Chapter 3 Bird
BIRD
My alarm goes off at six thirty, and the theme song from Dawson’s Creek turns on midway through.
I was feeling ambitious when I went to bed last night; thought I’d get up early and make myself coffee, take a walk, journal in the backyard, and then edit some of my stuff from the summer, all before anyone else woke up.
But I reach for the snooze button and mash it three times, instead of getting up and doing any of those things.
Then I’m back in my stuffy dorm room, waking up to the scents of clove cigarettes and coffee already brewing in the kitchenette down the hall.
I walk, barefoot, into the hallway and suddenly I’m in the tiny TV room in the Commons, and all seventeen kids from the creative writing workshop are crammed in.
They burst into song at once when they see me, crooning, “I don’t wanna wait… for our lives to be ove-err-er…”
I start laughing, but it comes out of me slow, like honey.
Dawson’s Creek was our Tuesday night guilty pleasure all summer.
Someone turned it on that first week to make fun of it—I can’t remember who it was anymore—but then we all quickly got roped into the drama, the love triangles, the small-town scandals.
The Capeside fan club grew in numbers, and soon we all adopted their “walk the dog” euphemism as if we’d made it up ourselves, and we came back week after week until it was standing room only.
Silas and Kat call me over now, the crowd parting like some biblical sea to make space for me between them on the dusty old green corduroy-clad couch. But then, behind me, someone shouts, “Turn it off!”
My eyes fly open just in time to see Liv throwing her pillow at my face.
I jolt up and nearly hit my head on the slanted ceiling of our shared bedroom. “What the hell, Liv?”
She tears her eye mask off so she can fully glare at me. “It’s the last friggin’ Friday of the summer, you reject!”
“Okay, god!” I reach over and switch the alarm off.
“Do you realize I’m not going to be able to sleep in again until December? December!” she shouts. “Cheer practice starts tomorrow morning and I’m juggling student council this year and varsity volleyball, not to mention—”
“Oh my god, it’s off !” I interrupt what could become an all-day monologue, which only causes her to narrow her eyes even more. “Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep,” I mutter under my breath. It’s the best I can do with the better half of my brain still in the happiest place I’ve ever known.
“Birdie.” There’s something about the way she always says my name that makes me hate it, and her. “You have no idea what kind of pressure I’m going to be under—this is my senior year.”
“Um, yeah, it’s my senior year too, Liv.”
She scoffs and rolls her eyes.
“What?”
“It’s not the same thing and you know it.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
She sighs and lies back down, carefully splaying her hair over her one remaining pillow—god forbid her perfect hair gets messy while sleeping. “Don’t start with me, Birdie,” she says, whisper-soft and sweet, the way she talks to her friends on the phone.
“I’m not starting with you—I just—why? Why is it so different?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to.
She thinks I don’t have pressure. Because I only have three friends to her three hundred or because teachers don’t know my name or find me charming and cute enough to give me higher grades than I deserve.
Or because I’m not a member of every single team and club our school offers, and every girl in our school doesn’t copy everything I do and say and wear.
Or maybe it’s because I don’t date the captain of the football team that she thinks I don’t have pressure.
What a joke.
Simply being the Great Olivia Rubens’s stepsister is pressure.
Sharing a bedroom with Olivia Rubens for the last eight years is pressure.
Every day a reminder she resents the fact that nine years ago my mom and her dad went on a date that resulted, nine months later, in our little brother, Bailey.
Which also resulted, shortly after, in the two of us wearing matching yellow tulle dresses at our parents’ wedding.
And every moment since has been an excruciating reminder that her dad is not my dad because my dad is…
somewhere-elsewhere-nowhere to be found.
That’s fucking pressure right there. But I don’t say any of it; I never do.
I’m one step out of bed when my foot sticks to something.
I look down at the line of silver duct tape Liv plastered down the center of the bedroom while I was away.
Her part of the room on one side, mine on the other, as if I ever had a doubt that’s the way things are between us.
I peel the tape off the bottom of my foot and step on her side for just a moment.
I want to throw something of mine at her now.
“Nice r-r-re-redecorating, by the way, Liv.”
She turns her head to look at me and rolls her eyes, sighing again. Then she re-splays her hair, closes her eyes, and says, in that whispery monotone voice again, “It’s just so you remember to keep your crap on your own side. You don’t have to get a stutter about it.”
I hate you, I think. But what I say is, “If anyone asks, I’m going to Kayla’s.”
She grumbles something incoherent, turning over in her twin bed, identical to mine.
Downstairs in the bathroom I run the faucet to only a pencil-width stream and try not to make too many sounds as I brush my teeth and silently spit into the sink.
Being the first one awake means no waiting for the bathroom—this house was not built for the number of people who live here.
The twins arrived two years ago, just as Charlie went off to college, and along with them went the chance of me ever having a room to myself.
I rummage through Liv’s shoebox of hair and makeup stuff under the sink and find a scrunchie I doubt she’ll miss.
I start to pull my hair back when I hear the first rumble of toddler tears.
If I don’t get out now, I know I’ll be stuck here all day.
Letting my hair free-fall, I snap the scrunchie onto my wrist instead.
Slip out down the hall, through the living room, past the computer, grabbing my bag from the row of hooks lined up next to the front door.
Then I jam my feet into the huarache sandals I got on clearance for three dollars last fall during back-to-school shopping.
Rushing, I forget to lift up the handle, so the door screeches open.
As I close it behind me, I hear my mom call, “Birdie, is that you?”
Holding my breath, I hurry to the end of the driveway. Exhale. I don’t mind helping out with the kids, I really don’t. It’s just… I’m not ready to go back to my regularly scheduled life yet.
Two streets over from mine there’s a little dirt path that cuts through a wooded lot that belongs to no one and opens to the fields behind the high school.
It’s littered with beer cans and broken glass and used condoms. I usually prefer to take the long way around, through the maze of suburbs, but the shortcut means it’s only a ten-minute walk to Kayla’s instead of twenty.
The cold dew soaks my feet as I trudge through the soft, tall grass, which hasn’t been cut all summer long.
If I block out the brick buildings and the football and soccer fields and parking lots, I could convince myself I was somewhere prettier.
Kayla lives at the end of a cul-de-sac in a newer subdivision, where all the houses look too similar and too clean.
As I make my way over, I see her dad in the front yard, wheeling in their garbage can, stopping halfway up the driveway to admire the precise diagonal lines freshly mown into the grass.
I pick up the empty green recycling bin at the curb and say, “Want some help?”
He snaps out of it and turns to see me walking toward him.
He has his tie and dress shirt on, ready to go to work.
But he’s the kind of person who leaves enough time to do things like bring in the garbage cans and inspect the lawn and talk to his daughter’s best friend without needing to rush off because he’s already running late.
“Hiya! Well, look who’s back from the big city!”
“Just got in last night,” I tell him, following him into the open garage.
“Well, you look smarter,” he jokes with me in that TV dad way of his. “The only kid I know who wants to go to school over the summer. I only wish some of that would rub off on Kayla.”
“Please don’t tell Kayla that,” I try to joke back.
“What’s that?” he says, taking a step closer to me.
“Is, um, Kayla up yet?”
“Oh, I doubt it,” he answers, and an unfamiliar line furrows his brow—if I didn’t know better, I’d call it worry. “But go on in. By the way, Bird,” he adds, more seriously, “we’re glad you’re back. You’re a good kid, a good influence on Kayla.”
Not sure what to make of that, I just smile and nod in return.
Her mom is in the kitchen, humming to an oldies station playing low on the radio that lives under one of the kitchen cabinets.
Her house is always clean and calm, and her parents are always present.
And she doesn’t appreciate any of it. Not even when we were little.
Her parents’ unwavering attention and attendance at every school concert, game, and PTA meeting embarrassed her, even when we first became friends in second grade.
I clear my throat to announce my presence.
“Honey!” Kayla’s mom waltzes across the kitchen to me and scoops me into a quick hug, and then she sweeps my hair over my shoulders.
“Thank god! We really, really missed you around here this summer.” She pulls out a stool at the breakfast bar—which Kayla’s dad made in his garage woodshop, of course—and says, “Sit, sit. Tell me how your summer was. The university, the dorms, the classes, the boys.” She laughs.
“Did you write an epic poem? The next Odyssey?”