Dark Days by James Ponti

upcoming test, I doodled the names of the five birds down the side of my paper and stared at them.
    Warbler
    Swan
    Starling
    Heron
    Pigeon
    I’ll admit that I may have been making a big deal over nothing more than a simple mistake. I have been known to do that. I even have a history of overreacting to geographically misplaced birds.
    My dad loves to tell the story about when I was six years old and we visited a neighborhood that was decorated for Christmas. We were walking through a yard that was made to look like Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. I started laughing because there were giant plastic penguins in Santa hats. I didn’t mean to be rude. I thought it was a joke and that you were supposed to laugh, because everybody knows that penguins only live in the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern.
    Well, apparently not everybody.
    It turns out it wasn’t a joke and the people who lived there were offended. I apologized and later my parents explained that you don’t always need to point out mistakes that others make. I usually do a good job of remembering that, but this was different. This was a bird expert giving a lecture at a top college.
    I kept doodling and filled in the formal names of the different species.
    orange-crowned warbler
    mute swan
    European starling
    great blue heron
    African pigeon
    It took me about thirty seconds to see it, but when I did I let out a hoot that made Ms. White stop in the middle of a sentence.
    â€œIs there something you’d like to add to the discussion, Molly?”
    All eyes trained on me. “Just . . . that it’s a . . . really good book.”
    â€œThat’s all?” she asked, shooting me a look.
    I nodded. “Pretty much.”
    â€œLet’s hope your book report goes into greater detail.”
    â€œIt will,” I promised.
    The instant she went back to talking, I looked back at my paper and smiled. My funk was over and my heart was racing as I drew a circle around the first letter in each name like I was playing a word search puzzle.
    It spelled out “Omega.”
    It had to be a message from my mother. She’s the one who made me join the Junior Birders, and she’d know I’d be the only student who could decipher the code. I don’t know how she got it posted next to the door to my English class, but I was certain she was trying to tell me something. I wanted to get a hall pass so I could go back and look for more clues on the flyer, but I figured I’d already caused enough distractions in this class for one day, so I waited until the bell rang.
    The lecture was scheduled for Saturday at noon. I couldn’t wait to tell the others. But then I noticed something else on the bottom. There were pictures of five more birds: an albatross, a loon, an owl, a nighthawk, and an eagle. Using the same coding method, I realized the first letter of each spelled out the word “alone.”
    I guess my mother didn’t want the others to come with me. Maybe it had to do with Natalie. If Mom knew she was undead, she might not trust her to be part of the team.
    That Saturday I took the train to 137th Street and walked the last couple blocks to the CCNY campus. (CCNY is the abbreviation for City College of New York.) Part of me felt like the time travelers in the book I was reading, because one moment I was walking in modern day New York, and then I passed through a giant archway and found myself in a secret world of tree-lined paths and gothic buildings. It was like Hogwarts in Harlem.
    The campus was built at the same time many of the city’s subway tunnels were being dug, and as a result the buildings were constructed out of the leftover rock. That’s right, it’s an entire campus made out of Manhattan schist. The first thought that went through my mind was that Natalie should think about going to college here where she would be surrounded by it. (That is, if Natalie turned out to be a