Read Online The Lovebird by Natalie Brown - Free Book Online Page A

least for me, to steep in Marilyn’s sad sweetness for a while. “Especially if it’s true,” Bear added.
    “If what’s true? That we’re together? But it is.”
    “No.” The others looked at each other. Ptarmigan nervously rolled his wheelchair backward and forward. “Just—” Bear began.
    “—what some people say,” said Raven.
    “About what?”
    “The truth about Simon’s wife.” Ptarmigan took a deep breath and stared into my face through his round little wire rims. “We’ve heard some rumors around campus—one of my professors in the theatre department teaches in the literature department, too. Some say that she didn’t really die—she just left.”
    “Left?”
    “Yeah, well, that’s what some people whisper—” said Orca.
    “But that’s impossible,” I said. “What about Annette? Her mother wouldn’t just
leave
her.” I felt a twisting in my stomach.
    “Why not?” asked Raven. “People do all sorts of things. And Simon might have found it easier to tell his kid and everyone else that the wife just got sick and died.”
    Possibly I’d learned a secret about Simon, I thought, fingering the sharp edges of the
Misfits
ticket in my pocket. Possibly I’d learned
the
secret about Simon, shaky Simon who shaded his eyes and lived in a shadowy house, but I would not, I decided, say anything about it.
    Simon had, with his tear-tinged hyacinth sighs, breathed life into me. I could feel his affection all around me. It was a vapor that enclosed me. And I lived in a state of elation because of it, and also a state of fear that he might one day pull his attentionback into himself, tuck it behind his dark eyes, and I would wither without it. I tiptoed through my own happiness, hoping never to do anything to push him away. Maybe that was what Simon had meant by marriage being Chinese water torture—maybe by Chinese water torture he meant to describe the latent terror of losing what we most desire to keep.
    “But, guys, you don’t really know what happened,” I said, “so what’s the point of speculating?” The crew was silent. “Anyway,” I continued, “what about the movie? What did you think?” And then there was no talk of Simon’s maybe-wayward wife, or even of wild horses, only of Marilyn. “She’s so tender,” said Bear, “you just hate to think of anything bad ever happening to her.”
    I DIDN’T ADOPT AN ANIMAL-INSPIRED NAME like the others. The truth was—though I never said so—I couldn’t bear to replace “Margie,” not because I was proud or particularly fond of my hopelessly clunky moniker, but because it was something Rasha had given me. The crew didn’t mind too much.
    “I must say, though,” Bumble said, “if you
were
to take a new name, it would have to be ‘She-Bird.’ ”
    “Indeed,” seconded Ptarmigan.
    “Not only,” continued Bumble, “because of your affinity with avian creatures, which was so evident that day in Azar’s”—he didn’t know about the lone lovebird over whom I tossed and turned—“but because of your own seemingly inherent birdishness.” He took a drag from one of the marijuana cigarettes he kept stashed in the futuristic fanny pack—it was called, he said, a marsupium, and it was, he added, waterproof—that encircled his waist.
    “Yeah, and because you are delicate—” added Orca.
    “I’m not delicate.”
    “—yes, delicate, and always looking around curiously at everything.”
    “She-Bird!” Bear hugged me.
    ON MY BIRTHDAY, JUST BEFORE I BEGAN my second year of college, Simon, Annette, and the crew took me to the same vegan Mexican place where Simon and I had gone on our date. “Why does she get to have a monkey?” Annette asked repeatedly, pointing to a Frida Kahlo self-portrait on the wall. I stared once more at the photo of the female Zapatista, the warrioress. Between bites of potato taquitos, Bumble pulled a tiny box from his marsupium and slid it across the table to me.
    “From all of us,” he