by Alan Cumyn
When I say, Shiels texted. It’s about W Wallin.
Sheldon turned around, trying to see where she was.
“What bloody planet are you from, you freak!” the angriest father yelled. “Do I need to get my shotgun?”
It wasn’t funny, but some people laughed. Pyke glanced at the man like . . . maybe he might skewer the guy for dinner.
Jeremy Jeffreys, at last! Hands wrapped around a football.
Make it about fb, Shiels texted. At the same time she said to the quarterback, “Do you think you can throw it onstage from here?”
Manniberg rose to join Pyke at the podium.
“Of course!” Jeffrey said.
“Show me!”
Manniberg said, “There’s no need for threats or even jokes about—”
Jeffreys reached back and sent a perfect spiral arcing over the heads of the audience. Even Shiels could appreciate the strength and accuracy of the throw. It snaked left a bit near the end. Pyke had to leap and stretch . . . but he nabbed it out of midair as fast as an eyeblink.
“Hey! Don’t give away our secret weapon for Walloping Wallin!” someone yelled—Sheldon! And Ron Fornelli leapt to his feet too. “Hoo, hoo!” he yelled. “Vista View!”
“Are you kidding me?” the angry father yelled. “This guy plays football?”
Manniberg retrieved the ball from Pyke’s jaws and tossed it—not badly at all—to the man with the stubble beard. “Try to get one past him!” Manniberg said.
The guy had a rifle arm. He sent a bullet straight at Pyke’s head. Shiels winced—but Pyke nabbed the ball like a natural, and even flipped it back to Manniberg like the principal was his caddie or something.
Did they have caddies in football?
A half dozen fathers, and one mother, in the audience took turns throwing the ball to Pyke, who only dropped one pass, a wobbler that slipped from the hand of the passer. “Sorry, son—sorry!” the embarrassed dad called. “It’s been a while since I tried this sort of thing.”
Manniberg picked up the ball and tucked it under his arm. The student body gave Pyke a standing ovation. Shiels was worried that Pyke might ruin it all by opening his beak and shrieking . . . but he knew enough to just bathe in the applause.
“All right, okay,” Manniberg said, giddy with the moment. “We don’t want news of our secret weapon to get out, do we? Vista View hasn’t beaten Wallin in, what is it, eight years now?”
“Seventeen!” Jeremy Jeffreys called out.
“Seventeen years. So we’ll just keep this under our hats until game time, all right? When is it, next week? Thank you all so much for coming tonight. Thank you for your understanding, your sense of community, your generosity of spirit. The society we’re building here at Vista View is inclusive, it’s supportive, it’s striving for acceptance of diversity every day. Thank you again. Thank you!” He smiled, he waved, he laughed and shook the football at Coach, who was standing with his arms crossed, scowling.
Well, the man was always scowling.
Jeremy Jeffreys slapped hands with teammates and well-wishers. And Sheldon—
Where was he?
Gone already.
• • •
Jeremy Jeffreys’s arcing pass stayed in Shiels’s mind: the elegant spin of the ball, the snake to the left, the coil in Pyke’s movement as he spied the incoming shadow then leapt and stretched, wings gigantic, to gather the ball into his wide-open beak.
It was an exquisite gesture for that moment, the whole thing a complex act of grace—how Shiels had pictured it happening, and found exactly the right words and movements—the order to the quarterback, the texts to Sheldon, all while keeping an eye on the unfolding disaster at the podium. Shiels had been invisible at the center, calling and executing the play, almost like a quarterback herself, or a coach, an unseen mover.
Perfect.
Too perfect.
As the assembly broke up, there was Jeremy Jeffreys surrounded by acolytes, reenacting the pass like he’d just won the Super Bowl with seconds draining on the clock. And there were Rebecca Sterzl and Melanie Mull and others from the council laughing with one another. “And now he’s a football star!” Rebecca exclaimed, without a glance in Shiels’s direction.
Of course Jeremy Jeffreys was not going to say, “Shiels Krane told me to do it!” And Sheldon Myers, who did not hang around, was not there to say, “Shiels texted me just before I yelled.” (He would have before. He had deflected all light to Shiels, almost to a fault.)
Pyke of course was gone seconds after Manniberg turned off the mic.
In the lobby after the event, in the press of people talking, laughing, reenacting the whole unbelievable spectacle, Shiels felt herself standing alone, still the girl with the purple nose.
Walloping Wallin was not going to happen all by itself—her council would have to lay on the buses, organize the rally, negotiate a block of tickets for as many people from the school who wanted to go (which now would be everybody, practically). It was the forty-seventh year of the rivalry; Wallin and Vista View had been the first two high schools in town, and although now there were fifteen schools, this was the game that counted. Or at least it used to count, before Wallin had became a football power.
Seventeen years since the last Vista View victory! In truth, Shiels had not been expecting to have to do much organizing for Walloping Wallin. Last year, when Vista View had hosted the game, fewer than a hundred people had come from the home side. But now, thanks to her invisible manipulations, her almost instinctive grasp of how to influence a nearly chaotic situation, another amazing event was set to unfold.
Why did she feel so miserable?
• • •
Alone in her bedroom that night: Was it just her purple nose, the wrangle dance? Was that why she’d been so abandoned? She was not the only one who had lost her head. That disaster zone of a gym after Autumn Whirl!
But it was as if something unthinkable—unspeakable—had happened. Shiels actually called Rebecca Sterzl and began to leave a pleading message—the weakness in her voice!—but stopped herself.
She had more pride than that.
She lay on her bed in the evening with her phone in her hand, smelling the sudden shift of the winds. It was like some elementary school romance. She remembered her grade six crush, Robbie Lewis, who had had a way of looking at her and not saying a word, as if he’d known exactly what she was thinking. In choir he would stand at the back and let his angel voice soar over everyone’s head. Shiels was not musical, not really, so she didn’t know how else to describe it. Robbie Lewis’s voice had lifted them all like a set of wings.
She remembered standing with him for some reason outside the library in their old school. She wasn’t used to being so close to him. His skin seemed to quietly hum something to her, something warm. He looked at her, and she almost leaned right into him. It got hotter and hotter until finally she said, “Where did you ever learn to sing, anyway?”
She was standing just below his chin by then. She remembered straining her neck to look up at him. He said, “I just do it because they make me. Only morons like singing.” He snickered, and tapped the top of her shoe for some reason with the dusty toe of his runner. That single touch—those two ugly sentences—broke the spell. She couldn’t look him in the eye anymore.
He didn’t even sound so good to her in choir either. It was like the milk had curdled. When they passed in the hallway, she drifted toward the wall to be as far away as she could get.
That was what this moment felt like too, as the air went out of the evening and Shiels returned to the reality of her life. What had her political team seen, when she’d been gyrating, purple-nosed, so close to the beast? What had she shown them? How had she betrayed herself?
“I didn’t even know I was doing it,” she said aloud, to no one, to the four walls of her too-quiet bedroom.
Robbie Lewis played for the football team now. He had grown enormous, his voice had dropped, and his eyes now looked like
old flat unremarkable discs. Who knew what he was thinking anymore? Who cared?
Not Shiels.
And somehow . . . somehow she wondered even if she cared about political success the way she had before. This manipulation of the public meeting had been almost accidental stagecraft, as much luck as anything else, she thought now. Even her parents had been won over, sort of, by the sleight of hand, the bold-faced changing of subjects. And the triumph at Autumn Whirl had not really been hers. She could admit that to herself now, alone, in the silence of her room. Sheldon and others had grasped the importance of Pyke long before she had. They had even done most of the setup and organizing. As leader, she had simply not stood in the way.
As leader she cared about things like crowd control, beverage revenues, the implementation of the cleanup plan. But as Shiels . . . as Shiels she found herself thinking for long stretches about the shocking changes in her nose, about Pyke’s magnificent crest, about being chosen, and choosing, and standing in the chaos of the gym feeling her body moving closer, closer . . .
And now what? Walloping Wallin might become even more of a triumph than Autumn Whirl. But maybe no one would ever treat Shiels like student-body chair again—ever give her any credit, or respect; ever volunteer for another of her committees; ever look her in the eye in the hallway or elsewhere.
And why?
Why?
Because they had seen the real her, stripped of her title, her costumes, her armor, her aura—they had seen her in the wrangle dance, another of Pyke’s girls. Chosen by him, marked by him, slave to him.
Slave?
She was nobody’s slave. Yet she did find herself glancing across the bedroom at her beautiful yellow shoes. She had worn them at the dance. That was why Pyke had picked her out. He had confused her for a runner, another Jocelyne Legault.
She was no Jocelyne Legault.
But she got out of bed and slipped on the shoes and imagined herself clip-clip-clipping along, tirelessly, like Jocelyne, her body an elegant, light transportation machine, the wind blowing, fresh against her face, deepening her lungs. They were heartbreakers, those shoes. Robbie Lewises. The first touch against the feet made you feel like you could cruise through a marathon, uphill, and hardly break a sweat.
Who was she fooling?
• • •
In the darkness, in the cold wind, Shiels stood outside the door of Sheldon’s house with her hands shoved into her pockets, listening to the sad fury of her heart.
She had not warned him.
He had followed orders; he had responded on cue perfectly in the auditorium, reading the situation as if he and she did indeed share the same brain. But that had been to save Pyke. She was not confident that Sheldon would have responded to another sort of text from her.
But if she showed up in person, if she sat by him in his room, where they had slept together not all that long ago . . . then this could be fixed. Couldn’t it?
She rang the bell. Sheldon’s mother answered.
“Mrs. Myers, hello.” Shiels was throbbingly aware of the other woman’s eyes on her purple nose. She felt like she was wearing a face tattoo, some kind of punk aggressive message to the world.
“Shiels . . . hello,” Mrs. Myers said.
Normally there would’ve been a hug. Sheldon’s mother wouldn’t be blocking the doorway.
“I was hoping . . . Is Sheldon in?”
A stilted moment. Then the woman stepped aside. “You know where it is,” she said.
By “it” she meant Sheldon’s bedroom.
The sadness on Mrs. Myers’s face. What had Sheldon told her?
Mr. Myers was sleeping in a stuffed chair in the living room. Shiels walked as quietly as she could up the stairs. When Mrs. Myers called out, “Sheldon! It’s Shiels!” Mr. Myers didn’t stir at all.
Sheldon did not race out of his room to greet her. Shiels stole down the hall and pushed open his partially closed door. He was sprawled on his bed, in his Aching Angels band T-shirt, on his phone . . . to somebody. Not her.
He said, to the phone, “Call you soon!” then clicked off.
He didn’t get up.
She sat in his desk chair—after moving his socks—and he stayed propped against his pillows. How often had she angled herself against those pillows too, and rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder while they wormed their way through some assignment or other?
(Wormed? Why did that word occur to her?)
“I thought—” she began, and all that she had actually thought fled from her mind.
“That was amazing tonight,” he said. “Really. Now I’ve seen everything from you. It wasn’t planned, was it?”
“It was Manniberg’s meeting,” she said simply.
He was staring at her nose; she touched it self-consciously. “It really isn’t coming off,” he said, meaning the purple. He scratched his own nose, which was clean, clean.
“Apparently not.”
The silence twisted between them.
“Sheldon,” she said, and her thought was this: If I cry now, he will hold me, and then we can get through anything. She said, “I’m sorry that I hurt you. You know I never mean to. You know I just get wrapped up—”
She dipped her head. She could not bear to look at the dark edges of his eyes. She was almost crying. But she fought it.
She didn’t want to get him back that way.
“—I get wrapped up in myself and what I’m doing. You know I don’t mean to—”
His phone rang. He glanced at the screen, and for a moment she thought he might actually take the call. But he didn’t.
He didn’t move toward her either, or grasp her hand. He didn’t envelop her in his arms or—
“Oh dear,” Shiels said. “What can I do? To make this right?”
He tapped the edge of his phone against his black-jeaned thigh.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I think we need to take a break.”
She heard the words and then felt their kick, unexpected, straight to the gut.
“Do we?” She almost launched herself at him. But he might resist her.
It would be terrible to be resisted.
“I need to take a break,” he said. “I don’t think straight when I’m with you. When you look at me—Shiels, be honest—half the time you’re looking past to something I don’t even see.”
Pyke, he meant. She was looking at Pyke, red-crested, immense, the whole improbable fact of him, monopolizing her mind’s eye.
She could be honest. She could sit in Sheldon Myers’s little office chair and not touch his foot which was so close to hers, and not pay any heed to how baking hot her face felt now that he had called her out like this. She could be.
Honest.
She loved him enough.
(She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.)
“All right,” she said. “I’m just going to say this. After the dance, I dragged you back here, I remember that. We ended up in bed, I remember that, remember . . . the morning. But did we . . . I mean, in the night did we—”
“You asked me this before. Do you think I would lie to you?” Sheldon said.
“About this. I mean in the heat of it—I mean . . . maybe, yes you would lie. I think, maybe, I dragged you up the stairs and ripped off your clothes and then . . .”
“And then you fell asleep. In my arms. And we slept together. As in, dreaming. As in—you snoring into my armpit. I would never do it to any girl who was unconscious. You know that about me, don’t you?”
She did. She did know that.
Sometimes, when all the world was theirs, they would both look up at the same time from whatever they were doing—their plotting, scheming, working, joking, laughing—and his eye would catch hers and lock and they would stay that way, not speaking, for about half a millennium, leaking into each other’s souls practically.
“You were desperate to make love to somebody that night, but, Shiels, it wasn’t me.”
Those times, she didn’t loo
k past him, she thought now. Those times, she was all his.
They looked now. She didn’t want to break it. She felt if she didn’t . . . didn’t move, then maybe they wouldn’t be over. Not really. There wouldn’t be this . . . taking a break.
If she didn’t . . .
But he didn’t either.
His gaze was stronger. Calmer. Truer.
So she had to break it.
(She had broken it anyway!)
She had to be the one to walk away.
• • •
A hard dream that night. Shiels saw herself at a train station, an old one, with the steam from the locomotive fogging the air. It was night, and she was carrying two of her parents’ old suitcases—the kind without wheels. They felt like they had rocks in them. The train came slowly into the station, but it didn’t seem to be stopping. She understood that she was going to have to board while it was moving. She started jogging down the platform, the suitcases unwieldy. The train really wasn’t going very fast, but it would take some coordination to leap onto the stairs by one of the doors. She didn’t have a hand free to grab the rail. She would have to time it perfectly and swing one suitcase into the opening—the left one—and then follow with herself and the right suitcase. She was jogging more slowly than the train so that the car would pass and then the doorway would appear.
Gradually she became aware that Sheldon was standing in the crowd. His body was angled off. He was reading something—his phone—not paying attention to her. He could’ve helped her, could’ve taken a bag, or even both bags. He was strong in the hands. He could’ve made sure she grasped the rail and swung herself at the right moment.
But he was pretending he didn’t see her.
The train jolted, slowed . . . then picked up speed just as she was getting ready to swing. So she had to hurry up. And now the end of the platform was nearing. . . .
Nearing but not swallowing her. “Sheldon!” she said, but the boy didn’t look.
The cases were heavy; she couldn’t set them down. She was tiring yet still ran, on and on. The door would not line up, but she kept trying. . . .
