Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend Read online

  • • •

  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 se
e.

  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.

  XVI

  Manniberg was going to handle it, but he wasn’t at dinner with Shiels and her family, when her mother was in full Inquisition mode:

  “What do you mean a pterodactyl is attending your high school? They’re extinct! How does he even exist?”

  “Well, he does. He showed up one day out of the blue—”

  “And he speaks? He sits at a desk? He takes tests and exams?”

  “He’s in Jonathan’s grade. I think so far his marks have been okay. Nobody’s mentioned—”

  Jonathan spoke up. “He might’ve come to us through a disturbance of the time-space continuum.”

  Their mother glared at him until he returned to his dinner.

  “Science can’t explain everything.” Shiels tried not to sound patronizing. “But the fact is he’s here, he’s delightful, he’s unique.”

  Her mother’s gaze did not indicate a softening of any sort. “This has been going on for how long? And the administration is just now getting around to—”

  “I think it’s fair to say there’s been a settling-in period—”

  The two women in the family kept at it while Jonathan and their dad, though still listening intently, were tucking into the seven-cheese lasagna with Creole garlic and portobello mushrooms.

  “This is the creature you danced with? Who turned your nose purple? When you said he was pretending to be a pterodactyl?”

  “I never said ‘pretended,’ ” Shiels said. “Dad said Pyke thought he was a pterodactyl.”

  “But you didn’t correct him. You let us both continue to blithely assume—”

  “I’m sorry there was confusion,” Shiels said. “But you’re against him simply because of his species orientation,” Shiels said.

  “His what?”

  “He’s different from us. He’s not from our tribe. So you’re against him. You have been from the beginning.”

  “This isn’t the beginning. The beginning, I gather, was some time ago, and yet—”

  “If he were a student of color, you would be all in favor of integrating him,” Shiels said. “If he came from a different country, or had an unusual sexual orientation—”

  “Do not call me a racist, or a sexist, or—”

  “It’s speciesism,” Shiels said simply. “You can’t believe someone from a different species, from a whole different era of evolution, could benefit from a normal high school education. Or could teach us anything—”

  “This is ridiculous!”

  “Is it? I spent half of today cleaning up the gym after Saturday’s dance. And you know who helped me? About a thousand crows. And they were so much more organized, efficient, and pleasant to deal with than any of my own team of so-called volunteers.”

  “Now you are just raving!”

  “Parents never understand!” Shiels said. She clapped her cutlery down. This was so . . . satisfying. To get to say those words.

  “I can hardly wait for this meeting,” Shiels’s father said, and he helped himself to another glass of wine.

  • • •

  “Thank you, folks. Thank you all for coming tonight on short notice,” Manniberg said. The microphone screeched. He had to step back from the podium—and someone in the back, Jeremy Jeffreys, yelled, “Pyke! Pyke!” which got everyone laughing.

  Well, the students laughing. The parents didn’t seem to know what to make of it.

  Pyke was sitting alone onstage beside Manniberg in one of the skinny, wooden orchestra chairs. His wings were folded, his beak was tucked, as if perhaps Manniberg had advised him to stay as small, as unthreatening as possible.

  Shiels was not sitting with her own parents. She preferred to roam an event like this—not that there had ever been an event like this at Vista View. But since she wasn’t speaking, she needed to be free to see, to work the room.

  Sheldon was on the other side of the auditorium, sitting with that same group of cronies he’d exploded umbrellas with some days before—Ron Fornelli and others. Rachel Wyngate. (Why did Rachel Wyngate look like she always belonged wherever she happened to be?)

  Sheldon was texting someone.

  “Yes,” Manniberg said, finding the right distance from the microphone, “this meeting is about a new student we all know as Pyke. If you remember in the fall newsletter, I did make reference to the Vista View Cultural Outreach Program, about how we are embracing many forms of diversity just as a lot of you have asked us to do—”

  A father with a black stubble beard, sitting near the front, yelled, “What does this have to do with a freaking pterodactyl?”

  Pyke raised his beak slightly. He seemed to inflate with the implied threat.

  It was hard for Shiels to take her eyes off him. If I need to, she thought, I will rush the stage and get him out of here.

  (But, no, this would not be the time for any reckless rescue attempts. This meeting was for talking it all through.)

  Pyke looked a little lost, up there without Jocelyne Legault. It was painful for Shiels to realize. Probably Manniberg had warned Jocelyne away too, because of her own purple nose.

  Shiels imagined herself sitting up there beside Pyke. They were on the right side of history, she knew. This might be one of those moments.

  “Pyke, who is a pterodactyl,” Manniberg said, “is right here beside me. He’s a student, he has a name, he has as much right to respect and privacy as anybody else’s children in the school. Let me just say”—his voice was picking up confidence; he could be a strong speaker when moved—“that in a short while I have come to know this young student very well. I am so impressed! He does come from a remarkable background. He brings his own wealth of cultural knowledge and experience—”

  “Where the hell does he come from?” another father yelled. “How sharp are his teeth?”

  Others called out as well. Manniberg smiled gamely. “I will take questions. This i
s meant to be your session. Let me just explain, though, that there are strict privacy regulations, the same ones that protect your child, ensuring that I do not divulge personal information in a public forum like this. So I can’t discuss background except to say Pyke came to us with the proper credentials. The board is behind this initiative, which, frankly, I think is an excellent opportunity to expose all of us to new ideas and ways of—”

  “Would you stop marble-mouthing and just answer the question?” a woman barked. “You sound like a bloody politician!”

  Laughter. Nervous energy snapping in the room.

  “Someone asked about his teeth. Pyke has none.” Manniberg turned to the pterodactyl. “Please, son, if you could just stand up, open your beak . . .”

  Pyke did so. He was being careful not to stretch his wings, not to look frightful.

  “You see, not a biter,” Manniberg said. “He eats in the cafeteria with the other students, with his friends. Just ask any of your kids. I think you’ll find he has integrated quite—”

  “He looks like a freaking monster!” the first dad yelled, the angriest one.

  “I assure you, sir—” Manniberg was starting to lose control of the room. If he’d ever had it. Shiels moved quickly, quietly back to Jeremy Jeffreys.

  “What exactly does he eat?” someone else yelled. “What was all this shrieking business over the weekend?”

  “Jeremy,” Shiels hissed, and pulled the huge boy aside from where he was standing by the back wall.

  “Maybe we need to hear from Pyke himself at this point,” Manniberg said.

  “What?” Jeffreys asked.

  “Get a football. Now!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  Jeffreys was practically twice her size, but he could not stare her down. He was gone in a moment, out to his locker.

  Pyke hop-hipped to the podium. It was hard to see him. At the bottom of the podium was a small box that could be pulled out. Shiels tended to use it to stand on whenever she was speaking in the auditorium. But no one had told Pyke.

  Shiels texted Sheldon: Rescue him now!

  Pyke clicked his beak and shuffled awkwardly in front of everyone. “Hllo hum,” he said. “Zorry, zorry trubbled maker. Hah?”