The Amazing Life of Birds (4 page)

Kind of.

As I pulled my T-shirt on over my head I felt/heard a
sproiing
and looked in the mirror to see the cowlick standing straight up.

Like a spear as big as two fingers. When I touched it to bend it back down it didn't move. It felt like wood.

I walked out of the locker room to the gym floor to find that I was right next to Rachel.

And just so you don't think I'm negative about everything, I tried to take a positive look at my situation.

All right. The Amber business hadn't gone too well. But, I thought, if I just play volleyball and keep
my mouth shut like I did with Amber maybe I can get through this day and then I will never come back to school or leave my room again as long as I live.

Could work.

Meanwhile we're just in front of the net, Rachel next to me in the corner. The opposing team serves, the ball loops over, somebody in the back row lobs it to me for an easy setup….

I would like to say that I two-handed it perfectly over to Rachel and she spiked it down over the net for the point and gave me a smile like we'd been doing this for years and perhaps after the game we could get together for a Coke and maybe take in a movie and later walk through the park in the moonlight holding hands.

What really happened is that the easy lob caught me on the side of my head and, to protect myself, I hit it with my fist.

Sideways.

Into Rachel's face.

Then I tripped and went headfirst into Rachel.

“Your hair stuck me!”

And because it's Rachel and not Amber, my mouth opened.

“I'm sorry, it's because I've got a skin condition that makes my hair stand up so I had to use spray to keep it down only it didn't stay down the way the doctors said it's supposed to and that's why it stood up and
stuck but the condition is only temporary and will go away … soon …”

Whereupon (I kind of like that word) I looked around and realized the volleyball game had stopped and everybody …

Even the coach.

… was listening to me.

God knows what would happen in industrial arts.

Probably something nuclear.

Man, I have
got
to get some kind of plan.

I picked up a three-ring binder notebook with color-coded spacers for different subjects and three clipboards, which I'm going to hang on the wall. I have a good wristwatch with a GPS.

I'm going to log my destruction. This journal will catalog one level of it, but I think if I keep track and try to write down what I plan to do before I do it maybe it will help scientists understand how all this happens for other unfortunate souls.

Last night after my perfect day, I dreamed I was a kind of puberty werewolf.

In my dream I handcuffed myself to the bed and when the puberty full moon came up and I started to change into puberty wolf, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make a puberty ass of myself.

Oh, I tried. In the dream I tried to talk to Rachel and not talk to Amber—both of them were standing nearby for some reason—but it didn't work. I tripped over the bed and babbled to Rachel and when my sister came into the dream with a rolled-up newspaper to housebreak me because I'd gone puberty potty on the floor …

Luckily I awakened before I bit somebody and spread the puberty disease.

ELBOW.

Yeah. Right there in front of me, right then. While I was writing. There's no predicting it.

I don't think the three-ring binder is going to work for one simple reason: I don't have a clue what's coming next.

Take today. No school, Saturday, so I call Willy and he comes over and we play video games and I work on my model of an F-105, which was the jet fighter my grandfather flew. It was nicknamed the Thud and fought in Vietnam, where he was a pilot, and I was trying to figure out what his life was like.

Not one ELBOW all day. And when it came toward evening Willy called home and spent the night and it was just a normal day.

That night Willy slept on the cot that turns into a chair and after all the lights were out and we were just lying there he said: “Doo-Doo, you awake?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever think about how it was when we were kids?”

“I think we're still kids.”

“No. When we were little. You remember playing with toy cars and trucks in the dirt?”

“Sure.”

“Wasn't that fun?”

“Yeah. I guess so. Why?”

“Sometimes I miss it….”

I had a sudden mental picture of a time when I was maybe three, no, four years old. I had a yellow metal bulldozer and was pretending that I was a heavy-equipment operator making a road in a sandbox in back of my grandmother's house.

I remembered it so clearly. I was working on a little hill and I leaned down and put my head against the ground so the hill looked bigger and the bulldozer had to push a little mountain.

The bulldozer became real to me and the sounds I was making were real engine sounds and just then my grandmother came out of the house with a half sandwich and a glass of milk.

“Working men have to eat,” she said, and I was proud that she'd called me a man and I explained that I was making a road.

“What will go on it?” she asked.

“Trucks. Lots of trucks.”

And for just that time, just that minute, I was a real working man and it was a real bulldozer I was running on a real road….

I started to cry and was glad it was dark and Willy couldn't see me.

I knew all that was gone. I would never be able to pretend again, not in that way. The model plane I was building would always be just that, a model. I wouldn't be able to hold it up and make jet sounds and see it flying over Vietnam with my grandfather in the pilot's seat.

And while part of me seemed glad to grow, another part missed that moment so much that it almost physically hurt. I shifted in my bed.

“Doo-Doo?”

“Yeah.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

“We have a new girl in school.”

“Oh yeah. What's her name?”

“Maggie.”

“What about her?”

“I think she's really hot.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm not sure exactly what that means.”

“You know. She's, like, hot. Like her hair is pretty. Like a movie star.”

“Oh. Well, then, I guess so.” I couldn't get a picture in my mind of a hot movie star girl. Major body. A blur with blond hair cut short, maybe blue eyes. Maybe green. Somebody moving fast all the time. I was still back in my grandmother's backyard, sad because I couldn't pretend anymore. I felt like I'd lost something I would never be able to find again and that's never good.

“Yeah.” Willy sighed in the dark. “She's really hot.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“Then it's cool.”

“Yeah. Cool.”

“I talked to Rachel yesterday.” Not bad. That was the truth.

“Yeah? What did you say?”

I thought, I hit her in the face with a volleyball and spiked her with my head and told her I have a skin condition that makes my hair stand up and I had four Band-Aids covering zits that looked like open wounds and I smelled like a cheap beauty parlor or a men's barracks. “Oh. We just talked.”

“Is she hot?”

“I don't know.”

I really didn't.

It's official.

I now have more zits than the bird has feathers. He got two more on his neck, I have four new zits on my chest and I don't even want to look at my back.

The cowlick is still there but I've got all day to work on it. It's Sunday. Willy went home early this morning. I rode bikes with him halfway and then came back and went to work.

Hair spray doesn't really help. Or maybe it does. It's only temporary and when the hair springs up again it has more force. Like it's angry.

I tried combing it back and down and finally came up with a solution. Simple, really. Just cut it off. So I took a scissors, borrowed my sister's small hand mirror— first mistake—and then started to hold it over my
head, looking from the bathroom mirror to the hand mirror. I didn't close the bathroom door. Second mistake.

Just as I was getting ready to snip off the few prickly hairs sticking up, my sister came by the door.

“What are you doing with my mirror?”
she screamed.

It startled me so badly that I jerked, snipped and dropped the mirror at the same time. The mirror shattered and I took out a chunk of hair half as big as my fist.

Now I was a bald man with seven years of bad luck. If that was on top of the way my luck was going so far I might just as well stick my head in the toilet and pull the handle.

“You broke my mirror!”

I was on my hands and knees picking up glass and I looked up at her and said: “Believe me, that is the least of my worries. Do you realize I now have more zits than the bird has feathers?”

That confused her long enough for me to get away before she peeled the skin off her skull and became the All-Evil Death's-head that Devours the World.

It could happen any minute.

Okay, back in my room. I'd wear a baseball cap. The solution was there the whole time.

No. Wait. They had a rule because gangbangers wore baseball caps. No caps at school.

A bag over my head?

The way things were going that wasn't too bad an idea. I could cut holes to see, be the mysterious boy with the bag over his head, which everybody would of course know instantly was the kid with the skin condition that made his hair spike out who ran around slamming volleyballs into girls' faces.

I sat at the windowsill by the bird. The bird family had totally accepted me now—unlike the entire rest of the world. I could be the new bird man. Like that guy in Alcatraz who had all the pet birds. I could just live in my room for the rest of my life, a giant zit and his birds, all alone.

The baby was more sure of himself every day. He'd sit on the edge of the nest to go to the bathroom (this afternoon he caught Gorm on the head, a perfect bull's-eye) and flap his little wings like he was trying to fly.

I suppose just to build his flying muscles.

Acting as if.

Maybe that was it. I was going about this whole thing wrong—clearly. Or I wouldn't look this bad. Maybe I had to be more positive. Act as if.

But as if what?

Where was this whole puberty thing going? That was the question. So far it was just something put on Earth to destroy me. Or maybe make my sister happy. Again, all I had to do was look in a mirror.

As if I could fly?

As if I were confident and sure of myself?

As if I were Ferris Bueller?

Nah. I would never have a Ferrari.

But act as if I were something I'm not.

Act.

That was the answer. Don't be myself. Be somebody better.

Like the bird, I had to act as if. I had to play the role of somebody cool.

Cool.

I went for it. No Band-Aids, no hair spray. I headed out to school like I was
proud
of all those zits and the bald spot. I had
earned
the right to be ugly.

And for a little while—fifteen or twenty seconds— it seemed to be working. Until I opened my locker and took out my books for first period.