All the Birds in the Sky (6 page)

This was going to require a change of tactic.

5

WHENEVER SHE COULD,
Patricia escaped to the heart of the forest. The birds laughed at her attempts to mimic them. She kicked a tree. Nothing responded. She ran deeper into the forest. “Hello? I’m here. What do you want from me? Hello!” She would have given anything to be able to transform herself, or anything else, so her world wasn’t just boring walls and boring dirt. A real witch ought to be able to do magic by instinct. She ought to be able to make mystical things happen, by sheer will, or with a profound enough belief.

A few weeks after the start of school, the frustration became too much. Patricia grabbed some dried-up spices and twigs from the basement of the spice house, went into the woods, and lit them on fire with kitchen matches. She ran around and around the tiny flame inside a shallow pit, doing nonsense chants and shaking her hands. She pulled her own hair and threw it into the flames. “Please,” she choked through tears. “Hello? Please do something. Please!” Nothing. She crouched on her heels, watching her failed enchantment turn to ash.

When Patricia got home, her sister, Roberta, was showing their parents camera-phone pictures of Patricia lighting a fire and dancing around it. Plus, Roberta had a headless squirrel inside a FoodPile bag, which she claimed was Patricia’s work. “Patricia is doing Satanic rituals in the woods,” said Roberta. “And drugs. I saw her doing drugs, too. There were shrooms. And 420. And Molly.”

“PP, we’re worried about you,” Patricia’s father said, shaking his head until his beard was a blur. “PP” was his nickname for Patricia when she was a little baby, and when they were about to punish her he would start using it again. She thought it was cute when she was little, but when she got older she decided it was a subtle reference to her failure to be a boy. “We keep hoping you’re going to start growing up. We don’t enjoy punishing you, PP, but we have to prepare you for a tough world, where—”

“What Roderick is saying is that we spent
a lot of money
to send you to a school with uniforms and discipline and a curriculum that creates winners,” Patricia’s mom hissed, her jaw and penciled eyebrows looking sharper than usual. “Are you determined to blow this last chance? If you just want to be garbage, just let us know, and you can go back to the woods. Just never come back to this house. You can go live in the woods forever. We could save a large sum of money.”

“We just want to see you
become
something, PP,” her dad chimed in.

So they grounded her indefinitely and forbade her to go into the woods
ever again
. This time instead of sliding food under her door, they kept sending Roberta up with a tray. Roberta put Tabasco and Sriracha chili oil on everything, no matter what.

The first night, Patricia’s mouth was burning and she couldn’t even leave her room for a glass of water. She was lonely and cold, and her parents had taken all of the stuff from her room that might entertain her, including her laptop. In her total boredom, she memorized some extra passages from her history book and she did all of the math problems, even the extra-credit ones.

The next day at school, everybody had seen the pictures of Patricia dancing around the fire, and of the squirrel with no head—because Roberta had sent them to
her
friends at high school, and some of Roberta’s friends had brothers and sisters who went to Canterbury. More people started giving Patricia weird looks in the hallway, and this one boy whose name Patricia didn’t even know ran up to her during Lunch Recess, yelled “Emo bitch,” and ran away. Carrie Danning and Macy Firestone, the theater kids, made a big show of checking Patricia’s wrists, because she was probably a cutter, too, and they were
concerned
. “We just want to make sure you’re getting the help you need,” Macy Firestone said, bright orange hair rippling around her heart-shaped face. The actual popular kids, like Traci Burt, just shook their heads and texted each other.

The second night of being grounded, Patricia started to go nuts and she was choking on the red-hot super-spicy turkey and mashed potatoes Roberta had carried up. She was coughing and rasping and wheezing. The sound of the television downstairs—too loud to ignore, too quiet to make out what anyone was saying—peeled her skull.

The weekend was the worst part of being grounded. Patricia’s parents put their own weekend plans on hold so they could keep her locked in her room. Like they had to miss an exhibition of vintage door knockers that they’d read about in one of their design magazines, which they’d been looking forward to.

If Patricia could do magic, then she could fly out her window or communicate with witches in China and Mexico. But no. She was still just boring, and bored.

Sunday came around. Patricia’s mother made a pot roast. Roberta poured Tabasco over Patricia’s portion before bringing it upstairs. Roberta unlocked the door and handed the tray to Patricia, then stood there in the doorway to watch Patricia eat. Waiting to see Patricia freak out and turn bright pink.

Instead, Patricia calmly loaded a big forkful into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. She shrugged. “It’s too bland,” she said. “I would prefer it to be spicier.” Then she handed it back to Roberta and closed her door.

Roberta took the tray back down and found a bottle of Texas extra-spicy five-alarm BBQ sauce. She splashed it onto Patricia’s pot roast until it gave off a pungent aroma.

She carried the food back up to Patricia and handed it over. Patricia chewed a bit. “Hmmm,” she said. “A little better. But still not spicy enough. I would really like something a lot spicier.”

Roberta went and got a jar of Peruvian hot pepper seeds and dotted them all over the pot roast.

Patricia felt as though her mouth was on fire after just one bite, but she forced a smile onto her face. “Hmm. I would still like it spicier. Thank you,” Patricia said.

Roberta found some chili powder on the top shelf of the downstairs pantry and put a generous scoopful onto Patricia’s dinner. She had to pull her sweater over her nose and mouth to carry it back upstairs.

Patricia considered this screaming piece of beef, which was way spicier than the spiciest thing she’d ever eaten (a five-alarm chili that had been billed as “forbidden by the Geneva cooking convention” by the roadside diner where her family had stopped last summer). She forced herself to take a big bite and chew slowly. “Sure. That’ll do. Thanks.” Roberta watched Patricia eat the whole thing, slowly—but like she was savoring it, not like she was in pain or reluctant. When it was all gone, Patricia thanked Roberta again. The door closed and Patricia was alone. She let out a fiery gasp.

Patricia’s stomach was being eaten from the inside. Her head was boiling away, and she felt faint. Everything was blinding white, and her mouth was a toxic disaster area. She was sweating red-hot oil through every inch of her skin. Most of all, her forehead hurt from pushing against the ceiling.

Wait a second. Why was her forehead up against the ceiling? Patricia could look down and see her own body, flopping around a bit. She was flying! She had left her body! Something about so much chili powder and hot oil all at once must have put her into a state. She was astral-projecting. Or something. She no longer even felt her stomach pain or any tingling in her mouth, that was for her physical body. “I love spicy food!” Patricia said with no mouth and no breath.

She flew to the woods.

She raced over the lawns and driveways, swooping and lifting, amazed at the feeling of the wind pressing through her face. Her hands and feet were pure silver. She rose higher, so the highway was a stream of brightness underneath her. The night felt cold, but not in a painful way, more like she was filling up with air.

Somehow Patricia knew the way to the place where the Parliament had met when she was a little girl. She wondered if she was dreaming all this, but it had too many funny details, like the highway construction closing one lane in the middle of the night—who would dream that up?—and it all seemed totally real.

Soon she was in front of the majestic Tree where the Parliament had met, its great wings of leaves arching over her. But there were no birds this time. The Tree just fanned in the darkness, the wind animating its fronds a little bit. Patricia had wasted a trip out of her body, because nobody was home. Just her luck.

She almost turned and flew back. But maybe the birds were in recess somewhere nearby. “Hello?” Patricia said into the darkness.

“Hell,” a voice said back, “o.”

Patricia had been standing planted in a patch of ground, but at the sound of that voice she jumped, and rose four feet in the air because she still weighed nothing. She remembered at last how to come back down to earth.

“Hello?” Patricia said again. “Who’s there?”

“You called out,” said the voice. “I answered.”

This time, Patricia could tell somehow that the voice was coming from the Tree itself. Like there was a presence there, at the center of its big trunk. There wasn’t a face or anything, just a feeling that something was watching her.

“Thank you,” Patricia said. She was getting cold, after all, in her panda pajamas. She was barefoot outdoors in the autumn night, even though this wasn’t her body.

“I have not spoken to a living person,” the Tree said, forming the words syllable by syllable, “in many seasons. You were distressed. What is wrong?” Its voice sounded like the wind blowing through an old bellows, or the lowest note playing on a big wooden recorder.

Now Patricia felt embarrassed, because suddenly her problems felt tiny and selfish, when she placed them in front of such a huge and ancient presence. “I feel like a fake witch,” she said. “I can’t
do
anything. At all. My friend Laurence can build supercomputers and time machines and ray guns. He can make cool things happen any time he wants. I can’t make
anything
cool happen.”

“Something cool,” the Tree said in a gust of vowels and a clatter of consonants, “is happening. Right now.”

“Yes,” Patricia said, ashamed again. “Yes! Definitely! This is great. Really. But this just happened on its own. I can’t
make
anything happen when I want it to.”

“Your friend would control nature,” said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. “A witch must serve nature.”

“But,” Patricia said, thinking this through. “That’s not fair. If nature serves Laurence, and I serve nature, then it’s like I’m serving Laurence. I like Laurence, I guess, but I don’t want to be his servant.”

“Control,” the Tree said, “is an illusion.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “So I guess I really am a witch. Right? I mean, you called me a witch just now. Plus I left my body, that counts for something. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I know it must be hard work being a tree. Especially a Parliamentary Tree.”

“I am many trees,” the Tree said. “And many other things besides. Goodbye.”

The journey back to Patricia’s house went much faster than the outward trip, perhaps because she was much sleepier. She passed through the ceiling of her bedroom and into her body—which was twisted with horrible stomach pain, because she had eaten enough hot peppers for a hundred thousand curries.

“Aaaaaaaaa!” Patricia shouted, sitting up and clutching her stomach. “Bathroom break! Bathroom break! I need a bathroom break NOW!!!!”

*   *   *

ON MONDAY, SHE
sat across from Laurence at lunch at the far end of one of the long tables, next to the slop cans, where the kids who had no clique of their own were stuck.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.

“Sure,” Laurence said without hesitating. He was poking holes in his gray, clammy hamburger with a knife. “You already know all of my secrets.”

“Great.” Patricia lowered her voice and covered her mouth. “So listen. You probably won’t even believe any of this. I know it’s going to sound crazy. But I have to tell someone. You’re the only one I can tell.” She told the whole story, as best she could.

6

EVERY TIME LAURENCE
showed Patricia another one of his inventions, he felt a crick in his neck. Sort of a charley horse, that only happened when he pulled an experimental device out of his knapsack. He wondered about this for days until he realized: He was instinctively flinching away from Patricia and lifting one shoulder. Braced for her to call him a creep.

“Here’s something I’ve been working on,” he would start to say—and then his neck would spasm. Even when he realized he was doing it, he couldn’t stop. Like part of him always flashed back to his sixth-grade Show-and-Tell disaster, the Laserscoop.

But if anything, Patricia just seemed endlessly curious. Even when he showed her the remote-controlled cyborg cockroach kit he’d ordered from the internet, one day after school. “Here’s where you connect it to the roach’s central nervous system, so it will obey all of your fiendish commands,” Laurence said, pointing at the little wires on the tiny metal wedge, fresh out of the box. A truck belched underneath the pedestrian overpass they were sitting on, so neither of them could talk until it had passed.

“Roach-borg.” Patricia looked at the roach-saddle in Laurence’s palm. “That is nuts.” She started to do a Borg voice from
Star Trek
: “Doritos are irrelevant.”

“So you’re not grossed out?” Laurence put it back in the box it came in, and the box back in the knapsack. He looked at her: still kind of giggling, though with a nervy edge to it. A car pulled a boat down the road. Probably the last chance for sailing this year.

Patricia considered this. “Sure, it’s kind of yuck. But not as bad as when we dissected a cow brain in Biology class. I just don’t feel sorry for a roach.” Her legs kicked against the metal underside of the bridge, through the slats in the railing. Right now, as far as Laurence’s parents knew, he and Patricia were halfway up the Crystal Lake Trail.

They both just watched the cars for a moment. Patricia had taken to rolling up the sleeves of her uniform cardigan all the time, so people could tell at a glance that she wasn’t cutting herself—she really wasn’t, okay?