Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (10 page)

Pyke raised his beak at a certain angle, he sang out something so old and bloodboiling yet soft and beguiling . . . He was beguiling. How did he do that? He never left the stage. He stayed where he was, hopped this way and that—anyone else who hopped like an oversize crow would just be laughed at, but when Pyke hopped . . . sentences unraveled. Thoughts spilled out like someone had reached in and pulled your intestines and you watched them, feeling . . . a certain pleasure?

Feeling something.

Feeling everything.

Everything came out on the dance floor.

Nobody was sitting. Nobody was standing around. They were wriggling earthworms together, earthworms on steroids. Was this what drugs were like?

Sheldon had as much as said he had tried drugs. He had said this was better than drugs.

He was wriggling in front of her, and she had to hold his face still, to climb him and wrap her legs around his torso . . . oh, his bony thin torso, her aching tired legs . . . didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

They kissed to the bottom of the endless ocean.

Everyone was kissing. As far as Shiels could see. Pyke screamed, the band played, Jocelyne Legault melted onstage and regrouped, melted and regrouped. Was that dancing?

Was anyone dancing?

The whole world was melting molten red hot wet and flowing . . . How long did Sheldon carry her?

Who knew he was this strong?

“Why don't we . . .”

Carried her around like he owned her. Her legs locked. Pressed in the seething mass.

Practically public.

“Why don't we . . .”

She couldn't stop kissing him down to the bottom of everything.

How deep did it go?

How deep did it . . .

How?

Blue walls. Everything
still. Light.

The slant of the attic, just like Sheldon's room.

Blue.

Sleeping on her stomach with her jaw twisted into the pillow. Like she was trying to eat it. For breakfast.

Shiels was ravenously hungry.

Where was this dream?

A typewriter, ancient clacker, nailed to the wall just like in . . .

And Don Quixote—Picasso's squiggles—on the other wall, the non-slanty one.

All familiar.

She blinked. Doesn't happen very often in a dream, that she was aware of. Blinking.

“Oh shit,” she said. Her throat gritted with sandpaper.

Sheldon raised his unshaven face from the mound of blankets. His nose was still ridged purple. “Good morning to you, too!”

“Oh shit. Oh shit!” she said, and she grabbed the sheet instinctively and drew it to her. Wrapped herself like a big wad of refuse.

“Are you cold?”

He was in his vintage Astrolab T-shirt and what looked like train engine boxer shorts, his boy hairs poking out of everything.

“How did I get here?” It felt like she had fur growing on her teeth.

Pterodactyl fur?

Even as he said, “You're kidding, right?” she remembered the dream of it—hauling him here as the night broke up, the comical pull-grab dance up the darkened stairs. Of his house.

Did that all happen?

“Are your parents here?” She looked out the window. It was a two-story drop to the back garden. How would she ever get out?

“I believe that's them downstairs cooking breakfast.” He knew she was torqued, could see it in her face—he must have—yet he still leaned as if she might be inclined to kiss him.

Or more.

Bacon and end-of-the-world eggs. Shiels could smell them now.

“You are going to create a diversion.” She could barely breathe, her brain was working so fast. “So I can get out. They don't know I'm here, do they?”

Sheldon was balanced midlean between his rejected advance and this other emotion he seemed to be having. What? He wanted her to saunter down the stairs and have Sunday breakfast with his freaking parents?

“They'll be cool with it,” he said. He was holding his teeth stiff.

Like he both did and didn't expect this from her.

Had they . . . Was she . . .

Sweet flying murder of crows. One crisis at a time, please!

Why couldn't she remember anything?

“Diversion, Sheldon,” she said. As if she had to keep things elementary. She reached for her clothes—her bra tied to the bedpost, her pants inside out. Her shirt and sweater twisted like a rope hanging from the corner of his grade school desk. With each movement she kept the sheet wrapped around her.

“It's not as if I haven't seen you.” Sheldon's hair was a sat-upon loaf of bread.

“I need to get out of here.” Her voice a feeble scratch. Had she really spent most of the night screaming her head off?

Had she really just gone to bed with Sheldon?

She felt stretched and raw . . . down there. Was it . . .

No. Sheldon would never drug her. She couldn't believe it. It was something else. Pyke. The head-banging churn of Autumn Whirl.

The mother of all crashes.

“Should I go out the back . . . or the front?”

She was dressed now. Sort of. Nothing fit anymore. It felt like she'd walked into the Salvation Army and randomly pulled things off the shelves.

“You should comb your hair and wash your face and walk proudly with me into the kitchen and say good morning to Eugene and Nancy. They already love you, you know that. They have been asking me, in their way, if we have slept together yet. They aren't against it.”

Shiels looked at him dubiously.

“They aren't!” he said, so loud that she shushed him.

Dear, stupid, deluded, dense-brained boy. He looked like he was going to be hurt.

“This isn't the way I want to do it,” she said. The kitchen was in the rear of the house. The stairs led straight down to the front door. That would be best. One of the advantages of living in a shoe box.

“How do you want to do it?” He was trying so hard to keep the hurt out of his voice. To just be Sheldon—never angry. Never surprised. Rolling with everything.

She kissed him, to get him to shut up, to not be so . . .

To get her one step closer to out the door.

“You might want to wash up,” she said to him, and she touched his purple-ridged nose. That look! My God. “I'm not face-raking you,” she said.

So furry in the mouth. They both were.

“You keep saying that to me.” Dangerous voice. He was looking at her with weird eyes. “You're embarrassed,” he said. “To be with me. To be . . .
with me
.”

“No. No. Sheldon . . .”

“It never has been about me, has it?”

“Sheldon—”

“It's about you. And now it's about you and Pyke.”

Where was all this coming from? How did she ever end up here, in this freaking moment?

From the kitchen—the house was so small, they could just yell—Sheldon's mother called out, “Breakfast is ready, dear!”

A strangulated, broken silence.

“Just trust me, please,” Shiels said. “I'm not face-raking you.”

•  •  •

Outside now. For once a plan had unfolded properly. She had just walked out the front door, hopefully unseen and unheard. Wearing the yellow shoes, it was almost as if she
had
to run, or at least try. What time was it? She was too tired to check her phone. But her parents never slept in. They would be in their cozy twin flannel dressing gowns staring dreamily into their locally crafted pottery mugs of fair trade organic coffee with the
Times
burning brightly on their respective screens: New York for her mother, London for her father. The sun would be flooding in from the east window.

Had they checked her room? Probably not.

Her legs creaked like they were made of wood.

(Had she really just ruined things with Sheldon? Because she couldn't face his parents at breakfast?)

Maybe if she slipped through the front door at home . . .

Jolt, jolt, jolt went her feet.

(It would be all right. Of course it would be. After all this had blown over.)

She didn't have her key. Probably the door was still locked.

(So why was she shaking? Why did her insides feel coated with ice?)

She walked. Too much to think about. Last night . . . last night was one of her weird dreams of late, but come to life. She remembered the shrieking, remembered wrapping herself around Sheldon, being carried around.

She remembered it as one endless kiss.

They must've done it. At Sheldon's house. In his bed. They'd been too molten not to have done it. Sheldon was a prince but he was not superhuman. He would have done it.

She would've throttled him if he hadn't.

So he had done it.
They
had done it.

Finally.

And it had been late, and they had been drunk—drunk on something. She couldn't even remember it.

She'd done it blacked out.

She'd missed her own party.

God, God, God, God.

What did God have to do with it?

And God said: Thou shalt use a condom, because if not, you'll become rotund with child and become a teenage mother, bottom wiper, and human milk dispenser.

And the Lord God said: Teenagers who do it while unconscious do not deserve to be student-body chair, much less be considered for a personal interview with Lorraine Miens who said, “A woman who treats her body like a highway deserves to be paved.” And who also said, “A man who treats a woman's body like a highway deserves every crash coming to him.”

Jolt, jolt, jolt. She was walking as fast as she could. But she felt like roadkill, or not quite—like she'd been winged by a passing truck so was lurching along, almost a hop-hop-hop.

Had it been that bizarre last night? Everyone in black, hopping and lurching? Everyone shrieking?

It hadn't been bizarre from the inside. From inside it had been . . .

Molten.

Her ears were still aching.

And she felt . . . raspy down there. She'd done it with Sheldon, obviously she had. She must've felt
something
.

Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe that was why the morning sky was purple and the grass gray and all her joints felt gritted with sand, including her jaw.

Her jaw?

What did her jaw have to complain about?

She imagined herself waddling in front of Lorraine Miens. The famous black-rimmed glasses would get pulled down for closer inspection.

“You're pregnant, Ms. Krane.”

“Actually, it's a thyroid condition. I'll go on a grapefruit diet during the semester.”

Those dark-pooled eyes that had seen everything forty times already.

“I want to work on . . . the cultural implications of interspecies hyper-communications.”

“The what?”

“I'm the student-body chair of Vista View. You might not believe this, but our high school—”

“I think as little about high school as I possibly can. And I certainly couldn't contemplate taking on a student who is going to give birth. Our program is highly—”

“We have a pterodactyl-student. I'm the chair through the whole thing. And what we've found . . . as I'm studying the various reactions to his—”

“Ms. Krane—you're pregnant!”

“I don't know if you'd call it charisma. I think that's too lame a word. He . . . gets inside us in amazing ways. So I'm calling it ‘interspecies hyper-communications.' ”

“Did he get you pregnant?”

“I'm not pregnant. I just—”

“Did the pterodactyl get you pregnant? Is this what you mean by ‘hyper-communications'?”

Shiels was outside her own house, shaking, when her phone rang. The earth was solid and unchanging before her—there were the elm trees, shedding their leaves; there was the water tower in the distance, as green and bulging as ever; and inside her, glaciers were melting and canyon cliffs falling into surging rivers.

It was her father.

Her father was calling her ten seconds before she would have been able to slip through the front door and possibly fool them.

Three rings. Four. One more, and Shiels's confident answering service voice would pick up. But she hit the button.

“Hello? Hi, Dad. Hi.” She was trying to find the right tone.

“Good morning, Shiels. It's your father speaking.” His phony formal voice. Shiels scanned the front windows to see if he was standing there, on the phone, watching her arrive. After being out all night. After spending the night with Sheldon, and doing it, and probably getting pregnant.

Maybe.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said. A flex of her little girl muscles.

He wasn't standing at any of the front windows.

“Your mother is worried that perhaps you didn't get your entire eight hours of restful sleep last night.” He was trying to keep a light tone. Shiels could hear her mother breathing over his shoulder.

“It was a long night,” Shiels said. “Amazing, though. Huge turnout. We were doing the cleanup, of course.” Breathe, breathe. Dark purple sky. Gray grass.

Yellow shoes.

“So you're just getting out now?”

Yellow shoes. The store. She remembered now. She'd said she'd clean up there. An excuse! A good reason to not go home right away.

“I'm okay. I'll sleep this afternoon. It was really a great, great event.” She could hear her mother wringing her hands. “Love you, Daddy,” Shiels said.

•  •  •

“What has happened to you?” the old man said, at the door of the running-shoe shop.

“Nothing. I'm quite fine,” Shiels asserted. “I'm here to fulfill my pledge.” When the old man failed to respond, but just kept standing there, blocking the door, she said, “Cleaning up the storeroom. I said I would do it this morning.”

“Why is your nose all purple?” he said.

“It isn't,” she said, but her hand went up to her nose anyway. It felt perfectly normal. She thought of Sheldon looking at her in bed, that weirdness in his eyes.