All the Birds in the Sky

CH@NG3M3 responded, “Do you think Laurence will become an enemy of magic?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why are you asking me?”

She couldn’t get to sleep for ages, even with Berkley scrunched along her rib cage — but then she finally slept, and dreamed she was carving Laurence open with a big knife. His skin parted to reveal a shining portal to a magical land full of kind wizards who gave her a wand of her own. She dreamed she lured him to the Wadlow River cliff, where the high-school kids partied, and shoved him off the edge onto the sharp, slippery rocks.

She woke up crying and shaking and holding on to Berkley for dear life.

* * *

SOMEONE THREW A rock at Patricia’s head before school started. Not a snowball with rocks in it, just a plain chunk of granite. Patricia ducked, but slipped on the path. Laurence grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet. He steadied her, and seemed to be trying to say something. Then he walked away, like he usually did these days whenever he was about to speak to her.

First period, Patricia reached in her backback for her textbook and something else spilled out: a pair of panties, with a stain she couldn’t identify and didn’t care to examine further. She was sure they hadn’t been there when she left the house. The other kids at her table, including Macy Firestone, started laughing and taking photos.

“What’s that commotion?” Mr. Gluckman asked from the board.

“Someone has put … something unspeakable in my bag.” Patricia tried to sound dignified, not like a victim but not like a troublemaker, either.

“Emo bitch,” someone hissed from the corner.

“That’s no excuse for disrupting my class.” Mr. Gluckman frowned, between gray sideburns. “You are taking time away from all of the children who are here to learn something.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Patricia said. “Somebody else—”

“If ‘someone’ has been storing inappropriate items in ‘someone’s’ bag, I suggest you take it up with the principal or Mr. Dibbs.”

Patricia looked around. A roomful of pure entertainment. She caught Laurence’s eye and he gave her a blank, helpless look.

“Fine,” Patricia stood up. “I will. May I be excused?” She didn’t wait for an answer. The door crashed shut behind her, failing to block out the cheers and applause.

She made it halfway to Mr. Dibbs’s office before Mr. Dibbs charged around a corner and grabbed her arm. “You”—he grabbed her arm with one meaty hand—“have some explaining to do.” She tried talking to him, but he hauled her right into the girls’ room, where she saw, written in blood on the wall:

DEATH IS EXCELLENT

It wasn’t human blood. It wasn’t fresh blood. It was definitely blood, though — whoever had done this had left plastic containers from the butcher shop in the trash. The “paint” was dripping, the message still melting on the wall. Someone had gone into the girls’ room and painted this right after first period began, without anybody noticing. You would have to be a ninja.

“What…” Patricia felt frostbitten from the inside out. The stench was punishing: a noxious slaughterhouse odor, the dying distress of cattle immortalized in smell form. She couldn’t bear to be in the same room with it.

Mr. Dibbs’s jaw twitched under his dark, thick beard. He gestured at the wall with his free hand. “You are going to clean this up and then we are going to call your parents to come and have a conversation about civilized behavior and barbarism and the vital! The crucial! Difference between the two.”

“I didn’t … Please let go of my arm, you’re hurting me.” She couldn’t hear herself talk. He jerked her closer to the wall, so she was inches away from it. “I don’t know anything about this. Please let go of my arm, corporal punishment is illegal in school and you are hurting me, please LET GO OF MY ARM!”

Mr. Dibbs let go of her, but he was already turning to go call Patricia’s parents. They wouldn’t listen to her either. There would be three adults screaming at her, instead of one.

“Listen,” Patricia said. “Whoever did this, they did it during first period. Lots of girls went to the bathroom before first period and there was no blood on the wall then. And everybody saw me in first period, I was the first to arrive at Math class. There’s no way I could have done this. So excuse me, sir, I am going back to Math class now.”

Her “victory” left Patricia with soiled panties still to dispose of and a classroom full of kids who kept trying to take photos of her to post on Instagram with mean comments.

The blood graffiti stayed on the bathroom wall the rest of the day. The school janitor refused to go near it on religious grounds — nobody knew what religion he was, exactly, and he wouldn’t say.