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

said.
    I looked at Simon. He looked back in the familiar way that said he could see straight through my flushed face and messy hair into the nesty coils of my mind, and this was what he saw, I knew, shooting synaptic sparks: I had friends.
Yes
, I thought in answer to his question of so many months earlier,
I do have friends
.
    Inside the box was a silver charm bracelet decorated with its first charm—a bird in flight, naturally. When I put it on, with Bear’s help, the crew cheered, and Annette offered an exuberant “Woooo!”
    Later that night, when we were snug in his bedroom, Simon gave me his present—a second charm for my bracelet. He dropped it into my hot palm and I savored its metalline chill for a moment. Then I remembered a fragment from the conversation I’d had with Dad a couple of years before, that day on the stairs when he’d told me about meeting and marrying Rasha. “Love,” he had said, “is laying your head down on the tracks while knowing full well that the train is coming, and enjoying the coolness of the metal against your neck.” I held the charm up to the lamplight. It was half of a broken heart. One side of theheart was curvaceous and smooth, while the other was jagged, like a serrated knife. “I have the other half,” Simon said. I curled my arms around his neck, and just when I was about to utter the word “Where?” Simon put a finger over my lips and pointed once to his own bare chest.

6 COW
(Bos primigenius taurus)
    THERE WERE MANY SATURDAYS WHEN , as I walked through the cool corridors of Simon’s silent house, where the air was always sea-heavy and damp, I spotted Annette alone in her room, sitting still as a sphinx, limp hands folded in her lap, staring into her cavernous dollhouse with its miniature mother, father, son, and daughter, its pixie furnishings, its dainty dishes, and I knew we had more in common than a home. In such moments, I recognized the perpetually waiting posture and hungry look of a motherless girl.
    Whether she really had died or just departed for greener grass, Annette’s mother was gone, and so was mine. Dad always said Rasha had disappeared in a blur of red poppies.
    Naturally, I wished I had a mother to talk to about Simon’s diamond eyes and broken edges, and about the irresistible pull of hurt, helpless things. And I wished I had a mother to talk to about the limitless longing I so often felt, a nameless longing I’d first known as a youngster when the orange blossoms entered my mind’s own mythology.
    In the old days, the blossoms had been abundant in our neighborhood. But long before I was born, the orange groves hadbeen razed to make way for the maze of tract housing developments. The tracts were assigned romantic Spanish names that struck their inhabitants as enticingly exotic—Vista Verde, Via de Oro, El Sol Rojo, and of course our own, Tierra de Flores.
    Still, there were a few lonely orange trees left standing here and there in our town, relics from the region’s rural past. One afternoon when I was thirteen, suddenly curious to discover just how their blossoms smelled, I hunted the trees from atop my bicycle. When I found one, I stood on tiptoe, straddling my bike’s seat, and broke off clusters of dust-filmed leaves where the five-pointed blossoms bloomed. I pressed my face into the waxy white stars and felt a tingling vibration, like a cello string plucked just once, in my womb. I realized the scent was one I had, in fact, smelled my whole life, that it had been there, in the air, all along.
    I wondered how something could smell like love and like home at the same time. I made a habit of keeping the blossoms on my nightstand, floating in a chipped ashtray Dad had discarded. My dreams were of dark-haired strangers who pulled the back of me against the front of them in spooning embraces.
    During the days that followed such dreams, I had that limitless feeling of longing, a nameless longing, so that the smallest sight, such as grass