I know Maddox’s schedule, when he runs, and I could have gone at the same time and pretended it was a coincidence. Instead, I hid in my room like a coward, too awkward to face him after what they’d done to me, how much they’d seen of me. And more than that, how they’d treated me, and how I’d reacted. I don’t know how the crew girls can ever face them again, let alone sit with them every day like it’s nothing to feel their hands on you, in you, all over you. To know they’ve seen you and touched you and whispered things in your ear that make you blush so hard you think your skin will peel like a sunburn.
That afternoon, I climb off the bus at the stop right in front of my house. I wave to Reggie, who’s outside sweeping his driveway and looking sullen about the chore. I wonder if he’s brooding about Mariana’s baby. He tips his chin at me, and I resist the urge to check the Norths’ house as I walk up the short, cracked sidewalk to my front steps. The white paint is mostly worn off our wide, wooden front steps, and one of them is rotting along the center of the board. I’m busy thinking about whether I should replace it before Lee asks when I reach the top step and pull up short, a scream lodging in my throat.
A black lump lies on the welcome mat, looking so small and insignificant you’d never know she was so bossy and demanding, so full of bravado and sass and life. But the moment I see her, I know.
“Poe,” I cry, racing forward and falling to my knees. Tears clog my throat as I gently lift her body. It’s still warm, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
“No,” I whisper, my voice trembling, my hands shaking so hard that I can hardly hold her.
Her head hangs at an unnatural angle, flopping down instead of staying intact with her body, and the fine feathers around her neck are crushed and bent.
I hold her gently, as if I could spook her now, as if I could hurt her. Tears blur my eyes and trickle down my cheeks as I stroke her beautiful black feathers, so much softer than I imagined before I touched her the first time. Over winter break, she reluctantly allowed me to pet her silky feathers once or twice before she’d hop away and watch me distrustfully. Now I can pet her, but it’s only with a rising sense of horror. It’s too late. There’s no triumph in it, only the finality of it, the realization that she’ll never look at me with consternation again.
She’d never let me hold her this way if she was alive.
I stroke her side, my shoulders shaking with sobs. Only her wing feathers are stiff. Feathers that should have helped her fly away from danger, not toward it. Did she fly into the door?
That’s impossible, though. Our door is heavy wood, with no windows. She wouldn’t fly into a solid door. She wouldn’t even fly into my window. Would she?
On trembling legs, I stand. Cradling her gently in my arm, I open the door and enter the house. The smell of smoke hangs in the air, the haze coming from the living room where Lee now sits all day, barking orders at my mother and watching TV. He can’t work, and the investigation into his attack hasn’t led anywhere yet. Apparently Maddox jumped him from behind when he was going to his squad car for something. He knelt on his back and broke both his arms and then left Lee lying in the freezing rain.
Now Mom rushes from the living room toward the kitchen with an empty plate and a glass. She stops when she sees me. “Oh—honey,” she says. “What’s that?”
“Poe,” I say, my voice cracking. “My… My bird.”
I don’t know how to tell my mother what she really is, that she’s so much more than a bird. She was my only company for most of the summer, my comfort when I was filled with helpless fury or loneliness, when the North brothers wouldn’t leave our pool or stop using it. She was there for me every time I exiled myself to my room to let the bruises fade. She listened to me rant about Lee and confess stupid, naïve fantasies about the North brothers. When I felt left out, she came to see me on the regular. With her, I wasn’t a murder of one.
“Get that rodent out of here,” Lee calls, though he can’t even see us from his spot in front of the TV. “I told you, those birds are a nuisance.”
Cold fury settles into my bones, and I step into the doorway to face him. “Did you do this?” I ask, my voice trembling with rage now.
“It probably flew into your window,” he says, not bothering to look my way. “It’s right above that porch. That’s what happens when you teach a dumb animal to get food from your hand.”
I swallow hard, staring down at her lifeless form, so small and vulnerable. Did I do this? Is it my fault for teaching her to come to my window?
“But then how’d she get onto the porch?” I ask, my voice small. “She would have been on the roof outside my window, not under the awning on our doorstep.”
“She probably flopped her way up there,” Lee says. “Birds do that after you wring their necks. That’s how you know they got no brains. They’ll keep running around even without a head on their necks.”
“She was smart,” I whisper.
“Sure she was,” he says. “That’s what we’d say about the chickens, but they’d still walk right up to us and let us grab their heads. You pick ‘em up like that, whip ‘em straight down, and the neck snaps like kindling.”
He turns his cold eyes to me, staring at me from beneath the ridge of his jutting brow, as if challenging me to contradict him. To accuse him. I let my finger run over the bent feathers on her neck, and my gorge rises. Lee’s hands aren’t in the cast. He can still grab things.
On stiff legs, I turn and walk up the stairs to my room. I don’t know what I’d do if I stayed there, where I can see that terrible man.
I sit on the bed, staring at the window where so many days I put out bread for Poe. I never should have fed her. I should have chased her away and shut the window in her face, locked her out and never let her get close. She was a wild animal, and I tamed her so I’d have company, never knowing that it came with dangers, just like letting a human close comes with dangers.
This wasn’t an accident. It was an execution. A warning.
If it weren’t for me, she’d be flying free, soaring through the ice blue January sky.
Now she’s dead. Not because I taught her to fly into the window and break her neck, but because I taught her to trust humans, to fly to my hand to get food. That’s how I killed her.
I should have known Lee would never let me have anything that brought me so much comfort, so much joy. Something he couldn’t take away from me.
Carefully, I lay her on the cushion in my reading nook. I open my drawers and pull out my three full composition notebooks, a handful of my favorite T-shirts, a few pairs of jeans, and enough socks and underwear to get me through a week. After reconstructing a box that’s been flattened in my closet since the move, I shove my things inside, line the edge of the box with a few fat paperbacks, and look around. Then I grab my pillow and lay it on top, carefully transferring Poe’s body onto it before donning my heaviest jacket and my school backpack. I cast one longing glance at my lovely window nook before turning my back on my room for the last time.