Birds

The sparrow had been trilling at her for almost an hour when Nina looked up at his branch and said, "Be quiet, will you?"

It was a stupid thing to do. He'd been starting to think about leaving her alone—pauses getting longer, sideways hops a little slower—but now he knew she was listening. Now he knew she would answer him if he kept yelling at her for long enough.

"Just go away," Nina said, but of course he didn't.

The trilling became contact calls, louder, shriller. He began hopping from branch to branch in a frenzy again. Seeing his desperation, Nina wanted to call him to her—wanted it so easily she nearly did it, until she remembered all the reasons she shouldn't.

It had been stupid to say anything. She should have just ignored him. If there was one thing she'd learned since what happened in the woods, it was that animals understood snubs, just as much as they understood when you liked them. Eventually, the sparrow would get it, and he'd give up on her, just like he should.

A little while later, the sparrow had calmed down again. It had just started to seem like he was bored of her and thinking about flying away again when a girl sat down next to Nina under the tree. She was maybe two or three years older than Nina, with shining red hair.

Just like Nina wasn't paying the sparrow any attention, the girl didn't pay Nina any. It was like she wasn't even there. Instead, she laid her schoolbooks on the grass. After a moment, one of them rose out of the stack and opened in the air in front of her without her even touching it.

Nina knew it was rude to stare. She hated it when people did it to her, just because there was a fox wrapped around her ankles or a squirrel in her hair—but she couldn't help staring now. Papa had said there were people like them here, other mutants, but although Nina had heard him every time he said it, this was the first time it really seemed like something real.

"Hi," she said, feeling stupid and awkward, which she usually did—but she also usually didn't care. She was never stupid or awkward with animals, the only place it had ever mattered before. The way things were now, though, she guessed she should probably figure it out, try to make friends with other kids the way Mama was always telling her she should.

That's not very flattering, said the girl, and it was a moment before Nina realized she hadn't said it out loud.

"What isn't?"

You only want to talk to me because you're too scared to talk to that bird.

"So?"

So that's not the kind of thing you should tell people.

"I didn't tell you anything. I said hi."

My point is that people might take it the wrong way if they think you only want to be friends with them because you won't have any otherwise.

Nina snapped off a piece of grass, started tearing it into itty pieces. "People might take it the wrong way if you boss them around whenever they say hi to you."

She didn't look at the girl—looking, with animals, was something you did when you were trying to intimidate them or start a fight, and that wasn't what she was trying to do at all, even if this girl was a person and not an animal—but then the girl laughed and said, Fair enough.

"Can you talk out loud, or just inside my head?" Nina asked, because if the girl had laughed out loud, then it didn't make a lot of sense that she was only talking inside Nina's head.

This time, the girl did answer her out loud—but in English this time, so that the only word Nina could pick out was 'I.'

"I don't understand you," Nina admitted.

I said, "I don't speak Polish."

"Oh." Papa had been trying to teach Nina English ever since they left home. She wasn't very good at it. She kept giving up. She couldn't see how she was ever going to remember all the vocabulary he gave her, how she was ever going to understand it the way real live people spoke it, so much faster and less clearly than Papa did in her lessons. She wasn't used to not understanding as soon as she tried, or without even trying. All versions of deer came to her like breathing. She'd never had to stop and think of how to ask a mole something. She'd never stumbled over, 'Hi, my name is Nina, what's yours?' when introducing herself to a toad. "Then how come I can understand you at all? And how come you can understand me?"

I'm a telepath, so I'm reading your mind to see what you mean. And when I project my thoughts to you, I'm sort of...bypassing the language part of your brain and just telling you what I mean. I'm not really sure how it works. It just does.

Nina thought about it, and decided, "That's really cool."

It usually freaks people out.

"I do, too." One time, a mama bear and her cubs had visited Nina at school. The teacher and other students had done a lot of screaming; Papa, when he'd come to pick her up, had done a lot of yelling of his own at the teacher. The next day, Mama and Papa had told her they'd decided to teach her at home, but Nina's mouse friends had listened to them talking the night before, and she knew that she'd actually been kicked out of school.

That's not really the same thing. Everyone here was kicked out of their old school. said the girl. She paused, and then, I might be able to help you.

There was nothing anyone could do to help Nina, because there was nothing anyone could do to change what had happened in the woods. There was nothing anyone could do to save her friends, the ones who'd trusted her, who'd come when she'd called for them, and done everything else she'd wanted them to.

I mean...I can help you learn English faster. I think I can use my telepathy to help you learn it right now, if you're not scared. Then you could talk to everyone, even people who can't read your mind. Maybe then things would be easier.

Nina barely even have to think about it. "Sure!"

Okay. It might not work, but I'll try.

The girl—My name is Jean, actually—closed her book and put it back on the top of the stack, then turned to face Nina. She reached for Nina's face, pressing two of her fingers against Nina's temple, then putting her other hand to her own.

The last time I tried anything like this was during one of my lessons, Jean said. The Professor taught me how to say 'Where is the bathroom?' in German. I taught him how to say 'What makes you think I know where it is?' in French. Or at least, he let me pretend I was teaching him—I think he might have already known. So it's not exactly the same as...this...

Jean's voice trailed off, and her fingertips became an extra pulse in Nina's temple, curling its way down deep into her mind. It didn't hurt; it was there, but didn't really feel like anything except a little bit of pressure, a sense of far-away heat and shadow.

Time passed. Nina sat there with her eyes closed, focusing on her own breathing the way she always did when she was trying to keep someone really skittish from running away—a doe with an arrow in her hind leg, a fox with a piece of glass in his paw. Jean didn't seem skittish, Jean was another person instead of an animal, but even so, this felt like something that could be that fragile.

"There. We should be done," said Jean eventually.

Nina opened her eyes to find the sun lower behind the school than it had been. The sparrow from before had taken their stillness for an invitation, and was now standing on Jean's head, nibbling on a strand of her long red hair.

"Did it work?"

Nina opened her mouth, not sure what was going to come out. She felt like a newborn fawn, still damp, folding long trembling legs underneath her to try to stand up for the first time. "I don't know. Did it?"

Jean smiled at her, warm and bright. "It sounds like it."

"Shoo," Nina said to the sparrow, suddenly convinced that he was going to poop on Jean's head in a minute or a two. Birds never realized they shouldn't go on people; even when she'd told them and told them about how rude it was, they still forgot, probably because pooping wasn't something they ever thought about otherwise.

The sparrow didn't shoo.

"Go away," Nina said.

He ignored this, too.

"It's okay," Jean said. She reached up and offered the sparrow her finger. The sparrow tilted his head, obviously thinking about flying away, but then hopped on instead. It reminded Nina of the way most animals acted around Mama and Papa—they might run away the first time, if they were really shy, but mostly they understood that if Nina was comfortable with someone, they might as well be, too.

"That's definitely more flattering than before," Jean said, and offered the sparrow to Nina.

"I can't," Nina said, though what she really meant was, 'I shouldn't.' Of course she could. She always could. That was the whole problem. If she was angry, or scared, or both, she could force him to come to her, whether he wanted to or not. If she let him stay near her, get used to her, then probably she would, sooner or later. Just because they'd left home because of the danger didn't mean danger couldn't follow them. She didn't need the mice in the walls to tell her what Mama and Papa whispered about on the train when they thought she couldn't hear; all she'd had to do was focus on her breathing until it was very quiet and slow, and then listen.

Suppressing your gift won't help you in the long run, Jean said, and the way it felt inside Nina's head made it obvious she was quoting someone else. "No, really, it's true. The more you use it, the more you'll learn to control it. Then it won't control you just because you get mad one day."

Before Nina could ask how Jean knew, the sparrow made his move, hopping from Jean's hand to Nina's, a light, careful weight. His little nails poked into her skin. He turned his head to preen his feathers, pleased with himself for his sneakiness.

Nina could have waved her hand to make him fly away; but now that he was here, she just couldn't. It had been almost three weeks since she'd let an animal near her. She hadn't realized until now how much she'd missed this, how much it had hurt.

"I'm Nina," she said to the sparrow, and didn't even realize until later that she was crying, "and this is my new friend, Jean."

***

A few nights after they'd gotten to Papa's friend's house, Nina dreamed.

It wasn't the dream she'd had a few times already since what happened in the woods, where she was there again, stepping over feathered body after feathered body, trying not to look at them...trying not to see the bodies of those men, either. This new dream had a bird, too, but one instead of many. A hawk, maybe, or an eagle, and it wasn't dead anymore. It was as tall as Nina—no, taller, casting a shadow that crept across her outstretched hands, then across all of her. It spread its winds, and they glimmered in the darkness. It screamed, and the heat rising off it was enough to burn her up.

She should have been scared of it. She loved animals, but she didn't fool herself about them. She'd been terrified of the fox that came last summer, the one that had stumbled into their yard and sat there twitching for almost half an hour, until she'd gone to Mama for help because no matter how hard she tried to understand him, nothing he said made any sense.

Mad as that fox had been, part of her knew the bird should have frightened her even more...but it didn't.

The bird screamed again. Nina stepped toward it, raising her hand to touch it. The bird spread its wings farther, made itself big. It lowered its head and screamed for a third time.

"Birds don't go mad," Nina said, and jerked awake. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the darkness enough to make out the dresser against one wall, the desk against the other, and remember that she wasn't at home. It took another minute after that for her to realize the bird was still there, screaming inside her mind, burning in some faraway place.

"Where are you?" she asked, and she closed her eyes and listened, until she knew what direction to go to find it. She threw off the covers, got out of bed and ran out into the hallway, moving when the bird was quiet and stopping to listen again whenever it screamed.

It wasn't long before she realized it must be near Jean's room; it wasn't long after that before she knew that it wasn't near Jean's room but in it.

"Don't be scared," she said first thing when she opened Jean's door and slipped inside. "It's just a bird. It's not going to hurt anyone...I think, anyway."

But there was no bird in Jean's room. Even before she flipped the light on, Nina knew she wouldn't have had to if it had been. All that was in Jean's room was Jean, tossing and turning in bed, mostly quiet but whimpering, too, sometimes. She was sweating, and the heat Nina had dreamed coming off the bird was coming off her; the closer Nina got, the more she began to sweat, too. There were welts growing on the walls, some of the paper peeling off, turning black around the edges.

"Jean," she said, shaking her shoulder. "Jean, wake up."

For a few seconds, she was afraid Jean wouldn't, the same way she was always afraid Papa wouldn't, when Mama tried to wake him out of his dreams. Then, between one second and the next, the room became forty degrees cooler. A second after that, Jean opened her eyes and sat up.

"What happened? Did I hurt you?"

"No," Nina said, more than a little bewildered; it had never occurred to her that either Jean or the bird could harm her. "Are you okay, though? That felt like..."

"Bad." Jean leaned back against the headboard of her bed, wrapped her arms around her knees. "This is why everyone else stays away from me. In case you were wondering."

Nina had noticed all the kids staring whenever she and Jean sat together. She'd thought it was her, that somehow they'd all heard about what she'd done in the woods. She'd thought they were steering clear of her the same way the kids at home always had. "Why? That's so stupid. It's just a bird."

"Actually, it's pretty smart not to want to be friends with the person who makes the entire house shake at night," Jean said, more nastily than Nina had known she could. She was just about to say that she hadn't felt anything shaking when Jean said, in a much less mean way, "...What bird?"

"A big one. In my dreams. It was made out of fire, and it was yelling...something. I couldn't understand it. It stopped when you woke up."

"That's weird."

"It's true. You can look if you want." Nina was a little surprised Jean hadn't already, since she always commented on everything else Nina ever thought about. The other day Nina had asked her about it, and she'd said she didn't know how not to look, so she wasn't going to pretend to just to make other people feel anyone else feel more comfortable.

"Maybe I don't want to see this. The...bird. Or whatever it is you saw."

"You should, though. It was beautiful," Nina said, surprising herself—she hadn't known she thought that until it came out that way. "I think you would—"

That was when the door to Jean's bedroom opened, a rectangle of light spilling out onto the bedroom door. Professor Xavier looked in, with Dr. McCoy behind him. "Is everything all right in here?" the Professor asked, looking at Jean.

"Everything's fine," Jean said.

Then the Professor, who'd glanced past Nina at first, did a double-take. He raised his eyebrow, opened his mouth, closed it again, and then, finally: "Well. I suppose that's all right, then...? Try not to stay up too late. Goodnight, now."

The door closed. Nine could hear the Professor telling the other kids to go back to bed, that they must get their sleep so they wouldn't be forced to drift off during their morning classes.

Jean giggled, just a little. When Nina looked at her, she said, "He was going to tell you to go back to bed, too. Then he thought your dad wouldn't like that."

"Professor Xavier isn't scared of Papa," Nina said hotly. Just because her Papa used to be Erik Lehnsherr didn't mean everyone had to be scared of him now.

"He's not scared," Jean agreed. "He just...he doesn't want to intrude? I think? It's complicated." A faraway look came into her eyes, and then she sighed. "—And now he wants to 'have a chat' with me tomorrow. About snooping. And how I shouldn't do it."

"Respecting people's privacy is important, supposedly," Nina said. She got this talk sometimes, too, though it usually came from Mama since Papa secretly thought it was smart for her to have her mouse friends listen to other people's conversations.

"Right."

Nina thought about mentioning the bird again, but she didn't know how to bring it back up, especially when Jean completely ignored her thinking about it. So, instead, she climbed into bed next to her, and they spent a while talking about how unfair and kind of stupid grownups were, and about how Jean's class was going to visit the Statue of Liberty tomorrow and maybe Nina could come, too, if her parents would let her.

Nina was pretty sure they wouldn't, but she was also pretty sure she could live with that; she had the feeling she was going to be pretty busy tomorrow. She hadn't really met anyone here yet—not any of the animals she'd seen or felt wandering the grounds. She was starting to think she might want to, after all.

"Then I can introduce some of them to you, when you get back," she said, not wanting Jean to think she didn't still want to be friends with her, just because...

"Yeah, I know," Jean said, and the best part about it was that Nina knew she did.