Then, without warning, Birdie sprays me with the rest of the freezing water. I can barely make a sound before he’s dropped the gun and is off, running toward the side gate.
I’m startled, but my feet are running too, chasing him into the trees, and onto the road. He’s faster than I expect, but I pump my legs, my track pants swishing with every stride.
After crossing the empty street, Birdie runs through some thorny buckbrush and his jacket gets caught. I almost reach him when he pulls out the MicroBlaster. The cold water hits me in the face. “Last-resort shot!” he shouts. Then the bush lets him go and he weaves through the plants toward the reserve. I stay in the brush, breathing heavy, my right eye burning from getting hit with water, my arms scratched from the thorns.
Despite my track pants, I am totally winded and have a stitch in my side. So I decide to walk, not run, the rest of the way.
When I get there, I don’t see Birdie, but I know he’s in the pallet fort. It isn’t exactly his fort since the wooden shipping pallets were already here when we first explored the reserve. But they had collapsed, and I helped Birdie stand them back up and later he added a bunch of branches to the top, which made it look like a beaver dam.
I stomp loudly as I approach, deciding that if he really wants to get away, he’ll hear me and then he’ll have time to leave. I’m hoping not to get sprayed again.
I’m almost there when the MicroBlaster is tossed out of the fort. “I’ll give you one chance to shoot me in the face. It’s only fair,” he says.
I creep past the gun to the entrance, which is just a gap between the pallets. He sits inside on the dirt. He moves over, letting me share the space.
“Your eye is really red,” he says.
“Yeah? It’s kind of burning.” I rub it a little, but that only makes it feel worse.
“Teddy called me gay, Jack.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“I know what gay is. It’s like when boys like boys, okay?”
I nod.
He says, “It’s just . . .” and then stops.
“Mama always understood,” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
A gust of wind blows and the fort’s branches scrape against each other.
Birdie gathers his knees to his chest and puts his head down. “I want to go back to Uncle Carl’s.”
I wipe my eyes and take a deep breath and try to smile. “That’s why we have to help him propose, Birdie. Just think. We’d be able to live with him again. Him and Rosie. Maybe they’d move into a new apartment, like the ones over by the park, and we’d get our own room.” The sting in my eye is almost gone, but I can’t help but rub it again. “Rosie makes Uncle Carl better.”
I scoot closer and lean my bent knees toward his. “And Mama used to love ceremonies.”
He nods. “She would love the hot-air balloon idea.”
“Absolutely.”
“But what about Patrick?” asks Birdie, his knee knocking against the inside of his fort. “He doesn’t want us going anywhere.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Patrick can’t keep us from our family, right? We’ll go early, before Patrick gets up.”
“Maybe we can also look for my bag. It got all dirty and a little ripped in the fight and Patrick took it away and gave me one of his old ugly backpacks. I said I could fix it, but he took it anyway.”
“Your bag with the ice cream cones all over it?”
“Yes.” He kicks the dirt. That was a birthday present from me and Mama two years ago.
“I’ll talk to Patrick about it, okay? I’ll get it back.”
Birdie suddenly sits up straight, almost hitting his head. “Oh my gosh! Duke! Did you leave the back door open? Do you think he got out?”
“Not likely. I doubt he’ll move from his post in the living room until Patrick gets back.”
“I tried to bribe him with some of the spaghetti and he didn’t even sniff it. He’ll never like me.”
“Well, I hope you ate some of the spaghetti. It wasn’t there to try to make Duke like you.”
“I ate . . . most of it.”
I sigh. He’s the most picky eater I know. But there’s one thing he never refuses. “How about some green eggs? I brought the blue dye from Uncle Carl’s.”
“Really?” he says. “But it’s not my birthday.”
“Well, maybe we need to eat green eggs more often.”
His smile stretches wide and I can’t help it; mine does too.
• • •
Mama told me that when I was four, she’d read me the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham and immediately afterward I demanded to know what green eggs actually tasted like. “Aren’t they yucky?” I guess I asked. Mama said absolutely not! And then she made me some to prove that they were delicious.
She tried and tried to make the ham green, but it always came out mostly brown, with dark green splotches all over that looked like mold. The eggs, on the other hand, were always this perfect peppy green. So we decided to forget all about the stupid ham and just focus on the perfect green eggs.
So the birthday green eggs started when Birdie was three. He was still trying to figure out how to string words together because he was kind of late to talk, and Mama had asked him what he wanted for his birthday. He jumped up and down and screamed, “Green eggs! Green eggs! I want green eggs!” And then he did this little exuberant dance with his hips moving around in a circle like there was an invisible hula hoop, and Mama and I looked at each other and just broke up laughing and so did Birdie. It was so unlike the quiet Birdie we were used to.
So when my birthday came, I copied his dance and shout because I thought it was cute and from then on we always made green
