Friends of a Feather (4 page)

W
hen we're back inside from lunch, Lexie takes one look at me and says, “Where'd your bandage go?”

“Mmm-MMM-mmm,”
I say, shrugging.

I side-eyeball Breezie. She's pretending to organize her desk, but her face says
la-la-la, this time I'm choosing with Ty
.

Lexie doesn't let up about it, and Taylor and Chase say things too, like, “Yeah, Ty, do you have magical healing powers? Is that how your arm got better so fast?”

Breezie doesn't join in, and neither does Joseph. I'm glad about that, but I feel guilty for abandoning him at lunch. Also, I'm embarrassed about “alone time.” So even though I know that Joseph is on my side, it doesn't feel like we're a team.

• • •

I don't wear the bandage the next day, since
duh
, I buried it. But I wouldn't have anyway. My bandage days are over. Lexie bugs me about it
anyway
, copying Chase by asking if I have healing powers and if I'm a wizard and if I can turn people into frogs, stuff like that. To the frog question, I say, “Yep, people like you,” and keep doodling in my notebook.

So
ha
.

Joseph and I sit together at lunch, but it's not just us. There are other kids, too. I help Joseph with his fractions worksheet, because he wasn't here when we started fractions. Everything's fine, I guess. But I don't know. We both might be pretending we're back to being best friends more than we really are.

Breezie's opinion is that Joseph is everybody's new best friend. That's what she says to me by the water fountain. “He thinks he's so important,” she adds, picking an invisible piece of dust off her dress.

“I don't think he thinks that,” I say.

“Well, I do. It's annoying.”

I guess she's missing Lexie. I guess she wants Lexie to leave Joseph and come back to her.

I guess I wish that, too.

I imagine the universe the way I drew it on Monday, with the planets all in the wrong places and space junk floating randomly. I'm beginning to wonder if the universe is ever going to line up straight again.

• • •

After school, Mom picks me up and tells me we have one errand to run.

“Blah,” I say, feeling sorry for myself. I just want to go home and watch cartoons, but I don't get to, so I roll the car window up and down. I lock and unlock my door. I do both of these over and over.

“Ty? Stop,” Mom says.

I slump. Next to me, Baby Maggie wiggles in her car seat, kicking her chubby feet to make her socks come off. It's cute, because she doesn't even need socks. She's a baby. But how come she's allowed to be squirmy and I'm not?

Mom glances at me in the rearview mirror. She says, “What's going on, bud?”

I press my lips together. How do my mom and my sisters always know when to ask that question?

“Well, it's just . . . Joseph,” I say. “He thinks he's so important, just because he's finally back from the hospital.”

“Ty,”
Mom says. I know she's disappointed in me. I'm disappointed in me, too.

“It was Breezie who said that,” I say in a small voice. “I know it's not true. I even told Breezie it's not.”

“Hmm,” Mom says.

“For real. Mom, that really is the truth.”

Mom exhales. “Oh, baby. It's hard, isn't it?”

I blink. I was waiting for a scolding. Cautiously, I say, “What's hard?”

“Life,” she says. She reaches back and squeezes my knee. “But you'll get through it, and that is also the truth. For real.”

She pulls into the parking lot of Collindale Care Center, and my heart sinks. Collindale Care Center is a nursing home. Every month, Mom visits an old lady named Eloise who lives here. I guess today is Eloise Day. I guess that's the errand.

Mom parks the car and turns to face me. “I know that visiting Eloise isn't your favorite thing to do,” she says, and I pick invisible dust off me like Breezie did at the water fountain. “But doing something nice for someone might make you feel better, if you let it. You might be surprised.”

I don't think so, because when we go inside, it smells the way it always does. The paint on the walls is the same yucky yellow, and the lightbulbs they use make my eyes hurt. Also, I know Eloise won't let me make her bed go up and down, so I don't even ask.

Joseph, when I used to visit him at the hospital, let me make his bed go up and down as much as I wanted.

Eloise makes “ooh-ooh” noises when she sees Teensy Baby Maggie. She reaches out a shaky hand, and Mom steps closer with Maggie in her arms. Eloise pats Maggie's leg. She and Mom start talking about baby stuff, and I push down a groan.

I leave Eloise's room and wander into the hall. I'm allowed, and Mom sees me go out the door and nods to say it's okay, so it's not like I'm secretly escaping or anything.

But—aha! Outside in the hall, in his motorized wheelchair, is Mr. Marconi, who is scary and strange and interesting. Mr. Marconi doesn't like it at the Collindale Care Center, and he's
always
trying to secretly escape. Really!

I press my back against the wall. I don't want Mr. Marconi to see me, because he has the bushiest eyebrows in the world. Eyebrows that could kill a small animal, Winnie says.

I don't know
how
his eyebrows would do that, but I believe her. If I were a small animal and I saw those eyebrows coming, I would run like the wind.

“Hey, kid,” Mr. Marconi says.

I pretend not to hear him.

“Hey!” he says. “Kid!”

I point at my chest. “Me?”

He gestures for me to come over. His chin sinks into his chest, making him look like a human version of quicksand. First his chin will sink all the way in, then his face, then his bushy eyebrows.

“Come on, come on,” he says. “Speed it up before one of those old biddies comes and makes me play bingo.”

I walk toward him, dragging my feet. He uses the joystick on his wheelchair to meet me halfway.

“What's your name, kid?” he says. He asks me this every time he sees me.

“Ty,” I tell him.

“What kind of name is that?” he grouches. “Your mother named you after a tie? What's she going to do, tie you around your father's neck?”

He says this every time, too.

“It's short for Tyler,” I say.

He waves his hand to say,
yeah yeah, not interested
. I can see the bones in his fingers, especially his knuckles.

“Listen,” he says. He thinks he's whispering, but he's not. “I need to get out of here. They put me in here by mistake, see?”

He checks for old biddies. Then he points at the emergency exit door at the far end of the hall. “Open that door for me, kid. The bar's too heavy for me to press. But just open that door, and I'll take it from there.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Marconi. I can't.”

“Aw, you.” He makes a raspberry sound, like when Dad blows on Baby Maggie's tummy. I bet he makes a thousand raspberry sounds a day, or at least a hundred, because he's always asking people to open the exit for him, and no one ever does. Everyone knows he's supposed to stay in the building. It's one of the nursing home rules.

“So . . . bye, Mr. Marconi,” I say.

His bushy eyebrows push lower and his chin sinks deeper. “Bah,” he says, making his wheelchair turn in the other direction. He rolls away.

I wonder if I should go check on Mom and Eloise, because Mr. Marconi reminded me about bingo, and if there's a bingo game going on, I want to know. Mr. Marconi might not like bingo, but for me, bingo is the one fun thing at the nursing home. I get to play for the people who can't play on their own, and I get to use a big fat bingo marker to make blue dots on B-11 or G-58 or whatever. When the prize cart comes around, I get to help whoever I'm with decide between a piece of costume jewelry or a banana.

As I'm walking back to Eloise's room, I see a lady come out of another room.

“Bye for now, Mom,” the lady says. She sniffles and dabs a Kleenex to the corner of her eye. “But I'll be back tomorrow. By then, I bet the nurses will have you completely settled in.”

Whoever's in the room must be new, that's my guess. And her daughter—because that's who the lady must be—is worried about her because it's her first day here.

I cross the hall, thinking I'll tell the lady about bingo and crafts and all the other stuff they do here. It's actually not
that
bad. I just don't want to live here myself.

But she hurries off before I reach her. And then—
uh-oh
.

Mr. Marconi. He spots her, and his wrinkled hand goes to his joystick. With a zoom and a fast stop, he plants himself in front of her.

“Hey, you,” I hear him say. He beckons her closer and speaks to her in his raspy voice.

The lady tucks away her Kleenex and says, “Of course, of course.” She walks in her high heels toward the emergency exit.

I chase after her. “Um . . . ma'am? Lady?” I don't know what to call her!

Anyway, it's too late. She pushes the “emergency only” bar, and there's a buzz, and the metal door that says “emergencies only” swings open! And this
is
an emergency, but only because the lady turned it into one! She didn't know, but still!

“Mr. Marconi, wait!” I cry. “You can't go out there!”

He hunches his shoulders and jams his joystick forward. I break into a run.

“Stop him! He's not allowed!” I call.

Mr. Marconi is five feet away from the door. The lady who opened it for him looks confused.

He's four feet away. A nurse pops into the hall and calls to Mr. Marconi in a panicked voice.

He's three feet away, and
there is traffic outside
, and
a real live road with sidewalks and yellow lines and cars
.

The lady draws her hand to her mouth.

He's two feet away. One foot away.
He's going out the door
.

The nurse's hands flutter in the air. “Mr. Marconi! Mr. Marconi!”

She reaches the exit, but the doorway is too narrow to fit both a nurse and a man in a wheelchair.

The traffic-y road is
right there
, just outside the door.

I high-jump over Mr. Marconi's wheelchair. It takes the highest jump ever to get over the armrest
and
his knees
and
his feet, and I stumble when I land.

“Out of the way!” Mr. Marconi yells. “Out of the way, out of the way!”

Owwee
, I think. But I turn toward him and brace myself. I do
not
get out of the way.

Bam!
goes his wheelchair, ramming into my shins.

He backs up and does it again.
Bam!
It HURTS, and I know I'm going to have bruises.

Inside the building, people speak loudly and do frantic things with their hands. I spot Mom, who says, “Ty?”

Mr. Marconi rams me again.
Ow!

I grab the armrests of his wheelchair. “Mr. Marconi,
no
.”

We fight for the joystick. He has crazy-eyebrow power, but I'm stronger.

The wheelchair stops.

I win.

Straining, I push him back into the building. The nurses flood around us, and Mom, and the lady. Everyone fusses over Mr. Marconi, but they also say, “Thank you, little boy,” and “Ty! What in the world?!” and “If you hadn't been here, just think what could have happened!”

I put my hands on my thighs and lean over, breathing hard.
I'm not a little boy
is the first thing I think, but it doesn't bother me too much because I know adults are bad at guessing ages.

The second thing I think is,
I did it. I saved Mr. Marconi. Maybe he didn't want to be saved, but I saved him anyway—and it
did
feel good.

The third thing I think is,
Joseph
.

Thinking about him makes me sad and happy. Sad because our best-friend-ness isn't back to normal, but happy because it can't be
all
the way gone, not if he's the first person I want to tell about my crazy afternoon.

And he is.

M
om calls Dad from the nursing home parking lot and tells him the whole story. She laughs as she tells it, and I hear Dad laughing on the other end. I'm not sure how I feel about this, because I didn't know it was a funny story.

But as I listen, I start to smile. I guess it was pretty funny, with Mr. Marconi scowling and motoring forward and the nurse flapping her arms around.

If Mr. Marconi had gotten hit by a car, it wouldn't be. But he didn't.

“Absolutely,” Mom says after she's reached the end of the story. “I know. I agree!” She listens for a moment, then laughs again. “If you say so. Bye, baby. Love you, too.”

Mom ends the call and twists to face me. Her eyes are soft and shiny. The softness is because she loves me, and the shininess is because her very own son rescued an old man in a wheelchair from escaping from Collindale Care Center.

Her very. Own. Son.

“Your dad is very proud of you, and so am I,” Mom says. “In fact, I think we should go out and celebrate.”

“Yeah!” I say.

“Your dad's busy, but how about I take you to Chipotle for dinner? Sandra and Winnie can fend for themselves.”

“Can I get a Coke even though it's after two o'clock? Can we invite Joseph?”

Mom laughs. “No to the Coke, but yes to Joseph.” She taps some buttons on her phone and hands it to me. “Here—you do the asking. If he says yes, I can talk to his mom after.”

Joseph does want to come with us, and we drive straight from the nursing home to pick him up. He sprints out of his house wearing his fuzzy red hat, and when he slides into the backseat, he grins. I grin back. I'm glad it's just the two of us. I mean, Mom and Baby Maggie are here, but they aren't kids. They aren't Lexie or Taylor or Chase or Hannah or any of those people.

“Hi!” he says.

“Hi!” I say, and since it's the first time Joseph has EVER MET MAGGIE, who's sitting between us because the middle seat is the safest place for her car seat, I make her say “hi” to him, too.

I pick up her bitsy hand and flap it at Joseph. “Hi!” I say in a baby voice.

Joseph waves. Baby Maggie kicks her cute little feet.

“She sure is pink,” Joseph says.

I tilt my head. “I guess she is.”

Maggie
pluhs
at him, which means that she poofs out her lips and goes
pluh
and spits out a tiny spit bubble.

“That means she likes you,” I say. “Also, she has hair sprouts now, which she didn't even a week ago.” I fluff up a tuft of Maggie's pale brown hair. “See?”

“Me too,” Joseph says, and he pulls his hat partway off.

“Awesome,” I say. His hair is super short, but unlike Maggie's hair, which so far grows only in patches, Joseph's short hair covers his whole head. He looks like an army guy.

After that, Maggie wiggles and Mom drives, and I tell Joseph the Mr. Marconi story.

“Where did Mr. Marconi want to go?” Joseph asks.

“I don't know. Back to his old house?”

“But he can't go back to his old house,” Joseph says, but there's a bit of a question in his eyes.

“I guess not. I guess he's too old.”

“He probably can't live on his own anymore,” Mom says, keeping her eyes on the road. “That's usually why people move into nursing homes.”

“Or they get moved in there by someone else,” I say, remembering the lady in the hall who'd dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex.

Mom nods. “Things change. Life goes on. It's not always easy.”

I shift. Joseph fiddles with his seat belt. Then he brings up LEGOs, because we both love LEGOs. From there we go to Origami Yoda and chocolate-covered potato chips, which I've never heard of.

“Really?” Joseph says. “You've really never heard of them?”

“I've really never heard of them.”

Lexie, if she knew about something that no one else did, would be a show-off about it. Like, she'd brag about how good chocolate-covered potato chips were to make the rest of us feel like we were missing out.

But Joseph isn't Lexie. He sits up taller and says he'll bring me some tomorrow.

At Chipotle, Joseph and I both order chicken quesadillas and chips, and Mom lets us get Izzes for our drinks, since they don't have caffeine. We both pick the orange kind, which is called Sparkling Clementine.

The guy at the cash register asks if Joseph and I each want a rubber bracelet. He has a big plastic container of them, and I wonder if the bracelets are like Chipotle's version of a kids' meal prize.

Joseph and I look at each other. “Sure,” we say.

I take a blue one and slip it on. It says BUILDING
A
BETTER
COMMUNITY.

Joseph picks a red one. It says CHANGING
THE
WORLD
ONE
DAY
AT
A
TIME.

The guy behind the cash register says, “Looking good, dudes.”

We eat on the patio. Mom and Baby Maggie sit at one table, and Joseph and I sit at another. The cheese in our quesadillas is warm and melty, and our Izzes are just the right amount of cold. I take a swig and let out a loud burp.

Joseph laughs. He takes a sip of his Izze and tries to burp, but no burp comes out. He tries again. Nothing.

“You have to swallow a sip of air,” I say.

“I know, but I can't.”

“Like this,” I say, and I show him. I don't even drink any of my Izze, and still I make a nice, loud burp.

“Ty,”
Mom says from the other table.

“Sorry!” I say. I giggle, expecting Joseph to giggle back. Instead, he stares at the iron picnic table.

I put down my drink. “Um . . . well . . . can you crack your knuckles?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Plus, I'm not allowed.”

“Taylor can,” Joseph says. “Taylor cracks his knuckles all the time.”

“Yeah, and it's annoying.”

“And he can make himself burp. So can Chase and John and every boy in our class. Even Lexie can make herself burp.”

I don't know what to say.

“Does everyone think I'm weird?” he asks.

“Huh?”

“I can't burp. I can't crack my knuckles. I didn't even know about Lester,” he says unhappily. “Why didn't you tell me about Lester?”

Lester, our class snake? Again, all I can say is
“Huh?!”

He tugs his fuzzy red hat lower over his head. I have a just-out-of-reach feeling, like there's something I should be figuring out. Something I
could
be figuring out, if I could stretch up and pluck the answer from the sky.

Instead, a big black crow swoops down and plucks Joseph's quesadilla off the table. And then the crow takes off with it! Gone!

Another crow meets the first crow in the air. It snaps its beak and steals some for itself.

“Wow,” I say.

Joseph's eyes are big. Together, we watch the crows.

“Check out all the crows by the trash can,” he says.

“Whoa.”

The metal trash can is overflowing with Chipotle wrappers and Dairy Queen cups and even some Dairy Queen unfinished ice-cream cones, and at least a dozen birds are fighting over the scraps of food. Maybe more.

Some are crows. Some are just regular birds. The regular birds are smaller than the crows, but they're quicker, and good at darting in for the fast grab.

“That one bird never gets any,” he says, pointing at a small brown bird a couple feet from the trash can.

“Poor bird,” I say.

The brown bird hops closer to the trash can, but a bigger bird flies down and lands in front of him. The brown bird hops to the left. A crow caws and says, in bird language, “Get out of here, buddy.” With its black flapping wings, the crow shoos the brown bird off.

“He can't fly,” Joseph says. “That's why.”

I study the bird. One of his wings flutters, but the other one doesn't. He's able to hop around, but he never leaves the ground.

“You're right,” I say.

Then it soaks in.

That bird
can't fly
.

I glance at Mom, who's talking on her phone and using her foot to rock Maggie in her car seat. I slowly stand up.

“Hey, Joseph,” I whisper.

He's already with me. He stands up slowly and silently, too.

We both put our fingers to our lips.

We are going to catch that bird.