They’re still in love, as far as I can tell.
And so, me being irrational about Aza? I think my moms actually saw it as karma. They remembered how their parents felt when the two of them met, which was, basically, WHA?!
They looked at me, and Aza, and said the exact same thing. But they couldn’t tell me not to do it.
Other people watch TV. Aza read about cryptography and sailor’s knots. We had an ongoing competition over who could give the other the best “piece of weird” they’d never heard about before. There was a tally, and I was winning, but only by one point.
Last year, Aza signed up for the talent show and came onstage, clicked play on a beatbox MP3, and started doing the strangest whistles over the top of it. I sat in the audience, dying.
Afterward, she said to me, “How’s your Silbo?” and cackled. Turns out Silbo is a whistled language from the Canary Islands. She won that round, though not the talent show. I still don’t know what she was saying. She wouldn’t translate.
I turn left at the cemetery and get in line behind Aza’s parents and Eli, in their beat-up blue car.
I honk: I CAN’T BELIEVE I KEPT FORGETTING YOU WERE DYING.
Aza’s dad is driving. He flashes me a sign, and then he honks his own Morse, actual Morse, carefully done.
FOREVER. He told me he was going to do that. I honk it in repetition, and so does everyone else. They don’t even know what they’re saying. But her dad and I do. Aza’s mom and Eli do too. I can see them in the car, trying not to break down.
Brief pi recitation.
So, back to me showing up at her birthday party when we were five, thinking my Halloween costume would make me invisible. It kind of did. I walked a mile, this really small alligator by the side of the road, and nobody busted me. I was on a mission.
No one liked Aza back then. She’d already resigned herself to it, no friends, mostly stuck inside at recess. Everyone said she was gross and contagious.
I don’t really need other people. Well, I need one other person, and she’s gone and shitshitshit.
I honk my apology list. It’s not much of a list, really. Just one huge thing.
Aza’s family, with input from me, decided to do this graveside, because the whole memorial thing works better if you can scream it, and that’s what we’re all about to be doing.
Crazy wind. All these people surrounding a hole in the ground, like something’s going to come out of it, rather than go in.
We thought her making it to sixteen mattered. Why? What does sixteen even signify? Nothing. It’s this nothing notion. It’s not even a prime number.
I look at everyone from school, Jenny Green and company. The whole last few days have been full of people getting passes to get out of class, at which point they smoke behind the cafeteria. Historically, Aza and I would’ve made fun of them, grieving for someone they didn’t love.
Aza didn’t especially believe in grief. This is inconvenient. I thought I didn’t believe in grief either, but now me and Aza have another divide, another difference. I see Mr. Grimm standing off to the side wearing sunglasses and a hat. He looks as though he’s been crying too.
My moms walk up behind me. Carol sighs in a way that says she was fervently hoping I wouldn’t be wearing what I’m wearing.
“Really?” says Carol. “Couldn’t manage to keep the suit on, huh?”
“You knew he wouldn’t,” says Eve. She even smiles.
“I thought he would,” Carol says. “I even called the costume place. They said the alligator was still right there in the stockroom.”
What Carol doesn’t know is that the costume place has two alligator suits. One my size, and one Aza’s. It was part of her birthday surprise.
“It’s Aza’s funeral,” I say. “She’d have liked it.”
I put the head back on. Eve gives me a little thumbs-up, but I catch Carol looking at me. Just when I’m honestly a little worried, thinking she’s 100 percent not on my side, she says “Wŏ ài nĭ,” which is “I love you” in Chinese, followed by “Nakupenda,” which is the same thing in Swahili. We learned to say I love you together in what felt like a thousand languages when I was little. That’s the kind of mom Carol is.
“Even though you’re trouble,” Carol says, her voice going a little sobby. “You don’t need to be sorry for what I bet you said you were sorry for.” I’d forgotten I’d told her about the apology lists. “It wasn’t your fault Aza died. You know that, right?”
I look at her from inside my alligator suit. No, I do not know that.
My mom presses her hand to the center of my chest and goes quickly to her chair.
When I first realized that Aza wasn’t going to live as long as me, I told Aza all the classic things people tell people who are dying. I said, “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” etcetera etcetera.
Aza was like: “True, except how often, seriously, Jason, do people get hit by buses and die?” Then she cruelly handed me stats. Not that often, as it turns out.
Aza’s mom throws her arms around my alligator self, and I walk Aza’s parents to their seats. Both of them lean hard on me.
The grave they’re going to put Aza in is really small.
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When it’s my turn to talk, I take off the alligator head, and recite a little chunk of pi. Then I say, as fast as possible: “So, you may or may not know that people keep finding more digits of that number. I wanted to give Aza all the digits. I tried that, the first time we met. I found out later that she knew more digits than I did. I was trying to give her something that wouldn’t ever end.”
People look at me. There is a collective adult sympathy noise that makes me want to puke.
“That’s it,” I say. “That’s all. I’m fine. No, don’t worry.”
People make the faces of a comfort army. In my head, I’m frantically pi.
Aza’s family does their thing.
Aza’s Mom: “She was sick, but would I have traded her for someone who wasn’t? If it meant I’d lose the person she was? No.”
Aza’s Dad:
Aza’s Mom: hugs him and passes him a piece of colored paper. I can’t see the I Love You list she’s given him, but he looks at her for a second, his face saying she just saved him.
Eli: “Last year someone gave me a valentine and Aza claimed she hated it. I liked it. She did too, but she kept pretending she didn’t. I’m going to give it to her now.”
Eli gets some confetti out, and we throw it into the air. It’s heart-shaped. It glitters as it falls.
I think: why did I never give Aza a valentine? I did not know she liked confetti. I did not know she liked hearts. She would’ve made fun of me. She would’ve told me I was sappy. But maybe I—
Looping.
I get the balloons. There are a couple hundred of them. It’s like we’re at a Party Palace, and we’re all five years old. Except it’s a Party Palace where some of us are dead.
Everyone attaches notes to the strings. Eve objected to these, because questionable materials. I had to go in several directions and find biodegradable. I feel momentarily like I’m getting it right.
It’s raining hard now. Some of the balloons pop the moment we let go, but others get up into the sky the way they should. That’s what always sucks about balloons. In your hand they’re big, but once you let them loose, they’re instantly tiny.
Mine’s a huge green one, because it has to carry a long letter, inside of its own waterproof tube. I wanted it to get as close to outer space as possible. Therefore, it’s a reinforced weather balloon, spray-painted to evade Eve.
And then—
Thunder.
Lightning.
People are fleeing to their cars as quickly as they can without being disrespectful.
Where am I supposed to go, exactly? Aza’s in a little box in the ground.
The grave is too small for me to get into it, scrunch my knees up to my ches
t, and let them cover me up. But how can there be a rest of my life?
Trees are leaning over. A branch cracks off and hits the ground not very far away, and my moms are trying, not subtly, to get me to come with them.
I look up, and I let my balloon go. As I do, I see something gleam—
a flash of white sail billowing, and a bright spot of light, something blazing out of the darkening clouds. I see something, ropes, the pointed prow of a—
An object falls down out of the clouds, and I hear Aza’s voice. I swear I do.
I hear Aza screaming my name.
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“Aza Ray,” says someone, way, WAY too loudly. “Aza Ray, wake up.”
I put my head under the covers. Absolutely not. There will be no waking up for me, because it is clearly five a.m., and this can only be cruel night phlebotomy. I have a spinny, achy head, leftover from whatever got me here, and yes, I remember some of it, and yes, some of it was bad, but it’s been bad before, but here I still apparently am, so it can’t have been that bad.
I’ve been sleeping like the dead. That’s a joke I’m allowed to make. Whatever drug they’ve got me on, it’s working. If they ask me, I can say pain scale zero, which has never happened before, not in my entire history of hospitals.
The voice gets sharper. This nurse has no sense of nice. Her voice is both way too loud and way too high-pitched. I yank the covers higher over my face.
“AZA RAY QUEL. It’s time to wake up now!”
Something sharp pokes me. My bed shakes.
I reluctantly open my eyes and I’m looking at—
An owl.
A HUMAN-SIZE OWL, a, what? WHAT? A WORLD-CLASS HALLUCINATION.
The owl stretches long yellow fingers and runs one over my forehead. It clacks its beak at me.
“Still fevered,” it says.
Oh, oh, no no no. Hallucinations in my experience don’t talk, though who knows because I seem to be an entirely new Aza lately, someone who hallucinates ships and gigantic birds and—
“HELP!” I scream. I don’t care if I’m breaking hospital rules by freaking out. This is me giving up on my carefully cultivated hospital-patient-since-forever coolness. “SOMEBODY HELP ME!”
The bed swings so hard I get instantly nauseous. I’m tangled in ropes and twigs, and wrapped in a blanket made of—feathers?
The bird thing has a beakish nose and lips. It’s not a bird. It’s not human. It’s neither. It’s also both.
This: you don’t know what real hallucinating is until you’re doing it. It’s a gigantically big deal.
At least everything’s not on fire, Jason says in my head. Yeah, except everything kind of is on fire. Bent brain, boiled brain, broken brain. The owl’s wearing clothes, but also has plumage. She’s covered in feathers and stripes. She has wings AND hands and she stretches her fingers out to me. She’s the size of a human, but wings, oh, definite wings, and she’s wearing a gray uniform with an insignia. There’s a ship shaped like a bird embroidered on her chest.
Angel? Angel-bird-creature-thing? What the hell am I looking at?
“Who are you? Where am I? Don’t touch me!”
The owl is definitely trying to check my vitals, but hell no, I’m doing it myself. If you’re a person who’s professionally sick, you get to be ridiculously expert in checking yourself for signs of death.
Maybe the poor owl’s a human nurse and I’m a raving feral thing. It’s not my fault if I am. Morphine? But morphine means bad things. If I’m on a morphine drip in a hospital, they’re making it hurt less. Which means I’m dying painfully.
Which means—
Rewind. Back to the ambulance. Back to the dark. Back to the silence and the snow falling down over the world.
Jason, Eli, my dad, my mom, my oh my god, I—
I died.
What. The. Hell.
Aza, what the hell?
Where am I?
I lose it.
I sob, no dignity.
“Where’re my mom and dad?” I manage to ask the owl. “Where’s Jason? How am I not dead?”
The owl clucks. “No need for such fear and fuss, nestling. You’re on a ship. Welcome aboard Amina Pennarum.”
I realize that everything she’s saying is in a language I understand, but it’s not English. I don’t know how I understand it. When I try to focus, I can’t. I look up at her through tears.
The owl’s head rotates all the way around, and then back again like the world globe in my history class, a dented sphere from the 1970s, its face pocked with pencil marks. She has black spots in white hair. She has freckles all over her face, and her skin is pale and kind of silver.
Her fingers are yellow, and scaly, and the nails are black. There are gold rings on all of them, all connected to one another. The rings are connected to something else, under her clothes. I can see chains running up her arms.
Some kind of harness? Is she a prisoner?
Am I a prisoner?
In what country? In heaven? Wait, what heaven? I don’t believe in heaven!
“HELP!” I shout again.
“Hush,” she says, her tone warm but impatient. “May the Breath take you, if you keep shrieking that way. You’re not a newborn, nestling. You are much too shrill. You hurt my ears. Hush now.”
My chest rattles. From inside it—inside my lung—comes one high note. I have an image of the bird in my room. The yellow bird. The one I swallowed.
Four sunrises, the bird in my chest says, in a voice totally normal, except that it is COMING FROM MY LUNG. Four sunrises you slept.
I gasp and brace myself to choke on feathers.
But I’m not choking. I can breathe. I test. I breathe in all the way slowly, and then out all the way, even more slowly. I’ve never been able to do that before.
I stop crying for a second and listen. None of the normal hospital desperation sounds and smells, no people dealing badly with their kid’s upcoming expiration over crap coffee in the waiting room.
My screaming didn’t seem to scare the owl, who is now just looking at me calmly and taking my pulse. I try questions.
If this is a hallucination, she’ll answer like a nurse. If this is heaven—
“Are you an angel?” I ask.
She laughs. “So you can speak politely. We weren’t sure you could. All you’ve done since you got onboard five days ago is shriek, tell everyone you’re dead and that this isn’t how dead is supposed to be, and then pass out again.”
I might be hyperventilating slightly. I get questions out between gasps, but I’m still not coughing. I should be coughing.
“Where am I? What happened? What the hell is this? Who the hell are you? Is this hell? Why are you a bird? Is that a costume? Do you exist? Are you a nurse? Is this a hospital? Am I on a ship?”
The owl looks at me, tilting her head with an expression that looks as though maybe I’ve already had this conversation with her. She tugs at my covers and straightens them. I notice I’m naked.
I have a vision of a morgue. Am I in a morgue? Am I frozen in a drawer? I don’t feel dead. I feel crazily alive.
“Nestling. You were brought aboard in considerable distress, by a Breath summoned in emergency when I and the rest of Amina Pennarum’s Rostrae couldn’t convince you to come peacefully. You would have died down there, trapped inside that skin, had Milekt not found you.
“This isn’t hell, but the sky,” she continues, “and I’m not hell either, but Wedda. Greetings, it’s nice to meet you too. I am no bird. I’m Rostrae. And of course this isn’t a costume. These are my feathers.”
Right, that explains everything.
This is some kind of meltdown. My brain floods with things I’ve read, Milton, William Blake, and Moby-Dick, plus Disney movies viewed unwillingly in children’s hospitals plus Christmas specials, plus New-Agey yoga moves that put y
our brain into some kind of cosmic release state, and I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Think.
Settle, instructs the bird in my chest. Nest. Feed.
“She hungers, it’s true,” Wedda says, talking casually to my rib cage. “It’s not natural to sleep so long.”
She leans over and starts trying to feed me something with a spoon, spilling food on my face. I fail to open my mouth, but she smashes the spoon against my lips, and I finally give in and take a bite of something sort of oatmeal-esque.
I can feel wind coming in from somewhere. Like, ocean breeze. The sounds I first vaguely thought were the beeping of machines are not beeping at all. They’re birds. Birds singing and screeching and peeping.
“Why are you here?” I ask the owl.
“I’m your steward,” she says. “The officers aboard Amina Pennarum all have stewards from the feathered class. You don’t know anything, little one, and you have a lot to learn. You’ve been gone a long time.”
Disregard the words “gone a long time.”
“What ocean is this? Is this the Pacific? Are we on a cruise ship? A hospital ship?”
She laughs again. “When you came aboard, you were a nestling fallen off the mast and too young to fly. But now, I think you’re recovering. Questions and questions. Let’s get you into uniform. You’ve been in bed long enough. You’re in need of fresh air, and exercise.”
“I’m fine,” I say, uneasy and lying. “I can dress myself. I can feed myself too. I don’t need a steward.”
Wedda sighs. “By the very Breath! I don’t need a nestling to dress either, but you and I aren’t in charge of that, so I suggest you make it easier on us both and let me do it. Then we can go about our business.”
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