Magonia(11)

“Right,” my dad said then. “That was someone who shouldn’t flip upside down flipping upside down. In case you were wondering how that’d look.”
“Don’t worry about the feather,” he tells me now. “I can see you worrying. We’ll get through this. I’m a master fighter. If it turns out Big Bird’s hanging out in your bedroom, I’ll slay that bird.”
This is actually weirdly comforting for someone who’s pretty sure that she’s about to die. Having a dad who’s willing to declare war against an institution as deeply rooted as Big Bird is not nothing.
“Even if the bird goes Hitchcock?” I ask him.
For a moment, my dad and I sit in silence in the car, imagining The Big Birds, a sky horrifically full of big, yellow, leggy birds, dive-bombing us. At first, it’s funny, but then, more worrying than you’d think.
“I don’t care. I’d still fight them for you,” he says. “I’d pluck them into oblivion.”
I’m actually semi-laughing as we pull up to the house.
Jason Kerwin’s waiting for me on our front steps. It’s only two o’clock, which means Jason isn’t where he’s supposed to be, namely, school. My dad notices this at the same time I do and sighs.
“Do you need me to call attendance?” my dad asks him.
“Seriously?” says Jason. “What do you take me for? It’s covered. I’m at a dentist appointment. Routine cleaning that’ll turn into a small gum surgery, with a couple of days of recovery time.” He turns to me. “I’m coming with you to the hospital tomorrow.”
How he knew anything about me going to the hospital tomorrow is anyone’s guess.
Jason has long been a collector of information. He’s also an entrepreneur with three patents, one of them for a chemical compound that can be sprayed on clothes, dry-cleaning them in seconds. It comes in a tiny can the size of a battery, and can be hung from a key chain. He invented it for people who don’t want their parents to know they smoke. Jason doesn’t smoke, because you don’t smoke if your best friend has a mortal-terror lung disease named after her, but he saw a market.

He has another patent for a small piece of plastic that attaches to hotel—or hospital—fitted sheets, kind of like a shoehorn, and enables people to make beds in half the time it previously took. These bits of plastic are manufactured in a small place known as the Kerwin Factory, in New Delhi. Jason runs the whole thing from his cell phone. We’ve had discussions about labor and questionable policy regarding outsourcing, but I haven’t won. There are parts of Jason that are more OCD than even I can penetrate. His vision of a factory trumped my utopian idea of handcrafted things made primarily of wood. So, he’s not perfect. He sometimes does things just because he can—and not the way he necessarily should.
He’s killing time in high school. He barely passes his classes because he says he’s proving a point. He plans to graduate at the bottom and then take over the world. Better for the inevitable, eventual biographies, I guess.
Jason is notoriously frustrating to all teachers. He doesn’t work up to his genius potential. He merely looks at you, blankly, and conquers.
“A feather in your lung,” he says. “Really? You snorted a feather? Going for an Icarus thing?”
When we were ten, I did go for an Icarus thing. Jason built the wings, from plans drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. Turns out that canvas and balsa-wood Renaissance wings don’t cut it when you’re hopping from the top of the garage. He broke his arm, and I broke my leg, and that was the end of Icarus. Our parents were relieved. It was one of our few displays of semi-normal. They told everyone the story of the wing fail for years, with these hopeful voices, an oh, kids, they do the craziest things tone. All the while not itemizing any of the other craziest things Jason and I did.
When we were twelve, we stole Jason’s mom Eve’s Pontiac, and drove it three hundred miles in order to acquire the correct feathers for the taxidermy of a hoax griffin. We paid a weirdo in cash, got back onto the freeway, and drove home, busted by Eve in Jason’s driveway. The Pontiac had a trunkful of dead turkey and roadkill lynx on ice, along with assorted talons from vultures, and a serious stash of superglue and glass eyeballs. Eve, to her credit, had an expression of hell yeah on her face when we opened the trunk, because Eve is the kind of person who’d build a hoax griffin on a moment’s notice, but then she had to pretend parental upset. Carol, Jason’s Mother Number Two, went to bed for four days.
Jason and I did normal things, too, knee-skinning things, bug-capturing things. But it’s the griffin-building that sticks in everyone’s minds.
Jason will either be recruited by the CIA or he’ll live a life of crime. No one is sure which. I mean, like those are opposites anyway.
“What?” I ask him. “Do you really think you get to have an opinion about me snorting feathers?”
I sit, despite the frost on the step. My dad sighs, takes off his coat, and buttons it around my own.
“Five minutes,” he says. “Then I’m coming back for you.”
“Don’t snort that,” Jason says, pointing to the coat, though of course it’s fake down, not really feathers.
We sit a minute in comfortable quiet, except that today has sucked so much nothing’s comfortable.
“There’s an increased likelihood of something,” I say experimentally.
“Of?”
“You know. Soon. Very soon.”
“You’ve been dying since forever,” says Jason, who doesn’t respect the rules. “And if they think things are accelerating, they’re wrong. You look good.”