Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(6)
I am a genius, according to the people who take and review the tests, measuring minds in columns of numbers and vocabulary words. I am in the top 2 percent nationally, not just for my age range, but for high school students as a whole. Sometimes I wish they had drawn a different conclusion from my scores. With my intelligence, they argue, mainstreaming is not only the appropriate course of action, it is the only course of action. Our Special Education program is underfunded and understaffed, and its resources are better spent on those who truly need them, while those like me, who can keep up with the classwork and excel at the material, are pushed out into the “real world” to fend for ourselves.
My mother attempted to contest the mainstreaming once, citing my absence seizures and my tendency to see catastrophe in the movement of the air as reasons that I needed more support. Carl put a stop to her objections. “She’s going to have to deal with the real world in three years,” he’d said, voice cold as ever. “She can’t stay here after she turns eighteen. I’m not going to be a nursemaid to your little mistake for my entire life.”
When Carl speaks, my mother stops. That is how it has been for as long as he’s been a part of our lives, for as long as David can remember, for there has never been a time when there was David and no Carl. They are part of the same equation, one for sorrow and two for joy, and to have the one I must accept the other. I would prefer David with no Carl, but as that is not, is not, is not to be, I am willing to have what I have. And what I have is classes with peers who will never belong to me, for their math is too different from my own.
Some of them are kind to me. Some of them are cruel. The lines do not follow the patterns that the television tells me they should; the math does not align. The ones in fancy clothes and letter jackets, with makeup done just so and eyes rimed in colors bright as birds, they are usually gentle; they remember my name, ask me about my birds, and do not mock me. The ones with tattered paperbacks in their hands and mockery ringing in their own ears, who have been kicked often enough to yearn to do the kicking, they are all too often cold; I am a target that cannot turn on them, I am vulnerable, I am a bird without a flock to come to my defense.
I sit quiet. I do my work, when I can, and I sit and stare silent at my desk when I can’t, my fingers tapping out the memory of birds against the wood. One for sorrow, two for joy, three’s a girl, four’s a boy. This is a nine-bird day, and I am on edge from the beginning. Something is going to happen.
Midway through first period, I cannot take it anymore. I put up my hand. I wait. The teacher ignores me as long as she can, but eventually, she must acknowledge my palm, pale and starfish-patient as I turn it toward the ceiling. She sighs, looking to me, and asks, “Yes, Brenda?”
“I need to go outside,” I say. “I need to go out into the field.”
Her exasperation grows. She likes my mainstreaming less than my mother does; to her, I am a trial, sent to test her, when she already has too many students to keep track of. I would apologize, if I could, but when I have tried, she has never understood what I was struggling to say. Sometimes I think I should bring David to class and have him translate me for her. He always knows what I am trying to say. “Why do you need to go outside, Brenda?”
“I counted nine corvids this morning. The math is bad. Nine means something will happen. I don’t want anything to happen. Please, can I go outside? I need to find more birds. I need to raise the count.”
For a moment, my teacher looks like she wants to put down her head and cry. I am more complex than she is paid to handle. She has the certifications, and she knew when she took the job that she might be teaching mainstreamed students. She did not expect me, did not expect obsessions and compulsions and the never-ending mathematics of a complicated, shifting sky. I am more trouble than I am worth.
She looks around the class. The other students are watching her, some with patience, others with irritation. None of them look as if they will object to her releasing me.
“You may be excused, Brenda,” she says finally. “Please come back quickly.”
“Yes, thank you, I will,” I say, and stand, and leave the classroom without look back. None of these people are birds. None of them are here to be counted.
(I have seen people who should be counted, ravens in human skins, crows with girl-faces who peek, shy and silent, from beneath the fringes of their blackened bangs. My psychiatrist says that these delusions are secretly good things, are proof that my mind is trying to translate what it needs and knows into what the world around me requires. When I can cast all people as birds in human guise, can see the feathers underneath their skins, I will be able to relate. I will be able to empathize. My psychiatrist is wrong. David is not a bird, is not something to count or configure, and I relate to him. I empathize with him. I am not impossible to reach. I simply do not care about reaching people who do not reach for me.)
The halls are empty, the students prisoned in their individual classrooms. I do not care for high school. Last year, David and I attended classes on the same campus. I always knew that he was near, that if I needed him, I could go to him; that he would pause in his own education to clarify the complications with mine. Carl said that it was unfair for me to lean so heavily upon my little brother, but David swore he didn’t mind, and if I must believe one of them over the other, I will always believe David, who has never lied to me, or threatened to be rid of me. David only ever needs to love me.