Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (20 page)

She paused. The opening paragraph had just poured out, almost without thought.

But what I wasn't expecting, what took me by surprise, is my fascination with political society. The science of groups, I suppose it might be called. Beyond the microbes in our gut, beyond the workings of various viruses and other physical instabilities, what makes the body politic tick and twitch? What are humans? Who are we and who could we be? And why are we like we are? When our hearts thump in certain directions, when life seems to have laid down an honorable and worthwhile course, why do we turn away and follow another distraction? Why can't we love who we are meant to love, simply and without doubt? Why does the blood boil in such uncomfortable directions?

Who are we?

Who are we when we dream, when we close our eyes and the good sensible sweet smart guiding judgment of our magnificent brains turns off for the night and what emerges is the soup of our desires with its clashing tastes and its talent for mixing the uncommon with the unnatural? Who is that naked woman with the purple beak running in the tall grass after the winged boy with the dark skin and the probing eyes and other things . . . other things that should probably not be included in a college application essay?

The truth of the matter . . .

Dear Committee, the truth of the matter is that you will be taking a big risk if you admit me to your esteemed program. I might be fine, I might settle down, I might yet get my act together and use your excellent faculties to springboard my way to a life in epidemiology or clinical obstetrics or forensic parapsychology . . .

Or I might fall in love with a pterodactyl.

I might sit in class dreaming of his glowing pectorals, of those arching wings. I might fly off.

I might fill my lab notes with descriptions of his odor.

He smells like: leather boots that were stored wet last season and now are moist and grainy to the touch, an unexpected slap to the nose;

like running hard in the rain with winter coming on but your heart and your body, everything is oiled, and suddenly you are awake to what the ground and the air and the moist trees and the dying leaves and the very world taste like with every breath;

like the place might slant suddenly, geotectonically, and Africa might suddenly collide with South America while swallowing the Atlantic Ocean, and so where would all that seawater go but onto the land, and what would it bring but a million gulls, who are like crows—white crows—and so we'd all better learn to fly then.

I know, that last item is not a smell.

It's an everything.

Are you sure you want to admit me to your school? It could be a waste. It could be throwing away a perfectly good spot.

Did I tell you that I am student-body chair and that in the course of my duties my nose has turned purple?

•  •  •

How was it that a whole school could imagine the same play over and over—the arcing spiral, the swooping catch, hapless Wallin players running comically after a flying Pyke—yet the closer it got to game day, the easier it became to imagine it might not happen at all?

Pyke hadn't been to practice.

He had said he would—to all of his friends in Human Geography, to his Spanish buddies, his bandmates, to Shiels's brother, Jonathan, who at her insistence had cornered Pyke in the cafeteria and then later outside the library. Pyke clicked his beak, he smiled, he said, “Za! Za!” whenever anyone brought it up.

He caught anything anyone threw at him.

On the track, in the early morning, he showed up only one more time to accompany Jocelyne Legault, who lapped Shiels time and again while Pyke circled above the champion, keeping pace.

“He knows about the game,” Jocelyne said to her when they—Shiels—was catching her breath at the end of the workout. “He'll be there.”

Melanie Mull was a whirlwind organizer. She reminded Shiels of herself last year getting Vhub vibrating on all cylinders. Ticket sales were brisk; the buses ordered; the cheer team prepped; megaphones procured, tested, assigned. Shiels, master delegator, was left to ponder the enormity of the failure if Pyke in fact did not show. Late in the afternoon of the day before the game, she found Pyke behind the auto shop hanging out with the smokers. She approached them with her jacket pulled tight. He looked like any other juvenile delinquent slouching against the wall, puffing away.

“Who gave him that?” Shiels demanded.

Randy Eggles, with his pimply face and his hooded eyes, said, “He's a musician. Of course he smokes!”

Shiels wanted to snatch the butt out of Pyke's mouth, but she guessed she could never move fast enough. He seemed to be smiling at her. His crest was flaming.

“Mebbee zu try?” he said.

Shiels glanced around at the empty parking lot, the blank wall. Then she reached out and took the thing from his beak.

It seemed like a deeply intimate gesture. She thought she was going to toss the cigarette into the can but found herself pulling it to her own lips, taking a drag, closing her eyes.

She would not . . . cough.

“Oh—hey!” Lionel Catching said. He was a tall boy who was all Adam's apple. “Shiels Krane hanging with the low-lifers!”

She blew smoke into his face. Filthy, wretched habit. But she stood with the thing in her fingers. Now that she had their attention, she turned her full gaze on Pyke. “You need to show up for that football game tomorrow. You're part of this school. A lot of people have stuck their necks out for you. You can't let us down.” She took another drag. Totally disgusting. She tried to make her face look like maybe it was all right.

Randy Eggles suddenly cried, “Pyke!” and flicked his burning butt into the air. Pyke leapt at it, swallowed it down triumphantly.

“Oh my God!” Shiels yelled. She wanted to whap Randy right on his smirking face, but he was too far away. Instead she said, “Pyke—cough it up! Cough it—”

Instead, Pyke twirled his beak and produced the cigarette, still burning, for all to see.

“Stop it! You—” She slapped him across the beak. The cigarette went flying and skittered across the cold pavement. Everyone looked at her in amazement. She tossed away the other cigarette, the one she was still holding. Pyke's grin flickered for a moment.

“Gotta give a beast some lead on the leash,” Randy said finally. “Especially if you're that hot for him!”

There was no time to react. A news van turned the corner and headed toward them. Shiels screamed at Pyke, “Get out of here! Go! Go!”

Pyke took off like an explosion. Shiels felt herself blown back against the wall. When she looked again, he was gone, disappeared around the corner of the building.

The van screeched to a halt. Two men scrambled out, one with a TV camera on his shoulder.

“Is this your lead?” Shiels asked calmly. “A bunch of kids in the smoking area?”

•  •  •

But she wasn't calm. On game day, when the buses were late because a windstorm had knocked out power to half a dozen stoplights in the downtown core, strangulating traffic everywhere, she raged against Melanie Mull's haphazard organizational effort in front of half the council — the half that had drifted somewhat back into Shiels's orbit—until Rebecca Sterzl finally said, “Shiels, enough!”

Enough.

(Rebecca Sterzl! Telling her!)

But it was enough.

Shiels's nerves were frayed. She was working herself into a state the way she had before Autumn Whirl. Why? Why did she operate this way?

She seemed to know, more than anyone else, what was at stake, how huge the failure would be if Pyke dropped the ball, or couldn't play, or didn't show up in the first place.

It was all on her.
All of it!

“I'm sorry, Melanie. I'm sorry!” Shiels said, in front of everybody. “Of course it's not your fault. You've been terrific, all throughout this. The buses will come. Of course they will! It's all going to be fine.”

And Melanie Mull accepted her embrace, wiped her tears, seemed to soak up this late praise from Shiels.

Later, on one of the buses, with a megaphone now in her hand, while Shiels called out the war cries of the Vista View Vikings, a strange part of herself seemed to drift above her body, like a spirit self looking down at the proceedings, at the strident young woman with the megaphone.

Hard left, hard right,

Cut, slash, Valiant Vikes!

It was as if the sound had leaked out of the picture, as if she were seeing things from the security camera mounted high above her life.

Inside, outside, crush 'em, fight!

Hurry hard, Valiant Vikes!

The bus hit a bump, and the red-faced, purple-nosed girl with the megaphone grabbed a seat back to steady herself, while her spirit self looked on, unmoving, and thought:
What if this is all a dream?

Kick 'em hard, trounce 'em, fight!

Stride to victory, Valiant Vikes!

A niggling memory: Mrs. Tron's world religions class last year. Some religions—Buddhism?—consider the entire world to be a construct, a mental fabrication (was that the right term?) . . . a dream. We take things in through our senses, we seehearsmelltouchtaste them, and reorder them in our minds, construct reality like a film on-screen.

We become fascinated by our own constructions.

Our dreams.

Walloping Wallin might be a dream,
she thought.

Tear their jerseys, struggle, bite!

Fight forever, Valiant Vikes!

The bus felt real; the students' faces looked as real as in any dream. Shiels could stand and shout and feel her hip against the side of the aisle seat, and it was all as real as any flying Pyke dream she'd had in the last several weeks.

(Swallowing burning cigarettes, and then regurgitating them, still lit! How could she fall for such a, for such a . . . She wanted to say “clown,” but he wasn't that. He was more like a god, and girls never got gods, did they? And if they did, it was always trouble.)

Who was that girl screaming into the megaphone? What was she yelling about? For all this public display of volume and spirit, why did this feel like a descent into sadness?

•  •  •

The wind blew, cold and hard, in the stands, and Shiels was not dressed for it. She hadn't thought this through. Normally she was three steps ahead of events; she was used to cracking the whip on life and watching the wave turn into a snap. But Pyke was not there at the start of the game, and now she sat on the metal bleacher in her cotton pants and felt the chill of new-November settle into her tissues. She was clutching her megaphone still and every so often would stand and let loose a rallying call that rattled inside her as if her bones had turned into aluminum.

The cheers of the Vista View crowd sank into the cold air.

A lumbering player for Wallin knocked down four Valiant Vikes, stepping on three of them, to score a touchdown on the very first play. They scored again just a few minutes later when Jeremy Jeffreys threw the ball directly into a stiff wind, only to have the sickly pass curve into the arms of a Wallin defender who'd been standing alone away from the play.

Pyke did not show up.

Pyke did not show.

The wind flung blankets off huddled knees and at the end of the first quarter sailed away with the referee's hat. Programs flew off, only to be pressed hard against the chain-link fence at the end of the sports field, and everyone on the Vista View side looked to the birdless sky with draining hope.

It was too windy for Pyke to fly.

Pyke was not going to save the game.

Robbie Lewis, who played somewhere on defense—that much Shiels could understand—knocked the ball out of a Wallin player's hands and then ran down the sidelines the wrong way, into his own team's end zone, and threw the ball down in deluded triumph, only to have a Wallin player fall on it for yet another touchdown.

It was that kind of game.

If Sheldon had been there—Sheldon had a nose for important events, and was not at this one, which only added to the building dread in Shiels's gut—he would have delighted in the cascading incompetence of the Valiant Vikes under the pressure of playing a large, ferocious, talented team. He would have videoed and posted the Robbie Lewis debacle; he would have perversely gloried in the way the Vikes' passing game went haywire in the wind; he would have found new adjectives for the sound of the Vikes' bodies hitting the ground after colliding with such superbly conditioned monsters.

Manniberg had skipped out. Jocelyne Legault was not there either. Too late, Shiels realized that Jocelyne's absence was a clue. Pyke never had intended to come.

This was all part of the dream, obviously. You could not summon someone like Pyke. Gods do not come when called.

At halftime the score was 31–0. The eight visitors' buses left with most of the Vista View crowd and almost all the media. But Shiels stayed because she was student-body chair, and felt responsible, and was clinging to appearances. When the teams ran back onto the field for the second half, Coach glared at her as if he'd known all along her central role. From seventy-five yards away she felt his accusatory malice hardening the roots of her hair.

Could she even return to the school with this utter failure hanging around her neck? Somehow the image stuck in her mind that the doors would not even open for her. That she would be prevented from stepping foot in the place.

But then, with Wallin about to score again late in the third quarter—when there was still time for a comeback!—Shiels spotted a speck in the eastern sky. Then not just one speck, a series of them, gathering force: crows. By the thousands. Heading their way.