Lonely birds (solo)

The winter days seemed to stretch on endlessly bleary. Each day seemed colder than the last, as if winter would spiral downwards forever and spring would arrive too late to pull it back out of the depths to which it had sunk. It had been days since Katrina had seen the sun. They sky remained a dismal color too ugly to even be called grey for days. Even the snow was ugly, spattered with dirt and trampled into mud. Even a fresh snowfall would have been a welcome sight, but the weather seemed to want to remain stagnant at bitterly putrid.

Katrina's mood, if anything, was more dismal than the weather. The geography teacher had handed back their tests and Katrina had failed, or rather nearly failed. She'd only managed to get about sixty percent of the stupid country capitals right, and the maps had gotten all confused in her head. Her studying plan hadn't worked out as well as she had hoped, ad during the test she had been really preoccupied worrying about a certain tiger mauling a certain lizard.

Math wasn't going well either. She had gotten ahead of her grade level in some areas during her studies with Slate, but in other areas she felt even more lost than before. She did really well when problems were like logic puzzles or when real life problems had to be solved, but with theoretical things like multiplying matrices, she was hopelessly behind. She could not wrap her head around something like multiplying an entire grid by another one and getting a whole new grid as a result. Everyone else had picked it up and even figured out how to do it in their calculators to solve word problems really fast. She didn't trust the calculator though, because she didn't understand how the function worked. She was beginning to think it had been a mistake for the teacher to try and move her ahead of her grade. Every day was a complete mystery as to whether she would breeze through or stumble around completely lost, and lately there had been a lot more stumbling than anything else.

She really needed someone to talk to about it. Someone who wouldn't scold her or tell her she should have studied harder. Someone who could make everything make sense again, albeit in a round about and illogical way.

Calley and Slate had been gone for over a week now. The last time that happened, Neena had the police out looking for him and everyone was worried. Calley had come home in the foulest mood Katrina could have imagined was even possible and had admitted that he hadn't thought he would be home at all. He'd thought he was leaving to die last time and he hadn't even said good bye.

He hadn't said good bye this time either. He did make vague excuses over the phone about an illness to try and explain his absence, apparently. Katrina had heard about it second hand that he was sick. It was a stupid excuse, though. If he was really sick, he should be in the infirmary or tucked safely into his own bed. How did he expect to get without anyone taking care of him? If he really was sick, that is.

Katrina sat slumped on Calley's bed. She wanted peace and quiet, and no one would come looking in here. No one would be checking to see if she was making progress with her studying. Her math book, notebook, and calculator were spread out in front of her amidst the folds and billows of the unruly comforter that may or may not have been lying more smoothly before the saturnine thirteen year old had gotten to it. It was a good bed for sulking, though she had to dig pillows out of the closet for leaning against the headboard studying purposes. She alternated glaring at the textbook and glaring out the window. The sun refused to come out, and her text book refused to shed any light on the subject of matrices. It was all stupidly hopeless.

Katrina tore out the notebook page and crumpled it up with a growl and threw it to the bottom of the bed. She'd already spent an hour on it and still had no correct answers as far as she could tell. After another five minutes of glaring out the window, she crawled to the bottom of the bed to retrieve it. She sat back against her pillow and smoothed it out again. Numbers one through seventeen were no clearer than they had been before she crumpled it. She sighed and folded the paper. Then in half again. Unfold. Fold diagonally. She reached for a pair of scissors from her backpack and trimmed off extra fringe and an unused three inches at the bottom. The folds came automatically without Katrina having to think about them. A moment later a paper crane sat on top of her notebook. Majestic white with light blue stripes, the scribbles and eraser marks had all ended up on the inside.

He was a lonely looking little crane, his face downcast and sad.

Katrina reached for her notebook, displacing the crane slightly to ponder the mystery of matrices. She tore out a clean page. The folds of this crane were much crisper and more exact than those of the first. They would be brothers, these two cranes with their matching blue pinstripes; one a little rumpled, with a lot of mixed up thoughts inside, the other well groomed and perfectly postured. Katrina frowned at them sitting next to each other on her math book.

“Why don't you ever say good bye?”

The cranes didn't answer, so Katrina left them to keep each others' silent company on Calley's bed when she left for her own room.