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Airheads, the whole bunch. She was not jealous of them. Not one little bit.
The metal door of the restaurant opened and the young waiter hopped out, swinging two garbage bags. Even with the garbage bags, the waiter was trying to fly. He jumped straight up, but the weight of the bags and his obvious lack of talent ensured that his feet lifted no more than a yard from the ground. Gurl muffled a giggle with the back of her hand as the waiter jumped his way over to the Dumpster, looking very much like a giant, ungainly frog. He opened the Dumpster and tossed the trash bags inside. Then he turned and leaped into the air, this time clearing the top of the Dumpster before landing. Gurl was sure the waiter—only a few years older than Gurl herself—had hopes of being a great Wing, dreams of joining a Wing team or maybe competing in the citywide festival and taking home the Golden Eagle. She wondered when he would realize that his dream was just that, a dream. When he would see that most of his life would be spent scuttling closer to the earth.
The waiter dropped in a crouch, panting. He looked around, to the left and to the right. Gurl stiffened, keeping herself completely still behind the garbage cans that hid her. He squinted, staring at something. A mouse, running alongside the brick. The waiter jumped up again, crashing to the ground in front of the mouse. It gave a tiny squeal and ran the other way. The waiter did it again, jumping and crashing, terrifying the little animal, laughing as he did so. Gurl waited until he sprang up a third time before reaching out from her hiding place, snatching up the mouse and tucking it into her sleeve.
The waiter landed, his grin turning to a frown, wondering where his victim had gone. Then, shrugging, he veered around and went back into the restaurant, slamming the door behind him.
Gurl rested her hand on the pavement. The mouse crawled out from the safety of her sleeve and ran into the darkness. “Bye,” said Gurl, watching as it disappeared through a hole in the brick. She supposed she was lucky that the waiter hadn’t seen her, but then again, she was not the type of girl that people noticed—she was too thin, too pale, too quiet. Sometimes people looked right through her as if she weren’t there at all, their eyes sliding off her as if she were made of something too slippery to see. Nobody, nowhere. When she was little, it made her feel lonely. Now she only felt grateful.
She stretched and walked over to the Dumpster. After throwing open the lid, she dug around until she found what she was looking for: four foil-wrapped packages of leftovers. Ravioli, lasagne, salad and a huge hunk of gooey chocolate cake.
If only the other kids from Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless were here, watching, maybe they wouldn’t think so little of her. But they, like everyone else, believed flying was their ticket to fame and fortune, and thought Gurl was horribly afflicted, maybe even contagious. Mrs Terwiliger, the matron of Hope House, had taken her to a specialist once. First he thumped at her knees with a rubber mallet to check her reflexes. He had her breathe in and out very quickly, hyperventilating, to see if the added oxygen might lift her off the floor like a soap bubble. Then he strapped her into a white quilted jacket with huge feather wings and had her run around the office flapping her arms. Finally, he said: “Not everyone can, you know, and most don’t do it well. In any case, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” As a consolation, he gave Gurl a red and white beanie with a propeller on the top. Mrs Terwiliger told the other kids that people had different talents and they should celebrate them all. “Leadfoot!” the kids yelled as soon as Mrs Terwiliger left the room. “Freak!”
Gurl smiled bitterly to herself. If they were such big deals, why hadn’t they noticed the broken lock? Why hadn’t they thought to sneak out of Hope House at night? Why weren’t they having dinner at Luigi’s? No, this was hers and hers alone. “No man is an island,” Mrs Terwiliger had told her. “One must learn to get along.” But this sparkling city was an island and it got along fine, didn’t it?
Just as she plucked up a pocket of ravioli with her fingers, she heard a sound, one she had heard only on TV.
“Meow.”
She turned, sure that someone was playing a trick on her. But it was no trick. A cat, as plush and grey as the sky above, padded down the alleyway and sat a few feet from her.
Gurl dropped her ravioli, gaping. She’d seen pictures of cats in books and magazines, of course, but Gurl couldn’t imagine where this one came from. Perhaps it was lost? But how could it be? Nobody let a cat outside; they could get hurt or sick or worse. Plus, there was the matter of people’s regular pets: birds. If people saw a cat, especially without a leash, they’d call the police. What if it attacked an old lady’s budgie or a businessman’s parrot?
The cat regarded her with queer green eyes that glowed in the dark of the alley. “Who belongs to you?” Gurl murmured. Cats chose their owners rather than the other way round; everyone knew that. This cat surely had an owner, someone who liked exotic animals, someone who worked in a zoo maybe. Gurl glanced around at the buildings that rose along either side of the alley. There were lights in some of the windows, but Gurl saw no worried faces in them, heard no frantic calls.
“Meow,” the cat said and took a few steps closer.
“Hey,” said Gurl. “Are you hungry?” She looked at the food in the packages and nudged the one with the lasagne. The cat sniffed, then began to eat in big gulps.
“You are hungry, aren’t you?” Gurl said. “Well, you and me both.” Keeping her eyes on the cat, she reached out and grabbed the package containing cake. Gurl ate like the cat did, in huge greedy bites.
The cat finished everything, right down to the noodles. Then it did something totally unexpected. It walked over to Gurl, reached up with a grey paw and patted Gurl’s cheek, once, twice, three times. Gurl’s eyes opened wide. “No, no, no!” she said. “I can’t take care of you! I’m just an orphan.”
“Meow,” said the cat. It yawned, climbed into her lap and began to make an odd rumbling sound. She’s purring, thought Gurl, who had read about it but never experienced it.
Gurl stared down at the cat. What was she supposed to do now? Where would she keep it? What would she feed it? She shifted her weight and her arm brushed against the cat’s leg. So soft. Hesitantly, Gurl ran a gentle finger between the cat’s ears, the way she would pet a friendly bird. The cat closed its eyes and sighed, pressing its head into her palm.
Just then, the back door of the restaurant flew open and the cat sprang from Gurl’s lap. The waiter marched out the open door carrying another bag of garbage.
“Whoa!” he said. Gurl froze, wishing with all her being that she was nothing more than one of the bricks in the wall. A queer shiver went through her.
But the waiter didn’t even glance in her direction. With his foot, he prodded the opened packages of food. Then he saw the cat standing there, back arched and tail spiked. “What the heck? Where did you come from?”
“Meow,” the cat said.
“Meow is right,” said the waiter. “Here, kitty.”
Since she was so close to him, Gurl could see that his brown eyes were hard and shiny, his smile cold. But why wasn’t he looking at her? Why was he acting as if he couldn’t see her? She was sitting right in front of him, right out in the open! But maybe he was just ignoring her like everyone else. The thought made her angry and she reached out for the cat.
What was wrong with her hands?
She could see them, but just barely. It was as if she were wearing gloves exactly the colours and textures of the alley itself: the black of the pavement, the red of the brick, the pink and white of the graffiti. And when she moved them, they changed to match the background. She touched her face, feeling the heat of her skin beneath her fingertips. If her hands looked like this, what did her face look like?
The waiter bent towards the cat. “Come on now,” he said. “I know someone who’d pay a lot of money to get a load of you.” He lunged for the cat, grabbing it by its front paws. The cat howled. “Shut up, you stupid thing,” the waiter said. The animal hissed, clawing with its back legs.
“Ow!” the waiter yelled, but didn’t let go. Carrying the wildly gyrating cat, he took one huge leap over to a garbage can on the other side of the alley and threw the cat inside. He quickly slammed the cover down and held it. The garbage can bucked and bounced, and the waiter kicked it. “Shut up!” he yelled.
Gurl was furious, but she didn’t know what to do. The waiter wasn’t big, but he was probably stronger than she was. And he could fly, even if he couldn’t do it that well. She unfolded her legs and saw they were exactly like her hands, nearly invisible. If he couldn’t see her, then…
The waiter kicked the garbage can again and the terrified mewls of the cat were too much for Gurl to bear. Though she had never done anything like it before, though she thought her heart would burst like a water balloon, she crept behind the waiter. Grabbing the waistband of his trousers, she yanked upward as hard as she could.
The waiter never flew higher than he did that moment and never would again. Gurl popped the lid off the garbage can. The cat vaulted into her arms, instantly becoming the colour of the air, the colour of nothing. The two of them, Gurl and cat, raced from the alley, just as if they had wings of their own.
Chapter 2 Blue Foot, Blue Foot (#ulink_6f287641-7127-5106-8b62-465c0d65b8db)
RUNNING, RUNNING. SHE WAS RUNNING, the cat curled in her arms, running so hard that her lungs hurt, running until she didn’t feel the pavement beneath her feet any more, until the ground below dropped away and she rose up into the air…
Gurl sat up in bed, clutching her chest. A dream. But not all of it. Not Luigi’s chocolate cake, which she could still smell on her fingertips. Not the cat, who slept across her feet under the threadbare blanket. But what about the rest?
She looked at her hands. They were thin and pale, but they were there, plainly visible. Gurl pulled the covers off her legs. Hands, check. Legs, check. She pulled the covers back up and shivered. The clock on the wall read 5.36am and pinkish sunlight marbled the iron sky outside the windows. The alley had been so much darker. Maybe that was why her hands had looked so strange, why the waiter hadn’t seen her. She had been hidden in dark shadows, odd shadows that mottled her skin.
Yes, she thought. That had to be it.
The cat mewled softly from beneath the blankets and crawled up to sit at Gurl’s side. She wasn’t much to look at. Cats in books had impish black faces and blue eyes, or smushed noses and fur the colour of butterscotch. With a wide, plain face and fur the grey of morning fog, this cat seemed unremarkable in comparison. Except for her eyes, the acid-green eyes that blinked so slowly as Gurl scratched one ear, then the other. The cat rolled over and exposed a white, tufted belly. She put her forepaws in the air and flexed them, clutching at something only she could see.
Gurl scratched the cat’s belly and a strange feeling came over her, a sleepiness, a peacefulness. A musical sort of purring filled Gurl’s ears, erasing the frown that had pulled at her lips. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around, she thought, does it make a sound? If a tree falls…if a tree falls…if a tree falls…
If anyone in the dorm had awakened, they would have thought Gurl had gone into a trance. Time passed, syrup slow, as Gurl scratched and scratched and scratched. Finally, the cat turned her little face to the clock and mewled softly. Gurl shook herself awake and checked the time: 5.57! In three minutes the alarm would ring and all the kids would wake up. What was she going to do with the cat? She couldn’t let anyone see it or else they would take it. Gurl was not very brave, not as brave as she wanted to be, but she was responsible. And if the cat had really chosen her, well then, the cat was Gurl’s responsibility.
Gurl climbed from her bed and pulled a box from underneath it, a box with a couple of old sweaters in the bottom. She reached into her bed, lifted the sleepy animal and laid it gently in the box. The cat peered at Gurl. “I’m sorry,” whispered Gurl, “but I can’t let anyone see you. Can you stay in this box until I can come back?”
The cat circled the box, kneading the sweaters. After curling up in a ball, she reached out with a white paw and rested it on top of Gurl’s hand. “You understand, don’t you?” Gurl breathed. Gurl knew that was a silly thing to think, that the cat was just an animal and couldn’t possibly understand what Gurl was saying. But cats were rare and special, Gurl told herself. Maybe the cat did understand. Gurl gave the cat one last pat and then she closed the box again, hoping that cats liked small spaces and sleeping for hours.
She didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it because soon the alarm rang and the kids climbed from their beds. As usual, no one greeted Gurl, no one asked her if she wanted to sit with them at breakfast. She ate as she always did, in the very back corner of the cafeteria, watching as all the others laughed and talked and shoved one another. It was just as well. Gurl had nothing to say to them anyway. A piece of toast fell lard-side down in front of her, but she ignored it.
“What’s up, Leadfoot?” said a voice. Gurl didn’t have to look to know who it was: Digger.
“Nothing,” Gurl muttered. It was what she always said.
“What? I can’t hear you!” Digger bellowed, getting up from her own table to lumber over to Gurl’s. She was huge, bigger than most of the boys even, with a great square head like a block of wood. She wasn’t much of a flyer, but she didn’t need to be. Once a brick had come loose from the second storey of the dormitory building. It had fallen on Digger’s foot while she was playing killer ball in the yard. She’d turned and proceeded to kick the wall so hard that some of the other bricks came loose. “Nobody messes with me,” she said. “Not even the buildings.”
Digger was tough, the toughest actually. The only thing that wasn’t tough was the way she picked her nose: delicately, with the tip of her pinky extended like she was sipping tea from fine china.
Gurl pushed her eggs around her plate, wondering if Digger would flip them on the floor or in her lap. Not that it mattered, for the eggs smelled like sweaty socks stuffed with day-old fish and were the last things in the world Gurl wanted to eat.
Digger snatched the fork from her hand and smacked Gurl’s plate to the floor, the eggs pellets scattering. “I said, I can’t hear you! Speak, Freak!”
Gurl finally looked up into that big blockhead face. Digger’s expression was the same as the waiter’s had been: smug and triumphant. It was like she knew that Gurl was beaten already, doomed before she began. Gurl thought of what she had done to the waiter, and a tiny smile made her lips curl up at the corners.
Digger’s nostrils flared. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re pathetic. All you do is sit there like a lump and stare at everyone.” With her knuckles, Digger rapped painfully on Gurl’s skull. “Hello, Lump. Is anyone in there?”
For a moment, Gurl wished she could disappear. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Then what would Digger do?
But her hands and legs and the rest of her stayed exactly the way they were and even Digger grew bored. “Freak,” she muttered and went to find someone more interesting to torment.
A word about Hope House: there are places in the world where so many desperate people have lived and so many bad things have happened that the places themselves have become desperately bad. They’re damp and weird and smell like foot fungus. The windows are never clean and the lino curls up at the edges because it can’t stand the floor. Every corner is sprayed with cobwebs and quivering shadows. When you walk into these bad places, you can feel a headache brewing between your eyebrows, a churning in your gut, a cold prickle at the back of your neck. You feel sad and angry and helpless, all at the same time. These bad places seem to hate you, but they also seem to want to keep you there very, very much.
Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless was one of these places. But, as Gurl had learned in her history lessons, Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless had not always been called Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless. Back in the early 1800s, when it was first built, it was called The Asylum For The Poor, The Lazy and The Wretched, and its mission was “to teach idle, wild and disobedient children self-discipline of the body and soul”. After that the name was changed again, to The Home of the Friendless—“for unprotected children whose only crime is poverty”. And then for a while it was called The Institute of the Destitute, which offered orphans job training in such occupations as sheep shearing, basket weaving and flower arranging.
Despite the various name changes, the mission was generally the same: keep homeless kids out of trouble and try to teach them something useful. To that end, in literature class the orphans of Hope House were again composing business letters to rich people urging them to join the Hope House “Adopt-an-Orphan” programme, in which a donation of just $7.50 a day—only the price of a double latte!—would keep an orphan fed for a year. In art they made Hope House oven gloves and place mats, which were sold for $14.95 plus $5.99 shipping and handling on the orphanage website. In computer class they learned how to send emails to thousands of people at a time, with subject lines like “Don’t let hope die at Hope House!” or “The truest heart gives until it hurts!”
As always, Gurl finished her work quickly and then stared out of the window or watched the other students. Preoccupied by the fact that she might have disappeared like a phantom the night before, and by the cat that she hoped was still sleeping in a box underneath her bed, she didn’t notice the new boy until biology. Gurl was particularly bored in biology because they never learned about any animals except birds (with the occasional bat or flying squirrel thrown in). And while Gurl liked birds well enough, she hated it that everyone else worshipped them just because they could fly. Just once Gurl wanted to learn about a wolf or a salmon or a salamander or an ant. “An ant can lift ten times its own body weight,” Gurl had once timidly told her teacher, Miss Dimwiddie, hoping that maybe she might do a lesson on something else. Miss Dimwiddie had barked, “Birds eat ants for lunch.”
This morning Miss Dimwiddie began with the same question she always began with: “Who wants to tell me about the bumblebees?”
“Bumblebees!” echoed Fagin, Miss Dimwiddie’s parrot, who perched on Miss Dimwiddie’s shoulder.
Persnickety’s hand shot into the air. Since it was the only hand to shoot into the air, Miss Dimwiddie said, “Yes, Persnickety.”
“Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly,” Persnickety said, knotting her hands on the top of her desk. “Their bodies are too big and their wings are too small.”
“Yes, Persnickety, that’s absolutely right.”
“Absolutely right,” croaked Fagin.
“Now, children, I want you all to remember that. Bumblebees look as if they’d be too heavy to fly and yet scientists have discovered that they beat their wings in circles to create lift. Now, none of you look like you can fly either, but you must all be like the bee. You children can use the bumblebee to inspire you to great heights. All right?”
She smiled, waiting for the students to agree, but the room was silent. Miss Dimwiddie cleared her throat. “Well then. Today we’re going to talk about the blue-footed booby.”
“Blue-footed booby,” parroted Fagin.
The class sniggered and Miss Dimwiddie put her hands on her ample hips. “Does someone want to tell me what’s so funny?” Ruckus, always the first to cause a ruckus, shouted, “You said ‘booby’.”
“You’re the booby,” said Fagin.
Ruckus’s tiny black braids, sticking up from his head like caterpillars reaching for a leaf, shook. “Shut up, you dumb bird.”
Fagin flapped his wings. “Booby head. Worm head.”
Miss Dimwiddie continued as if she hadn’t heard. “I want you all to turn to page eighty-nine in your textbooks. You will see a photograph of the blue-footed booby. Note its distinctive powder-blue feet.”
“Powder-blue feet,” Fagin crowed.
“The blue-footed booby lives on the Galapagos Islands,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “The blue feet play an important part in their mating rituals.” Again she had to ignore a lot of snickering. “The male booby initiates the mating dance by raising one foot and then the other. Like this…” Miss Dimwiddie raised one foot then the other, delicately pointing her toes as they touched the ground. On her shoulder, Fagin did the same.
“See?” said Miss Dimwiddie. “Blue foot, blue foot. Blue foot, blue foot.”
The class bit their knuckles to stifle their laughter. Except for one person, who laughed out loud. Gurl turned to look. In the back of the room was a new boy that Gurl hadn’t noticed before. This was unusual, the not noticing, and because of it Gurl watched him all the more closely. He was broad-cheeked and broad-shouldered, with large, wide-set blue eyes that made him look a bit like a praying mantis. He noticed Gurl noticing him and he raised his eyebrows. She looked away, feeling her face grow hot. (She hated to be noticed noticing.)
Miss Dimwiddie stopped blue-footing about. “That’s enough!” she said sternly. “These are birds we are talking about and they deserve your respect. Birds can fly. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but none of you can fly as well as a bird, can you?” She cast her icy eyes around the room. “Can any of you fly as well as a bird? And isn’t that why we learn about birds, to learn about flying?”
Fagin squawked. “No feathers. No wings. No crackers for you.”
“There there, Fagin,” said Miss Dimwiddie, patting the bird on the head. “I’ll have you know that the blue-footed booby is one of the most spectacular hunters in the bird kingdom. These birds actually stop in mid-flight and drop into a headlong dive into the ocean from heights of eighty feet.”
The praying mantis boy snorted. “Nathan Johnson has flown higher than that and he isn’t a bird.”
Miss Dimwiddie narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”
“Nathan Johnson,” said the boy. “He’s the Wing who won the Flyfest three years running. He can fly ten storeys in the air, go into a free fall and stop two feet before he hits the ground.”
“Really?” said Miss Dimwiddie. “How informative.”
“Ugly boy,” Fagin crowed. “Stupid boy.”
Miss Dimwiddie smiled. “You’re new. Have you gotten your name yet?”
“No,” said the boy. “But I like to call myself—”
Miss Dimwiddie cut him off. “So you admire Nathan Johnson?”
“Yeah,” said the boy. “Doesn’t everyone?”
The students started whispering, much to Miss Dimwiddie’s annoyance. “I admire birds,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “They are the true Wings.”
Mantis Boy scowled. “I still think Nathan Johnson is the best Wing we’ve ever had.”
“Let me guess,” said Miss Dimwiddie. “You’re going to be just like him one day.”
The boy’s scowl got even deeper. “So what if I am?”
“We’ll see about that,” Miss Dimwiddie told him. “At Wing practice you can show everyone at Hope House that you’re better than birds. I’m sure you’ll put on a spectacular show.” She clapped her hands together. “Now let’s turn to the next chapter. Can anyone tell me why crows like shiny objects so much?”
The boy crossed his arms across his chest and stared at Miss Dimwiddie as if he wanted to take a shiny object and thwack her in the head with it. Gurl wished he would, as it could keep them both from talking about birds and about flying. Gurl was so sick of hearing about flying. What was so great about it anyway? What was the point?
She looked down at her hands and tried to convince herself that she was more special because she couldn’t fly. Being a leadfoot made her watchful and patient. It had got her out of Hope House. It had got her a fabulous dinner. And, most importantly, it had got her the cat.
The cat!
After class, Gurl rushed back to the girls’ dorm. She got down on her knees and pulled the box out from under her bed—just enough so that she could see inside, but not far enough that any of the other girls could. The little cat was still there, curled in a tight ball. Gurl breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that the cat hadn’t disappeared.
No, you’re the one who disappears, she thought. But of course that couldn’t be true.
The cat rolled over and stretched, letting Gurl scratch its belly. She didn’t even know this cat and it wasn’t hers, but she already loved it more than she had ever loved anything else. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around, she thought, does it make a sound?
And then she thought: Yes. It purrs.
Chapter 3 The Chickens of Hope House (#ulink_3f1b91b5-63ed-5741-aae6-8bf54bcc72b5)
