Rufus is like a different bird this morning. I wake up Aunt Bea at the crack of dawn again and we are out with him on the creance and he flies from the post to my fist not once but four times! He starts getting squawky after that, so we feed him and put him back in the mews.
“We can try flying him from across the yard when you get home from school,” Aunt Bea says, whistling for Red, who swoops down from the trees.
Every time Aunt Bea says we’re ready to move forward, this double stream of panic and excitement burns up from my belly. “You think he’s ready?”
And a part of me knows he is. I knew giving him that pep talk last night would work. I told him that he was a good bird, and more, that he was the best owl ever, and that if he didn’t want to flap around on posts, he didn’t have to, because we were working on his schedule, and when he was ready, I knew he would fly.
But this other part of me is terrified that the minute I step even halfway across the yard, he’ll disappear into the shadows.
“He’s ready,” Aunt Bea says, closing Red in her aviary. “It’s you who needs to know that, though. It’s you he’s trusting. If you don’t believe in him, no way he’s going to believe in himself.”
“You really think all it takes is my believing he can fly to my fist?” That sounds like a load of manure fresh from the cow.
She takes off her gauntlet. “Not all,” she says. “But it’s not nothing.”
Rufus chirps, sounding more like a chick than a full-grown owl—then again, he might not even be full grown. I keep forgetting he’s just a baby bird, not even a year old. Maybe the last piece of his recovery is just believing he’s recovered?
The sun crests the trees. “You’d better run if you’re catching that bus,” Aunt Bea says.
I leg it inside and clean myself up, then grab a Pop-Tart from Aunt Bea’s hand as I pass the kitchen on my way out to the bus. I look back through the bus windows toward the house, sending good thoughts to Rufus through the misty strips of sunlight, half knowing that’s insane and absolutely not a real thing, but also sure that he hears me and feels loved.
Jaxon shows up late. “I had an overnight with my dad,” he says, sliding into his desk just as Ms. Thomas begins shuffling papers and clearing her throat to signal the beginning of the day. His backpack is bulging—the cuff of a pair of pajama pants dangles from where it’s caught in the zipper. He literally had a sleepover with his dad. I guess that’s what divorced kids have instead of “visitation.”
Not that I’ve had visitation in a while . . .
Ms. Thomas blathers on about Dicey’s Song. It’s about these kids who go to live with their grandmother because their mom is sick, and they have to start over with this stranger—it’s a little on the nose for my life right now. I think Ms. Thomas is trying to connect with me: every few pages, she gives me these puppy dog eyes.
Halfway through the period, we break into groups to talk about last night’s reading. Jaxon, Jamie, and I turn our desks together. Jamie has this whole theory going about the grandmother and some secret plot to keep the kids from their mom. I let her go on. It’s easier to believe the grandmother is the bad guy. It’s harder to know that sometimes your mom just can’t be your mom anymore.
“I bet the mom was the one who sent that letter,” Jamie says, her finger pointing at the book like she’s solved the case and everything’s going to be all better now—Mom’s going to swoop in and take the kids back to some big house complete with playground in the backyard and golden retriever on the porch.
“It’s from the hospital,” I tell her, because I’ve seen those same kinds of letters in the mail. “The mom’s not coming.”
“You read ahead?” Jaxon asks, flipping to the end of the book.
I shrug. “I have a feeling.” I know.
“I’m sticking to my version,” Jamie says as the bell rings. “I believe Mom’s going to show up before the end.”
I jam my copy of the book down into the bottom of my backpack and zip it closed.
In art, the teacher, Ms. Whipple, has set out on the tables some pieces of paper and coffee cans stuffed with colored pencils. “I’m going to give you the period to draw mandalas,” she announces to the class after everyone’s perched on stools. There’s a circle on each paper.
“A what?” I grumble.
As if answering, Ms. Whipple walks over to one of the posters on the wall. “This is a Tibetan Buddhist mandala.” It’s a cyclone of color exploding out in patterns and lines, squares inside squares with tiny figures nestled in between. “It means ‘circle’ and traditionally was meant to represent the universe. I’d like you to think of it as a way of symbolically capturing your personal universe at this moment. If you’re looking for where to start, think of it as having a center out of which the rest of the drawing sprouts, like a sunflower or a spinning galaxy.”
What a ridiculous project. This is exactly the kind of touchy-feely garbage that guidance counselors always give you.
But whatever. I have nothing else to do.
I pick up a yellow pencil. All I can think to draw is Rufus’s eyes. Two big yellow circles inside the black line of the printed circle. Two black pupils at the center of each eye. Then brown fanning out from those circles like scales, like the whorls of fingertips. A sharp jag of beak between them, screaming out red. Red, red, red, like lightning cracking through the circle.
The bell rings.
It’s like being shaken awake. I look up from my mandala. Everyone else is already packing up.
Jamie’s mandala is a bull’s-eye of pinks and yellows. Jaxon drew this incredible green and purple pattern of diamonds swirling out from a sunburst of red.
I look back at my picture. I’ve drawn a monster. Not Rufus, but some terrible raging nightmare.
Am I that nightmare?
I bring the picture over to Ms. Whipple. “What does this mean?”
She looks at my drawing. “I don’t know,” she says, handing it back to me. “But it seems pretty intense.”
The yellow eyes draw me in, the brown whirlpools around. “It’s so angry,” I mumble.
She peeks over the top of the paper.
“It’s okay to be angry,” she says. “Anger is something everyone feels. But sometimes it doesn’t feel very safe to be angry. A mandala is a safe place for you to put your anger.”
I want to tell her I said the drawing is angry, not me, but then I stop because her words are humming inside me, as if answering a call. Everything she said is true and right, but this anger feels so much bigger than any piece of paper can hold. “Oh,” I say.
“Here,” she says, holding out another page and a new box of colored pencils. “Take this home. See how you’re feeling tonight.”
I take the paper and pencils. It feels like I’ve been dropped out of a tree.
Jamie’s eyes bug out when she sees me. “What happened? Your face is, like, whoa.”
“Do you think I’m angry?”
Now Jamie’s confused. “At me?”
“No—just, like, in general?”
Jaxon scrapes a long sliver from his wood with his pen. “I’m angry.”
Jamie and I both look at him like he’s lying. Jaxon is the calmest and least angry person on earth.
“I am,” he says. “My parents had me see the school counselor when they were getting divorced. It took me a while to get there, but I realized I was mad at them. For getting divorced.”
“You told your parents you were mad at them?” Jamie’s voice is full of awe and wonder, like the concept of being mad at a parent had never occurred to her.
Then again, I’m also kind of like, Wait, you can be mad at your parents for getting divorced?
“Yeah,” Jaxon says, sliding the pen along the deep groove. “It was hard. But afterward, my parents kind of took their fighting someplace else. They tried to explain things to me, like why they were getting a divorce and how they still loved me.”
Jamie’s jaw dangles. I peek at my mandala.
“I’m still angry,” he says, scraping another piece. “But it helped to say it.”
“Is everybody angry?” Jamie asks.
Jaxon shrugs. “Maybe?”
“I’m not angry,” Jamie says.
“Maybe you are and you don’t know it,” I say, thinking back to what she said about the grandmother being the one who should die in Dicey’s Song. I slip the mandala into my backpack. “Maybe the whole world is actually powered by secret rage.”
Jamie frowns. “I hope that’s not true.”
Jaxon flashes his half smile. “Me too.”
I dare to grab both their hands. “Me three.”
But during the whole bus ride home, all I can do is stare at the mandala. What am I so angry about? The buzz answers, Alone. But I’m not alone—I have Jaxon and Jamie and Aunt Bea and Rufus—and then I remember that I don’t “have” Rufus, that he has to leave me and go back to the wild. That I don’t have Aunt Bea—that Mom is doing better and soon I’ll be leaving everything, though who knows what “better” even means or how long it’s going to last this time. And then this guilt for even thinking such a thing, for admitting—even just in my own head—that Mom will fall apart again, floods my lungs and I’m under water, sinking down, down, and by the time the bus stops at the end of my driveway, all I want is to see Rufus, so I stumble through the yard to his aviary, where he’s still snoozing, and I collapse through the entry and onto the floor among the feathers and whitewash and just start to cry.
The tears come and they rain down, soaking my shirt.