Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (11 page)

“Looks purple to me,” the man said.

Shiels pushed her way through. There was an employee washroom at the back, an odd, old-fashioned cement chamber with a showerhead, a sink, a toilet, a mirror, a garbage can, and a drain in the middle of the floor.

She examined herself in the mirror. Her nose looked like it had been coated in purple shoe polish.
Sheldon!
She bent to wet her face. Where was the soap? She spotted a hulking yellow bar resting on a piece of wood on the floor behind the toilet. It smelled like it might dissolve metal. Was that the soap?

Cautiously she wet the bar and rubbed, rubbed. The purple wasn't oily at all. It wasn't thick. It felt . . . like her skin.

Like the skin of her nose had simply turned purple.

The pigment wasn't coming off. She closed her eyes, breathed through her mouth, waited for this stupid nightmare to pass.

Blink. Blink.

Purple.

“Sheldon!”
She screamed his name into the phone, but he wasn't picking up. He was probably still having breakfast with his sunny-morning parents. He was probably punishing her.

She longed to face-rake him that instant. She wanted to . . .

“Is everything all right, miss?” the man called from outside the door.

“No!” she yelled. “My nose has turned purple!”

He didn't seem to have an answer to that. He waited forever, and then he said, “Just take your time.”

She stared at her face. She looked fierce, somehow, her purple nose beak-like. Dipped in ink. The pores on her nose were larger than those on her pale cheeks. She scrubbed and scrubbed, with her hands, with a rough cloth she found by the moldy garbage pail, then with a brush that she demanded the old man bring to her. The harder she worked, the more tender the skin became, until fresh-rubbed blood oozed like cherry sauce on sick chocolate.

“Is it coming off?” the old man asked through the door.

She had to hold herself against the crusty sink to keep from falling over.

“How did it get all purple anyway?” the old man asked.

“Go away. I'm sorry. Just . . . go away.” She could still hear him breathing outside the door. “It's all right. I'm not going to kill myself.”
There must be a solution,
she thought.
Don't people get tattoos removed?

Maybe she could get her nose removed.

And replaced, of course. A nose replacement . . . Her parents would know the right specialist. They knew all the right—

“It's just . . . this is the only bathroom,” the old man said finally.

•  •  •

In a crisis Shiels had learned, through her years in leadership, to turn to the closest thing at hand. Do that task. Focus, focus. Give your brain time to unglue.

She tackled the mess in the storeroom. Quietly, efficiently, with all the concentration she could summon. Did it make sense to sort the boxes by style and make or by size? Size made sense. Style and make might change regularly, but size is eternal, maybe. Size is orderly and predictable. Small at the bottom. Largest on top. But broken into manageable clumps so that the shelves were used to full advantage. And midsizes, presumably the ones most often in demand, would be at chest to eye level. Easy. Predictable. A touch of organization.

She was an organized person. An energetic and intelligent and disciplined person who dismantled the entire storeroom's structure—if near chaos could be called a structure—and rebuilt it along reasonable and practical and even scientific lines.

She swept and dusted, threw out more than twenty empty boxes that had been taking up space, pretending to hold shoes. She found three single shoes without mates. There were no more yellow ones—she was wearing the last pair.

She kept the door shut and did not look out. The old man came in twice, looking for a particular size and brand, and both times Shiels was able to retrieve the box within seconds and send him on his way.

She could organize a storeroom. If she didn't get an interview with Lorraine Miens, she thought, if her nose stayed purple and she lost all hope and couldn't even get into medical school, she could always organize storerooms.

Who knew how long she stayed in there? Her phone was off. She began to feel vaguely hungry, but that could be ignored until every last box was checked and stacked in its appropriate place in the universe.

In the end, when she could delay no longer, she had to open the door. The old man stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes large. Others were there too—customers who looked like they might be runners, and who (perhaps) had come to gaze at the miracle of organization.

“It's beautiful,” the old man said, evidently for everyone.

Shiels buried her nose in her arm so it could not be seen.

Step and step,
all the way home, no one answering her calls, not Sheldon, not . . . Sheldon. She was the student-body chair of Vista View High. That changes a person. The office had seeped into her posture, into how she thought of herself. Yet . . . she was hungry now, and cold, and terribly tired, and the whole of her world was a different place since yesterday, beginning with her foolish run, leading to other things. To the dance. To spending the night with her boyfriend, who now had fallen off the face of the earth.

It had led her to an unexplainable but apparently permanent purple nose.

Step and step. She would not bow her head. She would not walk around anymore with her hand in front of her face. She was student-body chair. She would not look away as the eyes of the others on the sidewalk, across the street, in the windows of the shops and restaurants she passed, registered their surprise.

A permanently purple nose.

(If she were pregnant, by her apparently disappeared boyfriend, would Babyface emerge with a purple nose too? Had the pigment seeped into her skin? Was the change encoded in her DNA?)

Step and step. Heading home to double-physician parents who would press her to recount every detail of the last twenty-four hours.

Maybe, she thought, she could just keep going. Grab a bus to somewhere large and anonymous where a purple-nosed girl would blend in with all the others who congregated there, waiting for their surgeries.

As if there were such surgeries.

She slipped into the house quietly, as she had learned to do. All still. Sunday afternoon. Her father would be in one of the dens, watching the game, whatever game it was. His hour of relaxation in the frantic week. Her mother would be reviewing her case files for tomorrow, because she never relaxed.

She could relax after she was dead.

“Shiels, is that you?” her mother called. Shiels had been soundless. But her mother could still feel Sheils's footfalls in her womb.

“Yes, I'm home.” If she pushed herself upstairs, she could barricade herself in her room, postpone the inevitable for an hour or two. But she was starving and would have to face inspection sometime.

Sure steps of doom headed toward her. Shiels waited. Her mother emerged from the western dining room carrying her tablet. Her reading glasses were still on. “I can't imagine you've made a dent in your assignments this weekend,” she said. “Don't you have that biology lab to do? And what about your—”

She was going to say “college applications,” Shiels knew it, but she stopped in the hall while her tidy chin kept working for another beat or two. It was rare to see her mother lost for words. “Have you taken a look at yourself lately, dear?” she asked finally.

Shiels's phone then. Sheldon. She turned it off.

The boy had slept with her when she hadn't been in her right mind.

He had let her leave the house without telling her that her nose had turned into night.

Probably he was the one who had inked it purple.

“Yes, Mother, I have seen.”

A standoff in the doorway.

“Is this some . . . fad or other? I think it's in terrible taste. Why don't you clean it off?”

“I will,” Shiels heard herself say. And then she was hurrying up the stairs—her feet seemed to have made the decision for her—and very quickly she was in her room. Door locked. She took out her phone and called her brother.

“What?” Jonathan said. He was just in the next bedroom.

“I want you to go downstairs and fix me a plate of mixed green salad with slices of tomato lightly sprinkled with olive oil and feta cheese, and I'd like some of those biscuits in the cupboard, the special ones in the russet package.”

“Why are you calling
me
?” he said.

“I'm starving, but I can't go down to the kitchen right now.”

“What, you're home?”

“Don't waste time. I'm famished.”

“You're at home and you're calling me to go get you food?”

“Just do it, all right? I'm not going to explain. Did I not just organize the best high school social event in the history of the universe?”

The boy was silent. As much agreement as she was ever going to get from him.

“You know it was beyond scalding. Please, Jonathan. I will owe you. If there are any olives—”

“I hate olives. I can't even touch them. They smell like rotting puke.”

“Forget the olives. Please. Anything. A plate of food.
I will owe you
.”

She closed her eyes and willed her impossible brother to connect with some remnant of humanity left in his pubescent body. Leaders got things done. She was a leader . . . still.

When at last the boy had given his burping, grudging acquiescence, she called Sheldon. “You didn't tell me!” she said as soon as he answered.

“I'm sorry—”

“You let me leave your house without telling me. Not a word. You let me . . .”

“I'm sorry. I just—”

“You let me sail into town looking like, like . . . a purple-beaked white bird. You didn't say one word. You didn't . . .”

“I'm sorry.”

“You are. You are very sorry. You were going to march me down to have breakfast with your parents looking like this. Now, what is this shit on my nose, and how do I get it off?”

“I don't know.” He didn't sound like himself. Sheldon wasn't an “I don't know” kind of person. He always had an opinion, a bright idea. He always . . . “Did you try soap and water?”

“Of course I tried soap and water! I almost peeled my skin off! Now tell me!”

“Well, I didn't put it on you,” Sheldon said. “It was after you went up and wrangle danced with Pyke. You came back, and your nose was done. I didn't see—”

“I never wrangle danced with Pyke. What are you talking about?”

“Everyone saw you. You and Pyke. You have to remember
that.
”

“I don't remember two molecules about what happened for a lot of last night, Sheldon. You'll have to tell me. I'm sorry. I wrangle danced with Pyke?”

Someone rattled her doorknob then—Jonathan. “Just leave it outside the door. Thank you!” she called. “Back away and don't look.”

There was half a microbe's chance that Jonathan would look away. She pulled on a hoodie and cloaked her face, then opened the door and grabbed the plate he'd left. She didn't even glance to see where he was.

Slam!
Safe again.

He'd made her a peanut butter sandwich with a tired purple grape on top. Did he know already? She bit into the sandwich, chewed dryly, threw the grape into the wastebasket.

“Are you there?” she said again into the phone.

“The most important bit about the whole thing,” Sheldon said—he sounded an odd mix of himself and some gravely serious person—“is what happened at the end of it. You do remember that?”

“Yes,” she said dubiously. “I think. I'm sorry, I'm just going to say this,” she said, because he was Sheldon, after all. It felt like the world had righted itself somehow, slightly at least, to simply be talking to him. “I'm just going to say it. I know we woke up together. Did we . . . Did we . . .”

“Say that we loved each other? Yes, we did.”

It didn't sound like he was joking.

“But did you . . . Did we . . .”

“Fall asleep in each other's arms? Yes. Wake up together . . . yes. Have breakfast with my parents . . . no. You would have been fine. Even with your nose. Mine was still lined, and I would have kept it that way.”

“Sheldon!” She bit more of the wretched sandwich. The peanut butter tasted like it had been buried by ancient Egyptians. “You know what I am asking.”

“You mean did we swim the English Channel together? Did we walk on the moon?”

“Any of those things.”

Silence, as if he were reveling in this occasion to be indignant. Of course he wanted her to remember. Ordinarily she would. This was not an ordinary situation.

“After you wrangle danced with Pyke,” he said slowly, “you practically dragged me into my own bed. I've got scratches still from where you ripped my clothes. What do you think we did?”

Was he breathing anymore? She couldn't tell. He stopped talking, and the silence stretched between them like an eight-lane highway.

She couldn't think of what to say. She didn't want to hang up. She wanted him to be right there. She wanted to be alone with him, in his bed again, skin to skin, as they must have been, after the storm had passed. They must have been lying together, cobbled, breathing. He must have wrapped his arms around her. She must have felt his strong hands, the thrum of his heart, the heat of him. She must have said it first.
I love you.

She could almost, almost remember.

“Sheldon?” she said. But the boy was gone, gone, gone.

•  •  •

Shiels gazed hard into the bedroom mirror at her tender, purpled, rubbed-raw nose. The color wasn't going to come off. The skin would not heal quickly.