The Amazing Life of Birds (3 page)

Oh, Grandma, you can't even imagine. But I didn't say anything about that. I told her about the birds. We hung up and I called Willy.

“It's all supposed to happen.”

“What is?”

“All of it.”

“Who says?”

“My grandmother.”

“All
of it?”

“That's what she says.”

“Even the ELBOW in the clouds and on the side of the bus?”

“Are you crazy? I didn't talk about that. She's my grandmother.”

“But everything else?”

“Yes.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah. Cool.”

“See you.”

“Yeah.”

And I went to bed but didn't sleep. I thought of my grandfather flying jet fighters and I thought of Amber and wondered how it would be if I was a jet fighter pilot and saved the country or maybe I saved just an old lady crossing the street….

How would that be? I thought as I fell asleep.

You know. Without the zit.

The birds know about me.

I've always stayed back from the window when I'm watching and I thought they would just see the reflection of the sky in the window and think it was more sky.

But this morning the mother, or the father (I can't tell which is which but I think it must be the mother because she spends more time at the nest while the other one goes hunting), looked at the glass and then through the glass right into my eyes.

She didn't look scared. Just curious. I smiled and nodded and she went about her work cleaning the nest. They're very clean. As soon as the baby could move around and balance, he would move to the side of the nest and go to the bathroom over the edge.

Which is better than a lot of humans. Billy Carson makes the gym bathroom look like …

Never mind. It's one thing to see it and talk about it, but it looks different when you write it down.

Anyway the birds are very clean and when I turned around and looked at my room I felt like a pig. It was a complete disaster and I thought, You know, if a little bird can clean her nest that well I can surely clean up my room.

Which made me think I was sounding like a parent. But still, I started putting things away and that brought out some sort of energy I never had before.

Pretty soon I was going crazy. Putting everything away, making my bed, tucking in the corners, fluffing the pillows—I even straightened my shoes and aligned them, left and right, left and right, and then in the bathroom I straightened and aligned all the towels and washcloths….

Totally crazy.

Luckily my sister was at breakfast and that broke my mood. She's good at that. I think when she gets older and moves away and gets married—as if anybody would marry her—she'll start breaking other things. Like backs. Husbands' backs.

“You smell bad,” she said as I walked into the kitchen. “Like you rolled around in a trailer trash hair salon …”

Yeah. Well, I thought I'd seen a hair or two on my
face and I took my father's razor and scraped a little and then used some of his aftershave cologne.

Maybe too much.

It felt like I was rubbing molten lead on my face and the fumes kept my eyes watering all the way down the stairs. I hoped nobody would notice.

You've got to love having an older sister.

Rooster, no ELBOW on the cornflakes box, quick bowl and out the door before anybody else noticed what I smelled like.

School went about like I expected.

Just wonderful.

In gym I found another zit on the side of my face, near my temple, and the gym towels are so coarse that after my shower they ripped the top off of it and it bled. All they had were these big square jock Band-Aids so I put one of those on my forehead because the shower made the small one come off. And another on my temple.

Things were going well.

I looked like Frankenstein. All I needed was a bolt through my neck and some really big shoes to make it complete. I could stagger down the halls from class to class scaring the villagers. People chasing me with torches and pitchforks. Babies screaming.

Doo-Doo the Zit Monster is coming! Run for your lives!

Just to make it perfect a new girl, who apparently
hadn't heard how terrible I was, said hi to me as I was leaving English.

Rachel.

Rachel Simpson. Dark hair. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said “Chocolate Forever!” across the front. Looked me right in the eyes as I came out of the room and said: “Hi.”

“I can't stop to talk right now because I don't want to be late for my next class which is down the hall and to the right so I have to hurry or I'll be late and it's not good to be late for classes and that's why I'm in a hurry and can't stop to talk because I'll be late….”

My mouth opened and all that came out. My own brain did that to me. It was like a river of stupid, just rolling past my tongue and out of my mouth.

Once, Amber stopped me in the hall and asked which way it was to the new music room and I couldn't speak at all. Just stood there like I'd been shot with a tranquilizer dart. Some big, doofy rhino with a dart in his butt, head down, swinging left and right just before he drops and they take his temperature and tag his ear with a metal tag that says “Stupid.”

I liked that better. Quiet. This whole motormouth thing wasn't working.

Rachel stared at me like she wondered where the volume control was located and I turned to stagger
down the hall in my giant shoes, arms out in front of me, and thought: At least she won't notice the zits. But she said: “Did something happen to your head?”

Must go, I thought, must find master, must find Puberty Master and kill him. Zit Monster must have revenge.

Arrgh!

You know, a week is just seven days.

Voice changing, parts of body dropping, ELBOWS everywhere, brain disengaged, motormouth in operation, leprosy in full swing—was it possible to just turn
into
a zit?—all systems in full malfunction.

Went to bed last night and lay awake for either a few minutes or ten or so years—time doesn't matter any longer. Just stages of disintegration.

Lay awake and thought—and this will show you just how stupid I was by this point—I thought, Well, this has to be the limit. There can't be anything else that can go wrong.

Right.

Woke up in the middle of the night, sat up sweating,
in horror, thinking,
Yes, but what will I do after college?

What then?

I know, I know. Crazy. (As if everything else is going so normally.) But … say I somehow get through all this, you know, alive, and only slightly disfigured by zits.

And I graduate from high school.

And I graduate from college.

And I pay off my student loans.

Whatever they are. (I just heard they're awful. I'm not sure why you have to borrow money to be a student. It's not like it's fun.)

Then what?

I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up.

I mean I thought of all the stuff when I was little. Cowboy. Fireman. Somebody with a big hammer that breaks things. (When I was very little.) Heavy-equipment operator. Rock star. (I'm coming back to that one later, I think—you know, when I can sing and play an instrument. Apparently complexion doesn't matter. You can cover it with tattoos or smoke and fireworks.)

But for now … nothing.

So why am I worried about what happens after college?

It took me forever to get back to sleep, especially
since the bed was surrounded by snapping little terriers that looked like my sister, yapping: “You smell bad, you smell bad!”

And when I woke up this morning, guess what?

On television they said it was all a new day and everything's going to be all right.

I woke up, took two steps, fell down—apparently it's something I'm going to do for a while—went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. (It should be obvious that this requires a lot of courage.)

Two.

New.

Zits.

One on the end of my nose. Another below my left eye.

And, oh, why not, on top, like a crown, a new cowlick in my hair. It sticks up in the exact middle of the back of my head like that bushy little tail you see on the back of a warthog in
National Geographic.

Actually the front end is starting to look like a warthog too.

So two more Band-Aids (that makes four—and the one on the end of my nose is really attractive), and a bunch of my sister's hair spray on the cowlick while I hold it down with my finger. Then some more of my father's aftershave to cover the smell of the hair spray. Down to the kitchen. Because everything is going
so well I knock the cornflakes onto the floor while my sister says I stink and I don't want to pick up the cornflakes because right then the rooster has turned into …

And then off to school.

I've got to have some kind of plan. The way it's working now, or not working, I'm just going from wreck to wreck.

Take today—and I wish somebody could.

School was like wilderness on the Discovery Channel and I was a wildebeest and every time I came down to a water hole a crocodile was waiting….

Well.

First, biology. Somehow I ended up in this advanced class for science brains. Now, at the moment I
am
biology—a full-fledged experiment. Somebody should just put me in a bottle of alcohol. Please.

Add to that fact that what we're supposed to do today is dissect a cat and examine its reproductive organs.

Reproductive organs.

In my present condition, I am trying very hard not to think about those words.

And my lab partner?

Take a wild guess.

Right.

Amber.

A whole period—not a word. Everybody should try this once in their life. Stand next to somebody over a table with a dead cat on a tray. A black-and-white dead cat, soaked in preservative, a black-and-white dead cat that looks apparently a lot like a cat Amber used to have; and you stand there a whole period while the other person says things like: “Here's the penis,” or “And look, here are the testicles. See how they retract?”

I grunted and nodded but I was sure if I opened my mouth something so horrible would come out that …

Death. I prayed for it. At one point I had the scalpel in my hand and I actually thought of suicide but knew I would probably mess it up and wind up as a vegetable in a hospital where someday a doctor named Amber would find me and remember me as the stupid grunting kid over the dead cat and she would say, “Look, there's the …”

So I didn't kill myself.

And the period didn't last that long anyway. Just four or five years. And I didn't rush out when the bell
rang and have Amber catch up with me to give me my books, which I'd forgotten.

Oh, no.

And things didn't get worse.

Unless you count gym.

I go to gym and find out there's going to be a mixed-team volleyball tournament.

Girls and boys mixed in two teams. And who's on my team?

Rachel.

Perhaps you have forgotten my condition, my physical appearance. Let me remind you. Four Band-Aids on the face, one on the end of my nose, hair spray holding my cowlick down.