Treasure Island!!!

existence. You fed him toxic foods, you cramped him in the cage, you never so much as bought him a jingle toy. But when he hung on—and what a fighter!—you wised up and decided to do the dirty work yourself. Directly.”
    “Adrianna, what are you talking about? Stop the Angela Lansbury business at once.”
    Her face shone. “That bird didn’t die from natural causes, and you know it. There are feathers inside this bag. And feather dust. Smell it!”
    I guided the bag away from my nose, marveling at the shelf life of that fetid odor. “You poor thing,” I said, switching tactics. “Stop rattling the bag and calm yourself a second. Animals die every day, remember? Think of the spiders we squash in the bathtub. The ants we used to burn with magnifying glasses. I know what you’re going through with Mr. Tatum—well, actually, I can’t
imagine
how I’d feel if I found out Mom was banging Lars, but I
do
know what it means to have your heart broken. All the same, let’s not get animal rightsy. If I’d allowed myself to get mushy every time a frog expired at The Pet Library, I wouldn’t have had the energy to keep living. You have to just swash through it all. Sensitivity is a peril. And you know what Jim Hawkins would say? He’d say what good is a life if it can’t be dashingly used, cheerfully hazarded?”
    “That book again.” Adrianna stared at me, aghast. “Listen, a parrot doesn’t get to make choices like you; it doesn’t get to play pirates. Torn from the wild, a parrot depends on you for its very existence.”
    What a pathetic pile of scrupulosity, what a lot of quibbling!
    “I was BOLD , Adrianna. I’m a fool, if you like, and certainly I did a foolish, over-bold act, but I was determined to do it.”
    “So you admit it? You admit you used this retail bag to suffocate your own parrot?”
    “I admit nothing.”
    Shuddering, the bag crackling in her hand, Adrianna walked out.
     

CHAPTER 23
     
    I n
Treasure Island
the pirates send a note called the Black Spot when they intend to throw you out of the gang. We used to pass notes like that in elementary school, only usually we didn’t draw anything as clear and direct as a Black Spot; it was more verbal—for example, once we wrote a girl named Etta Statchnik a note titled: Everything Wrong with Your Ears and Your Clothes and Your Hair. After that we penned a long list with categories and sub-categories. As I say, it was no Black Spot, but it tipped her off that she was no longer welcome to sit at our lunch table.
    One evening not long after my scene from
Murder, She Wrote,
my mother said that the next day she would need me out of the house. She was going to do some major cleaning. “Why can’t I stay in my room?” I said. “Because,” my mother said crossly, “I’m cleaning it
all
.” She arranged that Adrianna would drop me off at a mall near St. Catherine’s School for Girls, and in the afternoon, when Adrianna finished teaching, I could take the bus to school, and Adrianna would drive me home. It was an odd plan, but my mother gave me nearly a hundred dollars of pocket money and squeezed my arm. “Treat yourself,” she said. So I went with it.
    At the mall, it is possible to amuse oneself without effort. I tried on sixteen party dresses and asked the sales assistant to hold five. For lunch I ate a quinoa salad with a plastic fork while sitting on a bench by the Trevi fountain. Then I trolled the jewelry counters and shoe racks. After dropping eighty dollars on a tub of body butter, I ran for the bus.
    Half an hour later when I deboarded in front of St. Catherine’s School for Girls, I realized that my hand was too light. I’d left the swanky bag of body butter on my seat, but the bus lumbered on, its tires making two black lines on the snowy white road. Too bad. Streaming towards me on the pavement, came a clutch of girls, pale and drab, their slate blue skirts hanging beneath the hems of their puffy coats. I dodged their wheeling bodies and pulled open the school’s heavy door.
    The hallway was overheated. Too much glitter, too much glue, I thought as I passed the bulletin boards, cluttered with holiday art. Inside Adrianna’s classroom, my sister stood with her back to me, erasing equations from the blackboard.
    “So this is where you go every day,” I marveled, having never thought much about her work life, except to mock it in a general way.
    “Let’s get out of here.” She looked hot and sweaty as she chucked