Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (14 page)

He hopped a few steps toward her.

“It's all right. I'll do it,” she snapped.

Hop, hop, a few more steps. She happened to be holding a bag open, and he stuffed the jacket in with silvery quickness. She had a sense of him perched by a riverbank waiting, hunting, staying still and then exploding into movement.

Was this all some mating display? On her account?

He speared something else, and when he jabbed it into the bag, his lance of a beak rubbed against the outside of her thigh. It felt strong and gentle at the same time, precise somehow, as if he knew exactly how much pressure to use to graze her, rub her, without knocking her over. This close, a fierce heat radiated from him.

“Too long, juzt we,” he said. His voice was strange. It was a miracle he could talk at all, she thought. She remembered how stunned she'd been when he'd spoken on that fateful afternoon when he'd crash-landed on Jocelyne Legault.

Jocelyne—that was what he meant, Shiels thought. “Juzt we” had to include the other girl with a purple nose.

Pyke's two girls.

Hop, step, hop, stab, and each time his beak rubbed some part of her—her arm as he pulled out of the bag abruptly, her hip when she turned away, the inside of her knee when she spread the bag wide.

Two girls.

How had that happened? How did she become . . .

She tied shut the top of one full bag and bent to open another, and when she straightened up again, he had vanished. She hadn't heard or felt the rush of his wings, hadn't noticed the door open or close. Then she spied a window high in the far corner, the sliver of outside glistening on the tilted glass.

An opening big enough for a pterodactyl.

•  •  •

They came in waves, bursts of black spitting through that one open space and then scattering around the cavernous gym. Thousands of crows, Pyke's gang, streaming through endlessly, it seemed. Shiels stood for a while trying to hold open bags here and there, but then she gave it up and retreated to a safe wall, out of the diving, veering, wheeling path. They squawked and squabbled, heckled, pecked, jabbered, screamed, but it was not all madness. They seemed to know what they were about, pecking at the clumps of mess, picking up the wads of crêpe, flying off with them. A mass of crows—a murder—seemed to start a war over some piece of clothing underneath the basketball hoop, but as soon as it started, it was over, with the winner zooming off with the pink, gauzy thing—a tank top? a bra?—in its beak. They pecked their way into the bags that Shiels had already tied shut, but soon she realized it would be all right. Pyke had grasped the essential nature of the problem and had implemented a solution.

They flew off with everything, and it did not take long. Pyke did not reappear, but it was all his doing. He had set his fellows to work . . . just as Shiels had completely failed to mobilize her own.

She found herself leaning against the wall, her back cold on the painted cinder block, watching the window where crows flew in and out like bats. She kept wishing it was just Pyke and her again, the two of them. She pressed herself where Pyke had pressed—placed her hand where his beak had been.

Like probing a tooth that is not sore but is not well either, that's heading toward a greater awareness of pain.

•  •  •

It took hours to clean the gym, even with the help with the crows, but eventually order was restored. When she was done, Shiels retreated to the washroom and scrubbed her hands. At least they could come clean, even if her nose stayed unsightly. Pyke's odor lingered despite all the cleansing—he smelled of the bush and the ocean at the same time, it seemed, pine gum and salt air and fishiness, of black earth and depth and darkness. When she closed her eyes, his scent seemed to take her over. She was standing by a window left open despite the cold, and wondered if somehow he was hovering just out of sight on the other side of the fogged glass, letting the breeze blow his essence into her lungs.

Was he there really?

Her face in the mirror: still, relaxed, older somehow. Shiels but not Shiels. The purple nose was a bit of a mask. It was letting something else come forward in her character. What was it?

She had just a niggling thought, on the periphery of her imagination. When she tried to think straight at it, it disappeared.

And then . . . she felt something release. She'd been holding, holding it but now was not. Her period, of all things! She had supplies. It wasn't unusual. After her mother's words she'd been pretty well expecting it. What she hadn't been expecting was this feeling that somehow Pyke had brought it on, the pull, the gravity of him. That he was affecting her in ways far beyond her knowing.

•  •  •

Manniberg texted her shortly afterward—a meeting in his office, now! Had he even looked in the gym? He couldn't still be angry about the delayed cleanup. It must have been something else. She checked her other messages . . . but there were none. Sheldon was maintaining his radio silence, and all her other contacts had gone dead. No one would give her a heads-up. What could Manniberg possibly—

“I've been hearing from parents all day!” the principal said when she walked in. “They've been told stories about Autumn Whirl. Kids have been showing them videos of what all went on.” He was agitated, his face twitchy and red. “Shiels—what all went on?”

Manniberg had not been at the dance. That was not surprising. Certainly some of the vice principals had been there. Why wasn't he interrogating them?

Everyone had been dancing, writhing, shrieking. When it got down to it, after a while everyone who'd been there had just been . . . in a molten state. There'd been no adults, and no kids for that matter, left in the room. Just human beings, being human. And one pterodactyl. As far as she could remember.

Of course, she didn't remember a whole hell of a lot.

“It was a blisteringly good party, sir,” Shiels said. “I think everyone was safe. The gymnasium's completely cleaned up now, if you want to have a look.”

“I have parents telling me it was an orgy, a complete bacchanalian I-don't-know-what! I have parents who said it took them all day yesterday to figure out where their kids ended up spending the night. And with whom!”

Shiels blinked, blinked. She was not going to give in to his hysteria.

“And I have parents thinking we've got some kind of monster lurking in the halls here. I'm calling an open meeting for the whole school community tonight. I'm going to have to stand up there and tell them that Pyke is just as normal a student as any other and that there's no danger or—”

He was sputtering. His hands were moving up and down with nothing to do.

“He
is
just a normal student,” Shiels said evenly. “There is no danger. He's an extraordinary asset to the educational experience of every boy, girl, and even teacher in the school. I would be happy to stand up in front of a thousand parents and say just that.”

“In front of your own parents?” Manniberg said. “Because your mother was one of the first to call me. She's furious! She thought Pyke was a student pretending to be a pterodactyl. She thought maybe you gave her that impression. But then she ran into some other parent this morning who told her otherwise.”

Shiels felt a slight smile coming over her face. It was much better, this sense of control. She wasn't pregnant! The rest of life could be put into perspective. “I'm sorry you caught my mother's anger,” she said. “She chose to believe what she chose to believe. Hold the meeting. You say your piece, I'll say mine. Then we'll bring Pyke out, let him say a few words too. Pack the auditorium with students. We're
all
on his side. Our parents will see that above everything else.”

“Have you seen yourself in the mirror lately?” Manniberg said. “I'm not going to let you speak to parents with a flaming purple nose. One look at you, and I'd have a full revolt on my hands!”

Had he really not thought this through? Why had he ever brought the pterodactyl to Vista View anyway? Surely he realized the parents would have to be informed someday.

“He was a cross-boundary transfer,” Shiels said. “Where was he before this? How did they deal with him? Why is he here now?”

Manniberg pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “The school board said they were going to get me those answers. But I have a feeling they're dealing with smoke and mirrors. Wouldn't be the first time they've lost someone's paperwork. As far as I can tell, he's here because he's here. But he seems to be fitting in all right, wouldn't you say? Until now?”

“Everyone's in love with him,” Shiels said.

•  •  •

Vhub was boiling with talk of the scheduled meeting, but Shiels felt oddly above it all. She had been through her own mess. Manniberg was responsible for handling the parents. He was smart enough to figure things out thus far. And . . .

. . . she was not pregnant. And . . .

. . . Pyke had flown to her, come to her rescue when everyone else had abandoned her. Maybe there was a reason why her nose had turned dark, something she could not yet figure out.

On the way home, alone at the end of the day—an entire day at school in which she had not run into Sheldon, and had not heard from him, smelled him—Shiels dodged snowflakes and thought about how the world could be. How just when her heart had sought clear to the wide plain of knowing that she loved someone—Sheldon—then the planet shifted, and Sheldon slid out of reach.

But now it seemed the pterodactyl was attracted to her. He had branded her, chosen her, come to her aid. Hadn't she always known, from that first glimpse, that worm biting her gut? Just like that, she could feel the world leaning away from the boy who only the day before she'd realized was the love of her life . . . so far.

That was the thing. Her life so far had not yet been long. If Sheldon had shown up at the gym holding a box of garbage bags, she might have married him on the spot (maybe just to see the look on her mother's face).

She would've melted into his arms. If he could have forgiven her purple nose, and put away his pride, and understood how she would've felt about tripping into his parents' kitchen on Sunday morning with sleep in her eyes (and her head not too clear) and her nose so purple (he hadn't even told her!).

If he could have just been himself, steadfast, understanding Sheldon for one more day, the way he'd been for practically the whole of the last three years in which they had been inseparable . . .

If he had stood up for her, grown his own red crest, or whatever.

But he had stayed away. Like the others. Whose noses weren't fully purple. They had drawn those ridgelines. They could wash them off.

They had not wrangle danced with Pyke.

The building was boiling over, practically, with talk about what the parents would do when they found out for real that a pterodactyl had been going to school with their children. But surely once Pyke stood up and said a few things into the microphone, once everyone could see how harmless and fragile and magnificent he was, the whole thing would blow over.

On the way home, on one of the backstreets, Shiels heard a gasp of wind behind her, above her. A series of gasps . . . She turned to see the wings. The black bright eyes she was hoping to see.

Oh, that red crest burning for her!

Pyke circled, circled, his shadow skimming the road beside, ahead, around her. She ducked as he came in for a halting, awkward, semi-controlled crab of a landing.

“I thought you'd be better than that!” she said to him. It felt like her whole body was smiling.

He hop-hipped, hop-hipped toward her, his beak gesturing to something, the road in front of her.

“Where you?” he said.

“Right here,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“Where you? Where you?” he repeated.

She was freakishly warm, just being near him. And she wanted to run her hand again along his chest. She remembered that fragment of it, the wrangle dance.

She loved the look, the slope, of his scarlet crest.

“Where you?” he said again, glancing at her feet.

She looked down. She was in a pair of her mother's flats. Black with wide toes.

“You mean what am I wearing?” she asked.

“Wear you . . . yellow zhoe!” he said.

He reached down with his beak and untied one of her shoelaces, as if she might have the yellow runners with her right then.

“Wear you . . . yellow zhoe!” he said again. “Run-run! Zomorrow. Run!”

She laughed. “You like my yellow shoes?”

“Run-run!” he said.

“I hope Manniberg has talked to you,” she said. “There's going to be a meeting tonight in the auditorium. You need to be there. You should stand up and say a few things to our parents. Maybe—do you have parents? Where are they? Would you bring them to the meeting?”

He waggled his crest. He seemed to be flaming at her.

“You must come! You'll be fantastic! It's going to have everything to do with your future in the school.”

Hop-hip, hop-hip. A sudden stretch of wings. As he took off, flying away from her, he looked back, like a pilot in a biplane, glancing her way.

She watched him fly—watched him work his leathery wings into the distant fabric of the sky—until he was hardly a speck in the gray reaches.

Manniberg was going
to handle it, but he wasn't at dinner with Shiels and her family, when her mother was in full Inquisition mode:

“What do you mean a pterodactyl
is
attending your high school? They're extinct! How does he even exist?”

“Well, he does. He showed up one day out of the blue—”

“And he speaks? He sits at a desk? He takes tests and exams?”