Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend by Alan Cumyn

Author:Alan Cumyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

XIX

Robbie Lewis tracked down Shiels near the portable outside when she was heading to Postlethwaite’s forgettable English class. It was another gray, cool, wet day, and Robbie Lewis was not in Postlethwaite’s class, so he had clearly gone out of his way to reach her.

“Is Pyke a go for Friday?” he asked. “Because Coach has to submit the lineup sheet now. So we have to know.”

Robbie seemed smaller. He was shivering in his Vista View colors, the gray and gold.

“I thought you were practicing in secret,” Shiels said. “Haven’t you been working out plays and stuff?”

“He hasn’t come yet. But you said he would. You practically guaranteed him!”

“Did I?” Shiels was enjoying her little moment of teasing. Finally she said, “Of course he’ll be there. Put his name down.”

He almost needed to bend double just to talk to her. “But what position does he play?”

The same question she had asked him when she’d nearly knocked him over in the hall. “Anything where he has to catch the ball.”

“Tight end? Wide receiver? How about special teams? Punt returns?”

“Sure. You saw him in the cafeteria, in the auditorium. Just get the ball to him! It’s not rocket science.”

“Catching the football is a whole lot different from playing in an actual game. Does he even know the rules? Has he ever been hit? He wouldn’t swallow the ball, would he?”

“He grew up in the Himalayas playing football with his brothers and sisters,” she said.

“Really?” Was it getting bonked on the helmet that made Robbie Lewis so credulous all of a sudden? Shiels took a moment to enjoy him shivering in his flimsy shirt, trying to figure out if she was kidding or not.

“Every day on the mountaintop. Football, football, football,” she said. “That was his whole life. Just you see. It’ll be a game for the ages.”

• • •

I have always wanted to be a doctor, Shiels wrote in her application essay for her mother’s choice, Stockard College. I suppose it was simply in my genes, in the soup of my childhood. Having two doctors as parents helps a great deal, no doubt. I took it for granted that every girl grew up surrounded by microscopes. At breakfast, conversation revolved around the latest in cancer research or what an elderly woman might do to prevent bone loss. It is simply a given in my family that we serve others, that our lives were meant to be dedicated to improving the health and well-being of the ill and suffering, patient by patient, neighbor by neighbor, friend by friend.

She paused. The opening paragraph had just poured out, almost without thought.

But what I wasn’t expecting, what took me by surprise, is my fascination with political society. The science of groups, I suppose it might be called. Beyond the microbes in our gut, beyond the workings of various viruses and other physical instabilities, what makes the body politic tick and twitch? What are humans? Who are we and who could we be? And why are we like

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