Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“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.

One night, Laurence was already in his PJs, but he wound up on his hands and knees in front of his closet, staring at the skein of crossover cables running between all the jury-rigged parts of CH@NG3M3. The instructions had gotten much more numerous and complicated than Laurence could possibly understand, covering eventualities that he couldn’t envision. And CH@NG3M3 had thousands of accounts on free services all over the world, where it was storing data or pieces of itself in the cloud.

And then Laurence noticed something: Every time Patricia had one of her conversations with CH@NG3M3, the computer’s code base took another exponential leap into greater complexity right afterward. Maybe just a random correlation. But Laurence kept staring at the dates and times of the logs and thinking about Patricia breathing life into his machine, while he was blowing her off.

Laurence found Patricia on the front steps the next morning. She stared at the school, maybe trying to decide if she should even bother. “Hey,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I got your back. I don’t think you’re a Satanist.”

Patricia shrugged. Her dark hair had grown longer, so it almost ran into her jumper. “Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.”

Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. “I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.”

“But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”

Laurence and Patricia sat together at lunch — in the library, but not in the dark corner, because there wasn’t enough space for two people in there. Laurence tried to ask Patricia about how she was dealing, and she just shut down, like the whole topic of conversation put her in a coma.

“Maybe,” Laurence said, “maybe you should talk to Mr. Rose.”

“What?” Patricia snapped out of her daze, her eyes wide open.

“Mr. Rose, the guidance counselor. You said you thought he was cool.”

“I can’t talk to Mr. Rose,” Patricia said under her breath, barely audible even in the quiet library. “He’s … I think there’s something not right about him. He told me to … he said something seriously crazy to me, just a couple days before the bloody wall happened. And I keep thinking there has to be some connection there.”

Laurence had to lean so close to hear what she was saying, he nearly took her nose out with his chin.

“What did he say?” Laurence whispered.

Patricia thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t even repeat it. If I told you what he said, you would think I was making it up.”

“I would believe you, over Mr. Rose,” Laurence said, and meant it.

“Not about this,” Patricia said. “Imagine if you said something to someone that was so crazy, nobody would ever believe you had said it. This was worse.”

This was driving Laurence round the bend. “Just tell me,” he said. “It can’t be that bad.” But the more he pushed, the more she clammed up, until she had gone back to coma mode. Whatever Mr. Rose had said to her, it had messed her up more than a ton of kids accusing her of being a cutter and blood painter. They ended up sitting in silence until Lunch Recess was over, and then they had to hustle their trays back to the cafeteria.

“Let’s go to the mall after school,” Laurence said as they dumped their trays. “We can tell your parents you’re at my house, and my parents that we’re doing something outdoorsy. It’ll be like old times.”

“Sure.” Patricia shivered. “I could use some hot chocolate. With like a million marshmallows.”

“Let’s make it happen.”

They shook on it. Laurence felt like he’d removed a splinter that he’d forgotten was even jabbing into his skin. He walked to Science class alone. Brad Chomner lunged out and grabbed the collar of Laurence’s uniform jacket and lifted him with one hand, so Laurence’s armpits scraped.

“You should have left the emo bitch alone,” Brad Chomner said. He swung Laurence like a shot put and let go.

SNOW TURNED EVERYTHING gray, as far as Patricia could see. Even the forbidden woods near the spice house looked washed out, with their dark tree shapes covered with three storms’ worth of snowfall. Patricia never left the house now, except to go to school, so the cold came to seem much worse than it was. Mythic, in its ability to freeze the life out of you the moment you left your front door. Patricia sat in bed, talking to CH@NG3M3 or reading the stack of paperbacks she’d gotten from the big library sale. She curled up with Berkley in just a corner of her bed, making a warm space with her comforter and spare blanket. Berkley hadn’t gone near Roberta in months, and protecting this cat might be the one achievement of Patricia’s life.

Patricia had started flunking most of her classes, though she was still trying her best. She’d never had to hide report cards from her parents before.

Since the Wall of Blood thing, there had been a couple other incidents, including an obscene Barbie tableau in the girls’ locker room and a stink bomb in a big garbage can. Nobody could prove Patricia was responsible, but nobody doubted it. When Laurence had talked to Patricia in public, he’d gotten the crap kicked out of him.

Her craziest days, Patricia sat in class and wondered if maybe Mr. Rose had been telling the truth. Maybe she was supposed to kill Laurence. Maybe it was him or her. Whenever she thought about killing herself, like with a ton of her mom’s sleeping pills or something, some survivalist part of herself substituted an image of killing Laurence instead.

And then just the thought of killing the closest thing she had to a friend made Patricia almost throw up. She wasn’t going to kill herself. She wasn’t going to kill anybody else.

Probably she was just going insane. She’d imagined all this witchy crap, and she really was the one leaving messed-up shit all over the school. It would not surprise her if her family had managed to drive her nuts.