Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend by Alan Cumyn Page A

student-body chair of Vista View. You might not believe this, but our high school—”
    â€œI think as little about high school as I possibly can. And I certainly couldn’t contemplate taking on a student who is going to give birth. Our program is highly—”
    â€œWe have a pterodactyl-student. I’m the chair through the whole thing. And what we’ve found . . . as I’m studying the various reactions to his—”
    â€œMs. Krane—you’re pregnant!”
    â€œI don’t know if you’d call it charisma. I think that’s too lame a word. He . . . gets inside us in amazing ways. So I’m calling it ‘interspecies hyper-communications.’ ”
    â€œDid he get you pregnant?”
    â€œI’m not pregnant. I just—”
    â€œDid the pterodactyl get you pregnant? Is this what you mean by ‘hyper-communications’?”
    Shiels was outside her own house, shaking, when her phone rang. The earth was solid and unchanging before her—there were the elm trees, shedding their leaves; there was the water tower in the distance, as green and bulging as ever; and inside her, glaciers were melting and canyon cliffs falling into surging rivers.
    It was her father.
    Her father was calling her ten seconds before she would have been able to slip through the front door and possibly fool them.
    Three rings. Four. One more, and Shiels’s confident answering service voice would pick up. But she hit the button.
    â€œHello? Hi, Dad. Hi.” She was trying to find the right tone.
    â€œGood morning, Shiels. It’s your father speaking.” His phony formal voice. Shiels scanned the front windows to see if he was standing there, on the phone, watching her arrive. After being out all night. After spending the night with Sheldon, and doing it, and probably getting pregnant.
    Maybe.
    â€œHi, Daddy,” she said. A flex of her little girl muscles.
    He wasn’t standing at any of the front windows.
    â€œYour mother is worried that perhaps you didn’t get your entire eight hours of restful sleep last night.” He was trying to keep a light tone. Shiels could hear her mother breathing over his shoulder.
    â€œIt was a long night,” Shiels said. “Amazing, though. Huge turnout. We were doing the cleanup, of course.” Breathe, breathe. Dark purple sky. Gray grass.
    Yellow shoes.
    â€œSo you’re just getting out now?”
    Yellow shoes. The store. She remembered now. She’d said she’d clean up there. An excuse! A good reason to not go home right away.
    â€œI’m okay. I’ll sleep this afternoon. It was really a great, great event.” She could hear her mother wringing her hands. “Love you, Daddy,” Shiels said.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    â€œWhat has happened to you?” the old man said, at the door of the running-shoe shop.
    â€œNothing. I’m quite fine,” Shiels asserted. “I’m here to fulfill my pledge.” When the old man failed to respond, but just kept standing there, blocking the door, she said, “Cleaning up the storeroom. I said I would do it this morning.”
    â€œWhy is your nose all purple?” he said.
    â€œIt isn’t,” she said, but her hand went up to her nose anyway. It felt perfectly normal. She thought of Sheldon looking at her in bed, that weirdness in his eyes.
    â€œLooks purple to me,” the man said.
    Shiels pushed her way through. There was an employee washroom at the back, an odd, old-fashioned cement chamber with a showerhead, a sink, a toilet, a mirror, a garbage can, and a drain in the middle of the floor.
    She examined herself in the mirror. Her nose looked like it had been coated in purple shoe polish. Sheldon! She bent to wet her face. Where was the soap? She spotted a hulking yellow bar resting on a piece of wood on the floor behind the toilet. It smelled like it might dissolve