Friends of a Feather (6 page)

O
n Friday, before morning meeting, Joseph gives me a Ziploc bag of chocolate-covered potato chips.

“Thanks!” I say. I'd forgotten about those chocolate-covered potato chips.

“I'd hide them if I were you,” Joseph says in a spy voice. He gestures at Chase, who is playing paper football with John, and at Hannah and Elizabeth, who are making bracelets in the crafts area. “If you don't, everyone's going to want one.”

“Smart,” I say. “Oh, and here.” I hand him his red hat.

“Thanks.” He looks at it, and I wonder if he's thinking what I'm thinking, which is that here he is, not wearing his hat, and no one has said a thing.

He puts his hat in his desk.
Cool beanie-weenies
, I think. That leads to me thinking,
Cool benis-weenises
, but no, that is not a good think about, because what if I accidentally say it out loud?

We have eleven minutes of free choice before the day officially starts. Maybe more, because every so often Mrs. Webber comes in late. One morning I saw her in the teacher's lounge with Mr. Glasgow, the other second-grade teacher. They had Starbucks cups in their hands, and they were both off topic since they were talking to each other instead of teaching their classes.

But Joseph and I have at least eleven minutes to sneak-attack Lexie and tell her about Fernando while she's putting her stuff in her cubby. We want to tell her first off, because lots of mornings she has drowsy eyes when she first gets to school. Sometimes she shows up with a bump in her ponytail, which means she slept too late and had to hurry to get ready for the day.

I know about bumps in ponytails because of Winnie and Sandra. Neither of them would allow a bump to live in her ponytail, never-not-ever.

Joseph grabs my arm. “She's coming. She's coming!”

I glance at the door. She is! She doesn't have drowsy eyes, but she does have the last bite of a Pop-Tart in her hand. That means she had to eat breakfast on the run. That's a good sign.

“Hi, Lexie,” Joseph says.

“Hi, Ty,” I say. I whack my forehead. “I mean, hi, Lexie!”

Joseph laughs, because we just started and already I've messed up.
Not
cool benis-weenises!

“You don't know your own name?” Lexie says, eating the final crusty part of her Pop-Tart. She throws the foil wrapper in the trash. “Go back to first grade.”

“I know
my
name, just not
yours
.” Joseph and I go to her cubby.

“Guess what?” Joseph says.

“What?”

“Ty and I caught a bird yesterday.”

Other kids' ears prick up, probably because of the bird-catching recitation I did last week.

“What kind of bird?” Lexie says. She turns from her cubby. “A stuffed bird?”

Elizabeth comes closer. So do Chase and Taylor and Breezie. No one says anything about Joseph not wearing his hat, and I'm proud of them. Maybe they don't even notice, but still.

“Nope,” I say. “A
real
bird, with real feathers and a real beak and a real heart that beat super fast.”

“Did you really?” Chase says, while at the same time, Lexie says, “You did not.”

“They might have,” Breezie says. “You don't know everything, Lexie.”

Which means that Breezie is still mad at Lexie.
Hmm
. Too bad they didn't have a working-it-out like Joseph and I did.

Lexie folds her arms over her chest. “Where is it, then? Did you bring it to school?”

“Why would we bring a bird to school?” Joseph says.

“To feed to Lester!” Taylor say.

Everyone looks at him like,
Really, Taylor? Really?

“We didn't bring him to school, and we never would,” I say. “Unless it was pet show-and-tell day. But, even so, we couldn't, because we had to let him go.”

“Ha!” Lexie says. “You ‘had' to let him go? Boo-hoo. Too bad, so sad.”

“No, because he was sick. We rescued him, or he would have died. But now a veterinarian is taking care of him.”

“When he's better, he'll be released back into the wild,” Joseph says.

“Uh-huh,” Lexie says. “Where's your proof?”

Joseph and I grin at each other. We hoped she'd ask that question. I take a piece of computer paper out of my back pocket and unfold it. Everyone crowds around.

“It
is
a bird!” Breezie exclaims.

“Why is the picture black-and-white?” Chase asks.

“I have a raccoon trap in my backpack,” Taylor announces. He stands on his tiptoes at the outside of the circle, trying to see in. He moves from spot to spot. “I do. I'm not even kidding.”

“My sister took a picture of him on her phone,” I say. “She printed it for me on the printer.”

“Why don't you have colored ink?” Chase says.

Lexie holds out her hand. I give her the picture. She glances at it, snorts, and gives it back. “Fake.”

“What?” Joseph says.

Lexie sticks her nose up in the air. She is an expert at sticking up her nose. “Who says
your sister
took that picture? Who says it isn't just a random bird you found on the computer?”

“I do,” I say.

“Can I see?” Breezie asks.

I pass the picture to her. She studies it for longer than Lexie did. She doesn't just skim her eyes over it.

“The bird's in a shoebox,” Breezie says.

“Yeah,” I say. “That was to keep him safe.”

She lifts her head. “Ty, show me your arm.”

I'm confused, but I stick out my arm.

“Your other arm.”

I stick out my other arm.

Breezie nods and hands me back the picture. “It's a real bird, and Ty and Joseph really did catch it,” she pronounces. “Because of the bracelet. See?”

Oh yeah! The rubber bracelet from Chipotle! When Winnie took the picture, I was holding the shoebox in my lap.
I'm
not in the picture, at least not my face, but my arms are. On my wrist is my blue rubber bracelet. The same blue rubber bracelet I'm wearing right now!

“I have one, too,” Joseph says, thrusting out his arm.

“You're lucky,” Breezie says. She touches it. “Can I have it?”

He wrinkles his brow. I guess he doesn't know what to do when girls ask for stuff, either.

“Um . . . sure?” he says. He wiggles it off and gives it to her.

“Aw,” Elizabeth says. “You should have given it to me!”

“Or me,” Lexie says. “But, I mean, never mind, because it's ugly. No offense.”

Everyone starts jibber-jabbering.

Elizabeth says that saying “no offense” is rude, and Breezie agrees.

Chase tells everyone about his rubber bracelets. “I pretty much collect them,” he says. “They all say different things, and the reason I'm not wearing them is because they get in the way when I try to write. But boys
are
allowed to wear that kind of bracelet.”

Of course they are
, I think, as Silas talks on top of Chase about his own rubber bracelet collection. Boys are allowed to wear any kind of bracelet they want to. Most just don't.

Hannah brings up her gymnastics class. She says that in gymnastics, jewelry isn't allowed, period. Natalia tells everyone that she just started piano lessons and that piano is harder than gymnastics.

Maybe it is or maybe it isn't, I think, but what happened to talking about Fernando? What happened to the Great Bird Capturing story Joseph and I were going to act out?

Oh well. Things change.

I realize I'm okay with it, which makes me feel grown up.

Mrs. Webber comes in and tells us all to settle down. Nobody listens. She tells us it's time for morning meeting. Nobody listens. She does the
clap-clap clap-clap-clap
rhythm that we're supposed to clap back at her, and Joseph and I look at each other, but since no one claps back, we don't, either.

“I don't want to smell your shoe, Taylor,” John says. “If you ask me again, I'm going to give you a wedgie. I mean it.”

Taylor gestures at his privates, which he shouldn't do, and says, “Hey! Leave my pee-pee out of this!”

I wander toward the front of the room, because I can't not listen to Mrs. Webber for very long. If I do, my stomach will start to hurt. Plus she's heading for the light switch, and I know what happens after the light is turned off and on.

I sit on the floor and think about Fernando. I hope Sam's helping him feel better.

I think about all the pets I tried to get for Baby Maggie, even though she didn't want any of them. I make a list of them in my head:

A monkey, a fly, a puppy. A hyena and a platypus. A snake (like Lester), and a ferret and a hedgehog and a jackalope. An armadillo and a camel. Also a mouse, a koala bear, and a rabbit.

Wowzers. That is a lot of pets. If I had all of those pets, I'd have to build them a pet condominium, with different size rooms and places to eat and drink, and—ha—an emergency exit just in case. Maybe the ferret would escape. Maybe the ferret would dash into Sandra's room and hide in her fluffy Ugg boots, and she would never know it until she put her boots on and it bit her toe.

Joseph sits down next to me. We smile.

Mrs. Webber blinks the lights off and on. When that doesn't work, she threatens to get out the egg timer, and one by one the other kids come and sit down, too. I look at them, and it occurs to me that I do like them. Even though sometimes they're annoying.

I look at Joseph, who's saying “oh, cool” as Chase describes his rubber bracelets some more. I look at Elizabeth, who's tugging a scowly faced Lexie to the front of the room. I look at Breezie, who's wearing Joseph's rubber bracelet. The bracelet doesn't seem very Breezie-ish, not with her pretty hair and her pretty dress. But maybe she doesn't always want to be Breezie-ish?

Taylor is still talking about his pee-pee. Mrs. Webber strides to her desk, grabs the egg timer, and goes up behind him. She puts her hands on his shoulders and steers him to the far corner of the room. She tells him he needs to take a time-out.

“Aw, man!” Taylor complains, but he sits down with a thud. The corner of the room is better than outside in the hall, though. The corner of the room is a good spot for him.

I'm happy inside my skin, and my heart swells, because we're all in spots that are good for us. We're all exactly where we need to be.

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