She drew with a quick and certain hand, sketching out in a few deft strokes a tensed leopard, flash of tawny spotted coat, and teeth and claws as angry slashes. Cowering in the corner of the page, the gazelle caught in the split second of fear, legs bent, neck torqued as its head made a quarter turn too late toward the predator. Sean watched as she drew, tightened his body like the muscles in the gazelle's flanks. He smelled blood and fear. Lost in her drawing, Norah moved the colored pencils with grave concentration. Work complete, she set the paper aside, took another sheet, ripped it in half, and began folding precise creases.
Mrs. Patterson, making the rounds among the schoolchildren, paused to offer encouragement or advice to each child. When she reached the window and saw what Norah was doing, she broke from the regimen and strode to her, stopping close enough to cast a shadow over the table's pen-pocked surface, transfixed by the drawing of the attacking leopard and the delicate manipulations at hand. When she finished folding, Norah laid an origami crane beside her picture and immediately began work on another. Without a word, Mrs. Patterson slid the drawing into her hands, held it up in disbelief, and walked back to her chair at the front of the room. She considered the craftsmanship of the piece, still staring at its realism, and asked in a loud voice, “Where did you learn to draw like this?”
Norah did not look up from her origami. “I could always draw,” she said, bending over another wing.
The whole class now focused on her paper folding as she built a third bird. When finished, she lined them up across the front edge of her desk, stood, and bent so that her face was inches away from them. She drew a deep breath and blew. The paper birds seemed to float in midair, falling up before fluttering to the ground. Each one landed perfectly on its base before toppling under the weight of wings. Sharon clapped first, then Dori and Gail from the other side of the room, and all at once, the entire class was on its feet, cheering and stomping with sheer delight. Norah stared straight ahead at Mrs. Patterson, challenging her to believe, waiting for the teacher to smile before she returned a broken beam of her own.
Norah watched Sean as he had watched her, and every time he noticed her looking his way, he flinched and reddened. The lonesome, like the mad, know one another on sight. She recognized his broken heart before she knew its cause, and he knew that she knew. Later that afternoon, she sidled up to him to walk her home. As they waited outside the door after the dismissal bell had chimed, Sean asked, “How did you do that trick with the paper birds?”
“Origami. And not a trick,” she said. “What are we waiting for? It's freezing out here.”
“I just like to let the big kids go first.”
“Stick with me. They won't bother you.” She grabbed his hand and pulled, running and laughing as they parted clots of children, and once they were through the crowd, the ice-cold air took their breath away.
Someone slammed hard against the chain-link fence, sending a tremor along its breadth, but no person could be found. They passed through cliques of students walking home along the quiet sidewalks and into the emptiness of three o'clock. A dog barked, invisible behind a tall wooden gate, and Norah shushed it with one curt hush. The distance between houses widened as the school grounds receded, and to get home, they took a shortcut through the woods, a bike path that ran alongside a drainage ditch, not more than a hundred yards long. Hidden by the bare forest of January, travelers were invisible from the streets and prying eyes. Usually Sean lollygagged at spots along the trail, peering over the edge into the frozen creek, dropping stones to shatter the ice along the banks, listening to the trees complain in the shifting wind. When they were alone, Norah stopped suddenly, looked up and down the path, and then produced a single cigarette from her pocket, holding it before him like a sacred artifact. She peeled off her mitten and took out a book of ancient matches.
“You're not going to smoke that!” Sean's eyes widened. “Smoking stunts your growth, that's what my mum says. You don't want to get stunted, do you?”
The flame flared blue from the sulfur, and the cigarette already hung from her lower lip. “I used to smoke a pack a day,” she muttered, lighting up. Norah snapped out the match and threw it on the path. “Just kidding. I only want to show you this—” Forming an O with her lips, Norah exhaled a ring of smoke that widened like a ripple in a pond, and she blew another ring which passed through the first hoop, and then quickly, she exhaled a long trail of smoke that shot through both rings like an arrow piercing a heart.
Glee in his high voice, he asked, “Where did you learn to do that?”
With the toe of one shoe, she stubbed out the cigarette and then looked past him to the high thin clouds stretched across the winter sky. “I know lots of things,” she said, and catching the interest in his eyes, she shrieked and tore off through the woods, her shoes skating across the snow and bare earth, and he did not catch up to her until they reached the back fence of Mrs. Quinn's yard. At a blind corner, they nearly crashed, and as he caught himself short by grabbing her shoulders, Norah screamed at the touch and laughed and screamed again, and he could see stars glistening at the back of her throat.
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