All the Birds in the Sky

Chasing the ravens, Patricia forgot to look down, until she collided with someone. She felt the impact and heard the yelp of distress before she saw whom she’d run over: a gangly boy with sandy hair and an oversized chin, who’d fallen against the chicken-wire fence at the playground’s edge and rebounded onto the grass. He pulled himself upright. “Why the hell don’t you look where you’re—” He glanced at something on his left wrist that wasn’t a watch, and cursed way too loud.

“What is it?” Patricia said.

“You broke my time machine.” He yanked it off his wrist and showed her.

“You’re Larry, right?” Patricia looked at the device, which was definitely broken. There was a jagged crack in its casing and a sour odor coming from inside it. “I’m really sorry about your thing. Can you get another? I can totally pay for it. Or my parents can, I guess.” She was thinking that her mom would love that, another disaster to make up for.

“Buy another time machine.” Larry snorted. “You’re going to, what, just walk down to Best Buy and get a time machine off the rack?” He had a faint scent of cranberries, maybe from some body spray or something.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” Patricia said. “Sarcasm is for feeble people.” She hadn’t meant that to rhyme, plus it had sounded more profound in her head.

“Sorry.” He squinted at the wreckage, then carefully unpeeled the strap from his bony wrist. “It can be repaired, I guess. I’m Laurence, by the way. Nobody calls me Larry.”

“Patricia.” Laurence held out his hand and she hoisted it three times. “So was that actually a time machine?” she asked. “You’re not joking or whatever?”

“Yeah. Sort of. It wasn’t that great. I was going to toss it out soon in any case. It was supposed to help me escape from all this. But instead, all it did was turn me into a one-trick pony.”

“Better than being a no-trick pony.” Patricia looked up again at the sky. The ravens were long gone, and all she saw was a single slowly disintegrating cloud.

* * *

AFTER THAT, PATRICIA saw Laurence around. He was in some of Patricia’s classes. She noticed that Laurence had fresh poison-ivy scars on both skinny arms and a red bite on his ankle that he kept raising his pant leg to inspect during English class. His knapsack had a compass and map spilling out of the front pouches, and grass and dirt stains along its underside.

A few days after she wrecked his time machine, she saw Laurence sitting after school on the back steps near the big slope, hunched over a brochure for a Great Outdoors Adventure Weekend. She couldn’t even imagine: Two whole days away from people and their garbage. Two days of feeling the sun on her face! Patricia stole into the woods behind the spice house every chance she got, but her parents would never let her spend a whole weekend.

“That looks amazing,” she said, and Laurence twitched as he realized she was looking over his shoulder.

“It’s my worst nightmare,” he said, “except it’s real.”

“You’ve already gone on one of these?”

Laurence didn’t respond, except to point to a blurry photo on the back of the leaflet, in which a group of kids hoisted backpacks next to a waterfall, putting on smiles except for one gloomy presence in the rear: Laurence, wearing a ridiculous round green hat, like a sport fisherman’s. The photographer had captured Laurence in the middle of spitting out something.

“But that’s awesome,” Patricia said.

Laurence got up and walked back into the school, shoes scuffing the floor.

“Please,” Patricia said. “I just … I wish I had someone to talk to, about stuff. Even if nobody can ever understand the things I’ve seen. I would settle for just knowing someone else who is close to nature. Wait. Don’t walk away. Laurence!”

He turned around. “You got my name right.” His eyes narrowed.

“Of course I did. You told it to me.”

“Huh.” He rolled that around in his mouth for a moment. “So what’s so great about nature?”

“It’s real. It’s messy. It’s not like people.” She talked to Laurence about the congregations of wild turkeys in her backyard and the vines that clung to the walls of the graveyard down the road, Concord grapes all the sweeter for their proximity to the dead. “The woods near here are full of deer and even a few elk, and the deer have almost no predators left. A fully grown buck can be the size of a horse.” Laurence looked horrified at that idea.

“You’re not really selling it,” Laurence said. “So … you’re outdoorsy, huh?”

Patricia nodded.

“Maybe there’s a way we can help each other. Let’s make a deal: You help me convince my parents I’m already spending plenty of time in nature, so they stop sending me frakking camping all the time. And I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“You want me to lie to your parents?” Patricia wasn’t sure if that was the sort of thing an honorable witch would do.

“Yes,” he said. “I want you to lie to my parents. Thirty bucks, okay? That’s pretty much my entire supercomputer fund.”

“Let me think about it,” Patricia said.