Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend Read online

  She hadn’t tried to injure her mother.

  Had she?

  She hadn’t been trying to defeat her so utterly as to send her into a medicated stupor like this.

  Had she?

  • • •

  Shiels retreated down the hall to her own room. At last, reunited with her phone, she saw that indeed Sheldon had been texting her during Melanie Mull’s rally for Pyke outside the police station. One text even included the word “sori,” as in, sori i doubted u. huge crowd. portant 2B here.

  And then: what r u doing?

  And then: cant bleve u just did that.

  And then, much later: where r u? have u seen Pyke? whats the word?

  She phoned him, and he picked up even before the ring—which used to happen, a lot, before things fell apart.

  Why had they fallen apart? Because, she realized, she had not been paying attention. Just flinging doors on her way out.

  “The word is bad,” she said, by way of greeting. “I saw him, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. Oh, Sheldon, he’s broken, he just looks folded and stepped on. We have to do something right away. I don’t know that he’ll last the night. It’s that bad!”

  “Where are you now?” he asked. She imagined where he was: in the arms of Rachel Wyngate. She almost blurted, “That was pretty fast moving there, mister!” She almost said, “Glad to know I can be replaced in about fifteen minutes.” She almost yelled, “I saw you with her! At the rally you practically told me not to go to!”

  And the voices in her head argued—He already told you he was going with Rachel. . . . But it makes a difference when you actually see people together. It isn’t real until you see it.

  It was real all right. Shiels felt the sadness tighten like a shrinking ball in the shell of her rib cage.

  “I’m at home,” she said. “The police didn’t want me. Except to know about my sex life.”

  “What?”

  She told him about the questioning by Inspector Brady.

  “So—you fantasize about Pyke?” Sheldon said.

  Oh, for God’s sake!

  “I told you already,” she said. “I’ve had dreams. We all have. It isn’t real. What’s real is that we have to get him out of there. But I don’t know how to do it. I’d like to rally the crows somehow, but the cops are keeping him in a windowless room—”

  “You are practically raving right now,” he said. “Rally the crows?”

  And she remembered: He hadn’t been running at the track in the early morning when the crows had come en masse and lined the fence to watch her; he hadn’t been in the gymnasium to clean up after Autumn Whirl, when the crows had rescued her and Pyke from hours and hours of thankless toil; he hadn’t even been at the football game when the crows had swarmed the stands in the sucking wind.

  “It won’t work anyway,” Shiels said. “I’m not crazy. I’ve just seen some things you haven’t.”

  And in saying this, she realized they had been inseparable, one mind practically, two bodies, and now they were ordinary again. Separate and alone.

  Well, Sheldon wasn’t alone.

  “The media have picked up on the rally,” Sheldon said. “It’s a pretty unusual story, a pterodactyl football player ending up in jail. Maybe if we can raise enough of a stink—”

  “Yes,” Shiels said. They talked about it, the stink, the attention they might be able to garner in a short time, if they caught the world’s attention, if the right people became aware. And as they talked, she thought about that night she had spent with Sheldon, after the wrangle dance. In his room, in his bed, skin to skin. How he hadn’t tried to take advantage, yet . . . They had simply held each other, and breathed together. He must have held her while she was sleeping.

  Oh, how she liked the idea of that, falling asleep in someone’s arms tonight, if somehow sleep were even possible. Yet most of her yearned to burst out of the house and do something superhuman to free Pyke immediately!

  But even if she could have flown, she couldn’t penetrate the walls of the city jail.

  Even if she had had all the strength in the world, she was not going to be able to put Pyke back together. Not quickly. Not in one magnificent gesture the way she longed to.

  This night, at this moment, there was nothing she could do but surrender herself to the slow crawl of time and fate. What was going to happen was going to happen.

  Still, it was a comfort to talk to Sheldon, to hear his voice.

  • • •

  Shiels did not think she would sleep, yet the moment her head hit the pillow, she was back in that dark little observation room, Inspector Brady beside her in his rumpled suit with his garlicky breath. (Why had she not noticed his breath when she’d been so close to him for real? His breath now stank up her dream.)

  Pyke was folded, fossilized in the corner, but she could see now that he was still breathing. His little broken chest expanded and fell, somehow discernible despite the smudging of the glass (she had to strain to see, as if through fog). His dark eyes rolled open, but he couldn’t see her, she was trapped in her other reality. (Was that what it was?)

  She placed her hands on the glass. All her yearning seeped through her arms and out her palms into the dark prison room where Pyke was being held. Drip, drip went the leaky faucet. There seemed to be a flood in the room above. Water now was streaming down the walls.

  She yearned at him, and yearned, and he stirred.

  He looked at where she was in her separate reality.

  Could he see through the mirror somehow?

  The water rose around him. It was cold, and stank, too—sewage water, she came to understand. A hundred times worse than the reek from Brady.

  Sewage water was rising up from the caverns below the city jail, and it was only a matter of time before Pyke was drowned. She started to swim—she was in one of the caverns now, trying to follow the signs, but sediment in the water was slowing her down. LIBRARY, one of the signs said. STADIUM. Where was the jail?

  Where was Pyke’s cell?

  The water rose, and it was warm now with sludge, and she was able to breathe somehow, to look around. But no openings appeared. It was as if she were under the sea ice now, strangely warm, looking up, looking for the hole . . . but instead of rising to the light, she sank farther, into the mud at the bottom.

  And then she needed to fold herself, to become quite small, so she wouldn’t be found. Brady was looking for her. He had a clipboard full of unasked questions. So she tucked her head under her arm, she wrapped herself with her wing, she pulled the mud over her and burrowed down, down, ever deeper, so she would blend in.

  XXIII

  Shiels awoke before the sun. She seemed to know that the thing to do was to don her yellow shoes, to bundle up and go to the track. She wasn’t sure why, exactly. When she slipped out the front door—the very one she’d unwittingly jammed against her mother’s foot—she had a sense of passing from one part of her life to the next.

  But it was just a door. She closed it silently.

  A thin coating of ice had formed overnight, slickening the pavement. It would probably melt by midmorning, but she wanted to feel her body in motion, her blood surging with warmth, her feet on the ground traveling some distance, even if in circles.

  Maybe the crows would be there, maybe there would be a council of crows, maybe, somehow, the crows would know what to do, how to pry Pyke from the clutches of an uncaring law. Or maybe . . . Shiels would see Jocelyne Legault. The blur of yellow feet, the bouncing ponytail. The reminder of how this had all begun.

  Shiels had to be careful of where she placed her feet. She had to keep her mind on what exactly she was doing as she ran.

  Now, she thought.

  Be here now.

  Be aware of the slope of the road. Of how much weight sank on what part of the foot, of where to keep her eyes. She had to get there in one piece.

  It was enough, for now, to place one foot after the other.

  The cold air stung her
cheeks. But it felt good to be moving. The illusion of progress, she thought.

  No—one foot after the other. Don’t race ahead. Her legs were tired, they did not want to run. But they could, just through will. The fatigue would go away.

  Tree branches fingered blackly into the sky. The light of morning was coming on. The ice clung better to the piles of leaves on the side of the road than to the black pavement.

  She crossed into the school grounds. No Jocelyne Legault circling the track. No crows anywhere. The world was quiet, still, except for Shiels’s own breathing, and the clump, clump of her feet hitting the earth.

  She would like to be lighter of foot, she thought. Jocelyne Legault, when she ran, almost seemed to float above the ground. You couldn’t hear her unless you were terribly close. No wasted energy.

  I waste a lot of energy, Shiels thought.

  But it felt good to be alone, to circle the track slowly, on her own terms, to feel her body steaming in the cold morning air.

  • • •

  Then, on her way home, Shiels saw Jocelyne Legault standing at the corner of Roseview and Vine just the way Sheldon used to before everything fell apart. She was in a turquoise ski jacket with a scarf pulled around the lower part of her face. Shiels stopped jogging as she came upon her.

  “My uncle is a lawyer. He is representing Pyke,” Jocelyne said. “But the judge has set bail at ninety thousand dollars.”

  The champion runner’s white hands were ungloved, balled into small fists. Her face looked rumpled, pulled from the bottom of a drawer.

  “You’ve already met with the judge?” Shiels said.

  “It was my fault,” Jocelyne said. “I told Pyke to talk to the police. He should have just flown home and been done with all of us. But I wanted him to stay.”

  Jocelyne’s eyes looked like the tired blue of a bright day leaking into cloud.

  “Where . . . where is home for Pyke?” Shiels asked.

  “Somewhere they’ll never reach him,” Jocelyne said. “I don’t know where. It was his choice to come here. He wanted to make contact. After all these years. My family doesn’t have enough money.”

  For the bail. Shiels completed the thought. Jocelyne was talking to her now because her family did have the money.

  “You love him,” Jocelyne said sadly. She was standing unnaturally still, as if her words could not come out otherwise. “Everyone knows that. Pyke . . . has feelings for you, too. You could help him. You have to help him, Shiels!”

  Jocelyne had never said her name before. Shiels was aware of the sharp wind on her face now that her body was cooling down. She stopped herself from shuffling from foot to foot. Pyke too would have stayed extremely still.

  “I saw him in the jail last night,” Shiels said. “I thought he was dead. He was squished into the corner like . . .”

  The thought hung. Jocelyne Legault did not blink, and Shiels knew that she, too, had been brought into the spying room by Inspector Brady. Probably Brady had interrogated her on her sex life with the pterodactyl too.

  Shiels didn’t like to think about that.

  “Let me see,” Shiels said. “Maybe I can get the money together.”

  • • •

  Shiels’s father was in his study riding his exercise bike. He had his tablet open. He was listening to something on his earbuds. Maybe Brahms. He often retreated with Brahms on the weekends.

  Shiels did not wait for him to completely unplug.

  “I would like to use my education fund to save someone’s life,” she said.

  The strains of something classical—Mozart, perhaps, not Brahms?—leaked weakly from the tiny speakers now dangling near the spinning wheel of the bike. “Save who?” her father said. “The pterodactyl? That wrecked that boy’s arm?”

  “Pyke is a living link to a world that existed millions of years ago. He chose to come here, to make contact with us. Without bail he’ll die in a soulless cell being watched over by sadistic guards. We have to save him.”

  Her father slowly stopped cycling.

  “You know this—how?”

  “He has touched a number of us directly, so we know. We just know it. Dad—how many pterodactyls are we going to meet in our lives? This is important!”

  He mopped his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “It’s your education money, Shiels. You can’t throw that away. You can’t trade your future for some . . . killer who is just going to fly off anyway.”

  “He’s not a killer!” Shiels had to move now, to throw her hands in the air. “It’s my fault. I practically put him in that game. He just defended himself. And he won’t fly off. For one thing his wings are broken. I saw him in the jail. He could no more fly away than some fossil you chipped off a rock.”

  Her father’s eyes wavered. He could never deny her anything, not really. He loved her. This she knew.

  “He is the most precious ambassador we have ever had from the distant past. You can’t turn your back on him. We need to save his life now, bring him home, where he can be cared for . . . by two physicians. You are a doctor, Dad. You took an oath!”

  His expression softened. She did respect what he did, what a doctor could do and be. Maybe . . . maybe she even gave him the impression that she might after all pursue medical studies, that she was having a change of heart.

  She wouldn’t rule it out. Whatever it took to get Pyke free from that jail.

  “Your mother—” he began to say, in his old weak away.

  “Mom will be fine with this,” Shiels said quietly. “You will be too. Pyke is an extraordinary person. We might not see his like again for a million years. We have to do this, Dad. We have to,” she breathed.

  • • •

  “Absolutely not,” Shiels’s mother said. She was standing in the kitchen in her black plastic foot cast, making a cup of tea. Hardened snowflakes—they almost looked like hail—pecked against the back picture window.

  Shiels shifted her stance, braced herself.

  “You will not use your education money for anything other than school,” Shiels’s mother said. “Don’t even think of it. Your father and I have signing authority. He would never agree to it.”

  Until I turn eighteen, Shiels thought. In February. You have signing authority until then.

  Her mother kept talking. “I will never agree to it.” She thumped her broken foot against the floor, then winced, in case Shiels had not gotten the message.

  “They are killing him in prison,” Shiels said softly.

  “You do not risk your future,” her mother said. “Not for a boy. Certainly not for a pterodactyl. Not now. Not ever. As a parent I will not let you.”

  Shiels’s mother pulled tight the collars of her bathrobe.

  “There is very little risk,” Shiels said. “We will get the money back. Pyke is not going anywhere. His wings are broken.”

  “No.” Her mother’s dark eyes did not waver.

  “We can nurse him back to health here,” Shiels said. “You’re both doctors. This will be the perfect environment.”

  “No.”

  “What are you so afraid of?” Shiels felt calm inside, as if somehow every no was going to turn into a yes eventually.

  The snow rapped harder against the window. Winter was starting, the real thing. Despite the furnace burning downstairs, despite her warm clothing, Shiels felt the grip of the cold slipping under her skin.

  “I’m afraid of you butting your head against the world,” her mother said. “You move so fast, your eyes are fixed to the ground, you have no idea what you’re walking into. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  • • •

  They looked made for each other, somehow, sitting in the coffee shop booth, squeezed together: Sheldon and Rachel Wyngate. Shiels would not have been able to imagine having such a thought just weeks ago. Yet here she was sitting opposite the adorable couple. Sheldon looked rumpled, unshaven, sleepy-eyed, vibrating almost. The same old mismatched clothes, his trench coat and his blue cable-k
nit French intellectual sweater and the bright pink shirt underneath. He had an extra crackle to him.

  And Rachel was rounded in the way she cuddled against him. Had they just slept together? It was possible.

  Her eyes were sunny-morning blue. And she had taken no care whatsoever with her hair. It was simply perfect in a soft-focus-magazine-ad sort of way. She looked like she’d been lying in a cornfield in her blue jeans with a shirtless perfumed wonder boy feeding her strawberries.

  Anything was possible, Shiels thought. That was how wild the world was.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet me,” Shiels said, somewhat formally. She would never have said that just to Sheldon. But this was Sheldon and Rachel, a different beast altogether. “We have a small window of time. A couple of days at the most, I would think. If we’re going to crowdsource, it has to happen in a heartbeat.”

  She said it to Sheldon, had her eyes fixed on him. It was hard not to think of all the many projects they had worked on together, those memories fused together into one hot lump of feeling. But Rachel was the one who answered.

  “He’s the only pterodactyl student to ever be sent to jail,” she said. “So we have novelty on our side. This could reach contagion, and if we just got one, two, five dollars from every person . . .” Shiels could tell by their postures that they were holding hands under the table.

  They had fused together. It had happened in an eyeblink.

  “We need a video for that,” Shiels said. “If it’s going to go viral.” She had already run through the possibilities in her head—Vhub footage of Pyke first arriving at Vista View, of the famous wrangle dance with Shiels herself, of some parts of the football game. It was all supposed to stay private, but certainly the police had seen it. The regular media was hungering for content. Sometimes the rules could be broken judiciously for a good cause. “But we have a problem,” she said.

  Did she have to spell it out? Sheldon knew already where this was going, but Rachel Wyngate, with her perfect skin, her athletic shoulders, her wide-eyed look, was still miles behind.

  “As soon as we ask for money,” Sheldon said, “all anyone is going to see will be Pyke slashing that guy’s arm.”