The Flying Squirrel

It was a damp, gray, February day in Detroit, exactly like the twenty-one days before it and the sky hung heavy, somewhere between sleet and snow. The city bus pulled in front of Immaculata High School and Barb Cunningham and I stepped out over the blackened slush onto the sidewalk. It was definitely a Monday, but Barb's wired smile glinted beneath her hood. I'd seen that smile before. It would be a day to remember.

The principal was an older nun of the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Her office was filled with dead animals--stuffed wildlife contorted in quasi-natural poses provided courtesy of her father, a dismally mediocre taxidermist. A henna fox with a toothy grin stood guard over the outer office. A glass wall with a centered oak half-door divided the public space of the outer office from the inner sanctum. Through the glass wall, Sister Marguerita's desk was visible--a neat pile of papers and record books, a public address microphone and a stuffed snowy owl whose face was frozen forever in distorted mid-screech. A smallish badger with disproportionately huge curved claws, a snarling wolverine--the state animal--and a red flying squirrel whose arms and legs were outstretched as if in midair, but who was actually perched on a log, monitored the comings and goings of students from the window ledge. The two of us entered the building beneath their dead gazes.

Barb and I shared a locker and much of the same class schedule, but she was inexplicably absent from Calculus. Likewise, in Chemistry she was nowhere to be found. I excused myself to get a drink of water and caught a glimpse of her down the hall, in the principal's outer office. Suddenly, her head disappeared and I ran toward the office, impelled as much by fear as by curiosity. There was Barb, on the floor, crawling into the inner sanctum like a foot soldier crawls through enemy fields. To my horror, Sister Marguerita sat at her desk, not six feet from the crawling Barb, writing in one of her record books, obviously oblivious to the invasion. Like a rocket, Barb's arm shot up through the air, snatching the squirrel and the log to which it was eternally attached and brought them to her flattened chest. Fear and disbelief shot through me and I weighed for an instant whether I wanted to be even a witness to this crime.

Almost as stealthily as she came in, Barb wriggled out of the inner office and back into public space, which was surprising considering the bulk of her heist. She rolled her body up to a stand and nonchalantly tried to hide the quarry under her uniform blazer, which, frankly, didn't work very well. She walked briskly past me as if I were invisible, but I swear I could hear her heart beating from where I stood. Then she disappeared down the hall.

I returned to Chemistry, having been gone long enough to have imbibed twenty gallons of water. But Sister Rodriga, about four feet tall and four feet wide, faced the chalkboard and was engrossed in her explanation of covalent solutions and the atomic number of sodium and didn't even notice me. Not five minutes later Barb rushed in, out of breath.

"Sister, there's a squirrel in the chapel!"

Sister Rodriga's eyes grew wide for a moment as the realization of the words dawned on her. She flew into a flurry of navy and white, ranting something about those "pesky rascals" and how they're so difficult to catch and how they'll surely shred the new chapel curtains, and it took over two years to get the requisition for them through the archdiocese, and she whirlwinded from the classroom. Stunned silence was all that was left in the vacuum of her wake.

Incredibly, nothing more was ever heard or mentioned of the incident--it was as if it never happened. The only evidence was unveiled to us insiders three days later when we saw Barb, scrubbing three floors of stairs in four different stairwells with a toothbrush--a wired smile glinting beneath her hair.