***
I stumbled into the house, not stopping to watch the taillights of Wayne’s car disappearing around the corner at the end of the street. I hopped up the stairs in the dark, listening for my parents. It was late and no one seemed to be awake in the house.
I knocked softly on my parents’ bedroom door. The only answer was a loud snore from my mom. Dad was working the nightshift at the border and Mum, it appeared, was sound asleep. I moved away from their room, creeping into the basement to knock on Jeff’s door.
“Jeff, are you back yet?” I asked as I pushed into his dark bedroom. Just as I expected, the room was empty. He must have gone to the after-prom party, just like Ben Jones said they would.
I sat down hard on the slick, brown carpet of the basement stairs and pressed my fingers to my temples.
I have to find them, I thought.
What were the directions Ben Jones started to give Mum before they left – something about a reservoir? The party was out in the country, even by Upton standards. If I tried to find it on foot it might be dawn before I got there. There was only one option left – and it was not a good one.
“Sorry, Dad,” I sighed as I made sure my learner’s driving permit was still in my wallet. Upstairs, I slipped the keys to the station wagon off their hook on the kitchen wall, and slunk out to the garage. Dad had carpooled to the border with another officer so the car was still sitting there, safely and legally parked.
“This could be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” I whispered as I turned the keys in the ignition and set off on my darkest voyage ever.
I backed the car out of the garage ridiculously slowly. It was partly out of inexperience but mostly to give my mother plenty of time to wake up and come running out of the house to stop me. But she didn’t. I steered toward Main Street and headed south. “Drive down Main until the pavement turns to gravel,” I remembered Ben Jones saying, “and keep south until you pass the Murffits’ old house.”
I passed off the paved road and crunched into gravel. When the line of Upton’s streetlights ended, I noticed I’d been driving without using the headlights. I turned on the windshield wipers before I finally found the switch for the lights. I was already frantic and rattled by the time I started scanning the dark countryside for the landmarks I half-remembered from Ben Jones’s directions to the reservoir.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know which of the farmhouses set back from the dirt road used to belong to a family named Murffit. But the gravel road was newly graded and there were plenty of fresh tire tread marks running along it like a trail of bread crumbs left behind by the drivers before me. I followed them until most of the tracks turned a corner. My headlights lit up a blue, aluminum sign as I steered the car east. It read: “St. James Irrigation District – Shiloh Reservoir.” I had found the site of the Upton High School’s graduation party. And the police had not found me. I was almost there.
Through the willow brush bravely growing out of the hard clay along the edge of the water, I could see the orange light of the bonfire burning on the machine sculpted shore of the reservoir. Under my novice foot, the station wagon lurched to a stop next to all the other vans and pickup trucks. I wrenched off the ignition and sat for a minute behind the steering wheel of what was technically a stolen car. I let out the breath I’d been holding and tried to quiet my pounding heartbeat. I turned my face away from the windshield. My hair still smelled like Wayne’s cologne only the scent had gone from charming to cloying when it became dissociated from the boy himself. I threw open the car door, stepping out into the prairie wind.
The crowd of mostly wholesome, celebrating high school graduates did nothing to slow me down as I moved through it. Even if any of the people there recognized me, few of them had any reason to like me or even to talk to me. I only heard one cowboy holler, “Hey, junior prom was last week,” as I broke through the gap in the brush.
Keeping to the shadowy perimeter, I scanned the bonfire area. Jeff was there, talking to Miss Upton High School. Her date was busy with the rest of the basketball team preparing what looked like a paraffin wax bomb to throw into the fire. Next to Jeff was Ben Jones, smiling and shaking his head at Miss Upton High School’s pretty chatter. I didn’t want her to see me. She was a nice girl but things had never been the same between us since word got back to her that I could do a very convincing impression of her high, ultra-feminine speaking manner.
Nudging my way through the crowd around the fire, I approached Ben Jones from behind and closed my hand around his wrist like a manacle. He startled and looked back at me.
“C’est moi,” I whisper-called, withdrawing my hand.
“I’ll be right back,” Ben Jones said to Jeff, who hadn’t noticed my arrival. That was what I preferred anyway. I couldn’t be sure Jeff wouldn’t over-react to me sneaking the station wagon out of the garage all by my unlicensed self.
Ben Jones rose from his seat on a thick, overturned log and followed me back to the line of willows. In the orange dark, I could see that he’d pulled his eyebrows close together, like he was a little afraid. “Why are you creeping around out here? What makes you think you need to hide? And how did you get here, anyway? Is everything okay?”
I felt breathless. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m – great. But I broke my promise to you.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah. Even though I promised you I wouldn’t, I went and did something rash.”
“Rash?”
“Yeah. I think I might have stolen my parents’ car.”
“What?”
“Kids do it all the time, right?”
Ben Jones laughed and regained the ability to speak in sentences more than one word long. “How should I know? It’d probably qualify as the lesser criminal charge of ‘taking a motor vehicle without consent’ or something. It’s hardly grand theft auto.”
“Phew,” I breathed. I didn’t bother to ask how he knew so much about the Criminal Code. It was just the kind of obscure, esoteric fact Ben Jones was famous for being able to offer.
“Still,” he persisted, “you’d better tell me what was urgent enough to propel you into a life of crime just to get out here.”
“Um, I guess I realized I never thanked you properly – for telling me about your lost parakeet, about Clovis. That was a really sad story. It must have been unpleasant for you to talk about it but you told me anyway because – I don’t know – you’re a caring person, or whatever.”
He waved his hand. “Don’t worry about it. It was tough but I got over the loss a long time ago. It’s okay. And I think you actually did thank me at the time I told you – profusely, if I recall correctly.”
I scrubbed my face with my hands. This was not unfolding as I had hoped. With a quick change of tactics, I reached into my hair and smoothed out a thick lock of it and held it out toward Ben Jones. “Smell this,” I ordered.
He hesitated.
“It’s nothing gross,” I assured him. “Just smell it.”
Ben Jones stepped closer to me. He closed his fingers around the lock of my hair, bent his head, lowered his eyelids, and pressed the yellow strands to his nose and mouth. Then he straightened up quickly, dropping it back onto my shoulder. “What is that? Aftershave?”
“Cologne,” I said. “It’s called ‘Intensity for Men,’ I think.”
He took a step backward. “Heather – what are you trying to do to me?” The question was more rhetoric than it was an actual demand. He waved a dismissive hand at me and turned back toward the bonfire.
“No!” I lunged and grabbed for his hand as he turned. I barely caught him, by his thumb. The wax bomb hit the flames and a bright yellow cloud rose over the bonfire – like a hot blast of dragon’s breath. For one instant, the flash lit up every detail of every face, every hair on every head in the crowd. Voices cheered and hooted. Beside Jeff, Miss Upton High School let out an adorable little scream. And I saw
every freckle on Ben Jones’ face.
“The cologne,” I persisted over the roar of the fire, calling to Ben Jones as the light faded back into the fire pit. “That’s the smell of the biggest, fanciest robin I ever knew. And I wanted you to know that I sent him flying away from me.”
Ben Jones didn’t speak but he looked down at my hand as it gripped his thumb.
“You were right. I am a parakeet,” I went on. “And I can’t love anything else – even if there’s no real chance another parakeet will ever love me in return before I die.”
I thought I felt his hand twitch between my fingers. “Even if there’s no chance,” he echoed, more to himself than to me.
“Ben...” I turned my palm against his and threaded my fingers through the spaces between his fingers. Ben was still watching his own hand like it was an animal on the end of a leash. I forced myself past the embarrassment of him not returning my hold and kept my fingertips pressed to the back of his hand.
“So let me understand,” he began, coolly. “Because the other guys who liked you weren’t members of the Church –”
I still clutched his hand as I took a step closer to him. “It doesn’t matter who those other guys were,” I interrupted. “I’m stupid, okay. And I thought – I still think – that you’re way out of my league and I shouldn’t even dare to like you this way. I’ve been fighting it off all year. But I do like you. I like the way I feel like I’m having a revelation when you’re talking to me outside in the wind, and the way you’re supposed to be a genius but you can’t use a computer printer. I like the way you never properly fit in here but you fell in so easily with Jeff and me. I like – just – everything.”
Ben stood quietly in the orange night for a moment more before he bent his elbow to raise our intertwined hands. His free hand closed around my wrist before he unlaced our fingers, turned my palm upward, and gently dropped a kiss into it. I bowed my head, so relieved and happy I couldn’t even stand to look at him. With both hands he curled mine into a fist and held it.
“Now, before we return your family car to its rightful owners, I want you to come with me,” Ben said, tugging on my hand.
“Anywhere.”
“Just over to the fire. Come sit by me and let the smoky, burnt poplar smell replace that stinkin’ aftershave in your hair,” Ben insisted.
“Purification by smoke,” I mused. “I love it. It’s kind of like something out of the Old Testament.”
I heard him laughing softly as he folded his long arm across my shoulders. He pulled me close and kissed my forehead. “Now that’s my Parakeet.”
***
Look for these Parakeet Princess sequels:
Book 2: Bats in Between
Book 3: Swans in Sight
and
Jandy Branch’s new series, Hurricane Hana
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