Girls Don't Fly Page 8

  “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.

  Saturday morning my alarm goes off in my dreams, but I don’t wake up at first, I just dream about a jackhammer going off on the basement floor. When I do finally wake up I slam my hand into my alarm and realize I have five minutes to get ready for class and my interview. I race upstairs, throwing on lights and opening drawers in the bathroom. Melyssa stumbles into the bathroom scowling.

  She hangs on to the door frame to steady herself. “You have got to be the noisiest human being in the world.”

  “Sorry. I’m late.”

  “Why are you doing your makeup then? To impress Prince Charming? Like he’s going to care. Look at you. You’re anorexic.”

  “Did you borrow my new lipstick?”

  “He’s a self-centered, hypocritical weasel.”

  I brush by her into the hall. “I’ve been saving it.”

  Mel wanders back to her room. Over her shoulder she says, “You’re pathetic.”

  “I have an interview,” I say, but she isn’t listening. Her door is already shut.

  I am late to class, but so is Pete.

  There are a lot fewer kids than the last time we met. The Galápagos cheer must not have been enough to inspire all the other geniuses to get out of bed and do more unassigned homework. Or maybe the competition seemed too steep. My guess is the really smart kids are the ones home in bed. We’re down to me, Erik, Pritchett (the pain), Dawn (the goth), Ho-Bong and Ho-Jun (the superconductor twins), and one Megan. We all stand out in the cold under the streetlight, rubbing our hands, waiting for Pete to show up. I stand alone and look down. Then I see Erik’s shiny white tennis shoes practically on top of my black flats. I can smell the soap on his skin.

  “You’re looking nice,” Erik says. The sarcasm is so faint it’s hard to be sure of.

  I look up at his face and he smiles. Even at an obscene hour my stomach reflexively flips at that stupid smile. Maybe I shouldn’t have exploded his stuff on the curb.

  “Hi,” I say. I guess I can pretend he didn’t throw the DVD under my dad’s car too.

  He smiles again. I almost believe he means it. It must be the glare from his teeth.

  “So you going somewhere today?” he says.

  “I have a job interview.” Everyone can hear what we’re saying, so I don’t exactly want to talk about it.

  “At the harbor?” He laughs softly. “Doing what?”

  I say, “I’m applying for secretary.” My words snap on the end of my tongue.

  “Oh yeah? That’ll be perfect for you.” Erik’s genius is keeping his own hands clean while he gets everyone else’s dirty. Or maybe his genius is being a genius and being dirty is just a hobby.

  “Thanks,” I say. Maybe I go a little overboard on the bitter tone in my voice.

  Everyone is listening now. To the sound of hate-your-guts silence. Until Pete steps into the ring and says, “Good morning, everyone. Sorry I’m late.”

  No one talks.

  Pete says, “Did I miss something?”

  When we get inside Pete says, “What do you geniuses know about Darwin?”

  Nobody moves. It’s a trick question.

  Finally Pritchett says, “He spent a few weeks in the Galápagos and then he spent the rest of his life making bank on it. Cha-ching.”

  I’m starting to think this kid is a plant for a reality TV show.

  Pete moves to the back of the room and sets up a projector with his laptop. He shoots a picture onto the wall and hits the lights. The photo is of a white one-story building in a tropical location. Once he gets everything in focus we can see that it’s the Charles Darwin Research Center, and Pete is standing out in front of the center with a tall man, probably in his fifties, and a blonde woman in red shorts. Pritchett whistles through his teeth—at the woman, I’m assuming. Pete’s hair is longer and his skin is dark brown. He looks more like a surfer than a biologist. I get the funny feeling again.

  “This is the building where we rendezvous with other biologists on the trip.”

  “How come you aren’t going this time?” says Dawn.

  “The committee decided it was better the grad students took turns going. I’ll get down there again soon.”

  For some reason it blows me away to see someone who I kind of know standing in this place. To me it’s like somebody showing a slide show of their road trip to heaven, and then talking about going back and forth like it’s a trip to the car wash.

  “Sweet tan,” says Erik.

  “Believe me, the tan is the least of things that are sweet in the Galápagos, but let’s get back to Darwin and the project. Everything is hypercontrolled on the islands now. The Ecuadorians don’t want people coming in and raiding the place like the bad old days.”

  Ho-Bong says, “Why is their research center named after an Englishman then?”

  “Great question,” says Pete. “The center isn’t named after Darwin because he was the only person who ever discovered anything important on the Galápagos, or because he was the first guy to put his mitts on the theory of evolution. The center is named after him because he wasn’t about ‘cha-ching,’ for the most part. Like many men of his age—sorry, ladies, women mostly weren’t included back then—he was a scientist, with human flaws that kept getting in his way. But Darwin was in it for the long haul, even if he didn’t know it when he came to the islands. In fact, I think it’s safe to say he had no idea what he’d found until he was on the boat home.

  “Darwin was there to look at volcanoes and funky rocks. But he couldn’t leave the animals al
one. So he started collecting all kinds of stuff out of sheer curiosity. Among other things he collected four birds on four islands. On his way home he started to realize that the birds were more important than he’d assumed. Each bird could be identified by its island, its origin. That’s when the homework started.”

  Pete flashes a quote on the wall: “It is the fate of every voyager, when he has just discovered what object in any place is more particularly worthy of his attention, to be hurried from it. Charles Darwin.”

  “I don’t get it,” says Dawn.

  “That’s good,” says Pete. “That means you’re actually thinking about it.”

  Ho-Bong and Ho-Jun speak in Korean to each other, but everyone else is quiet. It seems like they talk a long time.

  Finally Pete says, “So guys, wanna share your opinions with the class?”

  I can’t see Ho-Bong’s face in the dark, but his voice is suddenly flat and American. “We never know what we’re looking for until we aren’t there anymore.”

  After class I go out in the hall. For some reason Darwin’s quote is stuck in my head, like some sort of philosophical earworm. I look up from my deep thoughts to see a heavyset woman wearing a shirt that has the insignia DNR on the arm, which I’m hoping stands for “Division of Natural Resources,” not “Do Not Resuscitate.” She’s sitting at the front desk, checking her watch. The interview. I totally forgot.

  She has red hair bobbed at her ears and freckles everywhere, even on her eyelids, but she looks all business, which is not how the rest of the room looks. The desk is buried in papers. The surrounding room is dusty and has a noticeable scent of mold.

  I walk to the front desk. “Are you Ms. Hunsaker?”

  “You must be Myra. Just call me Ranger Bobbie.”

  She has long arms for a woman. I try to be mature and stick my hand out to shake hers.