Monday morning. Snow falling. The first of the season, like little lost flakes blurry against the steel-gray sky. The ground cold and hard underfoot. Bitter wind. Students without hats and gloves, in sweaters only or light Windbreakers, undone, open to the elements, trudged into the brown-brick buildings of Vista View High clutching backpacks and cell phones and black umbrellas.
Shiels was intensely conscious, as she approached the school, that no one was staring at her purple nose. Sheldon was not with her. That was expected. She had not even taken the route past Roseview and Vine. She had staged, as it were, a preemptive strike against the loneliness of that moment when he would not be there.
He had already skipped out once before when they’d been still officially together.
Had they split up? She felt in her bones that they had.
She could feel the blood throbbing in her nose. She looked like Cyrano de Bergerac. ’Tis a rock—a crag—a cape— A cape? say rather, a peninsula!
She would not look at the ground. She would not melt under anyone’s pitying or gawking gaze. . . .
But no one was looking. Yet. With the snow and the biting winds, they were all just trying to get indoors to start their Monday in the prison of high school.
She pulled open the heavy doors, stepped inside. It smelled like elementary school, like wet wool and sweating mittens.
(Where were all the woolen mittens of elementary school? There were none here.)
Now her eyes fell. She did not want to wipe out on the slippery floor in front of everyone. She just wanted to blend in, be any anonymous senior student, hurrying to class and—
“Ms. Krane.”
Manniberg. In the middle of the hall, hands on his hips—“Akimbo,” Sheldon would have whispered, had he been there—looking at her. Her body turned toward the stairway, as if she might pretend . . .
“Ms. Krane, what the hell happened this weekend?”
Now, there was a question. She could not possibly begin to explain anything that had happened over what was probably the most extraordinary weekend of her admittedly so far fairly short life.
“Uh—”
She was stopped now in front of him in the crowded hallway. They were a spectacle for others to eye-grope.
He was staring at her nose. “Promise me that is not a tattoo.”
“Not . . . as far as I know, Mr. Manniberg.” He liked to hear his name spoken with some reverence.
“Well, what in hickory happened to the gym? I thought you had the cleanup plan in place? In fact, I distinctly remember signing and approving the cleanup plan you and your committee presented to me.”
Oh. Oh. The floor felt uncertain beneath her feet. “Did Rebecca not stay and—” she mumbled.
“Whoever it was, they definitely did not. You are in charge, Ms. Krane. I hold you personally responsible. Athletics classes are going to have to be held outside in the snow this morning because the gym is not available. I’m going to have to make that announcement. Your name is going to be all over it. And before you set foot in any classroom, you are going to assemble your team and do the work you should have done Sunday morning. As planned. Understood?”
Rebecca Sterzl had been on cleanup. She’d had a whole crew of volunteers. All right, Shiels had said she would look in later on Sunday to do a final inspection. There had been slippage. She hadn’t done it. She had been managing her own crises. But still—
“Yes, Mr. Manniberg.”
Shiels whipped out her phone and began texting. For one day . . . one day . . . she had ignored the beeping and vibrating of others. That was all. One sniveling—
“Get moving, Ms. Krane!” Manniberg roared.
• • •
For a moment Shiels yearned to be back in the storeroom of the running-shoe shop. That was tiny, at least—chaos contained in a manageable space. This was an entire gymnasium, a vast chaotic scatter of plastic cups, puddles of stinking pop, overturned tables, fallen posters, even cobwebs of crêpe paper—hadn’t she dropped the crêpe paper while running back from the shoe shop? But here were cobwebs of green, blue, black, red, purple crêpe paper hanging from the walls anyway, sodden with drink, already looking like some ancient wreck.
And clothing. Twisted leggings, a shirt. Someone’s panties. Black jeans leaning back on an overturned chair as if—
—as if they’d been ripped off in some jet-thrust of a hurry.
Where to start? She picked up the first thing at hand—the panties—then threw them down again and righted the table instead. She nudged her toe into a puddle of sticky soda. She checked her phone. No response. Not from Rebecca, not from any of Rebecca’s team, not from Sheldon.
Not from Sheldon.
The mop was in the janitorial closet. That much she knew. And the paper towels. And the garbage bags.
Twist their noses, she thought.
They are going to ignore me.
They sign up for student government. They want the glory, they want the responsibility, they want to be on the inside of a major event like Autumn Whirl. . . .
She marched to the janitorial closet. Unlocked. She freed the ancient mop and tub set, ran fresh water, added liquid cleaner—righteously harsh. She would not wear gloves.
She would not check her phone again.
The bell had already rung for class. Now Mr. Manniberg was on the intercom. Shiels willed herself not to listen.
They had no loyalty, Rebecca and her gang.
He was not worthy—craven Sheldon.
Craven? Was that related to crows somehow? They were all as bad as craven crows.
“When the glacier groans, that’s when you know who is a mountain and who is a rockslide,” Lorraine Miens had written. As the mop squelched to the puddles, as the garbage—the panties; the leggings; the soggy, disappointing cobwebs of crêpe paper—cragged into bag upon bag, she pictured herself in Lorraine Miens’s office, leaning across her desk, eyes locked, matching her quip for quote. “You want students who are going to grow into mountains,” she said, out loud, alone, in the gymnasium. “I am student-body chair of Vista View High. Do you have any idea what I’ve had to do to make it the best year ever in the history of the institution?”
By herself, she started in a corner and worked toward the middle. A gymnasium, too, is finite. She would work all day if she had to. It was her watch. She could not afford weakness.
And if Sheldon showed up, she probably would not be able to unclench her jaw. It was a good thing he didn’t.
She heard the squeak of the heavy door opening. She would not look. What time was it?
The reverse-groan upon closing. Probably some snivelly kid looking in on the disaster.
More mopping. More crêpe and cups and stupid stinking paper wads. What had they been for?
She was nearly out of bags, would have to return to the closet. It was the end of some period—which one, she didn’t care to think about. She heard students crushing, cruising in the halls. She’d wait, wait before showing herself.
Another squeak of the door. Who this time? Across the gloom Pyke stood with his wings out—enormous, magnificent—clutching a carton of black garbage bags.
“No zelp here?” he said in his funny accent, like he didn’t know humans, didn’t understand at all what they might get up to.
Something about him was different. What? He looked gigantic. It was his crest. . . . His crest had turned scarlet. He was standing there . . . waggling his knifelike scarlet crest at her. When had it changed? At Autumn Whirl it had been purple. Her nose had been white. Now she was standing before him purple-nosed, and he was red-crested, waggling . . .
“You’ve got to be kidding!” she said.
When he folded his wings, he was smaller again, just a bedraggled kid really, short and dark. He picked up something with his beak, a sharp quick movement—someone’s jacket that wouldn’t be wanted back, not now.
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.