Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (2 page)

Shiels knew it,
yet still she said: “Who are you? What do you think you're doing here?”

Peeking out of his purple backpack was a little pink sheet, a cross-boundary transfer. Shiels recognized the form.

Jocelyne moaned further into the beast's arms.

“Mebbee . . . go nurz?” It was hard to reconcile. The thing standing there. Talking.

“What?”
Shiels said.

“Nurz. Nurz!” His beak clicked when he spoke.

Nurse. He knew about school nurses. “Have you been a student before?” Shiels blurted.

Of course he had. The pink sheet was a cross-boundary transfer. Her brain was all gummed up with exactly the sort of thing her intellectual guide, Lorraine Miens, had written about in
Organic Misgivings
—what Miens called “practical/improbable absurdities,” the way life constantly surprises us with what we feel at first should not be true, and then accept without question: the round Earth, flying men, text breakups. This thing looked as if it ought to be extinct, nonexistent, yet here it was swaying and unsteady in front of her, carrying documentation.

Probably Manniberg had forgotten to brief her, as usual.

“Follow me!” Shiels turned, and the entire football squad, still many paces back, gave way. She charged, chin down, fists clenched, arms pumping. At the chained gate she whirled again and saw that the thing was having trouble keeping up with her, that he seemed to be staggering to both hold Jocelyne aloft and move forward at the same time.

Her heart jagged, she realized, somehow, she needn't charge anymore; this wasn't about defending the school or anything like that. The beast was struggling, he couldn't actually hold Jocelyne up. She was bleeding at one knee, a nasty scrape. She wasn't unconscious, but she wasn't entirely present, either.

“You're going to have to put her down,” Shiels said in as normal a tone of voice as she could find. And then—“Jocelyne, can you stand?”

The creature huddled forward and, with surprising gentleness, rested Jocelyne's feet on the ground. His beak looked razor-sharp, and he had a knifelike crest of sorts angled backward out of his head. And his body was covered in short, fine fur—it glistened. Jocelyne couldn't seem to keep herself from touching it. She leaned and hopped, still clutching him, and the beast hop-hipped—he wasn't entirely comfortable upright—and they all squeezed through the opening.

At the rear entrance of the school Shiels took the pink sheet from his backpack.

“I'm the student-body chair,” she said evenly, and tried to look him in the eye, for reassurance. The form, neatly typed, listed a single name:
Pyke
. In the address line was written
Cross-Boundary Transfer
with no previous school listed. Under languages it said
English
and
Pterodactylus
.

“You're a pterodactyl? Your name is Pyke?” Shiels said.

Pyke made a barking sound—his own name? His beak dipped precariously close to Jocelyne's throat.

“How old are you?” she asked.

But Jocelyne was slumping again. Pyke caught her, and Shiels held open the door. As they passed through clumsily, she glanced again at the form. He was eighteen.

Really?

He was coming in practically overage. Another line on the form read
Explanation for lost time: Other commitments
.

The nurse was there. Someone must have told her something exceptional was happening. With only a short, frightened glance at Pyke, she pulled Jocelyne into her office and closed the door. Shiels was left standing alone with the pterodactyl—with Pyke—in the otherwise empty hallway. But a huge crowd was gathered at the doorway, staring in at them.

His torso was heaving.

Those pecs. That fur. It was as if he were a museum exhibit she needed to touch.

But she restrained herself. How to talk to him? “I'm afraid you've made a terrible mistake,” she began. His head angle changed. “You've arrived at the end of the school day, not the beginning.” His eyes narrowed. “You need to come back at nine o'clock tomorrow, understand?” She held the paper out to him. She hated her hand for shaking, but this was an unusual situation. “And our principal, Mr. Manniberg, can be a stickler for details. You're going to have to do a much better job with your personal information. All right?” As if the mighty Manniberg himself would be a far more terrible adversary.

Ha!

Pyke snatched the sheet in his beak, twisted backward gymnastically, and tucked it into his backpack.

“Where are you from, anyway? What are you doing here?”

When his beak was shut, his jaw naturally curved upward in a devious grin. The light glistened in his eyes.

He turned, and moving on all fours—his wings folded, umbrella-like—he was at the doors and through in a liquid instant.

The crowd massed there—it looked like half the school—parted quickly enough, but his pink sheet fluttered. Did someone pluck it from his pack? Shiels wasn't sure what she saw. It took a moment to follow him through the doors. That sheet was being passed around while football players laughed and Pyke watched them all with quiet, still eyes.

Shiels's phone throbbed, but there wasn't time. “Give it back!” she yelled at Jeremy Jeffreys, the quarterback, who now held the pink sheet gleefully. “He's going to be a student here, just like you.”

Jeffreys scoffed, though in his other hand he held his helmet as if he might need a weapon. “Hey, freshman!” he called to Pyke. “You're eighteen already! What'cha been doing all these years?”

As terrible as Pyke's beak and claws looked, Shiels saw that the crowd could tear him to shreds. If she allowed it.

“He had other commitments,” she declared.

A howl of laughter engulfed the group.

“What?” the quarterback chortled. “Fighting off woolly mammoths?”

Shiels grabbed back the pink sheet. “Haven't you ever heard of personal privacy?” She stared down the quarterback until he glanced away. Then she tucked the sheet more securely into the pterodactyl's backpack, and raised her voice so others might hear. “I think you'll find a welcoming environment at Vista View. We're honored that you chose to come here.”

Pyke was glancing backward at the doors to the school. He seemed to be worried—for Jocelyne?

But then he hunched forward again—he really seemed quite small when he was on all fours—and exploded upward. Shiels, Jeffreys, everyone staggered backward in the shock of the moment, as if they had been standing too close to a geyser.

Shiels's phone throbbed again. Manniberg. He never texted her, yet there it was.
New arrival soon, test case. Let's talk tomorrow a.m.

She performed a sanity check. In the dirt in front of her—claw marks. The crowd around her—gaping. In the sky—Pyke, once again a speck in the distance, a sharp and zigzagging head followed by a riotously twisting tail of crows.

Eighteen? He didn't look a day less than sixty-five million.

Shiels met Sheldon
by the mailbox on Ridgeway, on her route home, as usual. With their busy after-school schedules, they could not always depart the building together. He was wearing the secondhand tie she had found for him, with colorful garden gnomes set against a black velvet background.

“What were you thinking, running out into danger like that?” he said. He was fingering his phone. Vhub, the social site that was the whole collective cranium of Vista View—she and Sheldon had helped popularize it on her way to becoming chair—was erupting with news of Pyke's unusual arrival. The little purple vein (or was it an artery?) in Sheldon's left temple was pulsing.

Her parents, both doctors, would kill her (metaphorically) for not knowing the difference.

(They didn't know anything about Vhub, not really. But they certainly knew all about veins and arteries.)

“It looked like he was going to fly off with her or something,” Shiels explained. “Hello to you, too.” And she stepped right up and kissed him, in part because Sheldon—who could be urgent in private, in his parents' den in the dead of night after homework and organizing—was uncomfortable showing affection in public.

She also kissed him, though she could hardly admit it to herself, because she desperately needed to kiss someone then. Her body was surging with something—extra adrenaline, maybe, or pheromones or dopamine or something scientific she might've known about if she had paid better attention in biology (and to her parents' chatter), but maybe not. Maybe this sort of thing was not covered in biology or by parents at all.

She kissed him hard and deep on the mouth and wanted him to put his stupid phone away for one minute and wrap his arms around her and feel muscular for once. Like . . . an animal.

She
felt like an animal.

But the kiss stayed mostly one-sided for too long, and then finally she backed off and pulled herself together.

“What was that for?” Sheldon asked.

He was not normally dim. Even emotionally he could be quite knowing. Like that first session three years ago over the
Leghorn
“Things That Rot My Mind” issue when he'd pulled back from his keyboard, when they had been alone in the same airless cubbyhole off the library for fourteen consecutive hours (or so it had felt), and he'd just looked at her—he'd looked the very same kiss she had just given him.

Most of the time, in private, he could drop anything to look a deep kiss at her and lean over to her so they could throb together.

But now he was asking: “What was that for?”

She didn't . . . didn't know. She took his hand (soon, with the cold winds building in the days ahead, they would need gloves), and they walked in uncharacteristic silence down Ridgeway and across to Thorniton Avenue. He had large, warm hands for an unathletic guy, the kind of hands that can instinctively find and knead out a knot under a shoulder blade or squeeze life into quietly exhausted feet propped on the sofa.

They felt strong and sure, those hands.

Finally, when they were close to her embarrassingly large house, he said, “So—what's he like?”

And those things she was going to say to him about the flying monster—mostly they stayed inside her.

“Everyone's going to hate him,” she said instead. “I've seen it starting. Jeremy Jeffreys, the whole football squad, practically attacked him! He can barely talk. His beak looks weird. And those flapping wings—what's he supposed to do with them in class? He won't be able to sit without bonking someone. I don't know what he's thinking, coming here. He already injured poor Jocelyne. I don't know if she's going to be able to run anymore.”

How injured was Jocelyne really? Shiels had no idea. She didn't know why she'd said it.

“Did he go straight for her?”

In this moment, disappointingly, Sheldon looked ordinary to her. His curly brown hair, so fine to run fingers through, just seemed limp. Had he even washed it today? Well, it was true, they had been up much of the night working through the details of the committee configuration for Autumn Whirl. And she didn't like a boy who was too fastidious about his appearance. Sheldon wasn't naturally interested in such things—appearances, or committee configurations. He was much more of a writer/observer type than a planner/doer/looker. But he did it—plan, organize, wear the ironic tie that she'd bought—for her. To be true to her.

She didn't like this feeling of hiding things from him. What was she hiding? That worm, whatever it was.

“Shiels?” He'd asked a question. What was it?

“It sure looked like he went straight for her,” she said. “But he didn't mean it, not at all. He's actually pretty helpless, if you think about it, in a sort of adorable way. He seems to have no idea what he's doing. That beak—it'll be like someone carrying a sword around in the halls. Maybe he could get a sheath or something.”

Sheldon was waiting for his kiss now that they were not on a main street. He was leaning in—listening to her, but waiting, too.

He almost never initiated a kiss. He just sort of . . . made himself approachable, and waited for her to bridge the gap. Why did he do that?

Shiels could never imagine the pterodactyl doing that.

And then she burst out laughing—poor, confused Sheldon, they almost always laughed together—but she couldn't help herself. Such an odd thought—kissing a pterodactyl!

“What—what is it?”

All right, the world was changing, a pterodactyl had more or less dropped out of the sky. But a real kiss, with Sheldon, at the end of the day . . . a real kiss, with eyes closed, and his boy breath, and the smell of him, his quiet urgency and the softness of his cheek and the little prickly bits he still needed to shave . . . could still make the whole rest of the world fall away.

Jonathan came roaring
down the stairs two, three at a time as soon as Shiels made it through the door. He had the feet of a man—
clump, clump, clump!
—but the gangly body of a boy. Too many limbs to know what to do with them all, that was the impression her brother made these days.

“What was he like?”
Jonathan croaked, his voice breaking as it did when he was excited. (But when was he ever excited? Never. The boy usually had the cold sludge of adolescent attitude in his veins.)

“Who?” Shiels asked, just to be annoying.

“Pyke! Pyke! You were right there when he arrived. I saw the video and everything!”

So someone had caught and posted it after all, which made it far more real and important for Jonathan than, say, if he'd been there in person when his older sister had raced across the sports complex to confront a supposedly extinct monster.

“Nothing special,” she said. “He's not very good at landing. Poor Jocelyne Legault. She must have been scared out of her skin.”