Birds of a Feather
TW: violence against a bird
My cousin drives a Kia Forte, and I don’t even know what that means. She was born and raised in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, and she was captain of her high school’s debate team. She knows how to roll a blunt (“In theory,” she told me with a wink). Her father owns a bar, and her mother knows Amanda Seyfried. My cousin has been to parties that end with people having their stomachs pumped. My cousin has never had her stomach pumped. She’s going to Yale.
My cousin and I see each other twice a year — once around Thanksgiving, and once at the end of the summer, in Rhode Island. In August, we lie like harbor seals sunning on beach towels as we listen to music on her iPod and watch our brothers play Ultimate Frisbee Deathmatch in the sand. My cousin has great taste in music; she has that hipster indie style that most clothing stores try to cultivate with faded band tees and ripped jeans. My cousin wears Vans with blue-ink stars scribbled on the sides, and denim jackets with pin-on buttons that say things like ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA. I’ve never heard her curse. She is the kind of girl who says “Aw, fudgesicles,” or some other quirky homemade expletive. She has “hooked up” with seven different boys, and one girl, as a dare. She’s not dating anyone right now; she says there’s going to be a whole new scene in college.
“How’d you do it?” I ask her. We’re reapplying sunscreen; she burns easily, and I don’t, but I do it anyway. “Get into Yale, I mean.” I try to temper my words with just the right amount of envy; a little bit of jealousy is flattering, I think.
My cousin shrugs. Her face is a white mask of indifference; she doesn’t want to get tan lines from wrinkling her forehead. “I worked pretty hard in high school. And the SAT score is important.”
“But, like, how? There are a million people with good grades and all that other junk. What’s the secret? Like a good luck charm or something?” I don’t really expect an answer. It’s banter, and a show-offy kind at that. I want her to tell me that I am her, only a year younger, and by next summer I will metamorphose into the kind of girl who knows how to play the acoustic guitar and drive a stick-shift, the kind of girl who dyes electric blue streaks in her hair and has read all one thousand and seventy-nine pages of Infinite Jest.
My cousin laughs. “You actually want to know? Really?”
“Uh, yeah.” No one is nearby, but my cousin still gives a furtive glance around; for dramatic effect only, but goosebumps race down my arms. “What? Did you bribe the admissions committee or something?”
She scoffs. “No. Wait, I’ll show you after dinner, okay?”
“Okay.” I lower myself onto my back, carefully so as not to drag my newly greased elbows through the sand, but my cousin is still looking at me.
“For real, though. It’s kind of weird. But it’s a superstition thing, like positive visualization. Like, a ‘take control, conquer your own future,’ kinda thing. You just kind of have to go with it.” She shrugs. “One of the debate kids from Harvard showed my team and I how to do it last year during regionals.”
“Wait, what is it?” I curl my toes and try to picture the high school debate team in a dorm at Harvard playing some sort of drinking game, or using a Ouija board. Oh ghosts of centuries past, will I get into an Ivy League school?
My cousin waves her hands vaguely. “I’ll show you. It’s better if I explain as we do it.” We, I think, and I imagine my cousin and I are lying in the grassy courtyard at Yale as the sun stretches shadows across our bodies.
Dinner is every family dinner; the kids sit at a separate table, and the requisite how’s-school-going interrogations are mercifully short. Three aunts and an uncle ask about college; I tell them I’ve been visiting, but I haven’t decided yet, oh yes, it would be wonderful if I ended up at a family alma mater, yes, New Haven is supposed to be lovely this time of year. My cousin and I excuse ourselves early and leave our brothers to their burping contest. It’s not quite dark outside yet, but the sun has set and the remains of the light are oozing down into the trees. “Okay,” says my cousin with authority as soon as we set foot outside, “there’s a hose near the boardwalk by the beach, right?”
The beach is quiet. All the idyllic sunset-watchers are gone, driven in by the chill that approaches with the shadows. The boardwalk is populated only by seagulls, searching the ground near the snack shack for leftover french fries.
My cousin is hefting the hose at the shower station, pinching the green tubing. “Okay,” she mumbles, “this’ll work.” She whips off the towel she’s been carrying on her shoulders and tosses it to me. “When I tell you, be ready with the towel,” she commands, and she twists the hose on, still pinching off the flow, and approaches the seagulls. The birds at the beach are used to humans, so they don’t flap away when she moves in. She gets around four feet away before she stops and releases her grip on the tube. The water sputters out in a gushy spray that hits the birds dead on.
One of them caws, and the others imitate it in a raucous chorus. The seagulls stumble away and launch themselves into the air, but there is something clumsy and heavy about their movements, like they don’t believe they will be able to find their way into the sky. It isn’t until I see my cousin’s frantic hand gestures that I realize why — the water is weighing them down.
“Now!” she hisses, and I hurry forward, towel out. “That one!” She trains the hose on one seagull struggling to flap its wings, and I toss the towel over the soaked white body, silhouetted against the dark salt wood of the boardwalk. My cousin stomps down on one end of the towel in a way that reminds me, for half a second, of a little kid crushing a beetle beneath a dirty sneaker. I follow her lead and pin the other end under my flip flop. The bird is thrashing beneath the towel, and seagulls are large, much larger than they seem at a distance.
My cousin is breathing hard, but her grin is infectious. “The adrenaline, right?” she gasps, and I nod and swallow hard. “That was great! You did it!”
“What now?” The seagull is moving less; I wonder if it can breathe under the towel. My cousin gets to her knees, still pinning the side down, and I mirror her.
“Now’s the hard bit. Okay? I’ll hold down the front, and you have to grab a feather.” She looks at me, biting her lip, and I blink back. “The towel is over its head, so it’s fine. It can’t peck you or anything.”
I falter for a moment. “What if it has, um, rabies?”
“I don’t think birds can have rabies. They’re not mammals. Come on.” Impatience creeps into my cousin’s voice. “Do it quickly.”
“How?” I half-whisper, but I grasp the side of the towel and take a deep breath.
“Okay, go!” My cousin leaps forward and seizes the barely moving form, and I flip the back of the towel up and grope for the bird. My fingers collide with something warm and smooth, and I scrabble for a feather.
The bird shrieks in a voice that sounds incredibly human, a cut-off wail of pain, and I jerk back on instinct. The seagull is thrashing now, and my cousin is clutching at the towel in vain. “It’s getting away!” she screams, and I screw my eyes shut and twist as I fall, bringing my full body weight down on the towel.
My shoulder grinds against something with a crunch, and my throat closes in horror. My cousin is on her feet, grabbing at my arm and yanking me up. “Let’s go,” she chokes. We sprint down the boardwalk, and my flip flop catches in one of the crooked boards. Pain explodes in my toe, and I am struck by a violent and involuntary memory: the time my mother’s toenail was ripped off when I accidentally shut my bedroom door on her foot. But my cousin yanks me forward, fisting her hand in the front of my t-shirt, her nails — she painted them yesterday on the porch, an alternating pattern of blue and yellow pastel — scraping against my skin.
We run until we are falling to our knees in the driveway of our house, gravel digging into our shins, our breath coming in almost-sobs. I am shuddering all over, still feeling the crunch of hollow bird bones against my shoulder.
“We left the fucking towel,” my cousin says under her breath. In the dark, her voice sounds like a stranger’s. “We didn’t even get a feather.”
“How is that supposed to help with anything?” My voice cracks a little, and I try to swallow down the blame in my words. It wasn’t her fault. “A feather?”
My cousin snorts. It’s not a condescending snort, but I still feel the kind of lump that precedes tears building in my throat. “It’s like a symbol. Truth and awakening, or something.” She turns her face up to the sky, and a realization shudders through me: she’s grinning. “They were like, ‘it’s about control,’” she says softly, and giggles to herself, a half-hysterical chuckle.
My cousin doesn’t come to visit on Thanksgiving. We stop in to see her on the way back from my uncle’s house, and she meets us at the entrance to the campus. I almost don’t recognize her when she approaches us. She blends with all the other students milling around the frost-layered lawn.
My cousin has dark circles under her eyes that could almost be mistaken for the smudgy remains of eyeshadow. She is smaller than I remember; her winter coat all but buries her. She tells us how glad she is to see us, and she means it; there is an exhausted loneliness in her eyes that was not there in August, and she sinks into the collar of her coat and blows clouds of breath into the frigid New Haven air as she leads us around campus. Her professors are nice, mostly, she tells us, but there is so much work, all the time. I ask her if she’s been to any parties, and she laughs the way she used to laugh when telling me about the pranks she played on her counselors at summer camp. No way, my cousin tells me, and her smile is empty. No way, her roommate’s a sophomore and she scared her straight on the first day. They slip things into your drinks and you don’t even realize it until — she breaks off and shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it, and smiles at me.
“But there are some great clubs I’m thinking of joining,” she says a little too brightly. “And the atmosphere is just like, so much better than high school. Everyone’s really chill, and you can just go off campus and no one’s like, ‘where are you going?’ I love it here.”
My cousin is interrupted by a flock of birds that bursts out of the trees above us. They move too fast for me to really see them; the only impression I get is that of specks of darkness against a blank sky. I pause to watch them, and she halts next to me.
“I love it here,” she says again, softly, and I nod like I believe her.
Cover photo by Bernadetta Watts
