Hummingbird Heart (2 page)

Karma looked at me and crossed her eyes.

I grabbed a sandwich bag and slammed the drawer closed, pinching the soft part of my little finger. I swore under my breath, shoved the sandwich in the bag and dropped it in my backpack. “I have to go.”

“Pickle, don't be like that.”

“I'm not being like anything. I don't want to be late, that's all.” I avoided my mother's eyes. “And don't call me Pickle.”

“Dylan…”

“I have to go,” I repeated. I tossed my backpack over my shoulder and headed down the stairs and out the front door.

My mother was obsessed with tattoos. Some of her interests—like belly-dancing and tai chi—were short-lived, but the tattoos, of course, were permanent.

It wasn't like I had anything against tattoos. Plenty of kids at school had used their fake
ID
s to get them. Even my friend Toni's mother, who was close to fifty, had a small butterfly on her ankle. But my mother was up to nineteen. She had birds—bright red and green and blue birds—flying up the inside of both forearms. Her feet and ankles were a swirl of green and black vines. Her belly button was circled by a sun. A lizard stretched lazily across her shoulder and a tree spread its dark branches across her lower back.

And apparently she wasn't done yet.

I got on my bike, cycled hard toward school and tried not to care. Whatever. It was her body. If Mom wanted to look like a walking canvas, that was her choice.

Judging by the state of his own arms, her latest boyfriend wasn't going to have a problem with it.

Toni waved from down the hall. “Dylan! How's it going?”

I hurried toward her so that she wouldn't try to have a conversation at full volume in front of half the school. “Hey.”

She pushed her curly hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears. It sprang back out the second she took her hands away. “How come you didn't call me last night?”

“Sorry. I…there was a lot going on.” I lowered my voice. “Scott came over.” One of the nice things about having the same best friend for a really long time was that you didn't always have to explain things.

“Really? Your mom's new…” Toni trailed off.

“Yeah. Her new whatever. We met downtown for dinner.” I started walking slowly in the direction of class, and Toni looped her arm through mine in one of those casual gestures that seemed to come so easily to her. I was clumsy and awkward about that kind of thing; always elbowing someone, or standing too close, or not knowing how to let go again.

“So?” she asked. “What's he like?”

“Total freak.”

“Details, please!”

I focussed on the obvious. “Tattoos from elbow to wrist, both arms. And lots of piercings.” Other than the regular ones in ears and noses, I thought piercings were gross. Scott had piercings in his lips and tongue and eyebrow, and God only knew where else. Well, God and my mother, presumably, but I didn't want to dwell on that thought.

“What does he do? Does he at least have a job?” Toni knew my mom's track record. Her last boyfriend had “borrowed” two hundred bucks before taking off to Montreal.

“Yeah, that's how they met. He ran a group Karma was in at the Boys and Girls Club.”

“Well, that's good, right? So he's—what? A counselor or something?”

“I guess. He's going to university. Social work.” I shrugged. “But he used to be a drummer for some totally lame hardcore band, and he's still working the bad-boy image. It's pathetic.”

“You should've texted me from the restaurant,” Toni said. “Is he cute?”

“Come on, Toni. He's at least thirty.” I didn't want to talk about Scott anymore, and kind of regretted having said anything. “Don't tell anyone, okay?”

“I won't. But I don't see what the big deal is.”

“Of course not. You have a mother, a father, a minivan and a golden retriever. Your family is like an advertisement for normal.”

“Uh, hello? Divorced, remember?”

“I know, I know.” I grimaced apologetically. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.”

“It's okay.”

“It's just that I don't need one more thing to make me feel like I'm weird, you know?” I held up my hand and numbered off with my fingers. “One. My mother is totally—well, you know what she's like.”

“She's cool,” Toni protested. “Just kind of different. Quirky.”

I snorted. Toni loved my mom, but she didn't have to live with her. “She smokes pot and takes photos of alleyways.”

“Which win prizes in photography contests.”

“Yeah, but they don't exactly sell. Anyway, let me finish.” I held up a second finger. “Two. I have a sister who isn't really my sister. And her name is Karma. I mean, it's not like there aren't enough normal names out there to pick from. But no. Karma.”

“Okay, okay.” She gestured at me to get on with it.

“Okay. Um, three. I don't have a father. I have my mom's one-night stand. Sperm donor guy.” That was what my mother had called him.
Just think of him as a sperm
donor
, she'd said.
No regrets because otherwise I wouldn't
have you, but don't you dare get pregnant at sixteen.
Since I'd never done more than kiss a guy—and barely even that—this hardly seemed likely. Mom said I was a late bloomer. I thought loser might be a more accurate description.

“Fathers aren't so great,” Toni said.

I ignored her. “He's never even bothered to meet me.” Toni didn't know about the photographs I'd sent him, but I knew what she'd say if she did.
Get a life, Dylan. He's not
worth it.
“Mom says he was an asshole anyway.”

Toni laughed but not unkindly. “And five, you have a best friend who thinks you're great.”

“Which makes you almost as weird as me. Anyway, you can't count. That's four.”

She ignored that and tilted her head to one side, considering. “You never know though. Amanda's new boyfriend could turn out to be an okay guy.”

“Whatever.” I shrugged. “He won't be around long anyway. You know my mom.”

“Maybe this time will be different.”

I doubted it. But then, Toni and my mom always said that I was a pessimist. I thought that both of them—like most people, really—were in denial most of the time. Look at the environment, for example. Everyone just carried on as if the entire human race wasn't on the edge of global disaster. It was insane. Sometimes, when I was trying to go to sleep at night, I'd picture the planet suspended in space, billions of people clinging to it like ants, the water being slowly poisoned, the ozone layer disintegrating, the ice caps melting, the oceans heating up, suicidal terrorists blowing planes out of the sky.

Think positive
, Mom was always saying.
Look on
the bright side
. But it seemed to me that there were all these possible futures and most of them looked pretty bleak. It was hard to feel hopeful in a world that was being destroyed.

TWO

I looked at the clock. Only five minutes into civics and the teacher had already succeeded in putting half the class to sleep. I rested my chin on my hands and watched the second hand ticking off the time.

Tick, tick, tick
.

Sometimes I'd be doing this, waiting for time to pass, and I'd get a sudden clutch of anxiety. Every second that passed was gone forever. Every minute, every hour, every day. It was awful, imagining all that time slipping away, all those seconds rushing past in an unstoppable roaring stream. I could almost hear it when I closed my eyes.
Racing toward the grave
. I mean, of course everyone knew we were all going to die eventually, but no one else ever seemed to think about it.

I could remember precisely the first time I realized how temporary everything was. I was maybe eight or so, standing at the fall fair watching the lights of the Ferris wheel against the night sky, and it suddenly hit me that one day all of this would end. That I'd be dead and my mother would be dead and everyone here would be dead. All these people who were laughing with their friends, screaming around the curves of the roller coaster, eating snow cones…every last one of us would be burned to ashes or rotting underground.

I didn't know how to live with that. It seemed like you had to forget you knew it just to keep on going. But I couldn't seem to forget it the way everyone else did. After that first time, the same realization kept flashing into my mind. I'd be sitting in class, surrounded by people, and I'd think, Eventually, we'll all be dead. Or a bus would go by and I'd think, If I just stepped two feet to the left, that'd be it. Dead.

I didn't talk about it. In fact, I did my best to push the thoughts away. I didn't even like seeing the word
death
. If I came across it while I was reading, I'd flip pages like mad, trying to find a good word—
life
or
alive
or
living
— to cancel it out. And if anyone even mentioned death or cancer or car accidents, I'd start to feel all panicky and I'd have to make them change the subject somehow.

Someone kicked the back of my chair, and I turned around. Krista slid a piece of paper across her desk, hidden under her palm. I grabbed it and stuck it inside my binder. Mr. Robertson droned on about representative democracy, completely oblivious.

The note was from Toni and covered with smiley faces. I frowned. When had Toni started putting smiley faces on everything? She never used to do that. Back in junior high, we used to make fun of girls who did that.
Cheer
up, it's Friday
, the note said. G
uess what? There's a party
tomorrow night at Jessica's place. Guess who's going to be
there? Hah. I'll tell you at lunch.

I turned and raised my eyebrows at Toni, but she dropped her gaze to her textbook with a smug smile. I turned back to my own notes, but of course now I couldn't concentrate. There were two things that note could mean. One, Jax was going. Or two, something else entirely.

Jax was sitting at the end of my row, three desks away. The new kid. He'd just started at our school, and because he was gorgeous and also because arriving halfway through the first term was kind of unusual, everyone was curious about him. Toni was the only person who knew that I had a bit of a crush on him. Not that I'd admitted it, even to her, but she'd figured it out somehow. I slid my eyes sideways to steal a glimpse.

Blond hair but not too fair—kind of streaky brown and blond together, always hanging over his face until he shook it back out of his eyes. Tanned skin, perfect white teeth, a grin that narrowed his eyes and creased his cheeks with deep lines that were almost but not quite dimples. A careless attitude, which threw me off balance somehow. How could someone be new, not know a single person and walk around with that kind of confidence? I'd gone to school with these kids since kindergarten and still I felt like I didn't really fit in. I worried all the time about what other people thought of me.