All the Birds in the Sky

Patricia kept feeling as though she was going to blow chunks, as she sat in classroom after classroom listening to the other kids whispering and the teachers trying to carry on as if nothing had happened. She couldn’t throw up if she were willing to, because the whole school had just a dozen toilet stalls for girls now and the lines were forever. She did wait in line once to pee, and girls kept shoving her “by accident.”

Patricia tried to talk to Laurence once or twice, but he kept slipping away.

As she reached the doorway, she noticed Mr. Rose studying her from inside the school. He’d gone back to normal size. She remembered what she’d been trying not to think about: He’d told her she’d be going away soon from this terrible place. Her training would begin. She would be free and luminous, a real witch. She only had to complete. One small task.

10

LAURENCE LOST TRACK of how many conversations he overheard about the scandal of Patricia. People had nothing else to talk about as they suited up for Track and Field (Laurence was Field, sort of), or studied for the big exams, or waited for gymnastics tryouts, which Laurence was “keeping Dorothy Glass company” for. (She hadn’t yet told him to go away and seemed to appreciate him bringing her stuff.) Dorothy did this thing with her leg as she perched on the bleachers that felt personally significant to Laurence.

Laurence had a line he wouldn’t cross: He would never say anything bad about Patricia or laugh at anyone else’s burn. He wouldn’t sycophant his way into the outskirts of anyone’s group by burning his onetime friend. Mostly, he tried not to think about the Patricia thing. She could look after herself. He was in a cocoon, pupating and incommunicado. There was nothing he could do either way. Six months from now, if everything went to plan, Laurence would be a freshman at the math-and-science school.

And in the meantime, Laurence poured every spare minute into upgrading CH@NG3M3, which claimed more and more space in his secure closet, until he had to throw out most of his clothes. Every time he added more processing power, the computer seemed to chew it up right away. Laurence had built a neural network with just a handful of layers, but somehow this had grown on its own to over twenty layers, as CH@NG3M3 kept refactoring itself. Not only that, but the serial connections had gotten more confusing — instead of sending data from Machine A to Machine B to Machine C, it was going from A to B to C to B to C to A, creating more and more feedback loops.

One day, Patricia was in line next to Laurence at the cafeteria. She looked messed up — dark hair falling into her face, circles under her eyes, uniform disarrayed, socks mismatched — and she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She didn’t even notice what sort of crap they slung onto her tray. Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

Laurence had a powerful conviction he should say something to Patricia. Nobody would notice. He wouldn’t stand up and shout that he was on her side or anything.

“Hey,” Laurence muttered in Patricia’s general direction. She didn’t seem to hear him. She stumbled, zombie-like, toward the desserts.

“Hey,” Laurence said, a little louder. “Hey Patricia. How are you, like, doing?”

“I’m doing,” Patricia said without looking up.

“Cool, cool,” Laurence said, as if she’d ended that sentence with an adverb. “Me too, me too.”

They went their separate ways — they were both eating alone, but Laurence had the privilege of eating alone in a secluded nook of the cafeteria, behind the milk pumps with their sawn-off rubber tubing. Patricia, meanwhile, ate alone in a dim corner of the library, behind the geography shelves, where Laurence barely noticed her when he dropped off a book on his way to class. She was so shrouded, she looked like Batman.

At home, Laurence studied his parents, who had forgotten that he’d yelled at them for being defeated by life a few weeks earlier. Laurence’s dad kept complaining about his car sound system eating his CDs.

There was an article online about problems with the aerospace company that Isobel, the rocket scientist, was helping to run. Launches getting canceled over and over, minor accidents. He read it three times, cursing each time.

Laurence got a letter saying he’d been admitted to the math-and-science high school for the fall. He kept it on his dresser, next to his grandmother’s old ring and his three different combs (for different parts of his head) and he looked at it every morning as he got dressed for school. The two crinkly folds in the paper started to look like the lines of Laurence’s palm after a while. Life lines.