All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “We should head back,” Patricia said.

  They headed back. This time they didn’t hold hands, as if getting stymied on their expedition had left them divided. Patricia skidded and fell on one knee, tearing her tights and scraping off some skin. Laurence reached down to help her up, but she shook her head and got up on her own.

  This was a metaphor for how it was with Laurence, Patricia realized. He would be supportive and friendly as long as something seemed like a grand adventure. But the moment you got stuck or things were weirder than expected, he would pull away. You could never predict which Laurence you would get.

  You could not count on Laurence, Patricia told herself. You just couldn’t, and you should just get used to that idea. She felt as though she had settled something, once and for all.

  “I think being able to control other people’s senses would trump everything, even shape-shifting,” Laurence said out of nowhere. “Because who cares what your physical form looks like, as long as you can control how everybody perceives you? You could be all deformed and messed up, and it wouldn’t matter. The key is controlling the tactile as well as the visual.”

  “Yeah.” Patricia picked up the pace and tromped back to the back parking lot, so Laurence had to rush to catch up. “But you’d know what you really were. And that’s all that matters.”

  When they got back through the parking lot’s gravel slush pit, they found the back door to the school was jammed shut. Locked? Frozen stuck? Patricia and Laurence both tore at the door, since the front entrance was all the way around the building and they would get busted for 100 percent certain. Laurence put one foot on the white-stone wall and pulled with all his Track-and-Field-but-mostly-Field might. Patricia pulled at the edges of the sharp metal handle, which was shaped like a shelf bracket. They both tugged as hard as they could, and then the door swung open. Someone was laughing on the inside of the door. Laurence and Patricia caught a glimpse of not-quite-uniform sneakers and a trio of pudgy hands, before she and Laurence both fell on their asses. Whoever had been holding the door shut from the inside laughed louder, as Laurence and Patricia tried to pick themselves up, and then a blue shape came arcing toward them, and Patricia barely had time to recognize a plastic bucket before a white arm of water sloshed out and they were both soaked. Someone was taking photos.

  12

  THEODOLPHUS HAD NOT eaten ice cream since the poisoning at the mall, and he didn’t deserve any now. Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets. Still, he kept imagining how ice cream would taste, how it would melt on his tongue and release layers of flavor. He no longer trusted ice cream, but he needed ice cream.

  Well. So be it. Theodolphus went and got in his Nissan Stanza, deflecting his landlady’s usual attempts at flirtation with a wave. He drove for hours, crossing and recrossing state lines, circling and swerving and doubling back, using every trick he could think of. Then he came to a convenience store two states away, where he bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, one of the flavors named after a celebrity. He ate it in the driver’s seat with a spork from his glove compartment.

  “I don’t deserve this ice cream,” he kept repeating with each bite until he started crying. “I don’t deserve this ice cream.” He sobbed.

  A few days later, Theodolphus looked across his desk at an angry blonde girl, Carrie Danning, and realized he had been working as a school guidance counselor for nearly six months, or a dozen times longer than he had ever held a regular job before. This was the first time Theodolphus had ever owned more than two pairs of socks.

  The most horrifying thing was, Theodolphus sort of cared about these children and their ludicrous problems. Maybe just because he’d invested so much time, he wanted to see how it all came out. He worried about school politics. He had a gnawing sense that all the debates over whether to allow kids to advance even if they had failed some part of the testing regime were somehow meaningful. He had vivid nightmares about sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.

  Carrie Danning was saying that she was over trying to be friends with Macy Firestone, who was a toxic individual, and Theodolphus was nodding without quite listening.

  Here’s how it worked if you were a member of the Nameless Order, like Theodolphus—you didn’t see your fellow members that much outside of the five-year gatherings, but you got bulletins in the patterns of dead grass around you, or human bones in one of your shoes—these would let you know if someone had ascended in the rankings, or had made a spectacular brace of kills lately. By now, all of his fellows would be getting little legless creatures in their hats or car glove compartments, signifying that Theodolphus had been having the dry spell to end all dry spells—including whoever had poisoned Theodolphus’s sundae and warned him against directly harming the two children.

  Something smooth and red was inside the half-open drawer of Theodolphus’s desk. For a moment he was certain it was a strip of blood-soaked silk from the Order, signifying his fall in status. But instead, he pulled out a cream-colored envelope, lined in red, around a card that informed Theodolphus the District had nominated him for Educator of the Year. He was invited to an award ceremony, at which black tie would be worn and factory-farmed creatures would be eaten. Theodolphus almost wept in front of Carrie Danning. He had to end this somehow. Whatever it took, he had to get his life back.

  13

  LAURENCE SAW HIS parents coming out of Mr. Rose’s office in the middle of the day. They looked alarmed—literally, as if an alarm had gone off next to their heads and their ears were still ringing. They wouldn’t look at him or acknowledge him at all, as they hustled out of the school and into their car.

  Laurence barged into Mr. Rose’s office without knocking. “What did you say to my parents just now?”

  “That’s covered by the same confidentiality that all of our conversations in this room enjoy.” Mr. Rose smiled and leaned back in his big chair.

  “You’re not a therapist,” said Laurence. “And you shouldn’t pretend to be.”

  “Your parents are worried about you,” said Mr. Rose. “You’re one of the most gifted and intelligent students we’ve ever had at this school.”

  “What did you say to my parents?” Laurence said. “And what did you say to Patricia, before that? She still won’t tell me what it was, but it messed her up.”

  “This is nothing to do with Patricia,” said Mr. Rose. “We’re talking about you.”

  “No. We’re talking about you.” Laurence was thinking about how Patricia looked like she’d seen a ghost whenever he mentioned Mr. Rose, and the way Mr. Rose had studied him like an insect before. Things were falling into place. “You said something to freak out my parents, just like you freaked out Patricia before. What did you say?”

  “As I was saying, your test scores are off the charts. But your attitude? Threatens to ruin everything.”

  “I guess I’m lucky that you already promised that everything I say in here is a secret,” Laurence said. “I can go ahead and tell you that you’re a fake. You’re not the coolest adult at this school, you’re some kind of troll, hiding out in your crappy little pasteboard office and messing with people. My parents are weak-minded and feeble, life has crushed their spirits, and so you think they’re easy marks. But I’m here to tell you that they’re not, and Patricia isn’t, either. I’m going to see that you burn.”

  “I see.” Mr. Rose’s hands were twitching. “In that case, what comes next is your own doing. Good day, Mr. Armstead.”

  Laurence’s parents weren’t around when he got home, and he was left to scavenge frozen pizza. Around 10:00 PM, he came downstairs and caught his parents looking at brochures, which they hid as soon as they heard his footsteps.

  “What were you just looking at?” Laurence asked.

  “Just some…,” said his father.

  “Just some materials,” said his mother.

  The next day, they hauled him out of bed just after dawn and told him he wasn’t going to school today. Instead, they stuck
him in the back of their hatchback, and his father drove as if he had a heat-seeking missile on his tail.

  “Where are we driving to?” Laurence asked his parents, but they just stared at the road.

  They sank into grayest Connecticut, with the interstate hemmed in with rock walls, until they turned onto a series of backwoods humps made of tarmac, then dirt, then gravel. The birch trees jittered and whispered, as if they were trying to tell Laurence something, and then he saw the sign: “COLDWATER: A Military Reform School. Now Reopened Under New Management.” They parked in a rock pile, surrounded by battered Jeeps, and on their left jumped a phalanx of twenty or thirty teenage boys, any one of whom could wipe the floor with Brad Chomner.

  And beyond those kids doing jumping jacks, a big American flag hung half-mast.

  “You,” Laurence told his parents, “have got to be kidding.”

  They mumbled that he had left them no choice, with his disruptive behavior, and he was just going to try out this school for a few days to see if Coldwater could be an option for him for high school—instead of that science school, where he would only learn more ways to be destructive.

  What the hell had Mr. Rose told them, that he was building a bomb?

  Laurence’s brain was as hot and oxygen poor as the inside of this car. He felt an acute pain, like the skin of his life breaking as his future was ripped away. His parents were already walking up the dirt path to the cement bunker that said “COMMANDANT” without waiting for him to follow. He ran after them, shouting that they couldn’t do this, and he already had a fucking school lined up, goddamn it.

  “The new and improved Coldwater Academy is all about helping the individual reach his full potential,” said Commandant Michael Peterbitter, who sat rigidly behind a fake wood desk with a Windows XP computer on one corner. Laurence couldn’t help snorting. “We see discipline as a means, not an end,” said Peterbitter, who had a lopsided handlebar mustache and a sunburnt nose under his buzz cut. “We believe in the age-old ideal of a sound mind in a healthy body. After a semester here, I bet you’d hardly recognize Larry.”

  Blah blah, physical fitness, learning to strip a rifle in under two minutes, self-esteem, blah. Finally, Peterbitter asked if anyone had any questions.

  “Just one,” Laurence said. “Who died?”

  “That’s a sensitive matter, and we deeply regret—”

  “Because that’s what the flag at half-mast means, right? How many kids has your awesome school killed, anyway?”

  “Some people don’t take to the rigorous and enriching course of study we offer here.” Peterbitter put on a sober expression, but also glared at Laurence. “When offered a choice between flourishing in a high-powered environment and pointless self-destruction, some people will always choose to self-destruct.”

  “We’re leaving now.” Laurence’s mother touched his arm.

  “Great,” Laurence said. “I’m ready.”

  But they meant a noninclusive “we.” Not for the first time, Laurence thought this was one of the annoyingly incommunicative features in the English language. Much like the inability to distinguish between “x-or” and “and/or,” the lack of delineation between “x-we” and “in-we” was a conspiracy of obfuscation, designed to create awkwardness and exacerbate peer pressure—because people tried to include you in their “we” without your consent, or you thought you were included and then the rug got pulled out from under you. Laurence dwelled on this linguistic injustice as he watched his parents walk back to their car, across the crunchy parking lot, without him.

  Peterbitter had a bored smirk. “So, you go by Larry?”

  Laurence was acutely aware that too many ginormous bruisers were staring at him already, from the front green with the teetering football goal. “No, I fucking don’t, I don’t go by Larry.”

  “That’s right. As of right now, your name is B2725Q, but people will mostly call you Dirt. You don’t earn the right to be called Larry until you reach Level One, and you are currently at Level Zero.” Peterbitter scrutinized the trainees, who were doing push-ups, and waved at one of their instructors, who came jogging over. Peterbitter introduced Dirt to Dickers, one of the Seniors and one of his trusted lieutenants.

  “C’mon, Dirt,” Dickers said. “I’ll find you a bunk. Afternoon Colors in an hour.” He had a chunky head covered with pale red fuzz and looked way older than eighteen.

  As they walked to the “barracks,” Laurence noticed that one classroom building had boarded-up windows and others had cracks in their walls. Kids in camo fatigues jogged past in no particular formation, and there was a .50-caliber gun lying half-assembled behind a slanty shed. He wouldn’t trust this military organization to defend a candy bar. The only new thing seemed to be a scrim of barbed wire draped over the electric fence around the outside of the campus.

  “Yeah, we had some runners,” Dickers said, following Laurence’s gaze toward the perimeter. “The school almost got shut down by the state last summer, but that was before the new management.”

  Dickers started telling Laurence that once you reached Level Three, life was pretty sweet: You got an hour of unsupervised computer time per day, and the school had just gotten Commando Squad (a game Laurence had beaten in a single day, two years ago.) At Level Four, officer level, you sometimes got to watch movies in Peterbitter’s apartment after lights-out, but that was a secret that Dickers absolutely had not told Laurence. Most of all, you did not want to get bumped down to Level Minus-One, because Dickers could not swear that they had gotten rid of all the MRSA in the Isolation Hole. Again, Dickers had not told Laurence about the MRSA, any more than he’d told him about the action movies (and microwave popcorn and pizza, delivered from outside) for Level Fours. Laurence said Dickers’s secrets would die with Laurence, which was probably true.

  “This here’s Dirt,” Dickers told the dozen or so massive teenagers in various stages of getting changed from athletic gear, toweling off, and changing into fatigues, inside a small white-brick dorm room. “He’s stayin’ here a few days, see how he takes to it. He needs a bunk and some gear. Show him a good time, girls.” Then Dickers was gone.

  Laurence drew himself up, kept his shoulders squared. “Hi. I’m Dirt, apparently. It’s not the worst thing I’ve been called this week. So, where am I supposed to sleep? He said you had a spare bunk here?”

  The room was maybe three times the size of Laurence’s bedroom at home and had bunks crammed so tight it was like how Laurence imagined a submarine. He couldn’t breathe this methane-nitrogen atmosphere, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep in here. His head spun.

  “Nope.” One dude with a DIY chest tattoo and a nose that had been broken multiple times rolled out of his bunk. He towered over Laurence. “No spare bunk here. You’re Dirt? You sleep on the floor.” He gestured at the dark far corner, which had a fresh spiderweb. Laurence looked for a bunk that was unoccupied, but he couldn’t see past the ring of massive kids on all sides.

  The part of Laurence’s brain that stood back and analyzed shit told him he was being hazed. This was part of the “breaking you down” program, and also normal social dynamics. Don’t let them get to you, he told himself.

  But what came out of Laurence’s mouth was: “What about the kid who just died? Maybe I can have his bunk.”

  Probably the wrong thing to say.

  “No way dude,” said someone farther back in the room, in a rumble like a forty-year-old truck driver. “You did not just disrespect Murph. You did not just piss on the memory of our fallen comrade. Tell me I didn’t hear that.”

  “Now you’ve done it,” said the noseless kid. “Now you’ve done it.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your stupid friend,” Laurence shouted as they lifted him over their heads so he could see the stains on the top-bunk mattresses and the deep fissures in the load-bearing beams. “This place got him, but it won’t get me. You hear me? I’m getting out of here.”

  His voice cracked. Fluorescent lighting t
ubes rushed toward his face until he braced himself for a faceful of glass, and then he was spinning as cheers erupted around him. He gave in to panic at last, as the candy shell of anger split open, and let out a hoarse scream as he was cast, headfirst, into space.

  14

  Patricia: Where is Laurence?

  CH@NG3M3: I don’t know. He hasn’t logged in for a few days.

  Patricia: I’m worried something happened to him.

  CH@NG3M3: Worry is often a symptom of imperfect information.

  PATRICIA TRIED CALLING Laurence’s house to find out what was going on. Laurence’s mother picked up. “This is your fault,” she said. Then she hung up.

  Half an hour later, the phone rang at Patricia’s house and her dad picked up. He greeted Laurence’s mom and spent the rest of the conversation saying, “Oh. Oh dear. I see.” After he hung up, he announced that Patricia was grounded indefinitely. At this point, Roberta was too busy with the high-school musical and schoolwork to wait on Patricia hand and foot, so Patricia’s parents went back to sliding food under her door. Her mother said this time they really were cutting their losses with her, once and for all.

  Patricia: I keep wondering if I should have told Laurence the whole story, about what Mr. Rose said to me.

  CH@NG3M3: What do you think would have happened if you’d told him?

  Patricia: He would have thought I was making it up. He would have thought I was nuts. That’s why it was the perfect trap. Whatever I do, I lose.

  CH@NG3M3: The trap that can be ignored is no trap.

  Patricia: What did you say?

  CH@NG3M3: The trap that can be ignored is no trap.

  Patricia: That’s a weird thing to say. I guess a good trap should be camouflaged, so you don’t realize you’re walking into it. On the other hand, you have to want to walk into it. A trap that doesn’t make you want to fall in isn’t much of a trap. And once you’re caught, you shouldn’t be able to ignore the trap because you’re stuck. So a trap that you can just pay no attention to is a failure. I guess I get it.