Chapter 8

I woke up thinking it. I was on my stomach, and I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a pile of my feathers. It was itchy, like sleeping on a pile of hay. I pushed myself to my knees, staring at each one, crushed and matted together from my sweat and heat. Instinctively I touched my back. Nothing. I lifted my shirt and checked my back in the mirror. The feathers were all gone from my back? They’d fallen off. Just like that.

So Ade was right. Sort of. But that didn’t change anything.

It was like there was an open hole in my chest that nothing could fill. I trudged back to my bed, as limp as a corpse, and scooped all the feathers into my garbage bin, shuddering a bit at each touch. After flushing them down the toilet, it was back to bed.

Sunday passed in a blur, though probably because I spent the majority of it staring at my bedroom’s awful blue wallpaper. Ade kept coming in and asking if I was OK. Then Dad came in the afternoon. He hadn’t a clue what was going on, but he’d overcome his hangover just long enough to notice that he’d seen only one daughter all day. I said maybe two words to him.

Early Monday morning, I refused to go to work. Called in sick. Ade vouched. She went out for a while after that, and about an hour later dumped a pile of pamphlets on my bed.

“Don’t worry. Dad didn’t see me with these.”

“So You’re a Swan,” I read, pushing one with my finger. “Learning to Love Your Feathers?” I looked up at Ade, unamused. Her already self-conscious smile faltered just a bit.

“I went to the free clinic early today and got them.” Her eyes avoided mine.

Must have been really early. No way Ade would want someone thinking she was getting them for herself. I slid the second pamphlet closer. “You picked these up for me?”

“I just thought, you know.” She paused. “I mean, it might help. With all the…” When she paused again, I lay back down, throwing my bed sheets over my head. “Come on, Deanna!” Ade shook my arm. “You can’t just check out of life. Come on, Dad’s worried! Even Ericka’s worried.”

My sheets flew off me in a second. I sat up and grabbed Ade’s wrist. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“Wha–? No, no, not about what happened!” It was odd seeing Ade panic, though her impression of a startled deer was quite good. “Dad called her and told her you weren’t feeling well. So, I mean, of course she’s worried.”

I rolled my eyes. “Right. Like nouveau riche Ericka Davis gives a shit about any of us anymore.”

Ade became very quiet. “Well, you know I give a shit, if that’s worth anything.”

I remembered how tightly she’d hugged me last night; the tears streaming down her face as she cried almost as loudly as I had. Letting go of her, I stared at the mess of pamphlets on my bed and sighed. “I know. Thanks.” With a shaky hand, I took the pamphlet nearest me, flipping it open. “Oh hey, did you know that ‘almost three percent of the world’s population are or will become swans during their lifetimes’? Huh. Maybe it’s time I start picking lottery numbers for Dad.” I tried to let some sun slip into my voice for Ade’s sake.

She nodded. “Yeah I read that part. Kinda surprising.”

She sat on the bed and shrugged. “Three percent. That’s still, like, millions. Just never really seems like there are a lot of…”

Again with the pause. I cleared my throat. “You know, I’m somehow doubtful that swans are itching to reveal themselves to the general public. What with the whole ‘possibly losing your autonomy forever’ part of their genetic make-up.”

You mean “our”, hissed that bitchy voice in my head.

“Actually, there are totally some celebs and other random famous people coming out as swans now. Like you know that one girl who was in The Last Happening? That shitty hipster actress who smirks a lot?”

“Mmm, Julia Something. Wait!” I gasped. “No way.”

“Uh-huh. And trust me, there are others. OK, granted, most of those are rumors. Still, I mean, at the very least that proves that the whole swan thing…” Pause. “I mean it’s not really something to be ashamed of…” Yet another pause. “Not that I thought that you thought of it as something to be ashamed of. And I’m certainly not suggesting that it’s normally something that people would think of as something to be ashamed of. Or that it should be – I’m totally not assuming or insinuating that by any stretch of the imagination...”

Well, at least she made me laugh. The sound of it seemed to loosen Ade’s shoulders. “You’re confusing,” I told her. “Also, just to note, this is starting to sound like that ridiculous conversation Winnie had with Kayla last month when she caught her making out with Shelly.”

“You gonna tell any of them? Your friends, I mean.”

What kind of a question was that? I liked my friends just fine, but this was not the kind of information you shared. Period. “No. Never. Dad and Ericka too. They can never know about this.”

Neither could Hyde. He’d sent me several hundred texts over the past twenty-four hours. In fact, Hyde was the reason why my phone lay in my dresser drawer, turned off. He could never know about this either. He already had too much on his plate what with the war he’d apparently decided to wage on the Reys. I didn’t want him to have to worry about this too…

Worry? I caught myself. No. He could never know because this wasn’t any of his business.

Ade nodded. “It’s between us then.” I noted the hint of pride in her voice while she picked up the So You’re a Swan pamphlet and started reading. “What are Swan Feathers? How do you get them? How can you tell if you have them?”

“And now I feel like I’m learning about venereal diseases.”

“Hey, at least you don’t have one of those, right? Bright side.”

She gave me a thumbs up. A beat of silence. Then we both cracked up. Ade spent the rest of the morning in my room. We went through all the pamphlets semi-seriously, and while I found them at least partially helpful, deep down I knew there was something I needed to know, something the pamphlets weren’t telling me because they were so deadly concerned with sanitizing the blood and guts out of being a swan.

At my request, Ade brought in her half-busted laptop: an old hand-me-down from Ericka that always overheated in a matter of minutes. While Dad was watching TV, we took the opportunity to do some of our own research. There was no greater abyss of random knowledge than the internet, after all.

I clicked and clicked. “Man, I had no idea how many support forums there are dedicated to this stuff: ‘The Swan Lake.’ ‘Be Down with Your Down.’”

Ade grimaced. “This shit is cheesier than the pamphlet.”

“‘Manifestation can happen at any time, though it typically doesn’t appear for the first time in people under the age of ten or over the age of eighteen’,” I read and glared, bitterly, when Ade couldn’t hide her relieved little sigh. “Manifestation…” I frowned. So there was a name for what happened to me last night. “Freak show” worked just as well.

“‘But after that,’” Ade continued reading, “‘whether or not your feathers emerge is up to you!’”

“What?” I whispered. “‘Intense physical distress and often emotional distress.’ Those are the triggers?”

“Hey, that’s great! So basically if you just stay calm forever and never get hurt you’ll never have to see those things again!” With a big smile, Ade shook me by the shoulder.

Right. Easy enough to do.

Pages and pages of anonymous, personal anecdotes ranging from benign tales to inappropriate tell-alls corroborated the theory. A mother at the funeral of her husband and only child. And this charming little story, as told by princesssugarbitch2000, whose boyfriend apparently blew his feathers before he could “blow his load”. Classy.

I think I get the idea. We went back to surfing, hoping we’d chance upon another useful forum with maybe less of the load-blowing.

How to Catch a Swan.

My hands froze over the keyboard.

“Don’t,” warned Ade. She started to take the laptop away, but I pulled it back. I don’t know why I clicked the link. Or why I didn’t take the first line, “first you need to get them scared,” as my cue to get the hell out of there. Pictures of cattle prods and Tasers. I felt every muscle in my face as it contorted in horror. Naked men and women twisted in piles, feathers strewn about as if torn from a pillow.

“Then you rip them out.”

“That’s enough, Dee.” Ade reached for the laptop but I blocked her hand.

“No wait.” There was a link. Of course there was. My gag reflexes were already on alert. But I needed to know. Ade must have known it too, because she didn’t stop me.

It routed to an uploaded video of a couple of kids standing around in what looked like some pre-teen’s bedroom.

The two kids certainly looked around that age. And there was a third; clearly someone had to be holding the camera since it wobbled every few seconds. Sunlight gave the girl’s dark hair an almost violet hue before she skipped up to the window and shut the drapes. Her friend flicked the light on before taking his shirt off.

Ade gagged. “Jesus, is this kiddie porn?” I would have laughed at the face she was making except I was making the same one.

I braced myself with my finger on the mouse pad, the cursor poised over the X at the top right of the screen. Please let this be relevant.

The girl’s friend grinned at the screen and said something in a language I didn’t recognize. German, maybe? It sounded German-ish. He turned to show his back, his friend pointing to it unhelpfully with a ridiculous, mugging grin on her face. Next they showed the knife: a tiny, pocket switchblade that popped out of its holster with one clean slice. The boy sat. The girl smiled.

And shoved it into the boy’s right thigh.

My hand had clamped the yell before I even realized I’d done it. Blood oozed out of the wound, dribbling down his leg and staining the pink sheets red as he writhed around on the bed. When the girl stuck her finger into the wound, my trigger-finger twitched, but I couldn’t close the window. I skipped ahead in the video instead, stopping when I suddenly noticed the sheet of white draping him. I let the video play.

The girl was already wrapping a bandage around the boy’s lacerated leg. The good that would do; the white turned red in a matter of seconds. But it was the feathers the girl was after – she eyed them almost hungrily as the boy dragged himself onto his feet.

The camera zoomed in on his back, panning slowly down its length. The feathers were thinner than mine were; long and almost oval with a faint black line stretching up the vein. They came out of his shoulder blades, just like mine had, draping down half his back, but I could see more of them peeking out of the skin itself, all the way down to his underwear. They were matted to his back in one continuous unit.

The girl chattered throughout the close-up in a frighteningly upbeat, tour guide-esque tone as if this were some sort of educational video appropriate for middle schools and bondage rooms everywhere.

It was like pulling a carrot out of the ground from the stalk. She yanked the feathers from the main stems and they all came out together. With a hand, she smoothed the cape over her forearm as it dangled there, limp, luscious and pristine. All the while her friend gazed up at her. The light was gone from his eyes.

“Turn it off,” Ade said in a voice so small I figured it was the last time she’d have the energy to tell me. I did.