Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets Read Free

plays field hockey and shows up late to gym.
    “Can you get it to me quick?” she asks, checking her phone but returning her gaze to me rapidly.
    I want to be honest and say no, but who am I kidding? This is the only recent conversation I have wanted to last more than twelve seconds.
    “Yawp.”
    “Huh?” she says.
    “I mean yes.”
    “Great!” Beth hops with glee. (Later, in my slow-motion memory, I will see hundreds of strands of her hair floating down lit by sunlight even though we’re indoors. I will see freckles that I never noticed before. I will see how her lips could easily be described as plumlike.)
    But right now she says she’s late for gym, and spins and runs off. I want to think something romantic because I’m convinced that something will happen with me and her. But damn my brain and my eyes—all I can think of is how wonderful her butt looks in those pants.

4.
    SINCE SHE LEFT , I have been in Jorie’s room only twice, to reclaim CDs from the cluttered maw of her desk. Those visits—during the day, when the room still seemed inhabited—lasted seconds.
    Once I’m sure my parents are asleep, I go into Jorie’s room and turn on the small lamp by the door. The shade has crude skulls cut into it. The skulls’ shadows shiver a bit on the walls. The lampshade is one of her late-night projects, for sure. Jorie enjoyed enhancing perfectly functional items. She drilled a hole in the side of her jewelry box that allowed her to shake out two earrings. She wore them regardless of whether they matched or not.
    My mother has cleaned a little and my father righted the fallen bookcase, but the room still has that Jorie energy. She could be asleep beneath the rumpled bedspread right now. Clothes, papers, and books are strewn everywhere. She hated leaving used dishes in her room, but she’d walk on notebooks and pens and art supplies. Jorie never worried about keeping certain valuables protected. She returned a number of my CDs with catlike scratches or coffee rings and didn’t understand why I was annoyed.
    But all this flotsam and jetsam is secondary to my purpose: tonight I’m looking for words and not-violent graphic images. I look through the half-dozen journals on her bookshelf. They stand too neatly for the room. It’s likely my mother has already skimmed through them, looking for evidence of sex and drugs and hatred. Instead, she saw lots of drawings. Pretty surreal fantasy stuff—fat fairies in skimpy clothes, spiky flowers covered in bees smoking cigarettes, dragons with butterfly wings and buck teeth. Some are from years ago, according to the dates (which are just as ornate as the drawings). One of the journals has text, which I only skim in order to feel a bit less guilty. It seems to be a story about a girl and her dog planning to help people in need but never getting around to it (at least not for the first few pages).
    There are some sketches of the girl, her dog, and a bloated-looking frog-man who might be a villain or the principal of our school. Or both. The girl is Jorie-like. I can tell by the hair. Jorie liked to keep her hair relatively short and use rubber bands to make little ponytail spikes randomly on her head. I look over at her dresser and there’s still a huge container of tiny multicolored rubber bands. She went through thousands. Sure enough, the girl in this journal has spiky hair and bony knees (another very Jorie detail).
    I’m struck by my first real memory about Jorie—one that has the arc of a story, anyway, and is not just a flash of images or feelings. When I was four, I was having a recurring nightmare—something about the Super Mario Brothers chasing me and making me eat huge bowls of cereal. After waking from that dream, I cried a lot, but I covered my mouth to keep from alerting anyone. I was afraid that the Mario Brothers would exact revenge if they knew I’d told on them. (The revenge, of course, would be to jump on my head before feeding me to Yoshi.)
    One