Strange Birds: A Field Guide To Ruffling Feathers

In Lane’s memory, the tree house had been a lot higher up in the branches of the old banyan. It was a scary climb when she was little, even with one of her older brothers leading the way and the other following behind. They allowed her up only when their parents insisted, so she never let on that she was scared, no matter how much the ladder wobbled beneath her feet.
She squinted up at the makeshift flagpole and blew a strand of hair out of her sweaty face. Her brothers’ flag, an old pillowcase with a large D for DiSanti sloppily written on it in red marker, still hung from the pole.
Lane noticed a peacock nearby, watching. The way the bird looked at her intently, its head tilted, one eye turned in her direction, made her feel like it knew something about her that even she didn’t know. She didn’t like the feeling.
“Whatcha looking at, weirdo?” she asked the bird, before wrapping her fingers around the sides of the ladder. She was twelve now. The climb wasn’t as high or as scary. She didn’t need her brothers.
At the top, Lane pulled off her backpack and tossed it into the tree house. She looked around at the familiar space. A hammock made of thick, interwoven ropes was strung across one end, a crocheted afghan lay in a ball inside it. She pulled out the afghan. It had once been a bright green and blue, but the colors had faded after years of lying in direct sunlight that came in through the opening in the roof. Lane held her breath and shook it out, watching dust motes swirl and scatter. She hung the afghan over a windowsill to air out.
She could see that the bird was still standing where she’d left it. She dug out a granola bar from her backpack, broke off a few pieces, and tossed them down to the bird. Her grandmother’s property was overrun with peacocks, and she had warned Lane not to feed them. Lane watched the bird scurry away, but not so far that it didn’t quickly return to investigate what had been dropped.
Lane turned back to her work in the tree house. Besides the hammock, the only other furniture in it was a wall of cubbies, some long and rectangular, others small and square.
Most of the cubbies were empty, but a few still held items her brothers had left behind: a game of checkers and a deck of cards, a box of matches and a flashlight, a deflated football, and a few books whose pages were stuck together, their covers warped from rain. Everything was covered in a layer of grit. She collected her brothers’ old things into one cubby. Even if the items were no longer useful, she couldn’t throw them away. They were relics of a time when her family was still a family.
Lane had her own room in her grandmother’s house, but in the tree house she stashed the things that would help her survive the summer. In one cubby, she unpacked her paints, brushes, and sketch pad, along with her X-Acto knife, an item that would probably alarm her grandmother if she found it inside. In another cubby, she placed a small canvas pouch with her collection of crystals. She had found a box of tiny, battery-operated string lights in the attic, which she now hung around the doorway.
When she was younger, she’d loved the tree house because it reminded her of her favorite picture book about a boy whose family didn’t like him building things inside their house. One day he runs away and builds his own house where he can do as he likes. Soon he’s joined by other kids whose families don’t like their pets and their hobbies, their dirt and their noise. The boy builds them all houses, and the children create their own little village.
Lane felt like the boy in the book as she pulled in the flagpole and removed her brothers’ old pillowcase flag. Except that in the story, the families all realize how much they miss the children. And the kids realize they miss their families too. They reunite and go home together and live happily ever after. Just like people always do in books, Lane thought.
She was glad to have the tree house to herself, a place of her own, away from her family. A place where no one was looking for her. Not her parents, not her brothers, and not her grandmother.