by Marilyn Kaye
He nodded.
I smiled.
End of my fabulous connection with a very cute guy.
At least, I thought it was the end. Mike walked out of the building behind me just as someone walking in bumped into him and knocked his book out of his hand. It dropped down a couple of steps and landed right in front of me.
I picked it up and couldn’t help glancing at the title. Birds of North America. I handed it back to him.
“Thanks,” he said, and tossed it into his backpack.
“You’re welcome,” I responded. “Are you into birds?”
I expected him to say it was for someone else, a sibling, a parent. Or maybe he had to write a report about birds.
He nodded. “Um, well…yeah. Watching them.”
I was impressed. Bird watching was definitely not among the popular activities for kids our age. Not the cool ones, at least, and Mike Twersky had to be one of them. Bird watching was like playing golf, something old retired folks did. It wasn’t just the fact that he did this that impressed me. He admitted it!
“Wow,” I said. “That’s—cool.”
He looked at me suspiciously, as if he thought I might be speaking sarcastically.
“No, really!” I said quickly. “I like birds.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie. I didn’t dislike them. I just hadn’t given them much thought.
His expression cleared. “That’s what I’m going to do now. You know the little kids’ playground, just by the woods? It’s a great place to spot birds.”
“That’s good to know,” I said. “I mean, in case I decide to take up bird watching. Which I might. Someday.”
“Want to come with me?”
Well, Robert Frost could wait.
I couldn’t believe I was actually walking side by side with Mike Twersky. I wondered what would happen if we ran into people from school, like some of the popular girls. Would he introduce me? Would they be impressed by the fact that I was hanging with a popular boy?
Pushing that thought from my mind, I scolded myself. Why would I care if kids from the popular crowd were impressed or not? I’d sworn off those girls, I knew what they were like. Lakeside was not going to turn into another Brookdale for me.
On the other hand, I hadn’t sworn off popular boys.
We walked in silence. I tried to come up with something to talk about, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Mike’s cell phone rang, and he took it out of his pocket.
“Hey, Thayer.”
The name was familiar, and I remembered where I’d heard it—he was the guy who tripped the smaller boy in the cafeteria. He must have been a good friend of Mike’s—they stayed on the phone the whole time we walked. It was kind of weird to think that Mike could be friends with a creepy bully type like that. On the other hand, I’d had friends who’d turned out to be not so nice.
Thayer was also a very talkative friend. Mike’s side of the conversation consisted mostly of “Yeah,” “Right,” “No way,” “Sure,” and “Okay.”
My cell phone didn’t ring. I’d gotten it for Christmas, and since I no longer had any friends calling me, or any friends to call, and since it wasn’t a smartphone, I’d mainly used it for setting the alarm to get up in the mornings. Thinking about that, I realized I didn’t even know if Alyssa and Rachel had cell phones. If they did, they hadn’t received or made any calls when we’d been together. Maybe it was time to actually add some names to my contacts.
It was a nice playground, with all the usual stuff—swings, a slide, a seesaw, and a pretty merry-go-round with painted horses. But it was very cold out, so the area was deserted. Mike set his backpack on a bench and opened it. He took out the book about birds and then pulled out binoculars. I stood there silently while he flipped through the book.
“Here are some birds we might be able to see in the winter,” he said, and held out the book so I could see the pictures. All the birds looked pretty much the same to me, but I pretended to study them carefully and faked some enthusiasm.
“Wow! A white-breasted nuthatch!” I exclaimed, and then immediately wanted to kick myself. Breast. Nut. How could I use words like that in front of a guy? I gritted my teeth and waited for the teasing.
But all he said was “Yeah, I’d like to see one of those. They’re not very common, but it’s possible.”
He held the binoculars to his eyes and searched the skies. Some birds flew out of the woods.
“Anything interesting?” I asked.
“Just pigeons.”
He continued to look around, and every time a bird flew he aimed his binoculars in that direction. He didn’t say anything, so I figured they weren’t very exciting birds.
I wished he would ask me something about myself, like where did I come from, or how I liked Lakeside. But we didn’t really know each other, so maybe he thought questions would be too personal. My mother once told me that boys my age get nervous around girls, which is why they might not be very talkative. Especially if the boys were attracted to the girls. So I guess it was a good thing that Mike didn’t say much. Except Mike really didn’t seem nervous at all. Still, he was a boy.
Suddenly, he let out a whoop. “I think that’s a white-winged crossbill!”
“Is that a rare bird?” I asked.
“Not rare, exactly, but not real common.”
He handed me the binoculars. “Look, over there. It’s circling around the fir tree.”
I looked. There was definitely a bird, but I didn’t notice anything remarkable about it. Still, I exclaimed, “Cool!” I handed the binoculars back to him and he looked again.
“It’s coming this way!” he exclaimed, and raised the binoculars.
I had a sudden memory of being in a park one day when a bunch of birds flew over me and one of them pooped right on my head. It was totally disgusting. Fortunately, Mike’s white-winged crossbill had better manners.
“Could you hand me the bird book, please?” he asked. “I want to check it off.”
I did. He flipped through some pages, took a pen out of his pocket, then smiled and put it back.
“For a second there I forgot it’s a library book,” he admitted.
Wow, that was impressive. A lot of people wouldn’t care about defacing a library book.
“Those binoculars are heavy,” I commented.
“Yeah, all the really good ones are,” he said. “I got these for Christmas.”
“Can you do bird watching through a…” I almost said “spyglass,” but that sounded too much like something in a fairy tale. “Through a telescope?”
“Sure,” he said. He looked at me curiously. “Why? Do you have a telescope?”
“Yeah. Well, it’s not exactly mine. I found it in the turret at home, just after we moved in.” I hesitated, then added, “You can come over sometime, if you want, and look through it.”
Was I being too aggressive? He didn’t look frightened.
“Yeah, maybe. Thanks.”
To be honest, the idea made me a little nervous. Would he see something other than birds? It was one thing to share my magic spyglass with my new odd friends. But a cool guy like Mike? Would he think I was weird?
He looked at his watch. “Oh, I gotta go, my grandparents are coming for lunch. See ya.”
“See ya,” I repeated as he put his backpack on and took off.
See ya, I repeated silently to myself. Did that mean he wanted to see me? That if we saw each other at school, we’d speak? I felt dazed. My head was spinning, in a very nice way.
Maybe that was why it took me a minute to realize that the playground was no longer completely deserted. Someone in a parka with a hood was sitting on one of the swings, listlessly swaying back and forth. A wind blew back the hood and revealed Kiara Douglas.
Since I was the only other person on the playground, I felt certain that she must have seen me, but she didn’t wave or give any sign of recognition. I strolled over, sat down on the swing next to hers, and spoke.
“Hi.”
She glanced in my direction but didn’t return the greeting. Surely she recognized me, after our encounter in the media center. Even so, I introduced myself.
“I’m Ellie. I sit behind you in English.”
“I know,” she said, in a tone that was less than happy.
Still, at least she spoke.
“It’s cold,” I said.
“I know,” she said again.
“Too cold to be outside,” I remarked.
“Then why are you?” she asked.
An actual question! I took that as encouragement, and I responded.
“I was bird watching.”
She made no comment about that, so I followed up with a question of my own.
“Why are you outside in the cold?”
“My father ordered me to get some fresh air.”
I nodded. “Well, it’s getting a little too fresh for me, if you know what I mean.”
Was that a nod of agreement? I couldn’t be sure.
“I think I’ll go home and make some hot chocolate.”
No response.
“Want to come?” I asked.
There was no mistaking the confused expression on her face. “Why?”
“Just, you know, for company. I’m new here and I’m trying to make some friends.”
She stared at me in silence for at least ten seconds. Then she spoke.
“I’ve already got friends.”
I couldn’t help myself, I had to get personal. “You do? That’s interesting. Because I never see you hanging with anyone at school. You’re always alone.”
“My friends aren’t at East Lakeside Middle School.”
“They go to another school?”
“I guess.”
How could she not know where her friends went to school? I was about to ask her that when she spoke again.
“PonyGirl,” she said. “FunkyMonkey. TurkeyTwentyTwo. Those are only some of my friends. I don’t need more.” And she hopped off the swing and walked away.
I DIDN’T WORK ON MY ROBERT FROST POEM Saturday night. After my encounter with Mike Twersky that afternoon, I had absolutely no desire to concentrate on poetic words and try to figure out their inner meaning. Maybe if it had been a love poem, I would have found it more interesting.
Fortunately, my parents were going out, so I didn’t have to hide in my room and pretend to be working. As soon as they left, I went into a certain closet where Mom and Dad had tossed a lot of stuff they never used anymore, like their skis and old DVDs. It was so weird to think they had been young once, but these DVDs were evidence of that. I picked out two with covers I liked—The Breakfast Club and Grease.
In the end, I had a very nice evening stuffing my face with popcorn and zoning out, but that meant I had to attack Robert Frost on Sunday. Late in the morning, I opened the book I’d checked out of the library and found the poem I’d been assigned.
It was called “Fire and Ice,” and I was very pleased to see that it wasn’t long at all. How much symbolism and inner meaning could be packed into nine short lines? I was even more pleased when I read it through and found it easy to understand. It was all about how the world could end, in fire or in ice. Robert Frost says he’d go with fire, but then he says ice would work too.
Not a complicated poem, but my heart sank. I could sum it up in three seconds. How was I going to talk about it for five full minutes?
Ms. Gonzalez said we had to relate the poem to our own lives. So I figured I should talk about how I thought the world would end. Which was not something I’d ever thought about.
Now I tried to think about it. I saw a movie once where an atomic bomb fell and everyone was slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Radiation—that would be sort of like fire.
I groaned aloud at the idea. This was so depressing! Here I was, finally feeling sort of okay about life—this poem was going to really bring me down. I put the book aside and went downstairs to see what we were having for lunch.
“Cold roast beef,” my father informed me as he perused the refrigerator contents. “Leftover chicken.”
“And there’s coleslaw and veggies,” my mother added. Then, to me, she said, “Did you finish your homework?”
“Just about,” l lied. And then I had an inspiration. “You know, this English thing we have to do is an oral report. Could I ask Alyssa and Rachel to come over after lunch so we can practice the reports on each other?”
I got permission and ran upstairs to retrieve my cell phone. Then I remembered—I didn’t have their phone numbers. I went back downstairs.
My mother was putting platters of food on the kitchen table. “Are they coming?”
“I couldn’t call them, I don’t have their numbers. And there’s no internet to look them up, remember?”
“I still have Jane Levin-Lopez’s card on the refrigerator,” Mom said. “I think it has her cell and home numbers on it.”
“Okay…but what about Alyssa?”
“Four-one-one,” my father said.
“Huh?”
“You call information. You dial four-one-one, you give the name, and you get a phone number.”
“There was information available before the internet, El,” my mother pointed out. “When we were your age—”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I interrupted. “Can I get cell phone numbers through four-one-one?”
“Usually just landlines,” she said. “So it’ll probably be under her parents’ name.”
I thought about that for a minute. There had to be more than one Parker in town—except, I remembered, Alyssa’s mom had a different last name from her daughter. Khatri. And her stepfather probably wasn’t a Parker.
I decided to try her mom’s name. I dialed 411 and gave the name. No luck. Then I remembered something Alyssa told me.
“Dad, do you know the name of the architect who’s building the community center?”
“Martin Kraft.”
I tried again—and it worked! I called the number 411 gave me and Alyssa answered the phone herself.
“Hi!” I replied. “It’s Ellie. Want to come over this afternoon and practice our oral reports?”
“Not particularly,” she replied. “I wouldn’t mind coming over, but I don’t want to practice this stupid report.”
With my parents able to overhear me, I decided to ignore that. “Great,” I said. “Two-thirty?”
“And we’ll do something else?”
“Absolutely.”
Rachel’s home phone was answered by a woman who didn’t sound like the mother I’d met. Probably her other mother.
“Could I speak to Rachel, please?”
“May I ask who is calling?”
“This is her friend Ellie. From East Lakeside.”
There was a moment of silence, and then I caught a whispered conversation but couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I imagined this parent—the one Rachel called Mami—was asking the other mother if she knew who I was. She must have said she did, because her Mami spoke again.
“Yes, one moment, please.”
Finally, Rachel herself was on the phone, and I repeated my invitation. She asked me to wait, and I presumed she was asking permission. Then she came back.
“Are your parents going to be home?”
I did a mental eye roll. Poor Rachel. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Rachel lowered her voice. “Better find out for sure. One of them will drive me over and she’ll probably want to see that someone’s there.”
I sighed. “Hang on.” I turned to them. “You guys home today?”
I got a couple of nods and was able to report to Rachel that adult supervision was available. Like we were all really five years old and needed it.
That afternoon, Alyssa walked over, and just as I opened the door, a car pulled up to the curb. Rachel and her other mother got out.
“Mom,” I called.
While my mother and Ms. Levin-Lopez talked, the girls and I went up to the turret.
“Ar
e we going to practice our reports now?” Rachel asked.
“Later,” I said. “First I have to tell you about Kiara.” I reported my meeting with her on the playground the day before.
Alyssa frowned. “FunkyMonkey?”
“Yeah, and Ponygirl, and another name I can’t remember,” I said. “I’m thinking they might be characters in the game she plays.”
Rachel looked puzzled. “So they’re not real people?”
“No, they’re avatars,” I told her. “So they are real people, but I don’t think Kiara actually knows them. It’s an online game, they could be anywhere in the world.”
“And she calls them her friends?” Rachel shook her head. “That’s weird.”
“She’s weird,” I declared.
Alyssa shrugged. “I don’t know. Everybody’s weird, in my opinion. We’re weird.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Maybe we’ll see her today,” I said, and went to the spyglass. I slowly moved it around town.
“See anything?” Alyssa asked.
“The parking lot at school. And it’s full of cars.”
“That’s impossible,” Rachel noted. “It’s Sunday.”
“I know!” I was excited. “Maybe we’re going to see something interesting. Wait—there are two people coming out of the building. They’re going into the parking lot.” I turned the dial so I could see their faces. “Hey, one of them is Mr. Clark!”
“Our science teacher?” said Rachel incredulously.
“Yeah. I don’t know the other one, but I’ve seen her around, she’s a teacher too.”
“Let me see!” Alyssa begged.
Reluctantly, I handed it over.
“Oh, yeah, that’s Ms. Hannigan! She teaches art.” Then she shrieked.
“What?” Rachel and I said in unison.
“They’re dancing!”
Sure enough, as we each took a turn viewing, we saw that Ms. Hannigan had a hand on Mr. Clark’s shoulder, Mr. Clark’s hand was on her waist, their other hands were clasped, and they were doing some kind of slow dance. Right in the middle of the parking lot.
“Do you think they’re a couple?” Rachel wondered.
Alyssa shook her head. “They must want to be a couple. The spyglass shows us feelings and wishes, remember? I’ll bet they each have a secret crush on the other.”
