“Because he’s a bird. An outdoor bird, and we don’t know how to help him get better.”
“We could call a bird doctor,” I say.
“We could,” Dad says carefully. “But I don’t know any bird doctors.”
“You could find one on the Internet. Or Mom could call Doctor Petty again,” I say.
Dr. Petty’s the vet who takes care of Sweetie-Pie. Her name really is Dr. Petty, with the “pet” part right in there, and Mom called her once already. It was right after we got home. We came in from the garage, and Mom plonked her purse on the island and shifted Baby Maggie from one arm to the other. Then she glanced at me and noticed Joseph’s hat.
She said, “Ty, isn’t that Joseph’s hat? Why do you have Joseph’s hat . . . and why are you holding it like that?”
So I told her, and I showed her, and she should have been a polite mommy and said, “Why, hello, Fernando. How nice to meet you.”
Instead, she made a pained expression and gave a speech that started with, “Oh, sweetie,” and ended with me going la la la in my head because I didn’t like what she was saying.
Then she dug her phone out of her purse and called Dr. Petty, only she reached a recording and not a real person. I heard Dr. Petty’s faraway voice saying when the clinic was open and stuff like that, and then, at the end, “If this is an emergency, please call two-three-one-something-something-something.”
And it was an emergency! It still is! But Mom didn’t call that other number. She just pressed the hang-up button and set her phone by her purse with a sigh.
From her spot in the den, Mom sighs again. “This is my fault. I’m sorry, Ty. I never should have said yes to keeping a bird in the first place.”
“But you did,” I say.
“She didn’t think you’d actually catch one,” Dad replies.
A quivery feeling spreads over me. I’m so mad at him, and I’m so mad at Mom, too. Fernando is being a very small shape in the very corner of the box, and it doesn’t make any sense but I’m mad at him, too. Couldn’t he . . . perk up? Fluff his wing feathers and look around at everybody with his bright eyes?
Winnie runs her finger down Fernando’s back.
“He’s such a cutie,” she says. She places her whole hand over his body, gently, and holds it there. Does she feel his heart beating? Does she feel him breathing? “He is sick, though.”
“That’s why you were able to catch him,” Sandra adds. “Well, but you know that already.”
Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.
“What would you do if you did keep him?” Sandra goes on. “Keep him in that box? Do you think he would like that?”
“I’m not even sure he’d be that fun as a pet,” Winnie says. She moves her hand from Fernando’s body to my knee. “I’m not saying that to be mean.”
I twitch my leg to get rid of her. She’s being nice, because she’s Winnie, but right now I’m trying not to cry, and niceness makes it worse.
“And what about Sweetie-Pie?” she says.
“What about Sweetie-Pie?”
“She’s a cat. Cats like birds.”
“Cats like to eat birds,” Sandra says, in case I was too dumb to understand.
I hold the shoebox tighter. “We would keep him safe.”
“None of us has ever taken care of an outside bird, or any bird,” Mom says. “In your heart, I think you know that.”
A stupid tear runs down my cheek. A lot of stupid tears. Winnie hugs me, and I bury my head against her side.
“I made a mistake, Ty,” Mom says. “Grown-ups mess up, just like kids do.”
“But you shouldn’t,” I say, my voice muffled by Winnie’s shirt.
“But I did, and now my job is to figure out how to fix it. I hope you’ll help.”
I peek at her and see Dad pull her close. He kisses the top of her head.
I peek at Fernando. He’s still in the corner of the box, just . . . sitting there.
I take a shuddery breath. I push myself up from Winnie and drag the back of my arm over my eyes.
“Okay, but we can’t just put him back outside,” I say. “How would that be helping him?”
“I agree,” Winnie says.
“Me too,” Sandra says. “I think you should call the emergency vet number, Mom.”
Mom starts to protest. I bet she’s going to say she doesn’t want to bother Dr. Petty or something dumb like that. Then Mom’s expression changes. She nods and says, “You’re right. I can do that. I can, and so I will.”
“Will you do it now?” I ask.
“Absolutely. I left my phone in the kitchen—I’ll be right back.” She slips out of the den, closing the door behind her.
“I’m sorry you’re sad, Ty,” Dad says. “Things don’t always work out the way we want them to, do they?”
You think? I want to say, but I don’t since that would be smart-mouthing. But I know more about things not working out then he ever will.
When Mom comes back, she tells us that Dr. Petty’s assistant, Sam, is willing to come pick Fernando up, and Sam and Dr. Petty will do all they can to get Fernando well. Mom also tells me that even though birds from nature should be left in nature, Dr. Petty said I probably saved Fernando’s life by bringing him home.
That’s good, I guess. I hold Fernando’s box in my lap until Sam arrives. Then I pet him one last time and say, “Get better.” I don’t want to be the one to give him to Sam, so I hand the box to Winnie, who takes him to the front door.
After I see Sam’s car pull away, I go to my room. I lie on my bed. I think about birds and promises and things not going how they’re supposed to, and then I call Joseph. I tell him everything that’s happened.
“Oh,” he says. He pauses. “Well, it’s good that we saved him.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s good that your vet can help him.”
“Yeah.”
We breathe.
“Baby Maggie still doesn’t have a pet,” I say.
“Maybe when she’s older, you can get her something,” he says.
“I know,” I say heavily. He’s being kind about it, even though he sat next to Baby Maggie in Mom’s car and saw that she really is a baby. Babies don’t need pets. Babies don’t know what pets are. I pretended Maggie wanted a pet, but it was me all along.
I swallow, needing to make some part of the day be worth it. “But catching him, that was fun.”
Joseph tries to help out by laughing. “Remember when that crow flew into your face and you went, ‘Ahhhh!’”
“That was you!” I say. “And then you jammed your elbow into my eye and practically made me blind?”
“You have two eyes. I only hit one, so you wouldn’t have been blind.”
“You never know about me.”
“Um, yes I do.”
“You know what, though?”
“What?”
I grip the phone, because this is the important thing. The thing I need to make sure Joseph understands. “The reason we had so much fun is because it was us. Just me and you.”
“Well, your mom was there, and Baby Maggie.”
“You know what I mean.” I gather my courage. “At school, I sometimes feel like you get stolen from me.”
“Stolen?”
I speak quickly. “It’s better when it’s just us, that’s all. So we should keep it that way, including at school. Deal?”
He’s supposed to say, “Deal.”
He’s not supposed to go silent.
“Don’t you want to be my best friend?” I say.
“Yes!”
“Then what’s the matter?”
More silence.
“Joseph?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” he says. But there is, because he sounds sad, just like at Chipotle when he
couldn’t burp. When he asked if everyone thought he was weird.
Oh.
Puzzle pieces come together in my mind.
Burping, knuckle-cracking, fractions. Not knowing about Lester. Things change and life goes on and it’s not always easy, that’s what Mom said, and I guess that’s especially true for Joseph. I guess I haven’t thought about that as much as I should have.
And Mr. Marconi, he’s a whole ’nother piece of the puzzle because of how he’s always trying to escape from the nursing home. He keeps trying to go back to the way his life used to be, but it’s never going to happen.
And then . . . me. I’m a puzzle piece, too. Ever since Joseph came back to school, all I’ve wanted is for us to be best friends again, in the plain old Joseph-and-Ty way and without so many other people butting in. That’s what I wanted Joseph to understand. That’s what I wanted Joseph to agree with.
All of that is true. All of that makes up part of the picture. I think there’s a puzzle piece I’ve been missing, though.
When Joseph was absent from school for all those months, the rest of us kept going. Then Joseph came back, and I guess things felt really different to him. I guess he felt like he missed out on a lot of stuff, which he did. I guess he felt left behind, which he kind of was.
For me, things felt different, too, but I was Mr. Marconi. I wanted to go back in time when all Joseph wanted was to go forward.
The earth spins, and I fall back against my pillow. Of course Joseph wants to go forward. It makes sense to me now, but I feel pretty stupid.
“Can I call you back?” I ask Joseph.
“Um . . . sure?”
“Okay, great. Bye.”
I push the end call button and hold the phone on my chest. I stare at the ceiling. I haven’t done a great job of being Joseph’s friend this week. Like how I felt left out because he was the sun and I was space junk. Whatever! I bet he never felt like the sun. I bet he even felt like space junk, sometimes!
It takes a while to straighten out my feelings inside me. But once I do, I lift the phone and punch in Joseph’s number.
“I have an idea,” I say after he answers.
“You do?”
“Yeah. Do you want to know what it is?”
“Um, sure.”
“Both,” I say. “We could do both.”
“Huh?”
“What we were talking about! Sometimes it could be just you and me, but other times we could do stuff with everyone. Well, maybe not Taylor. Or maybe Taylor. We could decide on the day of.” I take a breath. “What do you think?”
I’m nervous, but Joseph doesn’t make me wait for long.
“I think yes!” he says.
“Yay!”
I can hear how happy he is, and I’m happy, too. I feel happier than I’ve felt all week. And who knows? Playing with John and Chase and the others might be fun. It probably will be, with Joseph as part of the group.
Now that I’ve figured things out, I’m ready to move on.
“Are we going to tell Lexie about catching Fernando?” I ask.
“She’ll never believe us,” Joseph says.
“If we both tell her, she’ll have to.” My chest feels looser. I feel more like me. “I agree that she’ll be all nuh-uh about it, though.”
“We need to figure out how to catch her unawares,” Joseph says.
“A bird ambush!” I say. “Only without birds!”
“‘No birds were harmed in this ambush,’” Joseph says in a TV commercial voice.
I laugh. I settle into the fort of pillows and stuffed animals on my bed and wiggle around till I’m good and comfortable. “So. What, exactly, is our plan?”
CHAPTER TEN
On Friday, before morning meeting, Joseph gives me a Ziploc bag of chocolate-covered potato chips.
“Thanks!” I say. I’d forgotten about those chocolate-covered potato chips.
“I’d hide them if I were you,” Joseph says in a spy voice. He gestures at Chase, who is playing paper football with John, and at Hannah and Elizabeth, who are making bracelets in the crafts area. “If you don’t, everyone’s going to want one.”
“Smart,” I say. “Oh, and here.” I hand him his red hat.
“Thanks.” He looks at it, and I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking, which is that here he is, not wearing his hat, and no one has said a thing.
He puts his hat in his desk. Cool beanie-weenies, I think. That leads to me thinking, Cool benis-weenises, but no, that is not a good think about, because what if I accidentally say it out loud?
We have eleven minutes of free choice before the day officially starts. Maybe more, because every so often Mrs. Webber comes in late. One morning I saw her in the teacher’s lounge with Mr. Glasgow, the other second-grade teacher. They had Starbucks cups in their hands, and they were both off topic since they were talking to each other instead of teaching their classes.
But Joseph and I have at least eleven minutes to sneak-attack Lexie and tell her about Fernando while she’s putting her stuff in her cubby. We want to tell her first off, because lots of mornings she has drowsy eyes when she first gets to school. Sometimes she shows up with a bump in her ponytail, which means she slept too late and had to hurry to get ready for the day.
I know about bumps in ponytails because of Winnie and Sandra. Neither of them would allow a bump to live in her ponytail, never-not-ever.
Joseph grabs my arm. “She’s coming. She’s coming!”
I glance at the door. She is! She doesn’t have drowsy eyes, but she does have the last bite of a Pop-Tart in her hand. That means she had to eat breakfast on the run. That’s a good sign.
“Hi, Lexie,” Joseph says.
“Hi, Ty,” I say. I whack my forehead. “I mean, hi, Lexie!”
Joseph laughs, because we just started and already I’ve messed up. Not cool benis-weenises!
“You don’t know your own name?” Lexie says, eating the final crusty part of her Pop-Tart. She throws the foil wrapper in the trash. “Go back to first grade.”
“I know my name, just not yours.” Joseph and I go to her cubby.
“Guess what?” Joseph says.
“What?”
“Ty and I caught a bird yesterday.”
Other kids’ ears prick up, probably because of the bird-catching recitation I did last week.
“What kind of bird?” Lexie says. She turns from her cubby. “A stuffed bird?”
Elizabeth comes closer. So do Chase and Taylor and Breezie. No one says anything about Joseph not wearing his hat, and I’m proud of them. Maybe they don’t even notice, but still.
“Nope,” I say. “A real bird, with real feathers and a real beak and a real heart that beat super fast.”
“Did you really?” Chase says, while at the same time, Lexie says, “You did not.”
“They might have,” Breezie says. “You don’t know everything, Lexie.”
Which means that Breezie is still mad at Lexie. Hmm. Too bad they didn’t have a working-it-out like Joseph and I did.
Lexie folds her arms over her chest. “Where is it, then? Did you bring it to school?”
“Why would we bring a bird to school?” Joseph says.
“To feed to Lester!” Taylor say.
Everyone looks at him like, Really, Taylor? Really?
“We didn’t bring him to school, and we never would,” I say. “Unless it was pet show-and-tell day. But, even so, we couldn’t, because we had to let him go.”
“Ha!” Lexie says. “You ‘had’ to let him go? Boo-hoo. Too bad, so sad.”
“No, because he was sick. We rescued him, or he would have died. But now a veterinarian is taking care of him.”
“When he’s better, he’ll be released back into the wild,” Joseph says.
“Uh-huh,” Le
xie says. “Where’s your proof?”
Joseph and I grin at each other. We hoped she’d ask that question. I take a piece of computer paper out of my back pocket and unfold it. Everyone crowds around.
“It is a bird!” Breezie exclaims.
“Why is the picture black-and-white?” Chase asks.
“I have a raccoon trap in my backpack,” Taylor announces. He stands on his tiptoes at the outside of the circle, trying to see in. He moves from spot to spot. “I do. I’m not even kidding.”
“My sister took a picture of him on her phone,” I say. “She printed it for me on the printer.”
“Why don’t you have colored ink?” Chase says.
Lexie holds out her hand. I give her the picture. She glances at it, snorts, and gives it back. “Fake.”
“What?” Joseph says.
Lexie sticks her nose up in the air. She is an expert at sticking up her nose. “Who says your sister took that picture? Who says it isn’t just a random bird you found on the computer?”
“I do,” I say.
“Can I see?” Breezie asks.
I pass the picture to her. She studies it for longer than Lexie did. She doesn’t just skim her eyes over it.
“The bird’s in a shoebox,” Breezie says.
“Yeah,” I say. “That was to keep him safe.”
She lifts her head. “Ty, show me your arm.”
I’m confused, but I stick out my arm.
“Your other arm.”
I stick out my other arm.
Breezie nods and hands me back the picture. “It’s a real bird, and Ty and Joseph really did catch it,” she pronounces. “Because of the bracelet. See?”
Oh yeah! The rubber bracelet from Chipotle! When Winnie took the picture, I was holding the shoebox in my lap. I’m not in the picture, at least not my face, but my arms are. On my wrist is my blue rubber bracelet. The same blue rubber bracelet I’m wearing right now!
“I have one, too,” Joseph says, thrusting out his arm.
“You’re lucky,” Breezie says. She touches it. “Can I have it?”
He wrinkles his brow. I guess he doesn’t know what to do when girls ask for stuff, either.
“Um . . . sure?” he says. He wiggles it off and gives it to her.