All the Birds in the Sky

“I would never advocate violence.” Mr. Rose leaned back in his pleather chair with his hands behind his smooth head. “You children are too important. You are the future, after all. But find ways to make them see what you’re capable of, so they respect you. Keep alert and always know your escape routes. Or try to blend into the shadows as much as possible. They can’t hurt what they can’t see.”

“Okay,” Laurence said. “I sort of see what you’re saying.”

“Children,” said Theodolphus Rose, “are adults who haven’t yet learned to make fear their hand puppet.” He smiled.

7

A BULLFROG JUMPED out of Patricia’s locker. A big one, too large to cup in your hands. It croaked, probably something like “get me out of here.” Its eyes looked strangulated with panic, and its legs — awfully little, to support such a bulbous frame — twitched. It wanted to find its cool wet nest and get away from this white hell. Patricia tried to catch it, but it slipped through her grasp. Someone must have spent hours catching this thing, gotten up at dawn or something. The frog gave a vengeful grunt and took off down the hallway, heading god knew where, as all the kids shrieked with laughter. “Emo bitch,” someone called out.

After school, Patricia sat on her bed and talked to CH@NG3M3, Laurence’s supercomputer, like she did every day lately. “My parents say they’ll never let me go into the woods as long as I live, which means I’m no use to anybody at all. And everybody at school keeps accusing me of being a cutter and a crazy person. Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier.”

“If you were crazy,” CH@NG3M3 responded, “how would you know you were crazy?”

“That’s a good question,” Patricia admitted. “You would need to have one person who you completely trusted. Like, if you trusted one other person, you could check to see if you were seeing the same things they were.” She chewed her thumb, sitting cross-legged on her brass-kettle quilt, legs tucked under her skirt.

“What if you didn’t see the same things?” CH@NG3M3 said. “Would you be crazy?” Sometimes when the computer got out of its depth, it would rephrase Patricia’s answers back to her and change them slightly — which almost looked like it was thinking, but not quite.

“You’re lucky you don’t have eyes, or a body,” Patricia told it. “You don’t have to worry about any of this stuff.”

“What do I have to worry about?” CH@NG3M3 asked, in another blue speech balloon.

“Getting unplugged, I guess. Laurence changing his mind and turning you off.”

“Where would you get another pair of eyes?” CH@NG3M3 abruptly dragged the conversation back to the earlier topic, something that happened when it judged they’d reached a dead end. “What kind of eyes would you want to have?”

Something about this conversation gave Patricia an idea: If her parents wouldn’t let her go back to the woods, maybe she could get them to agree to something else? Like maybe she could get a cat. At dinner, Patricia forked steamed kale around her plate while her mom asked what everybody had done to Improve themselves today. Roberta, the perfect straight-A student, always had the best Improvements, like every day she’d aced some crazy-tough assignment. But Patricia was stuck at a school where all you ever did was memorize stuff and fill out multiple-choice ovals, so she had to lie, or else learn something in her spare time. For three or four days in a row, Patricia kept coming up with Improvements that sounded kind of impressive, storing up credit, and then she started mentioning that she wanted to get a cat.

Patricia’s parents disliked animals and felt certain that they would be allergic. But at last, they relented — so long as Patricia promised to do all cat-related labor, and if the cat got sick they wouldn’t have to rush to a vet or anything. “We have to agree in advance that all veterinary care will be scheduled far ahead, in a time window that’s convenient for Roderick and myself,” said Patricia’s mother. “There will be no such thing as a cat-related emergency. Are we in agreement?”

Patricia nodded and crossed her heart.

Berkley was a fluffy black kitten with a huge white stripe on his stomach and a white smudge across his scowly face. (Patricia named him after a cartoonist.) They got Berkley already fixed, out of a litter of kittens from their neighbor, Mrs. Torkelford, and right away Patricia noticed something familiar about him. He kept giving Patricia the stink-eye and running away from her, and after a few days she realized: He must be the grandson, or grandnephew, of Tommington, the cat she’d stranded up a tree when she was little. Berkley never spoke to her, of course, but she couldn’t shake the impression that he had heard about her.