by Alan Cumyn
Completely innocent. Shiels marched toward him. “Why didn’t you wait for me?” was on the tip of her tongue.
And then when she was just paces away, Sheldon snapped open his black umbrella—whump!—and just as quickly shut it down again. It was an enormous one, golfing size, and Shiels found herself stepping back. Maythorn did the umbrella trick then too, right at her, and Fornelli, in a different direction, and Rachel Wyngate laughed in her athletic way—Shiels suddenly noticed her baldly interested manner of looking at Sheldon—and Shiels could see then all down the south corridor people snapping open and shutting down their black umbrellas . . . as if they were all Pykes, every single one of them.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said to Sheldon, who looked at her as if . . .
What?
As if she were the last kid in high school to grow wings.
• • •
Manniberg was not even in. Shiels found herself standing in the office in front of Ms. Klein, whose thick lids were raised at her, momentarily distracted from her screen. Shiels was ready to fire, to launch a new umbrella protocol. (That wasn’t what she would call it; enough with the protocols!) “We can’t have people opening umbrellas suddenly indoors!” she was ready to say. “It’s not about some silly superstition. It’s eyes being poked out! It’s . . .”
But Manniberg was not in.
“Do you mean he—he’s late?” Shiels sputtered. “Or he’s not coming in?” Who would she have to deal with in his absence—Jimble? Or Ketterling? These vice principals were all—
“I’m not sure,” Ms. Klein said.
“What do you mean?” Every drop of diplomacy had left Shiels; she could taste blood in her voice.
She tasted blood, but then she willed herself back from the brink.
(What is the point of browbeating the school secretary, Ms. Krane? she asked herself in the imagined voice of Lorraine Miens.)
(And—why had Sheldon been horsing around with a black umbrella? He was not a masses kind of person. Usually she could count on him. If everyone in the school were headed one direction, he was off in the opposite, out of principle.)
“I’m sorry,” Shiels said. “People are exploding their umbrellas open in the halls.”
Ms. Klein’s heavy eyes shifted back to the screen, then again to Shiels. What was she looking at?
(Shiels wouldn’t have thought Rachel Wyngate was an umbrella-masses kind of person either. But somehow the two of them together . . . )
“Students have brought exploding umbrellas?” the secretary asked dully.
“They’re popping them open suddenly, right in people’s faces!” Shiels sensed a great tide shifting against her.
“I can make a note of it,” Ms. Klein said uselessly. She brought out a memo pad and waited for Shiels to say it again, to sum up the problem.
“Is Mr. Manniberg coming in today or not?” Shiels pressed her palms against the countertop separating her and the functionary.
(Functionary. What a lovely word. Why wasn’t Sheldon here?)
Ms. Klein wrote on the pad—STUDENT UMBRELLAS—as if that explained the situation.
What else was spinning out of control?
Shiels left without another word.
• • •
Slashing rain. Cold gray sheets sprayed against the windows as if launched from some gigantic faucet far above the Earth. The whole school felt submarine-like, underwater.
Shiels met up with Sheldon—or rather Sheldon caught up with her—in the library just before lunch. “What? Why are you looking at me?” he said, meaning like that.
Like he could be washed away in a slick of mud and she probably wouldn’t even go to his funeral.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Good! Waiting for some kind of response!” He was thrusting his jaw out, which he did sometimes when he was miffed about something she had done. It normally lasted about ten seconds before he unthrust his jaw and agreed with her over whatever it was he had been confused about.
“What are we talking about?”
They weren’t standing in a particularly quiet corner of the library. Computers were humming, students were cutting across to get to the cafeteria—which Mr. Wend had forbidden, but they still did it—and Mr. Wend himself was fiddling with a collapsible bookstand well within earshot.
“Pyke’s band! Morris came through. That’s what I was bleeping you about all last night. You never answered. They were heat source. Total freaking rummage!”
Sheldon flicked his hands, a sort of chicken-wing gesture that erupted when he was excited.
“Are you face-raking me?” she said calmly. “Pyke has a band? He just arrived!”
“They were on last night at Dead Papyrus. Didn’t you look at anything I sent? I missed the first set because I was waiting for you to get back to me. But the second was cellular. I’m not exaggerating. And Morris talked him into doing Autumn Whirl.”
Sheldon had his phone out, despite the in-library ban—Mr. Wend was right there, still—and he thrust the screen at Shiels. At first she could make out nothing—someone’s writhing back, people jostling, ugly sounds from a bass guitar offscreen—and then a bouncing glimpse of Pyke, onstage, wings folded, his body in a crouch almost, as if about to spring into the air.
“Does he sing, or—what?”
Mr. Wend was looking at them. Not only were they using Sheldon’s phone, but it was making weird noises.
“Wait for it. Wait—”
More bouncing. Sweaty bodies. Sheldon must’ve been changing positions, trying to get a better view.
“Could you not have edited this?” Shiels said.
And then the shriek. Pyke rose to his full outstretched grandeur, and his jaws were wide open. That beak . . . and the eyes. Even with this crappy phone-quality video, she could see the intensity of spirit there. And the sound—
“What in God’s name is that?” Mr. Wend said.
The video stopped.
“That’s all I got,” Sheldon said. “My batteries died. But the show went on and on. Everybody was wailing—we just stood there and spilled our noodles.”
“Did you dance?” Shiels asked.
“It’s beyond dancing. You just—emote pure sound. It’s like—better than drugs. You don’t even want to dance. Your body does whatever.”
He was hopping in place as he talked, almost like Jonathan with his rehearsed board moves.
“Since when do you do drugs?” Shiels said. The boy would not even take mayonnaise on his cheese sandwich. But he glanced away for a second, as if he might not be all that she thought she knew. “Anyway, Autumn Whirl is a dance! Why would we hire a band that made you not want to—”
The way he was looking at her, as if—
“I’m not face-raking you!” she said. “I honestly believe—”
“It’s so much more than dance music!” Sheldon practically oscillated in front of her. She could feel her own feet tingling. Was it from Sheldon, his heat for this shriekiness, or was it from the small taste she had had on video of the shriekiness itself?
“Would you please take your caterwauling outside?” Mr. Wend said, and then the bookcase he was fiddling with eased itself to the ground, like a wounded horse kneeling, about to topple over.
IX
The Autumn Whirl standing committee met for lunch in the theater arts room in the basement. Rebecca Sterzl chaired but looked to Shiels for approval on everything—and sometimes, such as today, Sheldon sat in just because he was Sheldon. They were talking about Pyke’s band and how this new brand of music—could it even be called music?—would change the nature of the event. Without Shiels’s direction they would all just roll over in the face of this new thing, this pterodactyl craze that was taking over the school, and what was going to be a lacerating opening event to the social calendar would instead be . . .
Shiels sat listening to Rebecca go on and on about the electric nature of the shrieking experience, how everyone who’d been there
last night vibrated freakishly and how other shrieks ruptured out of people like glorious teen vomit. “Only better,” Rebecca said. “We’re going to have to take a hard line on limiting access. No one from outside Vista View. It’s going to be insane.” Her face betrayed that same loopy glow that Sheldon’s had had when spewing about the weird music.
He was standing beside Rebecca in front of the circled committee. Showing his few seconds of video over and over.
“We could double the price and still overfill the gym,” Melanie Mull said. “What about another venue? The Steadhouse?” She was a quiet, conscientious sophomore, the kind of girl who often showed up on school committees. Her head seemed full of this new possibility, Autumn Whirl with Pyke’s band.
“The Steadhouse is jammed with seats,” Rebecca said. “Nobody’s going to be sitting. And anyway—”
Shiels shifted her chair. She was chewing a quinoa bun and made a soft sucking sound with her teeth. Everyone’s head turned toward her.
They all seemed highly aware that she hadn’t spoken yet.
“Autumn Whirl hits in a week,” she said in her dead calm, assassin’s voice. “We don’t have time to change venues. And I hear what you’re saying about this band, Rebecca, but yesterday you seemed to think you’d hit a totally other righteous band. Maybe tomorrow—”
“But Morris really liked them!” Sheldon said.
Shiels turned her smiling, cutting eyes on her boyfriend and waited to see if he was going to continue to advertise this divided front before the entire committee. His words shriveled. But he wasn’t sitting down.
“Morris isn’t here,” Shiels said finally. Reasonably. “Maybe a lot of kids will be into shrieking their heads off. But is that what Autumn Whirl is all about? If we return to the mandate”—Shiels flipped back in her open binder—“we’ll see it’s all about school spirit and community-oriented socialization. I don’t see anything here about descending into the primordial ooze.”
She knew Sheldon would appreciate that last phrase. But he was looking . . . as if he somehow still disagreed with her.
“I think we need to keep looking for a band,” she said curtly, finally. She glanced at her watch, took another small bite of her bitter muffin. “How are the ticket sales going, anyway?”
“We’ve barely hit a quarter of our target!” Rebecca blurted. “I know if we hired Pyke’s band, we’d—”
Shiels signaled, with a glance, that the meeting was over. Rebecca’s lips flapped noiselessly. Nobody else said anything.
Shiels closed her binder. “We’ll have to redouble our efforts. This is our first big event of the year. Let’s nail this down. Walloping Wallin is next, and that’s going to be a struggle. We all know that. What’s it been, seventeen years? There won’t be a lot of joy. So we have to get this one right. Shall we meet again tomorrow?”
• • •
Sheldon would not let it go. He should have taken the east corridor to Family and Society, but he just had to get in one last word.
“You knew you were wrong back there. You just won’t admit it. If you had thought of it—if you were the one who’d been trying to bleep me all night, then the outcome would have been completely different. Admit it, Shiels!”
He grabbed her arm and stopped her midstride. She stared at his fingers until he unhanded her.
(“Unhand me, sir!” she imagined herself saying.)
“You get this way,” Sheldon said. “I’ve seen it over and over. You get hyper, your brain is like a gerbil on a running wheel, you’re just going to keep scrambling till you crash and I have to pick you up. And when you’re like this—Shiels, listen to me!”
What was that fire in his cheeks? From her mousy Sheldon.
“When I’m like this, what?”
“You make crappy decisions. You’re not really in control of yourself!”
She almost laughed at him, he was so serious all of a sudden. Over a shrieking dinosaur bird boy. Over Autumn Whirl, for God’s sake! He never cared about politics. But now his hands were cramping with it. It made him . . .
“A gerbil!” she said. “You think I’m a gerbil on a running wheel?”
“No,” he said, backtracking. Because he was Sheldon. Now he didn’t seem to know where to look.
“Do I make you nervous?”
“No. I—”
But he was nervous. He was standing in front of the janitorial closet, and she knew it would be unlocked because that was the way the universe lined up sometimes. She pushed him in then closed the door behind him, and he nearly sat in the bucket, he was moving back so fast. She turned on the light and tugged at his shirt.
“So you think I’m hyper. Just going on fumes.”
“No, I—Well, yes. What are you doing?”
“You are so cute when you get agitated.”
“Am I?”
Off with the shirt. Buttons flew in odd directions. The closet smelled of chemicals, of eons of accumulated high school dirt never quite rinsed out of the ancient gray mop. Sheldon pulled at her shirt, but she fended him off.
“No. No. This is just you,” she said.
“Is it?”
She snapped off the light and unzipped him. His hips were so skinny, she barely had to yank to lower his trousers. He was ankle-bound now, back against the cinder-block wall, trapped on one side by the stinking buckets, on the other by a set of shelves.
Why had she turned off the light? She wanted to feel his ribs, his bony nose, the hardness of him. She didn’t want to see him . . . and the thought surprised her. Guys want to see—she had read that somewhere—but she wanted to feel him, to breathe him in. (Beyond the stench of the closet? On top of it. It all went together.)
He was hard in all the right places. This boy had angles. She kissed him, bit his lip until he squealed and she shushed him down. “Not a sound,” she breathed.
Tendons. Muscles. Boy sweat. Naked in the dark. In the old dark. This could be the ooze, she thought. This could be primordial.
“Shiels,” he said. His voice was strange, like he was mumbling underwater.
“Shhh.”
“But I don’t . . . I’m going to . . .”
She held his tongue with her teeth until the noises stopped.
She was breathing hard. It was as if they were both running somewhere. In the wild. Out of the woods, across some grassy plain.
Running hard and getting nowhere.
Staying right where they were.
“Shiels. I think I—”
He was right. They were all right. It just hit her in the dark and sweat of that little black wild box they had wandered into.
Pyke had to do Autumn Whirl. It was the only solution that made any sense at all.
• • •
And then, once the decision was made, everything fell into place. Shiels was hardly prepared for it. (Yet she should have been, she thought later. Surely this was close to the same phenomenon as when she’d taken Manniberg’s simple suggestion to let the student body know they should keep Pyke as their own secret. There it was, both times—the power of so many suddenly pulling in the same direction.)
Rather than simply an announcement over the PA along with schedule changes and activity notes, she waited an extra day, until the Blaze of Fall Scholars’ Awards assembly. By then, of course, everyone knew already. A few well-placed leaks by Sheldon and others, and the news spread like a grass fire on the savanna. Pyke’s band is playing Autumn Whirl! It didn’t even matter that the band had no proper name. They weren’t the Acid Toads or Sacred Disaster or, as Sheldon had laughingly suggested, the PteroTunes. They were just Pyke’s band, a bunch of boys from different garages with a smattering of equipment and, oh yeah, a flying ancient screeching monster everyone was in love with.
By the time of the official announcement, some tickets were being reverbed on Vhub for double, triple, quintuple the face value. How to stop the practice? Even when they limited initial sales, the tickets disappeared like a whisper.
&nb
sp; Sheldon, and others, were right. Shiels could see it. She didn’t necessarily have the best ideas. The gym was not going to be big enough for the whole school, but if the weather cooperated, they could set up a video link to the athletic field scoreboard, and the overflow crowd could gather there. Pyke could perform a flypast at the end of the evening—he’d have to go home anyway—and everyone would be delirious.
By the time of the official announcement, at the assembly, all the plans and more were already in place. The student body could barely stay in their seats. They had waited for an hour as the likes of Chandra Xu and Natalie Micau and, yes, of course, Sheldon, had trouped across to pick up various plaques and certificates for their brain-bending work during the early part of the academic year. Blaze of Fall had actually been Shiels’s idea from her first term on council, to get the school honoring academic stars throughout the year rather than waiting until June, when everyone was desperate to be free of the place and not likely to be inspired to sweat their homework. Pyke sat near the back with shades on, of all things, like a jazz musician, with Jocelyne Legault tucked under his wing. From Shiels’s place on the stage, where she was sitting beside the department chairs and helping to organize the certificates and plaques, she could just see the two of them. Pyke turned his beak toward Jocelyne and murmured something, and then she laughed—when did Jocelyne Legault ever laugh?—and Shiels felt that something, that worm in her gut, chew a tender spot.
When Shiels took the microphone near the end of the assembly, she could feel too the coil in the room, like they were twelve hundred starlings suddenly braced for flight.
(Or were they all turning into Pyke’s crows?)
“I just have one quick announcement,” Shiels said. Why did she pause? Did it have anything to do with the way Jocelyne Legault ran her hand over Pyke’s naked purple chest? “But first,” she said, “one final round of applause for the brilliant brains of Vista View!” The tepid, ironic applause of the last hour—all right, the student body had not fully embraced the idea of honoring academic achievement—gave way to something entirely different. Now the students erupted, cheering, Shiels realized, because they knew already what Shiels was going to say next.
