorrow.

  Where the hell was Sheldon?

  She imagined, for a moment, him exploding out of bed in his way—he had described it to her—when he has overslept and his limbs move all at once and in contradictory directions. Maybe . . . maybe he caught his foot flailing down the stairs and knocked his head senseless. Maybe he was right now speeding to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, his body strapped to a board, a paramedic checking his pulse.

  She even heard a siren in the distance. She pictured herself wheeling him around, wiping the remnants of lunch from the crusty edges of his lips. “I’m sorry,” she said, under her breath, as if rehearsing the line. “I’m going to have to go to Chesford. We’ll
stay in touch, of course we will. You know I care about you deeply.”

  A gust of wind blew her red umbrella inside out, and Shiels had to struggle to bring it back into shape. One of the struts was bent and dipped down ridiculously.

  Five minutes late!

  Shiels would not waste another moment. Sheldon was going to get an earful when she saw him at school.

  • • •

  As she approached the tired brick building—assemblage of buildings—Shiels began to sense something wrong. It was nothing she could see. All around her the usual assortment of teenagers spilled out of buses, traveling in packs or clumps of two or three with backpacks, earbuds, slouchy clothes. Everyone had an umbrella, which only made sense—it was raining.

  But everyone with an umbrella? Normally half the school at least would just show up wet on a rainy day, with soaked hoodies, hands in pockets, shivering as if nothing could be done about inclement weather. In winter too, on the coldest day, most of the school would still be in sneakers, without gloves or hats, practically frostbitten. It was part of the unwritten code of the place: no care given to the weather. Now—umbrellas all around?

  And black umbrellas at that. A shroud of them, bobbing as people walked. Was it a funeral? What could have possibly happened overnight that Shiels had not heard about? She checked Vhub quickly—the traffic was overwhelming. She really couldn’t keep up with all the threads. . . .

  She had a sickening thought again that it was Sheldon—Sheldon who had died. It would have to be something bizarre. Something falling from outer space. A dead satellite. If Sheldon were to go, it would be something like that.

  Shiels felt as if she had lost a week somehow—just blacked out, perhaps—and so could not account for whatever terrible thing had happened.

  She pulled open the front double doors and . . . everything was normal. Except that everyone practically, except for her, was carrying a soaked black umbrella. She spied Sheldon near the trophy cases horsing around with Rachel Wyngate, from the volleyball team, if that were at all believable, and some of the football players: Ellis Maythorn, Ron Fornelli. Sheldon was one of those boys who moved well in all sorts of company. They were sparring with their umbrellas, whacking one another and laughing.