When I get to the house, Mel is bad. She’s more than pale. You can see the spidery veins in her skin. Mom brings the big plastic bowl that we affectionately call the barf bucket. Just the sight of it makes me ill. Mel gets in the car and cranks up the radio to a station with a guy whining about how bad he wants to jump his girlfriend. Mom says, “Isn’t there anything else?”
Mel looks out the window with the bowl bouncing on her knees. No one answers.
I drive as slowly as I can so I won’t jiggle her. The road is bumpy to the clinic. Frost heaves.
She says, “If you drive any slower I’ll have the baby before we get there.”
I speed up. Mel rolls down the window and the icy air slices through the car.
“For heaven’s sake,” says Mom.
Mel hangs her head out the window.
Mom says, “Can we at least turn that music off? That kind of racket would have made my head fall off when I was pregnant.”
“I’m not you,” says Mel.
Right as we pull into the parking lot of the clinic, Mel heaves into the bowl. I coast over to the curb. Mel lowers the bowl, rubs her mouth with her sleeve, and says, “That was refreshing.”
She puts the bowl on the seat and steps onto the curb, like she’s leaving me a loaf of hot bread. Mom gets out too. Mom looks at me with the bowl. “Are you going to survive that?”
“I’ll live,” I say. “How long are you going to be?”
“We’ll do the best we can,” says Mom, stiffening. “But you’re just going to have to be flexible.” She takes Mel’s tiny arm. The two of them walk up the stairs and leave me with the bowl.
If I wasn’t a germaphobe this would be bad, but for me this bowl might as well be filled with the Ebola virus. Just the smell of it is going to kill me. Being flexible is one thing, balancing a loaded barf bucket while driving is a whole other deal. I try to wedge the bowl against the seat so I can drive to the bushes. It sloshes.
I reach for the hand sanitizer in my glove box. I’m out. How can I be out?
Suddenly I hear my phone ring from inside my purse. I have to touch my purse with germ-covered hands, but I dive in after the sound anyway. I drag out the phone and say, “Hello?”
“Is this Myra Morgan?” says a voice as crisp as starched napkins.
“Yes.” I have no idea who this is, but she sounds like she thinks she’s important.
“This is Bobbie Hunsaker. Head ranger at the Great Salt Lake State Marina. I understand you are looking for employment.”
“Yes,” I say. The smell of the bowl is blinding me, but I try to focus. Head ranger?
“Would you be available for an interview Saturday morning after your class meets?”
Why does she know about my class? “That would be terrific.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting you.”
Just as I am trying to find a way to ask her how she knows so much about me, there is a tapping at my window. Much to my horror, it’s a police officer with surprisingly hairy knuckles. I have no idea what I’ve done. I roll down the window.
He starts to talk and then makes a gagging face. He stares at the barf bucket. “You’re in the red zone, young lady. That’s not allowed.” He looks at the bucket again. “Unless you need me to move the car for you.”
I say, “I’ll move.” Then I remember I still have a phone at the side of my face.
“Sounds like you’re busy,” says Bobbie Hunsaker. Her voice is pressed and puckered.
I look at the policeman but answer the phone. “Sort of.”
“Well, see you Saturday?”
“I’ll be there,” I say.
I close the phone as the policeman disappears into my rear view mirror.
I turn the car on using as few fingers as possible. It’s important to contain the germs. I tell myself I’m two minutes from a bathroom where I can lose the bowl. I can do this.
GERMS BAD BUT REMOVABLE
. Then I look down at my dashboard and realize I’m almost out of gas. The policeman sits in his car and watches me pull away from the curb.
I drive in circles around the parking lot until the policeman leaves. Then I slowly pull over to a garbage can and put the entire evil bowl into the can. It makes a loud spilling sound. Normally I would lose my mind at the thought that I have filled this can with a repulsive liquid that will probably never be washed out and that I have wasted a perfectly good plastic bowl. But not today. Today I’m an illegally parking, bad daughter with barf on her hands.
I know I’m going to catch it from my mom later when she can’t find the bowl, but I don’t care. I really don’t. As I drive away from the garbage, I feel better, and it’s not just because the stench is gone.
I roll down the windows with my pinkie finger, which I’m pretty sure is clean, and let the fresh air into the car. Maybe doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is better than doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. At least it feels that way. Now all I need is a gas station, hand sanitizer, a thousand dollars, and a brilliant research proposal.
I’ll start with the gas station.
16
Down Feathers:
The short fluffy ones that keep birds warm.
It’s late, really late, when Carson sneaks down to see me. I am reading about the Galápagos cormorants’ mating dance, which starts with them swimming around each other with their necks in a swan-style S, then taking themselves up onto the shore and interlocking their necks and making these low guttural sounds in their throats. Then they twirl around until they get riled up enough to go for it. For birds it sounds kind of, well, you know—so I nearly jump out of my sleeping bag when I hear Carson’s voice behind me. “Are you down here because you’re mad at Melyssa?”
Once I get my wits back I say, “I’m not mad.”
The truth is I’ve spent most of the night (up until I was reading bird porn) in a frozen rage at my mom and sister. I know it makes more sense to hate Erik, but it’s harder. There are so many good days with Erik I have to forget. And part of me wonders, in a deeply ironic way, if he did dump me because I’m destined to get pregnant without a permit. My mom (not that he knows about her) and my sister both did. Maybe I am from a long line of knocked-up women and I don’t even know it. Maybe my DNA has an extra baby-making bump.
Carson says, “You can sleep in my room. It’s warmer.”
“I like it down here.” I pull Carson under the blanket with me. We kick our toes around until both our legs are covered. We look up at the plastic green stars I thumbtacked to the bare beams. “I’ve been reading this cool book about a place where animals aren’t afraid of people. Even the birds.”
“Is it real? Or in your story?”
“Both. They have birds and lizards that swim.”
“Dinosaurs?”
“Pretty close.”
“Can we go there?”
“It’s real but it’s out in the middle of the ocean. For a long time only missionaries and pirates went to these islands. Even now it’s pretty hard to get there.”
“That sucks,” says Carson.
“Don’t say ‘sucks,’” I say.
Upstairs I can hear my parents talking. Occasionally I hear my dad’s low tones, but mostly my mother’s wordless voice cuts through the floor until the furnace goes on and drowns them out.
Carson gloms on to me. “I miss you.” His voice is sleepy and warm.
“You can’t miss me. I’m right here.”
“You seem far away.”
I look up at my green stars and thaw a little. “Do you want to sleep down here tonight?”
He twists onto his side and then rolls back over again.
He rubs his toes against my shins. They are like ten little icicles. “Do you want to go up to your own bed?”
“Yeah.” He gets up to go. He’s delirious. “Are you going to stay down here forever?”
“Just until things settle down.”
“Settle down to what?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “To something else.”
“Don’t leave, okay?”
“Who said I was leaving?” I say.
After Carson’s gone I turn out the light and close my eyes. I’ve decided the dark is the worst place after a breakup. In the dark I can see the past. I can remember what it used to be like to have someone hold me. I can see Erik leaning back against his truck, shivering in the cold, so I could wear his coat while we stood in my driveway and talked. What I loved about Erik at those wonderful moments was not who he was but how he made me feel. When I was with him it seemed like anything could happen.
I guess something did happen, just not what I wanted.
I force myself to think of cormorants. I figure that will put me to sleep at least. I imagine them twirling, neck and neck. But soon my mind drifts, and I see the thin brown birds standing on the turquoise shore, drying their tiny flightless feathers in the ocean wind, so far from the pirate ship marooned on Deadendia’s sad shores.
17
Spur:
A bone that pokes out of birds’ feet, for fighting dirty.
Erik calls at five on Thursday night.
I look at the number. I let it ring four times. Why is he calling? Five times. I can’t stand it. I pick up.
He says, “Sorry to bother you.”
“You aren’t bothering me,” I say. Long awkward pause.
“I think I left one of my track sweatshirts over at your house. The one with the pirate on it.”
“Oh,” I say. Pirates are Cyprus High’s mascot, but suddenly the guy with the knife in his teeth seems like the perfect emblem for Erik.
“Yeah, well, can you bring it to school on Monday? We’re wearing ’em for a meet on Tuesday.”
I imagine myself giving back the sweatshirt in front of the entire track team, including Ariel. I say, “Or you could just come get it.”
“I don’t need it until Tuesday. Just bring it to school,” he says.
Don’t be a doormat, don’t be a doormat, don’t be a doormat
. Returning clothes to your rumor-spreading ex in the hall is worse than being a doormat. I say, “I’ll bring it in my car. You can come grab it after school.” That’s reasonable. Unemotional.
There’s another awkward pause. “It’s not going to make a difference,” he says. “I wish you’d stop trying to make this into something.”
I’m stunned. “You called me.”
“For my sweatshirt,” he says.
“It’ll be on the curb. Next to the trash cans.” I clamp my phone shut.
In five minutes I have his rotten pirate sweatshirt in an apple box with every other piece of Erik junk I can find. Stuffed animals, a T-shirt that never fit right, dance pictures, photo booth pictures, cinnamon gum, dried flowers, pink socks, two pairs of earrings, matchbooks, and three boxes of stale, crappy chocolate. I unpair the socks.
I walk out to the curb. I stand there for a second and then I drop the box. Not by accident. I open my arms and let it fall. Which is utterly cool until the box hits the ground and a picture frame breaks and sends a shard of glass flying past my head, just missing my face. I have nearly blinded myself with a dance photo.
I get a broom and a dustpan. Then I sweep up the nearly invisible flakes of glass and dump them back into the box on top of the sweatshirt.
The next morning my dad goes out for the paper and comes back with Ms. Miller’s Galápagos DVD. “I found this on the driveway. You know anything about it?” He tosses it on the kitchen table.
I stare at the dirt-smudged movie case. “A friend from my study group must have dropped it off,” I say. “I’m writing a paper about the Galápagos.”
“That’s pretty careless. I could have run it over.”
I wish I’d thrown Erik’s stuff into the street.
In biology we talk about parasites. Which is about as repulsive as it gets. I answer three questions in a row about built-in defense systems and freak Ms. Miller out. Erik answers two questions and he gets one wrong. She sticks her hands in her lab coat and stares at me. “Myra Morgan, you’ve been holding out on me.”
Who knew there were 342 parasites that can live on or in humans? Me, that’s who. Because after Erik tossed the DVD on my driveway I snuggled up to my biology textbook and studied my brains out. I’m no genius, but I can memorize. And I’ve been typing Erik’s essays up since we started dating. So I guess the last nineteen months aren’t a total loss.
After class Jonathon asks me if I want to go see
Dead Man’s Daughter
. “You can practically smell it.”
I say, “Thanks. But I have work to do.”
18
Niche:
When a bird finds just the right place so it won’t starve or get munched.