All Faculty Excerpts

Birdy

This is an excerpt from N. West Moss's middle grade novel, Birdy.

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Chapter 4

Birdy’s Heartbeat

Birdy lay in bed in the dark, her heart still beating on New York City time, out of sync with the quiet around her. Not even a TV was on, and there were no horns honking or trucks backing up outside her window. There were no street-lights either, or car lights, or billboards blinking. It was dark and quiet, and she thought she might suffocate.

She tried not to think about her mom dying all alone in the hospital without the two of them there, coughing a lot probably, no one to hold her hand. The painful thoughts spooled out from her like she was a ball of misery twine. She didn’t want to think about how much she missed her mother, or how mad she was at her for dying, or for being so sad, or for leaving Birdy in charge all the time. She was mad at her mother for having to work so much, and for being impatient. Once, she shouted right into Mouse’s face when she’d been in one of her moods. Birdy could still see his long eyelashes blinking. “Are you stupid?” Mom had shouted at him. Shut up, Birdy thought. Shut up!

There were plenty of unwanted memories like that, memories she wished she could forget. But the room was quiet and her thoughts filled it up.

Then, just as she thought she might jump out of bed and scream, there was a tiny sound at her door. Birdy propped herself up on her elbow. “Hello?” she said into the darkness, wiping at her eyes.

“It’s me,” said Mouse.

“Oh, Mousey. Good.” She could see her brother’s shape in the moonlight as he padded over to her bed. “What are you carrying?” He lifted up his science textbook.

“It’s really quiet here,” he said, climbing under the covers. “And my throat is all filled up with tears.”

“Me too,” said Birdy. He curled up in a ball with his back against her and hugged his book.

He yawned. “Do you think I’ll get in trouble for sleeping in here?”

“I’ll protect you if she’s mad,” she said.

“She seems alright,” he said. “But what if they don’t like us?”

“I hope they like us, I guess.”

“I hope we get to stay,” he said into the darkness. He smelled good, like what a bird’s nest probably smelled like. “I feel like I might never cry again for a hundred years and someone’ll have to use a crow-bar to get all of the dried-up tears out of me when I’m old.” He sounded sleepy. Birdy sat up and with great effort got the window next to the bed to slide open a few inches. Cool night air rushed in.

“Hear that?” she said, lying back down. It was the peepers. “Try to pretend it’s like noise from home, garbage trucks backing up or something.”

“Right.”

“And stop picking at your scab,” she said softly, and she could feel his body relax. “You can cry if you want to.”

“My throat’s too full.” He was falling asleep, and his words were muffled and drowsy. “Are you sad?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

"Me too.”

Birdy focused on the sweet smell of the air coming in the window, and on the peepers. She tried to make their song fill her head so that there was no room to think about anything. Her brother’s warm back pressed against her, and his steady breathing helped her relax.

At some point, she heard the bedroom door swing open. A slice of light from the hall cut into the room, or maybe she dreamed it, maybe it had just been the moon pouring into the window onto them, the moon that was supposed to remind her of her mother. The slice of light narrowed then until it was just the width of a razor blade before blinking out. Birdy let the sweet throbbing sound of the peepers swell up over her like a giant wave. She wrapped herself in the croaking frogs of June, and in the cool dark outside the window, and in the sound of all of her brother’s uncried tears, and finally drifted off.

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Reprinted with permission from Christy Ottaviano Books. You can learn more about West and her work here.