Flyaway Page 7

  I hand Alan the towel. "So, you do this now instead of going to school ?" I ask as he wipes up the mess and then pours the rest ofthe food into yogurt cups.

  It's summer.

  Well, technically school doesn't get out for two days, but whatever. "You know what I mean."

  "Well, then, yep."

  "Isn't that against the law or something?"

  "Hey, I'm seventeen. As long as I'm working, I don't have to go to school if I don't want to." He hands me one of the cups and a syringe. "I notice you haven't been exactly burning up the halls of old Ballard High, either."

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "You brought it up." He smiles that real smile again. "Hey, how about this? I'll spill my story if you tell me yours."

  "I don't know. Mine's kind of long."

  He shrugs. "We got nothing to do but feed a bunch of birds."

  Truth is, I'm dying to tell someone. Even though Alan is the last person on earth I thought I'd be telling it to, I have a feeling I'm not the only one who's had a rough ride.

  So while I poke the syringe down Tweety Bird's throat, I tell him about the night Aunt Mindy showed up at the apartment. As I dangle a wiggling worm from a pair of tweezers, I tell him about having to stay with her and get tutored by Rick. While I refill a food dish for a couple of noisy crows, I tell him what I saw at Drake's, and last of all, as I use a mister to wet down some swallows, I tell him about Mom going into rehab. I keep expecting him to chime in with some nasty comment, but he doesn't say a word.

  Finally I'm finished. We stare at each other across the room. Then, with a totally straight face, he says, "Sounds like your life just let a bunch of bad farts."

  I open my mouth to give him a hard time, but instead I burst out laughing. "Bad farts, that's good," I say. He laughs too.

  We continue feeding, but every few minutes one of us snorts. I'm actually starting to feel glad Valerie isn't around. But when I get to an injured jay, I stop laughing.

  "Hey," I say, "I can't get this jay to gape."

  "Yeah, that's a tricky one." He comes up next to me and peers into the cage. He's so close that his shoulder touches mine, but this time I don't pull away. He holds one hand over the jay's head and moves his fingers toward his thumb and then away, like a beak opening and closing.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Sometimes a bird will gape for me when I do this. It thinks my hand is its mother's beak."

  Sure enough, the jay opens its mouth wide, and I manage to squirt in a syringe-full of food.

  "That doesn't seem fair. I mean, obviously you're not its mother."

  He looks at me like I'm crazy. "So ? The bird got what it needed, didn't it?"

  "It just seems like you're tricking it."

  "Hey, if we weren't willing to con them a little, half these birds would be dead right now."

  I look around at the cages and incubators. I don't know if you can tell how a bird feels, but I could swear these birds look happy. Or contented, at least, as Valerie would say. They don't seem to remember they ever had mothers.

  As I watch Alan hunched over the jay, opening and closing his big hand some more, I decide maybe I was wrong about him. This Alan seems really different from the guy who treats people like dirt, the one everyone was scared of at school.

  "Okay, it's your turn," I say as I stick the syringe down the jay's throat a second time. "How come you're not in school?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know."

  "Wait a second. I just told you my entire life story."

  He turns to me and the old smirk is back. "I guess you're pretty stupid, then."

  "But you said—"

  "I say a lot of things." His eyes are so cold and hard, he might as well be wearing the sunglasses.

  Talk about bad farts. We avoid each other the rest of the afternoon. When my shift ends at three, I grab my sweater and hurry out the door.

  While I'm waiting for the bus, I check my cell phone. Three missed messages. I'm kind of hoping one will be from the Professor, but they're all from Tonya.

  "Come over, okay?" says the last one. "I really need to talk to you."

  CHAPTER 9

  Tonya's stretched out on the living room couch with her dreads tucked under the hood of her sweatshirt and a can of Mountain Dew in her hand. Her face is even paler than usual.

  She doesn't know how close I came to blowing her off, after what she did to me at the party. But since I can count my friends on the fingers of one hand, I figure it will be easier to make up with her now than hang out by myself all summer. Not to mention that her brother's tight with the Professor.

  "You look like crap, girl," I tell her.

  She gives a weak smile. "You should've seen me this morning. Let's just say for a while there, the toilet bowl was my best friend."

  "Tell me about it."

  "I skipped school so I could get this place cleaned up before Mike gets home tonight."

  She hasn't made much progress. Bottles and plastic cups cover every square inch of the coffee table, potato chip crumbs litter the floor, and an overflowing ashtray balances on the arm of the couch.

  "You think this is bad, you should see the kitchen."

  I plop down next to her. The soles of her white socks are gray, and her feet stink. I can pretty much predict what's going to happen: She'll say she's sorry forty-nine million times, and on the fifty-millionth time I'll forgive her.

  "Come on," I say, "let's get it over with."

  "Get what over with?"

  "You know: 'I'm sorry, I'll never do it again,' and all that."

  She sits up. "But I am sorry. Really, really sorry. I didn't mean to tell Laura, but I was majorly drunk and it sort of came out. I won't do it again, I promise."

  "That's what you said last time."

  "What can I say? I'm a screwup."

  She looks so miserable with her shoulders sagging and the hood of her sweatshirt hiding her face that I feel my anger start to fade a little. I know she wasn't trying to hurt me; she just wanted to impress Laura. And if spreading stories about my bad fart of a life is the only way she can impress somebody, you've got to feel sorry for her.

  But I decide to make her sweat a little. "I don't know if I can forgive you this time."

  She takes a swig of her Mountain Dew. We both stare at the floor. I'm about to say something—maybe crack a joke to break the tension—when Doug bursts into the room in grass-stained gray sweats, hugging a football under one arm.

  He points to the coffee table. "You better get this place picked up, or Mike's going to be pissed."

  "I don't see you doing anything," Tonya says.

  He grins and holds up the football. "Got to go to practice. Have fun."

  "Loser!" Tonya shouts.

  Doug wiggles his eyebrows at me. "That Prof is one crazy dude." Then he leaves, slamming the front door behind him.

  I look at Tonya and shrug. If anyone's crazy, it's Doug.

  "I'll help you clean up," I say.

  Her face brightens for the first time. "Really?"

  "Yeah." I get up and snag a couple of plastic cups. "You got a garbage bag or something?"

  "Does this mean you forgive me, then?"

  "I'm thinking about it."

  We tour the house together, her holding the bag and me tossing in cups, bottles, and cigarette butts. Then we head out to the backyard and start clearing stuff off the deck. Even though it's cool, a late-afternoon sun peeks through the clouds, and Tonya ditches her sweatshirt.

  "My brother's such a royal pain." She holds up an empty beer can like it's a football. "'Gotta go to practice.' What a jerk."

  I go long on the lawn. "Hey, throw me a pass."

  She shakes the dregs of beer onto the grass and then heaves the can at me. I actually catch it. "Go for a touchdown!" she shouts.

  I start running for the deck, but she tackles me and I tumble to the ground. We roll around a little, shoving each other and laughing. I sit up and pull some blades of dry
grass out of my hair.

  "You're not supposed to tackle your own team," I tell her.

  She shrugs and laughs. "Who says I play by NFL rules ?"

  It takes us about an hour to finish cleaning up, and by the time we're done, the house looks better than I've ever seen it. We even reorganize Mike's collection of country CDs, alphabetically by artist.

  "I think we're covered," Tonya says. "Let's go down to my room."

  I've always been jealous of Tonya's bedroom. It's in the basement, and it's got a sparkly ceiling and its own tiny bathroom, just like a Motel 6. We sprawl out on her bed and prop ourselves up on her pillows. The pillowcases smell a little like greasy hair, but I pretend not to notice.

  "So," Tonya says once she's settled, "I heard Cole was all over you last night."

  "According to who?"

  "According to Doug. He also told me the Professor gave you a ride home." She looks over at me. "So, spill it already. Did you guys end up in the back seat or what ?"

  "Like I'm going to tell you."

  "Come on, I won't tell anybody, I promise."

  "Yeah, right."

  "Okay, fine, be that way." She grabs her laptop and logs on to Facebook. I peer over her shoulder; she's making a comment on Laura's wall.

  "So what's the deal? You're hanging out with Laura now?"

  She shrugs. "Sort of."

  Then I get an idea. "Hey, look up Alan Parker."

  Her face screws up like she sucked a lemno. "Alan Parker? What for?"

  "Just look him up, okay?"

  She tries a bunch of different searches, but we can't find him.

  "Maybe he has a screen name," I say.

  "I'd vote for Butt Wipe."

  "Come on, he's not that bad. He works at that bird place I told you about—you know, where I've been volunteering—and he's actually kind of cool."

  "Are you serious? The guy is mean. Remember how he used to hassle Gina?"

  Gina was this special ed kid who smiled at everybody and wore glasses that made her eyes look too big for her face. Alan used to trip her every chance he got, and once he taped a note to her back that said, "Kick me, I'm stupid." Her parents finally transferred her to another school.

  "And you know that thing he wrote all over the building ? About Jeff Taylor?"

  "Yeah." I can still see the words Jeff Taylor is a faggot scrawled across the front of the school in three-foot-high letters.

  "Well, Jeff Taylor really was a faggot. I mean, he's gay. His parents are, like, born-agains or something, and when he saw his thing for guys advertised all over the school like that, he tried to kill himself. That's why Alan doesn't go to Ballard High anymore, in case you didn't know."

  Her words sink to the bottom of my gut like a day-old doughnut. I always knew Alan had a mean streak a mile wide. But it's hard to believe the guy she's talking about is the same guy who taught me how to make a baby bird gape.

  "You should see him with those birds, though."

  "You think he really gives a rip about a bunch of birds ? I bet he's just stuck there, doing community service. Don't kid yourself. Guys like him never change."

  I pretend to agree with her, but inside I'm not so sure. Even though he jerked me around earlier, what sticks in my mind are those few minutes when he actually kidded with me and how he pretended to be a mother jay.

  We give up searching for Alan on Facebook. Tonya shuts down her computer.

  "Hey, want to try something?" she says. She digs around under her mattress and holds up a little plastic bag with a couple of blue pills in it. "Laura says they're awesome."

  "What are they?"

  "Her boyfriend's ADD medication. They're supposed to get you really wired. If we like them, she can get us some more."

  "Here, let me see those."

  She hands me the bag, and I shake the pills into my hand. They're so small and light and such a pretty Easter-egg blue, it's hard to imagine they could do much damage. I bring them close to my face and sniff. They don't smell like medicine. In fact they don't smell like anything at all.

  "Go ahead, take one. It'll be fun."

  I could definitely use a little fun. And Tonya and I have sort of been drifting apart lately; maybe this would be a way to get back with her again. I pinch a pill between my fingers and bring it to my lips, but I can't make myself open my mouth and stick it inside.

  "Come on, take it already."

  I flash on an image of Mom in Drake's window, with her too-thin face and shaking hands. I drop the pill back in the bag. "I don't think so."

  "Fine. Then I will."

  I see the look on Mom's face while she waits for Drake to set her up with a line. Still clutching the bag, I push myself off the bed. "What are you, insane?"

  "What the—?"

  "You don't even know what this stuff is. What if it really screws you up?"

  "Give them here."

  She reaches for the bag, but I hold it over my head. "No way."

  She grabs at my T-shirt. "Give them here, Stevie!"

  I jerk away and dash into the bathroom. She's right behind me, so I shake the bag over the stained toilet bowl and flush the pills down before she can stop me.

  "What did you do that for?"

  "Because I'm your friend. And you should stay away from Laura, because she's not." I toss the empty bag at her.

  "Oh, I get it," she says. "You're jealous."

  I bark out a laugh. "Of that slut?"

  "Don't you call my friend a slut."

  "Try slutty whore, then."

  She narrows her eyes and gives me the finger. "Why don't you just get the hell out of here ?"

  "Fine." I leave her standing in her smelly bathroom and make for the stairs without looking back.

  It's around five, so traffic is crazy. I have plenty of time to sit in the back of the packed bus and go over what happened. I've had fights with Tonya before, but nothing like this. Ever since she started hanging out with Laura, it's like I hardly know her.

  By the time I get off the bus downtown for my transfer, the fact that I haven't eaten is starting to catch up with me. I hit the McDonald's on Third Avenue and order a Quarter Pounder with extra cheese. While I'm chowing down, I decide a movie might get my mind off things, so when I'm finished I hike over to Pacific Place and buy a ticket for some stupid movie I've seen previews for on TV. It's a total waste of money, because all I can do is sit there and think about Tonya and Mom and those little blue pills and crystal meth.

  I get back to Aunt Mindy's about ten-thirty. I'm dying of thirst after that Quarter Pounder, so I head into the kitchen and pour myself a big glass of OJ. Juice splashes onto the counter. Of course Aunt Mindy picks that exact moment to shuffle into the room in her robe and slippers.

  "I hope you were planning to clean that up," she says. She tries to hand me a sponge. "And by the way, it's after ten. Where have you been?"

  I turn away. "Don't even start, okay? I had a fight with my best friend, and I miss Mom and I'm not going to see her all summer, and..." I can't get anything else out past the knot in my throat.

  Her frown disintegrates. "Oh, sweetie, I'm sorry. What was I thinking? Of course this is hard for you. It's hard for me too." She hugs me from behind. Her bathrobe is nubby against my arms. I close my eyes and just for a moment, I imagine it's Mom holding me.

  Then she says, "But I'm not going to put up with you disappearing like that. Next time at least call and let me know where you are."

  I unwind her arms and step away. I can't pretend anymore. She's so not Mom.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hi Mom,

  It's me, Stevie. Sorry I didn't write sooner, but I was pretty sure you were, mad at me for talking to Aunt Mindy. Believe me, most of the time I wish I'd kept my big mouth shut. I mean, I'm the one who has to put up with her for the whole summer now. But it will be worth it if you get better.

  She says the place you're in is nice and that it's real close to the ocean. Can you hear the waves from your room? I know
you'd love that. But I hope you don't love it too much, cuz I definitely want you to come back!

  When you get home, let's make popcorn with extra butter and watch WWE Smackdown. I could never do that with Aunt Mindy. She'd have a heart attack if I got butter on her precious white couch. Plus she likes to watch Great Performances on PBS (gag!).

  I miss you Mom. Write soon so I know you're OK and that you're not mad at me.

  Love,

  Stevie

  I read the letter aloud. It took me over an hour to write, but it still sounds like something a third-grader would come up with. I think about ripping it up and starting over, but I've already done that four times and it didn't help. Besides, it's been two weeks since Mom left for rehab, and I can't see waiting much longer. So I fold the lined paper, making sharp creases with my fingernails, and slip it under my pillow.

  Aunt Mindy left for work hours ago, but the smell of her coffee haunts the house. Outside the guest room window, puffy clouds hover in the sky and the Olympic Mountains peek over the evergreens. A crow caws from a nearby telephone wire.

  My cell phone rings. I'm thinking maybe it's Tonya calling to say she's sorry, but it's the Professor. Even though I know he can't see me, I suck in my stomach and run my fingers through my hair.

  "Hey," I say, "where'd you get my number?"

  He laughs. "I have my sources."

  It had to be Tonya, since she's the only one who knows it besides Aunt Mindy. I wonder if she told him about our fight or the blue pills, but I'm not about to ask.

  "What's up?" I say.

  "A couple of us are heading down to Carkeek Park. Want to come?"

  I glance at the clock. I'm supposed to meet Rick at the library in twenty minutes. Thrillsville. We've been meeting for three weeks now, and I still don't know what he's talking about half the time. And of course, I still haven't done that book report.