Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (7 page)

He was standing beside Rebecca in front of the circled committee. Showing his few seconds of video over and over.

“We could double the price and still overfill the gym,” Melanie Mull said. “What about another venue? The Steadhouse?” She was a quiet, conscientious sophomore, the kind of girl who often showed up on school committees. Her head seemed full of this new possibility, Autumn Whirl with Pyke's band.

“The Steadhouse is jammed with seats,” Rebecca said. “Nobody's going to be sitting. And anyway—”

Shiels shifted her chair. She was chewing a quinoa bun and made a soft sucking sound with her teeth. Everyone's head turned toward her.

They all seemed highly aware that she hadn't spoken yet.

“Autumn Whirl hits in a week,” she said in her dead calm, assassin's voice. “We don't have time to change venues. And I hear what you're saying about this band, Rebecca, but yesterday you seemed to think you'd hit a totally other righteous band. Maybe tomorrow—”

“But Morris really liked them!” Sheldon said.

Shiels turned her smiling, cutting eyes on her boyfriend and waited to see if he was going to continue to advertise this divided front before the entire committee. His words shriveled. But he wasn't sitting down.

“Morris isn't here,” Shiels said finally. Reasonably. “Maybe a lot of kids will be into shrieking their heads off. But is that what Autumn Whirl is all about? If we return to the mandate”—Shiels flipped back in her open binder—“we'll see it's all about school spirit and community-oriented socialization. I don't see anything here about descending into the primordial ooze.”

She knew Sheldon would appreciate that last phrase. But he was looking . . . as if he somehow still disagreed with her.

“I think we need to keep looking for a band,” she said curtly, finally. She glanced at her watch, took another small bite of her bitter muffin. “How are the ticket sales going, anyway?”

“We've barely hit a quarter of our target!” Rebecca blurted. “I know if we hired Pyke's band, we'd—”

Shiels signaled, with a glance, that the meeting was over. Rebecca's lips flapped noiselessly. Nobody else said anything.

Shiels closed her binder. “We'll have to redouble our efforts. This is our first big event of the year. Let's nail this down. Walloping Wallin is next, and that's going to be a struggle. We all know that. What's it been, seventeen years? There won't be a lot of joy. So we have to get this one right. Shall we meet again tomorrow?”

•  •  •

Sheldon would not let it go. He should have taken the east corridor to Family and Society, but he just had to get in one last word.

“You knew you were wrong back there. You just won't admit it. If
you
had thought of it—if
you
were the one who'd been trying to bleep
me
all night, then the outcome would have been completely different. Admit it, Shiels!”

He grabbed her arm and stopped her midstride. She stared at his fingers until he unhanded her.

(“Unhand me, sir!” she imagined herself saying.)

“You get this way,” Sheldon said. “I've seen it over and over. You get hyper, your brain is like a gerbil on a running wheel, you're just going to keep scrambling till you crash and I have to pick you up. And when you're like this—Shiels, listen to me!”

What was that fire in his cheeks? From her mousy Sheldon.

“When I'm like this, what?”

“You make crappy decisions. You're not really in control of yourself!”

She almost laughed at him, he was so serious all of a sudden. Over a shrieking dinosaur bird boy. Over Autumn Whirl, for God's sake! He never cared about politics. But now his hands were cramping with it. It made him . . .

“A gerbil!” she said. “You think I'm a gerbil on a running wheel?”

“No,” he said, backtracking. Because he was Sheldon. Now he didn't seem to know where to look.

“Do I make you nervous?”

“No. I—”

But he was nervous. He was standing in front of the janitorial closet, and she knew it would be unlocked because that was the way the universe lined up sometimes. She pushed him in then closed the door behind him, and he nearly sat in the bucket, he was moving back so fast. She turned on the light and tugged at his shirt.

“So you think I'm hyper. Just going on fumes.”

“No, I—Well, yes. What are you doing?”

“You are so cute when you get agitated.”

“Am I?”

Off with the shirt. Buttons flew in odd directions. The closet smelled of chemicals, of eons of accumulated high school dirt never quite rinsed out of the ancient gray mop. Sheldon pulled at her shirt, but she fended him off.

“No. No. This is just you,” she said.

“Is it?”

She snapped off the light and unzipped him. His hips were so skinny, she barely had to yank to lower his trousers. He was ankle-bound now, back against the cinder-block wall, trapped on one side by the stinking buckets, on the other by a set of shelves.

Why had she turned off the light? She wanted to feel his ribs, his bony nose, the hardness of him. She didn't want to see him . . . and the thought surprised her. Guys want to see—she had read that somewhere—but she wanted to
feel
him, to breathe him in. (Beyond the stench of the closet? On top of it. It all went together.)

He was hard in all the right places. This boy had angles. She kissed him, bit his lip until he squealed and she shushed him down.
“Not a sound,”
she breathed.

Tendons. Muscles. Boy sweat. Naked in the dark. In the old dark. This could be the ooze, she thought. This could be primordial.

“Shiels,” he said. His voice was strange, like he was mumbling underwater.

“Shhh.”

“But I don't . . . I'm going to . . .”

She held his tongue with her teeth until the noises stopped.

She was breathing hard. It was as if they were both running somewhere. In the wild. Out of the woods, across some grassy plain.

Running hard and getting nowhere.

Staying right where they were.

“Shiels. I think I—”

He was right. They were
all
right. It just hit her in the dark and sweat of that little black wild box they had wandered into.

Pyke had to do Autumn Whirl. It was the only solution that made any sense at all.

•  •  •

And then, once the decision was made, everything fell into place. Shiels was hardly prepared for it. (Yet she should have been, she thought later. Surely this was close to the same phenomenon as when she'd taken Manniberg's simple suggestion to let the student body know they should keep Pyke as their own secret. There it was, both times—the power of so many suddenly pulling in the same direction.)

Rather than simply an announcement over the PA along with schedule changes and activity notes, she waited an extra day, until the Blaze of Fall Scholars' Awards assembly. By then, of course, everyone knew already. A few well-placed leaks by Sheldon and others, and the news spread like a grass fire on the savanna.
Pyke's band is playing Autumn Whirl!
It didn't even matter that the band had no proper name. They weren't the Acid Toads or Sacred Disaster or, as Sheldon had laughingly suggested, the PteroTunes. They were just Pyke's band, a bunch of boys from different garages with a smattering of equipment and, oh yeah, a flying ancient screeching monster everyone was in love with.

By the time of the official announcement, some tickets were being reverbed on Vhub for double, triple, quintuple the face value. How to stop the practice? Even when they limited initial sales, the tickets disappeared like a whisper.

Sheldon, and others, were right. Shiels could see it. She didn't necessarily have the best ideas. The gym was not going to be big enough for the whole school, but if the weather cooperated, they could set up a video link to the athletic field scoreboard, and the overflow crowd could gather there. Pyke could perform a flypast at the end of the evening—he'd have to go home anyway—and everyone would be delirious.

By the time of the official announcement, at the assembly, all the plans and more were already in place. The student body could barely stay in their seats. They had waited for an hour as the likes of Chandra Xu and Natalie Micau and, yes, of course, Sheldon, had trouped across to pick up various plaques and certificates for their brain-bending work during the early part of the academic year. Blaze of Fall had actually been Shiels's idea from her first term on council, to get the school honoring academic stars throughout the year rather than waiting until June, when everyone was desperate to be free of the place and not likely to be inspired to sweat their homework. Pyke sat near the back with shades on, of all things, like a jazz musician, with Jocelyne Legault tucked under his wing. From Shiels's place on the stage, where she was sitting beside the department chairs and helping to organize the certificates and plaques, she could just see the two of them. Pyke turned his beak toward Jocelyne and murmured something, and then she laughed—when did Jocelyne Legault ever laugh?—and Shiels felt that something, that worm in her gut, chew a tender spot.

When Shiels took the microphone near the end of the assembly, she could feel too the coil in the room, like they were twelve hundred starlings suddenly braced for flight.

(Or were they all turning into Pyke's crows?)

“I just have one quick announcement,” Shiels said. Why did she pause? Did it have anything to do with the way Jocelyne Legault ran her hand over Pyke's naked purple chest? “But first,” she said, “one final round of applause for the brilliant brains of Vista View!” The tepid, ironic applause of the last hour—all right, the student body had not fully embraced the idea of honoring academic achievement—gave way to something entirely different. Now the students erupted, cheering, Shiels realized, because they knew already what Shiels was going to say next.

They were boiling over to hear the actual words.

“Some of you might have heard that the first VV social of the year will be held this Saturday—”

And then it was like the roof blew off. All at once the whole student body was on its feet, howling, stamping, hopping about, and exploding black umbrellas over and over. Shiels glanced, nervously, back at Manniberg, who looked startled.

“And the band . . . ,”
she screamed. She could not hear herself. She waited and waited, but they would not stop, so she shrieked as loudly as she could,
“The band is Pyke's!”
Then the auditorium itself seemed to be bouncing in an earthquake. She held on to the mic, as if she might think of something else to say that could at all be relevant. And she glanced at Pyke—at where Pyke and Jocelyne had been sitting—but they were gone.

Sheldon stood at floor level by the stage, close to Shiels's shoes, laughing and exclaiming and pointing at her, as if much of this glory somehow was hers. And maybe . . . maybe it was hers. It hadn't been her idea, but she was the one who'd made the decision—the right decision—and now the shock wave was unleashed and there was nothing to do but hang on and ride the crest of it all the way to shore.

Wherever that might be.

•  •  •

The strange, silly, euphoric wave of Shiels's announcement jaggered through the halls. It was hard to think. Everyone wanted to talk to her, congratulate her, ask her how she had come up with such a brilliant idea.

But there wasn't much time to celebrate. Rebecca Sterzl dragged Shiels to the cafeteria, where the roar of the students sounded almost as loud as in the auditorium. Shiels pushed through the heavy double doors. The dull gray tables were the same as always, but the place was packed, everyone was on their feet. Where was Pyke? There—in the middle, on a table, grinning. Football players around him chanted, “Food fight! Food fight!” Jeremy Jeffreys, the VV quarterback, had a sandwich in his hand. Pyke was waiting. . . .

“They're throwing food at him!” Rebecca said.

Shiels's gut clenched. Was this, finally, the hazing of Pyke she'd cut short when he'd first arrived?

But no food was in the air yet. It was all potential, like a buildup of static waiting for the touch of a metal doorknob. The wrong word now, and the entire cafeteria would erupt in flying pizza slices and worse. Shiels didn't want to be the one to call out. She didn't want to be the heavy.

Jeremy Jeffreys might not listen,
she thought.

I will look like a fool.

Jeffreys fired his sandwich. Not at Pyke at all but high above the pterodactyl's head. Pyke stretched up, up, his neck, his beak—he spread his wings and snagged that sandwich in a flashing, stabbing motion that released a roar from the students half again as big as anything in the auditorium earlier.

Or that was what it sounded like in the crush of the cafeteria.

Then Jeremy Jeffreys had another sandwich in his hand. How long before the whole room would be smeared in projectile lunch bits?

Shiels knew she should say something. She should—

She turned, and there was Manniberg, standing beside her, his eyes squidged together as he tried to understand this new unfolding affront to order.

“Wait!” Shiels screamed, her voice suddenly bigger than the room.

(She knew it. She felt it.)

Jeremy Jeffreys turned. He looked like he would be just as happy to fire apple jelly and chocolate spread right into the middle of her chest.

He hadn't seen Manniberg yet.

“There'll be one more shot!” Shiels yelled. “And then it's over!”

She picked up someone's applesauce fruit cup and thrust it at Manniberg.

With her eyes she said to him,
If you say no to these people now, the whole place is going to be flying food.