The Amazing Life of Birds (6 page)

Yeah. It works really well. I go in today and they'll probably burn me at the stake.

For the first time in my life I almost skipped school. I think I would have except for Willy.

The night before I was sitting in my room and staring at the wall. Not the poster wall. The blank wall. I was ready to go backward. This whole puberty thing wasn't working out for me at all and every day just seemed to get worse.

So I called Willy.

“All right, when you burned your hair, were you embarrassed?”

Willy snorted. “No more than if I had peed my pants in church …”

“Well, how did you handle it?”

“You drive on. I acted like I meant it. Like I was experimenting with hair burning. Why? What happened?”

So I told him. The whole day, ringworm, disease, all of it. And when I finished there was a little pause and then: “Cool.”

“Cool?”

“Absolutely. The coolest.”

“Were you listening to me?”

“You bet.”

“Ringworm, disease, bald spots is cool?”

“Totally.”

“Explain that to me.”

“You have to think of it as an opportunity.”

“Oh, sure. An opportunity for everybody in school to hate me.”

“That's
it.
The magic word. Everybody. Everybody in school knows who you are, right?”

“I can't deny that. Everybody knows I'm Doo-Doo the Diseased Monster slithering up and down the halls.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“Speak for yourself. I'm planning to wear a bag over my head.”

“Think.
Everybody
knows who you are. Every single kid in the school. It's perfect.”

“Willy?” I thought he'd gone out of his mind.

“All you have to do is something good.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You do something good now, something cool, and you're in. Everybody will see it.”

“You really think so?”

“I just wish it had happened to me.”

“Right.”

“No. Seriously. Everybody knows who you are. You do something really cool now and they'll all know it right away. It's simple.”

In Willy's world, it really was simple.

But Willy's world wasn't mine.

He didn't understand what a destructive device a shoelace can be.

A word on cafeteria food: ELBOW.

Well, not really. But many of the words the kids use to describe the cafeteria food are not printable.

The most accurate one I've heard was
sludge.

Or Desiccated Dinosaur Droppings.

Personally, I don't really know what they have to do to actually make macaroni and cheese as bad as it is, but it's amazing. Most of the time it's inedible.

Still, at a certain time we are all herded into the cafeteria and we move down a line and this … this
stuff
is put on our trays.

I read in a history book that the school lunch program was started after the Second World War because so many men who were drafted to fight showed up
with problems from eating bad food—poor bones, deformed bodies.

Man, if what they're feeding us now is supposed to give us healthy fighting bodies, we're in big trouble.

But here we were in line. Sort of. Where I stood with my tray there was a gap, nobody closer than four or five feet to keep from getting some dread disease.

In a way it was all right because I was in my own little zone. The puberty zone.

I'm thinking, All right, I can just go through life like this, walking along with a little gap around me, nobody talking to me, everybody looking away if I look at them. My own little world.

It wouldn't be so bad.

And then: Remember when it was cool to have tennis shoes with that wraparound Velcro strap that held them on? I liked those.

Then there was that little period when it was very cool to wear shoes that just slipped on your feet with no fasteners at all. So easy. Up in the morning, feet on the floor, into the shoes. Gone. Even Willy, who works hard at deciding what things are or are not cool, thought the slip-ons were cool.

But the cool/fashion pendulum has swung the other way again and we are now back in the phase where we wear tennis shoes with really long laces. So long you have to double-tie them.

It is not a good time for me.

I get up in a hurry, always seem to have something to do, and with the slip-ons or Velcro shoes it was easy to just get going.

Now I have to stop and tie my shoes.

And what with puberty and all, taking the time to tie my shoes is not that high on the list.

So sue me.

Well, don't, actually.

Anyway, one of my shoelaces came untied and strung out behind me while I was in line at the cafeteria.

I looked down and saw it.

Not a problem, you say? The next thing would be simply to fix it.

And the way to do that would be to gently put my tray back on the slide rail, kneel down, retie the shoe, stand up again and move on down the line for an exciting dessert of green Jell-O filled with something that I think was supposed to be small grapes but looked suspiciously like entombed bug larvae.

But you are forgetting how my life has been going. Any little difficulty, something that would be a minor glitch in some other life, went nuclear in mine.

I mean, a cowlick that turned into an epidemic?

I looked down at that shoelace and any thought of rational action vanished.

I froze. The wildebeest at the water hole when the
lion stares him down, the impala when the cheetah locks on, the shoelace like a cobra, me the mouse.

I had to do something, but what?

I took a deep breath and started to put my tray on the slide rail just when Peter Helms, who was next in line, said: “Come on, mud hen, get moving!”

And because he's a jock he actually broke the disease barrier and touched me, pushing me sideways.

I took a step to keep from falling, right onto the shoelace, which stopped one shoe dead.

There was a moment of scrambling, with my feet trying to stay under me, and then I surrendered to gravity, feet going up, face heading for the floor and the tray spraying macaroni and cheese, green dessert, dry lettuce and a plastic tomato slice with mayo all over the person in front of me.

Rachel.

And as I fell all I could think was
Mud hen
—what's a
mud hen
?

The baby bird is amazing. He seems to be changing hourly. Just two weeks ago he was this ugly little thing with bulging eyes and a huge mouth that seemed like it could swallow the world and now he's almost grown.

He's nearly as big as his parents and his mother is trying to teach him to eat all by himself.

Apparently puberty isn't working for him, either, because the lessons aren't going so well.

She comes back to the nest with a grasshopper and holds it out to him. When he's standing on the edge of the nest he's bigger than she is so she has to hold it up in the air.

When he starts to reach for it she drops it to
the windowsill, to teach him to pick it up and feed himself.

He just raises his head again, opens his beak and chirps.

Feed me.

So she picks up the bug, holds it up, and when he reaches for it, she drops it and the same thing happens.

You can tell she's getting sick of it because about the tenth time she just sort of throws the grasshopper down and walks away as if to say, “Let the little bugger starve.”

He still doesn't get it and she finally comes back and tries again. And again. And again.

Just when I feel like screaming, “Pick it up!” through the window, he gets it. He reaches down as if discovering the grasshopper for the first time, pushes it around with his beak.

And then grabs it and eats it.

He sits on the edge of the nest and flaps his wings, almost like a rooster crowing. Very proud. And when he flaps he bounces up in the air.

Not flying. Not yet. He needs more practice. But definitely a little bounce and you can see he's surprised by it and pleased, bouncing around the edge of the nest in pretend-flight, and it suddenly brings back the dream I had the night before.

It was a flying dream. And I wasn't naked. I've had them where I was naked and that's just embarrassing; you catch yourself flying over a community and you don't know whether to fly right side up or upside down. It more or less ruins the cool part about flying. But this time I was in some kind of tights, only I didn't have a cape. But kind of like a superhero. I was soaring over the countryside, having a great time, when I went over a little canyon and saw these flashes. People were shooting surface-to-air missiles at me.

One of them burst near me and I tumbled lower before I could regain control and saw that the people manning the missile batteries were all girls. They were wearing cheerleader outfits and helmets and whenever a missile came close they would cheer:
“Die, Doo-Doo! Die, Doo-Doo! Die, die, die!”

As I started to fly out of range a close burst injured my flight mechanism and I started spiraling down out of control.

Just before I hit the ground I looked at the nearest missile battery. What do you know, my sister was handling the controls, standing on the firing platform shaking her fist at me as her head split open and turned into a fiery skull while I crashed into the ground and was covered with worms.

I woke up on the floor hugging the pillow and crying
a little, only a little, hoping that whatever career was in my distant future, being a fighter pilot was not one of the things fate had in store.

If I lived through puberty.

Which was starting to look doubtful.

This morning in the kitchen, it came to me that other people weren't living this critical-mass disaster every minute of every day of their lives.

Why?

I looked at the cereal box. Mom had replaced the one that had the rooster on it with one that had a woman tennis player slamming a serve over a net.

Not fair. It was bad enough with a rooster. How could I cope with a beautiful woman on the box?

But surprise! She just stayed a tennis player and didn't turn into something embarrassing.

This got me started thinking normal thoughts.

Again, if other people weren't having perfectly innocent images turn into soft-core porn, why was I?

As far as I could tell, nobody else had started a false
ringworm epidemic, or seemed to be covered with fresh zits every day, or was throwing trays of food around the cafeteria.

Only me.

Of course, Willy had burned his hair. That counted.

But at this level of catastrophe, it was just me.

And I got the weirdest idea that I ought to ask somebody for advice.

I ought to ask my parents.

So I looked at them: father over the sink, reading the paper, dripping; mother eating dry toast, holding a hand under her chin to catch the crumbs while she read the rest of the paper.

Sister … never mind. Sitting looking at her hair to see if the color went all the way through each strand, looking at each strand, studying each strand, thinking about each strand. If you opened her brain and looked at her thoughts that's what you would see:
I'm thinking of … hair.