All the Birds in the Sky(54)

“Oh,” Taylor leaned back, hands raised. “I thought you knew. They’re thinking of sending you to Portland.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Kevin blinked.

“Forget I said anything. I was talking out of school.” Taylor’s smile had vanished, replaced with wide eyes and a clenched jaw. This was so like Taylor: They were so closed off you could barely tell what they were thinking most of the time, but then they would toss out these bombs just to see everyone jump.

Patricia seized the bread with her bare hands. Let it burn her. “This is bullshit. They can’t make me move to Portland.” In Portland, all the young witches lived in one group house, with a curfew, and a few older witches supervised them.

“When were you going to tell me you were moving to Portland?” Kevin said.

“I’m not,” Patricia said, choking and coughing.

“Who’s making you move?” Deedee asked from the sofa, pierced eyebrows raised. “I don’t get it.”

“Please forget I said anything.” Taylor was squirming now. “Let’s just eat.”

Everybody stared at their plates and each other, but nobody said anything. Until Racheline broke the silence.

“Actually, I think you had better explain,” said Racheline, who was older than everyone else and the master tenant on the apartment. “Who are these people, and why are they forcing Patricia to move?” Racheline was a quiet woman, a perennial grad student with wild red hair and a placid round face, but when she decided to assert herself everybody snapped to attention.

Everybody stared at Taylor, including Patricia. “I’m not allowed to say,” Taylor stammered. “Let’s just say Patricia and I both have the same … the same caseworker. And everybody worries about her. Like, she goes off on her own for days. She tries to take everything on herself, and she doesn’t let anyone help her. She needs to let other people in.”

“I let people in.” Patricia felt bloodless. Her ears were ringing. “Right now, this moment, I am interacting with people.” She should have known.

“It’s true, though,” Deedee said. “Patricia, we never see you. You live here, but you’re never home. You never want to tell us anything about your life. You’ve been here nearly a year, but I feel like I don’t know you at all.”

Patricia tried to catch Kevin’s eye, but it was like lassoing a hummingbird. She was still holding the bread, and it was burning her hands. “I’m really trying. Look at me trying right this moment. I’m having a party.” She heard her timbre rising, until she sounded like her mother. Red haze, blinding her. “Why did you have to ruin this for me?” She threw chunks of bread at Taylor, who covered their face. “Do you want some bread? Do you want some bread? Have some f*cking bread!” Now she sounded exactly like her mom.

She threw away the rest of the bread and bailed out of there, crying and spitting on the dry sidewalk.

Patricia had fallen in love with Danger Bookstore on her first ever visit, and whenever she climbed the wooden staircase, she usually felt a little of the packing tape around her soul unwind. But this time, she just felt the stabbing in her neck get worse as she reached the top floor with its unsafe railing and threadbare purple carpet.

Ernesto sat in his usual chair, eating a microwaved TV dinner. He was in love with the invention of the microwave, both because it fit in with his love of instant gratification (“the lineaments of gratified desire”) and because you couldn’t leave food near him for more than a few minutes before it grew spiky white mold. He wore a silk robe, emerald pajamas, and fuzzy slippers, with William Blake’s poems perched on one knee.

“What the hell,” Patricia said before Ernesto could greet her. “When were you going to tell me about this plan to send me to Portland?” She almost knocked over the bookcase of Ideas Too Good To Be True.

“Please sit.” Ernesto gestured at a clamshell armchair. Patricia tried to rebel for a moment, then gave up and sat. “We do not wish to send you away, but we have spoken about it. You make it difficult for us to watch over you. People want to care about you, and you will not let them.”

“I’ve been trying.” She shuffled in her chair. This was the worst day. “I’ve tried and tried. Everybody gives me grief about Aggrandizement, but I’ve tried so hard. I’ve been so careful.”

“You are hearing the wrong thing,” Ernesto rose and stood close to her, so she could feel his unnatural warmth. “People warn you about Aggrandizement, and you keep hearing the opposite of what they are saying.”

Nobody knew why Ernesto was the way he was, but there were rumors. Like he’d cast a huge spell that had backfired. Or there’d been an endangered species, a rhino or something, and all the surviving animals had poured their life essence into one massive creature, which swelled with the lost potential of future generations. Maybe this towering gestalt stomped across the countryside, and everything it touched rotted. Blood bubbled from its eyes, ears, and stumpy toes, and it gave off an overripe stench. The creature, the story went, threatened a town full of innocent people until Ernesto took on its burden of excess life. Ernesto was so old, he’d gone to school back when Eltisley Academy and The Maze were still two separate schools.

“Everybody thinks Siberia was my fault,” Patricia said. “Because I was too proud or whatever. Too reckless.” In her mind, Patricia saw before-and-after images of Toby, first alive then dead, like a GIF from Hell. “They think I’m still too arrogant now. I’m just trying to help.”