All the Birds in the Sky (7 page)

“Just remember,” Patricia said in a suddenly grown-up voice, “control is an illusion.” He could see the unscathed veins in her bare forearm. He realized she was quoting the magic voice she’d talked to. “And yet,” she went on, “I’m still jealous of your toys. You just never give up. You keep on making stuff. And whenever you show off something new to me, you have this look of joy on your face.”

“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.

She shrugged. “Well, you
look
joyful. You get all excited. I envy that.”

Laurence wondered if he could possibly cringe and be joyful at the same time. He rubbed his sore neck, first with one hand, then with both.

For some reason, Laurence believed Patricia’s story about talking to some birds and having an out-of-body experience. He was still kind of a gullible person, which had made him easy to prank at summer camp—but also, he rebelled at the idea of starting to close off possibilities in the world. If Patricia, who was sort of his friend, believed this stuff, then he wanted to support her. Also, she was suffering for her “witchcraft” and it would offend some basic sense of fairness for Laurence to think she was being punished for nothing. And really, was her story any crazier than other stuff, like the way Laurence’s body seemed to be rolling out new, totally unrequested features with alarming speed? Not really.

Plus Patricia had become pretty much the only person Laurence could talk to at school. Even the other so-called geeks at Canterbury Academy were too chickenshit to hang with Laurence, especially after he’d managed to get himself banned from the school’s computer lab (he wasn’t trying to hack anything, just make some improvements) and the school workshop (he was doing a carefully controlled flamethrower experiment). She was the only one he could laugh with about the Saarinian Program’s weird test questions (
“Faith is to religion as love is to ____”
), and he liked how she people-watched in the cafeteria, how her gaze turned Casey Hamilton’s student-council campaign into an amusing pageant taking place on the outskirts of fairytown.

Patricia pulled her legs out of the railing and got to her feet. “But you’re lucky,” she said. “There’s a difference between your type of outcast and mine. If you’re a science geek, people give you wedgies and don’t invite you to their parties. But if you’re a witch, everybody just assumes you’re an evil psycho. It’s kind of different.”

“Don’t try and lecture me about my life.” Laurence had gotten to his feet as well, and now he dropped his rucksack on the ground, so it nearly tumbled off the overpass. He felt both sides of his neck tighten up. “Just … don’t. You don’t know what my life is like.”

“Sorry.” Patricia bit her lip, just as a tanker rolled underfoot. “I guess that was out of line. Just trying to warn you that if you’re going to be my friend, you have to be prepared for worse stuff than just people thinking we’re girlfriend-boyfriend. Like, you might get some of my witch cooties on you.”

Laurence rolled his eyes at this. “I think I can handle a little peer pressure.”

*   *   *

BRAD CHOMNER GAVE
Laurence a Dumpster swirlie after fifth period a few days later. Laurence looked up, head soaked with slime, rusty walls tearing at his uniform shirt, and Brad was grabbing Laurence by the lapels and hauling him up so they were
almost
face-to-face. Brad Chomner’s neck was thicker than Laurence’s whole torso. Worse yet, when Brad let Laurence fall to the cement walkway he saw that his indelible forever crush, Dorothy Glass, had been watching the whole thing.

“I don’t know if I can take four more years of this place,” Laurence told Patricia when the two of them were sitting at one end of the lunch table, uncomfortably close to the garbage cans so soon after his trash baptism. His head still itched. “I keep thinking maybe I could transfer to the math-and-science high school in town, instead.”

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “You’d have to get up early every day and take the bus alone. You’d be spending so much time on the bus, you’d probably miss out on all the after-school stuff.”

“Anything’s better than this,” Laurence said. “Mr. Gluckman, the math teacher, already wrote a letter for me. Now I just have to get my parents to sign the form. I have a feeling they’re going to be weird about me going to school so far away, though.”

“They just want you to have a real childhood. They don’t want you to grow up too fast.”

“They worry about me too much, ever since I ran away from home this one time, to go see a rocket. They just don’t want me to stand out.” While Laurence was talking, a Tater Tot hit him in the head, but he just kept talking as if nothing had happened.

“I think it’s good that you have parents who care what becomes of you.” Patricia seemed to have a soft spot for Laurence’s parents, maybe because they weren’t scary overachievers like hers were.

“My parents are cowards. They’re always terrified someone will notice them and they’ll have to explain themselves.” A second Tater Tot impact. Laurence barely flinched.

Lunch was almost over, and then they had separate classes. Laurence changed the subject. “Hey, do you want to talk to my supercomputer?” He was gathering up all his stuff into his book bag. “I think it needs more interaction with different people, to help it learn how humans think.”

“What would I talk to it about?” Patricia said.

“Just whatever you want,” Laurence said. “Think of it as a friend to confide in.” He pulled a scrap of yellow lined paper out of his bag. “This is the computer’s IM account, on all the main services. Its name is CH@NG3M3.” He spelled that. “It’s a temporary name, just like it sounds. When CH@NG3M3 becomes fully sentient and starts thinking for itself, it can choose a new name. But I like that name. It’s like I’m challenging the computer to grow and change and find an identity for itself.”

“Or maybe you’re asking the computer to change you,” Patricia said.

“Yeah,” Laurence looked at his own handwriting on the notepaper. “Yeah, maybe I am at that.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll try talking to it.” She took the paper from Laurence and stuffed it into her skirt pocket.

“Anything you tell CH@NG3M3 will be between you two,” Laurence said. “I won’t ever read any of it.”

“Speaking of which,” Patricia said, “I hear the new guidance counselor is actually pretty okay. Maybe you should go talk to him about your Brad Chomner problem.” The bell rang, and they ran their separate ways.

Laurence decided to take Patricia’s advice, since he’d heard other people say that the new guidance counselor was cool. He’d only recently taken over, after the previous school counselor got run over by a meat truck. The new guy did have an easy, talk-show-host vibe about him as he told Laurence that he could share anything inside this boxy office, with its antidrug posters and bookcases instead of a window. Theodolphus Rose was a tall man with a shaved head—no eyebrows, even—and grotesque, knobby cheekbones and chin.

“I just,” Laurence said. “The bullying. It is interfering. With my ability to achieve academically. When I get locked in a Dumpster, it causes me to miss Social Studies class, which is going to drag my grades down. I am not an escape artist.”

If Laurence didn’t know better, he would think Mr. Rose was studying him. Like a bug. Then the moment passed and Mr. Rose looked friendly and supportive again.

“It seems to me,” the guidance counselor said, “that the other children see you as an easy target, because you’re so noticeable, and yet so defenseless. You have two options in this situation: to make them respect you, or to become invisible. Or some combination of the two.”

“So,” Laurence said, “stop standing out so much? Stop eating lunch in the cafeteria? Build a death ray?”

“I would never advocate violence.” Mr. Rose leaned back in his pleather chair with his hands behind his smooth head. “You children are too important. You are the future, after all. But find ways to make them see what you’re capable of, so they respect you. Keep alert and always know your escape routes. Or try to blend into the shadows as much as possible. They can’t hurt what they can’t see.”

“Okay,” Laurence said. “I sort of see what you’re saying.”

“Children,” said Theodolphus Rose, “are adults who haven’t yet learned to make fear their hand puppet.” He smiled.

7

A BULLFROG JUMPED
out of Patricia’s locker. A big one, too large to cup in your hands. It croaked, probably something like “get me out of here.” Its eyes looked strangulated with panic, and its legs—awfully little, to support such a bulbous frame—twitched. It wanted to find its cool wet nest and get away from this white hell. Patricia tried to catch it, but it slipped through her grasp. Someone must have spent hours catching this thing, gotten up at dawn or something. The frog gave a vengeful grunt and took off down the hallway, heading god knew where, as all the kids shrieked with laughter. “Emo bitch,” someone called out.

After school, Patricia sat on her bed and talked to CH@NG3M3, Laurence’s supercomputer, like she did every day lately. “My parents say they’ll never let me go into the woods as long as I live, which means I’m no use to anybody at all. And everybody at school keeps accusing me of being a cutter and a crazy person. Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier.”

“If you were crazy,” CH@NG3M3 responded, “how would you know you were crazy?”

“That’s a good question,” Patricia admitted. “You would need to have one person who you completely trusted. Like, if you trusted one other person, you could check to see if you were seeing the same things they were.” She chewed her thumb, sitting cross-legged on her brass-kettle quilt, legs tucked under her skirt.

“What if you didn’t see the same things?” CH@NG3M3 said. “Would you be crazy?” Sometimes when the computer got out of its depth, it would rephrase Patricia’s answers back to her and change them slightly—which almost looked like it was thinking, but not quite.

“You’re lucky you don’t have eyes, or a body,” Patricia told it. “You don’t have to worry about any of this stuff.”

“What do I have to worry about?” CH@NG3M3 asked, in another blue speech balloon.

“Getting unplugged, I guess. Laurence changing his mind and turning you off.”

“Where would you get another pair of eyes?” CH@NG3M3 abruptly dragged the conversation back to the earlier topic, something that happened when it judged they’d reached a dead end. “What kind of eyes would you want to have?”

Something about this conversation gave Patricia an idea: If her parents wouldn’t let her go back to the woods, maybe she could get them to agree to something else? Like maybe she could get a cat. At dinner, Patricia forked steamed kale around her plate while her mom asked what everybody had done to Improve themselves today. Roberta, the perfect straight-A student, always had the best Improvements, like every day she’d aced some crazy-tough assignment. But Patricia was stuck at a school where all you ever did was memorize stuff and fill out multiple-choice ovals, so she had to lie, or else learn something in her spare time. For three or four days in a row, Patricia kept coming up with Improvements that sounded kind of impressive, storing up credit, and then she started mentioning that she wanted to get a cat.

Patricia’s parents disliked animals and felt certain that they would be allergic. But at last, they relented—so long as Patricia promised to do all cat-related labor, and if the cat got sick they wouldn’t have to rush to a vet or anything. “We have to agree in advance that all veterinary care will be scheduled far ahead, in a time window that’s convenient for Roderick and myself,” said Patricia’s mother. “There will be no such thing as a cat-related emergency. Are we in agreement?”

Patricia nodded and crossed her heart.

Berkley was a fluffy black kitten with a huge white stripe on his stomach and a white smudge across his scowly face. (Patricia named him after a cartoonist.) They got Berkley already fixed, out of a litter of kittens from their neighbor, Mrs. Torkelford, and right away Patricia noticed something familiar about him. He kept giving Patricia the stink-eye and running away from her, and after a few days she realized: He must be the grandson, or grandnephew, of Tommington, the cat she’d stranded up a tree when she was little. Berkley never spoke to her, of course, but she couldn’t shake the impression that he had
heard
about her.

Also, even though Roberta had expressed
no
interest in getting a cat beforehand, she wanted to share Berkley. She would hoist Berkley by his little shoulders and carry him up to her bedroom, then close the door. Patricia would hear a pitiful groaning, even over Roberta’s loud music. But the door was locked. And the one time Patricia told her parents she thought Roberta was mistreating the cat, they referred back to the “no cat-related emergencies” clause. All Roberta would say was, “I’m teaching him to play the bongos.”

Patricia wanted to protect Berkley from her sister, but he hissed if Patricia even came close. “Come on,” Patricia kept pleading in her human voice. “You have to let me help you. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to keep you safe.” But the cat fled whenever Patricia approached. He’d taken to hiding in a million nooks and crawl spaces in the spice house, emerging when his bowl was full or he needed the litter box. Roberta had an uncanny ability to know when Berkley was out, and astounding reflexes for scooping him up.

*   *   *

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER
Improvement. After lights-out, Patricia heard yowls that started high and got lower and more tragic, coming from Roberta’s room.

The next day, after school, Laurence came over to Patricia’s house, where he’d gotten used to the musty aromas of old seasonings. The two of them sat in the front parlor, where you could still see the outlines on the wall where spice bins had once hung, and worked on a solution to the problem of Berkley.

“If we could capture the cat, we could rig some kind of protective exoskeleton,” Laurence said.