Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (6 page)

“Are you saying I should break up with Sheldon?” Shiels could blink every bit as passive-aggressively as her mother.

“Of course not! Honey! He's great. In many ways you're like an old married couple. I mean, you do everything together. Do you know how long I've waited just to get you alone to have this chance to talk? He's always with you. It's like you're welded at the hip.”

Shiels's phone vibrated again. Sheldon. She turned it off. Pyke was not going to reply to her, not tonight, if ever. Where was home even, some huge nest in a big tree?

“See other people. Have some fun. This is your graduating year. After June everyone will take off to the four corners of the world. These days—literally. Keep your focus for what's really important. You know you are not a natural for some things. But you're really smart and you outwork everyone else. You always have. That's your strength.”

Shiels could see that her mother was feeling better the further she got into their chat.

“I didn't meet your father until Saint Luke's,” she said. “I had boyfriends. Of course I did. You don't have to be a nun. But stay on track.” Her hand was warm. She squeezed Shiels's shoulder and then they were hugging, and Shiels felt herself brimming, brimming . . . then flooding right into her mother's sweater.
Stop it! Stop it!
she screamed at herself, but she couldn't. Her mother's warm hand at her back.

If things didn't work out with Lorraine Miens, if she didn't get into Chesford after all, then yes, of course, she could always be a doctor.

A pelting rain
the next morning, wearying in the cold, and then, unaccountably, Sheldon was not waiting for her at Roseview and Vine. Shiels stood uncomfortably under her wind-tossed umbrella, looking down the street, waiting for him to come tearing around the corner, his worn treads slapping the puddles and his arms flapping, not quite like a girl—like a girl who couldn't run—but maybe like a chicken surprised and alarmed.

He had stopped texting her after midnight. That in itself was not unusual. Often when she became cataclysmically busy, she didn't respond, sometimes for hours at a time, and he had always understood it meant nothing. Roseview and Vine was a given. They always met here in the morning.

Now she fought with the wind and texted him and waited in growing unease as the gray sky, rain-lashed trees, the quietly shuddering shrubs and lawns gave her nothing.
We have been here forever,
they seemed to sigh.
You are an insect gone tomorrow.

Where the hell was Sheldon?

She imagined, for a moment, him exploding out of bed in his way—he had described it to her—when he has overslept and his limbs move all at once and in contradictory directions. Maybe . . . maybe he caught his foot flailing down the stairs and knocked his head senseless. Maybe he was right now speeding to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, his body strapped to a board, a paramedic checking his pulse.

She even heard a siren in the distance. She pictured herself wheeling him around, wiping the remnants of lunch from the crusty edges of his lips. “I'm sorry,” she said, under her breath, as if rehearsing the line. “I'm going to have to go to Chesford. We'll stay in touch, of course we will. You know I care about you deeply.”

A gust of wind blew her red umbrella inside out, and Shiels had to struggle to bring it back into shape. One of the struts was bent and dipped down ridiculously.

Five minutes late!

Shiels would not waste another moment. Sheldon was going to get an earful when she saw him at school.

•  •  •

As she approached the tired brick building—assemblage of buildings—Shiels began to sense something wrong. It was nothing she could see. All around her the usual assortment of teenagers spilled out of buses, traveling in packs or clumps of two or three with backpacks, earbuds, slouchy clothes. Everyone had an umbrella, which only made sense—it was raining.

But
everyone
with an umbrella? Normally half the school at least would just show up wet on a rainy day, with soaked hoodies, hands in pockets, shivering as if nothing could be done about inclement weather. In winter too, on the coldest day, most of the school would still be in sneakers, without gloves or hats, practically frostbitten. It was part of the unwritten code of the place: no care given to the weather. Now—umbrellas all around?

And black umbrellas at that. A shroud of them, bobbing as people walked. Was it a funeral? What could have possibly happened overnight that Shiels had not heard about? She checked Vhub quickly—the traffic was overwhelming. She really couldn't keep up with all the threads. . . .

She had a sickening thought again that it was Sheldon—Sheldon who had died. It would have to be something bizarre. Something falling from outer space. A dead satellite. If Sheldon were to go, it would be something like that.

Shiels felt as if she had lost a week somehow—just blacked out, perhaps—and so could not account for whatever terrible thing had happened.

She pulled open the front double doors and . . . everything was normal. Except that everyone practically, except for her, was carrying a soaked black umbrella. She spied Sheldon near the trophy cases horsing around with Rachel Wyngate, from the volleyball team, if that were at all believable, and some of the football players: Ellis Maythorn, Ron Fornelli. Sheldon was one of those boys who moved well in all sorts of company. They were sparring with their umbrellas, whacking one another and laughing.

Completely innocent. Shiels marched toward him. “Why didn't you wait for me?” was on the tip of her tongue.

And then when she was just paces away, Sheldon snapped open his black umbrella—
whump!
—and just as quickly shut it down again. It was an enormous one, golfing size, and Shiels found herself stepping back. Maythorn did the umbrella trick then too, right at her, and Fornelli, in a different direction, and Rachel Wyngate laughed in her athletic way—Shiels suddenly noticed her baldly interested manner of looking at Sheldon—and Shiels could see then all down the south corridor people snapping open and shutting down their black umbrellas . . . as if they were all Pykes, every single one of them.

“What the hell are you doing?” she said to Sheldon, who looked at her as if . . .

What?

As if she were the last kid in high school to grow wings.

•  •  •

Manniberg was not even in. Shiels found herself standing in the office in front of Ms. Klein, whose thick lids were raised at her, momentarily distracted from her screen. Shiels was ready to fire, to launch a new umbrella protocol. (That wasn't what she would call it; enough with the protocols!) “We can't have people opening umbrellas suddenly indoors!” she was ready to say. “It's not about some silly superstition. It's eyes being poked out! It's . . .”

But Manniberg was not in.

“Do you mean he—he's late?” Shiels sputtered. “Or he's not coming in?” Who would she have to deal with in his absence—Jimble? Or Ketterling? These vice principals were all—

“I'm not sure,” Ms. Klein said.

“What do you mean?” Every drop of diplomacy had left Shiels; she could taste blood in her voice.

She tasted blood, but then she willed herself back from the brink.

(
What is the point of browbeating the school secretary, Ms. Krane?
she asked herself in the imagined voice of Lorraine Miens.)

(And—why had Sheldon been horsing around with a black umbrella? He was not a masses kind of person. Usually she could count on him. If everyone in the school were headed one direction, he was off in the opposite, out of principle.)

“I'm sorry,” Shiels said. “People are exploding their umbrellas open in the halls.”

Ms. Klein's heavy eyes shifted back to the screen, then again to Shiels. What was she looking at?

(Shiels wouldn't have thought Rachel Wyngate was an umbrella-masses kind of person either. But somehow the two of them together . . . )

“Students have brought exploding umbrellas?” the secretary asked dully.

“They're popping them open suddenly, right in people's faces!” Shiels sensed a great tide shifting against her.

“I can make a note of it,” Ms. Klein said uselessly. She brought out a memo pad and waited for Shiels to say it again, to sum up the problem.

“Is Mr. Manniberg coming in today or not?” Shiels pressed her palms against the countertop separating her and the functionary.

(Functionary. What a lovely word. Why wasn't Sheldon here?)

Ms. Klein wrote on the pad—
STUDENT UMBRELLAS
—as if that explained the situation.

What else was spinning out of control?

Shiels left without another word.

•  •  •

Slashing rain. Cold gray sheets sprayed against the windows as if launched from some gigantic faucet far above the Earth. The whole school felt submarine-like, underwater.

Shiels met up with Sheldon—or rather Sheldon caught up with her—in the library just before lunch. “What? Why are you looking at me?” he said, meaning
like that.

Like he could be washed away in a slick of mud and she probably wouldn't even go to his funeral.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Good! Waiting for some kind of response!” He was thrusting his jaw out, which he did sometimes when he was miffed about something she had done. It normally lasted about ten seconds before he unthrust his jaw and agreed with her over whatever it was he had been confused about.

“What are we talking about?”

They weren't standing in a particularly quiet corner of the library. Computers were humming, students were cutting across to get to the cafeteria—which Mr. Wend had forbidden, but they still did it—and Mr. Wend himself was fiddling with a collapsible bookstand well within earshot.

“Pyke's band! Morris came through. That's what I was bleeping you about all last night. You never answered. They were heat source. Total freaking rummage!”

Sheldon flicked his hands, a sort of chicken-wing gesture that erupted when he was excited.

“Are you face-raking me?” she said calmly. “Pyke has a band? He just arrived!”

“They were on last night at Dead Papyrus. Didn't you look at anything I sent? I missed the first set because I was waiting for you to get back to me. But the second was cellular. I'm not exaggerating. And Morris talked him into doing Autumn Whirl.”

Sheldon had his phone out, despite the in-library ban—Mr. Wend was right there, still—and he thrust the screen at Shiels. At first she could make out nothing—someone's writhing back, people jostling, ugly sounds from a bass guitar offscreen—and then a bouncing glimpse of Pyke, onstage, wings folded, his body in a crouch almost, as if about to spring into the air.

“Does he sing, or—what?”

Mr. Wend was looking at them. Not only were they using Sheldon's phone, but it was making weird noises.

“Wait for it. Wait—”

More bouncing. Sweaty bodies. Sheldon must've been changing positions, trying to get a better view.

“Could you not have edited this?” Shiels said.

And then the shriek. Pyke rose to his full outstretched grandeur, and his jaws were wide open. That beak . . . and the eyes. Even with this crappy phone-quality video, she could see the intensity of spirit there. And the sound—

“What in God's name is that?” Mr. Wend said.

The video stopped.

“That's all I got,” Sheldon said. “My batteries died. But the show went on and on. Everybody was wailing—we just stood there and spilled our noodles.”

“Did you dance?” Shiels asked.

“It's beyond dancing. You just—emote pure sound. It's like—better than drugs. You don't even want to dance. Your body does whatever.”

He was hopping in place as he talked, almost like Jonathan with his rehearsed board moves.

“Since when do you do drugs?” Shiels said. The boy would not even take mayonnaise on his cheese sandwich. But he glanced away for a second, as if he might not be all that she thought she knew. “Anyway, Autumn Whirl is a dance! Why would we hire a band that made you
not
want to—”

The way he was looking at her, as if—

“I'm not face-raking you!” she said. “I honestly believe—”

“It's so much more than dance music!” Sheldon practically oscillated in front of her. She could feel her own feet tingling. Was it from Sheldon, his heat for this shriekiness, or was it from the small taste she had had on video of the shriekiness itself?

“Would you please take your caterwauling outside?” Mr. Wend said, and then the bookcase he was fiddling with eased itself to the ground, like a wounded horse kneeling, about to topple over.

The Autumn Whirl
standing committee met for lunch in the theater arts room in the basement. Rebecca Sterzl chaired but looked to Shiels for approval on everything—and sometimes, such as today, Sheldon sat in just because he was Sheldon. They were talking about Pyke's band and how this new brand of music—could it even be called music?—would change the nature of the event. Without Shiels's direction they would all just roll over in the face of this new thing, this pterodactyl craze that was taking over the school, and what was going to be a lacerating opening event to the social calendar would instead be . . .

Shiels sat listening to Rebecca go on and on about the electric nature of the shrieking experience, how everyone who'd been there last night vibrated freakishly and how other shrieks ruptured out of people like glorious teen vomit. “Only better,” Rebecca said. “We're going to have to take a hard line on limiting access. No one from outside Vista View. It's going to be insane.” Her face betrayed that same loopy glow that Sheldon's had had when spewing about the weird music.