Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (27 page)

“Is that on the Internet?” her mother asked. Then—“Do not use your own money. Do not gamble your education. Do not let your head be turned by a boy.”

Shiels felt her face baking. “We'll get him out somehow,” she said.

Her mother kissed her. “You have a good heart,” she said. “That's so impressive. Just keep your perspective. That's all I ask.”

•  •  •

Shiels wasn't sure of the process, but it seemed to her that after the meeting with Jocelyne Legault's uncle, they might be able to go directly to the jail with the funds and bring Pyke home. She might see him later that day. She might be the one carrying him out of prison, cradling him in her arms. She could practically feel him against her chest, the weight of him and the lightness.

So she wore her yellow shoes. In case she saw him. In case he saw her.

She wore them despite the snow that had fallen, and the ice that had formed on top of it overnight. Those yellow shoes might as well have been ballerina slippers—they gave so little traction. She should have worn ice skates. And carried ski poles. She slipped and slid all along the roadway on the sidewalk, creeping like an eighty-year-old.

I'm not doing this for a boy,
she told herself.

She was almost all the way to school before she looked up enough to notice them, the hundreds of crows lined along the telephone lines. Looking down. At first she thought they were frozen, they seemed so still.

Watching her.

And then it seemed to her they were mourning—that Pyke might already have died, that in their silence and stillness they were letting her know she was too late, that all this slipping and sliding came in vain.

She stopped to look at them. “What is it?
What?
” she called finally.

The crows did not move, did not squawk and bicker amongst themselves, did not acknowledge her in any way.

•  •  •

They were supposed to meet the lawyer at eleven o'clock in his office downtown, but Shiels felt she could not wait, and she certainly could not sit through biology lab with her head spinning in such different directions. She hunted down Jocelyne Legault in anthropology, and stood quite shamefacedly at the front of the class to tell Mr. Pinkle that Jocelyne was needed on an urgent matter of school council business. As she was saying the words, Shiels felt their truth; as she walked away with Jocelyne down the hall, she wondered if she wasn't simply accessing mankind's deep and ancient reserve of brazen self-deception.

I say it and feel it, so it must be.

“We're way too early,” Jocelyne whispered.

“I think we need to be there now,” Shiels said.

Sheldon had not yet texted her to confirm that he had transferred his education fund to her bank account, the meager one she did have access to, so she brought Jocelyne to communication science and rapped on the door. Mrs. Keele opened it impatiently. Shiels said, as importantly as she could, “There's an emergency meeting of the school council to work on the Pyke issue. Sheldon Myers is needed right away.”

Mrs. Keele's eyebrows knit together. “Do you have a principal's note?”

“Principal Manniberg has called the meeting,” Shiels replied. “You won't be able to reach him on the office phone. He's in the library, where the meeting is being held. Sheldon's late. That's why we're here to get him.”

Mrs. Keele was barring the doorway with her heavy arm. Under it Shiels could see Sheldon in the far corner, reading something, lost in thought.

Mrs. Keele said, “I didn't think Sheldon Myers was even on the school council.” At this mention of his name, Sheldon finally looked up.

“He's a friend of the council,” Shiels said immediately. “We need his input. He knows Pyke better than most of us.”

Mrs. Keele stared pointedly first at Shiels's nose and then at Jocelyne's. “I doubt that could possibly be the case,” she said.

If only Shiels could push the woman out of the way! If only she had a beak, Shiels thought, she'd slash the woman's arm from that doorframe.

“Please, Mrs. Keele,” Shiels said quietly. “A life is at stake. Believe me, Sheldon can help.”

•  •  •

But Sheldon could not help. In the school parking lot, when they were waiting for the taxi to arrive, Sheldon blurted out that his parents had forbidden him to use his education money to bail out a violent pterodactyl.

“He's not violent!” Shiels said. “He reacted in self-defense. And you promised me the money.” Sheldon could not look at her. “Why did you wait until we got all the way out here before telling me?”

The boy stared down at his own running shoes, hopelessly inadequate against the ice and snow, before finally raising his eyes again. “You didn't give me time, Shiels.” His ears were red. He looked like he might blow up, but his voice stayed quiet. “You're just a tornado. You carry everything in your path, and you don't stop to think about anyone but yourself.”

“I'm thinking about Pyke! That boy is close to death. When I saw him on Friday night—” Her fists were balled, her voice filled her neck, oh she wanted to just blast at him!

But his quietness somehow got through to her. Maybe too it was that Jocelyne was also standing quietly, looking at the both of them.

“I know he's in rough shape,” Sheldon said. “You told me. But even if I get a scholarship, college is still going to be expensive. We don't have a lot put by. I just can't risk it.”

Shiels bit her lip. The jab about the tornado—well, of course it was true. That was who she was. That was how she got things done. If Sheldon didn't love her for that—

If Sheldon—

(Sheldon kissed her on the cheek then, unexpectedly, as she was standing. The taxi entered the curving driveway of the school.)

If Sheldon—

“I'm going back inside,” Sheldon said. “Sorry.”

He walked away.

The taxi smoothed to a stop in front of the girls. The driver kept the engine idling while he lowered the window. Maybe it was too icy for him to get out? “Where to?” he said. He was blurry until Shiels wiped her eyes. Then he was a Middle Eastern man who looked like he had been up all night, driving around, waiting for calls.

The school door closed, and Sheldon really was gone.

“I think maybe we don't need you after all,” Jocelyne Legault said uncomfortably.

“Yes. Yes we do!” Shiels said suddenly. She opened the door and forced herself inside. To hell with him. To hell with Sheldon. “Haven Heights Hospital!” she said.

•  •  •

A young woman had been hit by a bus. She'd been riding her bicycle in the ice and snow, and obviously the bus driver had assumed no one was out on skinny tires in such weather, and had cut across the poorly designed bike lane. . . . It was a cascading disaster of bad choices, according to the nurse in surgery, who explained this all to Shiels and Jocelyne, presumably because Shiels was, after all, the surgeon's daughter. The nurse had a blood spot showing on her left elbow, just below her pink short sleeve, and was formidable in a down-to-earth way. Any thoughts Shiels might have had about barging into the operating room to plead with her father one last time to bail out a young pterodactyl melted into the same puddle that was forming on the floor below her soaked yellow shoes.

“How . . . how long do you suppose he'll be?” Shiels asked.

“The leg is broken in four places. It could be hours,” the nurse said. “Do you want me to tell him you're here?”

Shiels hesitated, then said no. But where else to go? Time was running out! They needed to just stop for a while and think things through. She and Jocelyne took seats in the small waiting room. A thick-necked man with white curly hairs heading down into his collar sat staring at the floor, his huge hand clasping that of the birdlike woman beside him with a clenched jaw—the parents, presumably, of the cyclist.

On impulse Shiels leaned over and touched the man on the knee. “You couldn't have a better surgeon working on her in there,” she said. The man stiffened, and then his eyes narrowed when he saw her face. Her nose.

“Please take your hand away,” he said coldly.

“I'm sorry. I—”

The mother, too, looked at Shiels in alarm.

“It's our
son
,” the man said finally. Jocelyne pulled on Shiels's arm. But Shiels still didn't understand . . . until she glimpsed the boy through the partially opened door of exam room A, with her father's assistant, Kelly Brogue.

The boy with the bandaged, limp arm that Pyke had slashed and poisoned.

“Oh!” Shiels felt sick suddenly, roasting from within. “I'm so sorry!”

“What have you done to your faces?” the mother said to both of them. “Shame on you. You're supporting that . . . that . . .”

“Mary—” the father said.

“That beast attacked our boy!” the mother said. Shiels sat like a statue, unable to move. “We'll never be able to afford the physical therapy. He can hardly move his fingers now. His muscles are wilted.”

Jocelyne pulled Shiels to her feet. “We're terribly sorry, ma'am, sir. We're just leaving. Please excuse us. Please.”

The man squinted. “You're those girls we saw on the video. You were cheering on that damn bird!”

“I'm sorry!” Shiels sputtered, over and over, on her way out.

•  •  •

Shiels allowed Jocelyne to pull her to the hospital cafeteria. On the way ghostly patients in drab blue gowns wandered by wheeling IV stands, or shuffled with walkers, or looked up from their tilted beds to see who was passing by.

A menace, that's who,
Shiels thought.

A young woman cavalierly setting plans into motion with no idea what the actual outcome might be. And for what?

To salvage her own standing.

To appear a certain way to others.

To “win,” whatever that meant.

What did anything mean?

At a table, in front of a plate of french fries, her chest constricting, Shiels flipped through the world on her phone. Melanie Mull's crowdsourcing effort had raised $117 so far. “She'll never get there,” Shiels said. “And we have to raise money for the Wallin boy, too. For his rehab.”

“Why are you doing this?” Jocelyne asked quietly.

She was such a slight girl when she was not outrunning everyone. With her winter coat resting on the chair behind her, she looked like she was twelve.

She had no trouble downing french fries, though.

A simple question, but the usual constant flood of answers was not available. The cafeteria was a sorry excuse for a refuge: dismal plastic trays, muted colors, gloom-stricken faces of relatives and friends masticating mediocre food in a windowless prefabricated room trapped in the depths of a massive edifice of illness.

This felt like the culmination of many things. Shiels hadn't had to touch that father on the knee and try to say something genuine and human. But she had, just as an instinct, with the best of intentions. She had tried. And even that had gone terribly wrong.

Why was Shiels doing this?

“I don't know what's happening to me,” Shiels said. “I'm not the same person at all since Pyke arrived. I don't know who I am anymore. I think I love him. Whatever that is. I think I love him profoundly. But I don't know why. And I know you love him too, I know he is fixated on you. I know I have no right or expectation. I just feel he's cracking me open, and I can't do anything about it. I don't want to. I want to see so much who I might become after all. And I absolutely don't want to see him suffer and die in prison. I don't think I could bear it.”

Jocelyne had left only two french fries on the plate. Shiels ate one of them, Jocelyne took the last. “You scare me,” Jocelyne said. “You always have. Everything is perfect with you, and if it isn't perfect, you make it so, no matter what.”

“That's not who I am. That's who I used to be. Right now I am out of ideas. I don't know how to save Pyke.”

“I used to be afraid of a lot of things,” Jocelyne said. “I was so afraid of losing a race, I would run through my own puke to win. But when Pyke arrived, all that fear just fell away. Now I just run to feel like I'm flying.”

“Yes.” In her own pokey way that was how Shiels felt too.

“So we're sisters, you and me,” Jocelyne said. “We'll leave it at that. Pyke is big enough for a lot of ways to love him.” She checked her phone. Her eyes flattened in disappointment.

“What?”

“The fund is at $243. They're never going to get there.”

Shiels took out her parents' credit card and tapped it, nervously, on the table.

“The movement spreads
like a virus,” Lorraine Miens had written in
Animal Man
. “It doesn't even have to be a good idea, it just has to be infectious. We are built to mimic our neighbors—to covet their lawns, their cars, their hula hoops. One in a million of us sees the world fresh; the rest watch with cow eyes and then copy as if our lives depend upon it.”

And an infusion of cash usually doesn't hurt to start the ball rolling. Anonymously—she needed to buy the time from her parents' wrath—Shiels sent a good round number, ten thousand dollars, which she would pay back in February. Her parents would forgive her. Maybe. Possibly. Shiels imagined Melanie Mull staring at her screen in shock when the huge donation came in. Minutes later Melanie purpled her own nose and sent round a selfie with news of the groundswell. By the time Shiels and Jocelyne were heading back to Vista View in a taxi, the Free Pyke crowdsourcing fund was at more than twelve thousand dollars. And the number kept climbing as the pictures rolled in from across the city and all over—kids, mostly, sending in a few dollars and purpling their own noses now with markers, with paint, some even getting themselves tattooed.