***
Wednesday night was our church youth group’s activity night or, “Mutual” as everyone was calling it for some baffling, unexplained reason. We didn’t use that term in the church on the east coast. Maybe it was old-fashioned. I didn’t know. I stood out in my new Young Women’s group from the moment we recited the theme together. I droned on through its phrases without knowing the rest of the girls were going to pause, tilt their heads, and take a breath all at exactly the same time.
Pretty Melanie from my French class at school was in my church class too. She held the handle on the opposite side of a beat up laundry hamper from me as we walked through a small stand of corn, tearing away ripe, stringy ears and piling them in the plastic basket. It was part of some kind of annual service project that everyone understood and no one bothered to explain to me. Looking back now, I see that it was darling of Melanie to try so hard to be nice to me when I was so prickly and cynical with her. But at the time, all I could see was a page I imagined in her journal where she’d written down goals about being kind to someone in need of a friend.
Tawny, my prospective math tutor, was in our ward too. Melanie introduced us to each other as we rode back to the chapel from the corn field in the open bed of a grain truck.
“Is it legal for a bunch of minors to ride back here like this?” I asked her, dragging my bare arm through the air rushing by the truck. “We don’t exactly have seatbelts – or seats.”
Tawny grinned. “It probably isn’t. But the only one policeman in town and he can’t be everywhere so it’s a moot point.”
I managed to roll my eyes and smile at the same time.
“So when do you want to get started on the math tutoring?” she asked me.
“Oh,” I stammered. “I was going to take a few days to try those extra readings and worksheets your dad gave me. If I can figure it out myself I might not have to bother you. I mean, it’s really nice of you but I can’t imagine tutoring me would be very much fun.”
Tawny shrugged. “Oh, don’t worry about that. Tutoring experience would make some nice padding for my resume, actually. But I hear you’re a really good student so maybe you won’t need me after all.”
“Someone said that about me?” I was genuinely touched.
“Oh yeah,” Tawny nodded. “Good gossip travels just as quickly as the bad stuff in a town like this. Sometimes the gossip even exaggerates our best features for us. Like, they used to say Ben Jones had a photographic memory. But it turns out he’s just a plain old genius.”
There was a pause—a little gap in the conversation where I could have assured Tawny that my talents had been exaggerated too. I left it gaping open.
“Well,” Tawny continued at last, “people made sure word of your brains got back to me probably because I’ve been the top student in our class ever since kindergarten.”
“When we started school at five years old she already had a third grade reading level,” Melanie supplied.
“That’s awesome,” I capitulated. “You must be gifted, Tawny.”
“Oh, she’s definitely gifted,” Melanie confirmed.
My fingers felt for my locket as I sat beside the girls, between the corn cobs, and marveled, a little miserably, at how beautiful it was to have a best friend close enough to hear and see and touch whenever she was needed.
“Aw, thanks you guys,” Tawny said. “I guess people wanted to warn me that, with the new girl parachuted into town, I might not have next year’s valedictorian award locked up after all.”
I yelled out a loud laugh over the diesel roar of the massive, accelerating grain truck. In my huge high school on the east coast, the honour of being named valedictorian was reserved for top performing students who were also elite athletes and student body presidents and, preferably, Nobel Prize laureates. It seemed genuinely funny to think of getting the award myself – even in a place like Upton where the school valedictorian was simply the kid in the graduating class with the highest grade point average.
“I wouldn’t get too worried about competition from me if I was you,” I finally assured Tawny. “I work in the city at least three nights a week so I won’t exactly have a lot of time for studying. That plus the dismal direction my math marks are heading will keep me well out of the running for anything like a valedictorian award.”
“I hate to say it but that’s probably for the best,” Tawny called over the rush of wind. “The possibility that we might have a girl for a valedictorian next year is controversial enough in this town. If it was a girl who was also from out of town there might be mayhem.” She ended these comments with a laugh that didn’t quite dull their menacing edge.
Maybe that’s what made me set a goal of my own – only it was too mean-spirited to write down in my journal. At that moment, in the back of the grain truck surrounded by all that corn, I decided I was going to rise to the very top of the academic standings of Upton High School. And I might just do it out of something like spite.
That night, the boys from church were meeting at the Jones’ house on the western edge of town. I sat in the front seat as my mother pulled into their long driveway. It was a narrow strip of asphalt running between two rows of tinder dry white spruce trees. The bristling trees all bent slightly eastward, away from the winds that came falling down the Rocky Mountains onto the town. Picking up Jeff from the Jones’ house was Mum’s last stop after rounding up the rest of us from all over town. We waited in the driveway, watching the big, brown front door for signs of Jeff coming out to meet us.
“He’s not coming. Honk the horn,” Carrie hollered from the backseat.
“That is uncouth,” our mother instructed her. “Heather, go and politely ring the doorbell.”
“But I’m all smeared with dirt and corn silk.”
“Look, somehow I’ve been driving around this little town for hours tonight, Heather,” she cut me off. “I’ve had enough. Please, just go.”
I rolled my eyes and clambered out the car, smoothing my pony tail and scuffing mud off the soles of my shoes as I walked to the entrance of the Jones’ posh ranch house. I’d heard the dad of the family had a good career – one of those icky but highly educated healthcare professions that earn a lot of money. He was some kind of specialized dentist, or something. Whatever he was, it meant he could afford to have a huge solar panel bolted to the roof of his house. I was so distracted by the sight of it I didn’t notice the door opening just a crack at sound of my knock.
“Hurry!” a young boy called through the crack, beckoning urgently. “Squeeze in. Don’t let her out.”
I turned sideways and crammed myself past the big, wooden door. Behind the first boy stood another, even younger brother. On his head sat a little turquoise bird, cocking its head from side to side as it examined me with each of its bright, black eyes in turn.
“I’m looking for Jeff, the new guy,” I told the boys even though they didn’t seem interested in anything else but their little pet.
“I’ll go get him,” Bird-Boy offered, turning to go.
“Leave the parakeet!” the other one called after him.
“Oh, right,” he grinned, trotting up so close to me that our toes nearly touched. “Hold out your pointer finger and say, ‘Step up,’” he directed.
I glanced at the other boy and saw him miming the instructions his brother had just given me. There was nothing to do but obey.
“Step up,” I told the parakeet.
It raised one pink foot and then the other, stepping onto my finger as if it had perched there a hundred times. Bird-Boy spun on his sock feet on the fancy tiled floor before he capered out to the vast cedar deck at the back of the house where Jeff and the others were meeting.
“Isn’t she the coolest birdie ever?” the other boy asked me, reaching up to scratch the parakeet’s neck.
“It’s a girl?” I don’t know why it surprised me but it did.
“Yup.”
T
he animal leaned into the boys’ fingernail. I had never held a tame bird before. Its feet were surprisingly warm against my finger and the tiny claws didn’t scratch my skin at all. The bird’s feet were covered in a soft, pink skin nothing like my own. It was scaly looking but not quite like a reptile’s. The little creature was amazing.
There were heavy footsteps coming down the hallway – the sound of Jeff’s canon ball walk. He came into sight, followed by tall, lanky Ben Jones from my French class.
“Hey, it’s Jeff’s little sister,” Ben Jones greeted me. I looked up at him but even though he was talking to me, he wasn’t looking at me – not directly. It was like I was a solar eclipse or something and he knew to be careful of me. Maybe that was the way he acted whenever he talked to any girl. “And,” he went on, “she’s standing right here in our house, charming our family’s pet parakeet.”
“These crazy guys just gave her to me like they could trust me, or something,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t they trust you?” Ben Jones asked. “You and the parakeet look great together.”
I scoffed. “Thanks, Jones,” I said, “but I know what I look like.”
At the sight of Ben Jones, the tiny bird started waving its neck like it was locked in a bitter game of dodge ball and then, with a rustle of wings, it was sitting on Ben Jones’s shoulder. “Hello, Wazo,” he said. “Weird name, I know. It’s an Anglicization of ‘oiseau,’ obviously.”
“The French word for ‘bird,’” I explained to Jeff. My poor brother had some kind of mental block when it came to French and could hardly speak a word of it.
Jeff nodded and reached for the doorknob. The same little boy who’d let me into the house let us out, pressing us sideways through the same narrow crack between the door and the jamb.
“Sorry for squishing you,” he said. “We have to be careful. No matter how much she loves us, Wazo still might fly away.”