The toucan is five times the size it’s supposed to be. Jack got the measurements wrong (forty centimeters is not forty inches) and his mom stayed up all night gluing paper mache scraps to a creature too big to hold its own weight. He blames the imperial system. He blames the British. He blames his mom. He almost blames Penny, the girl standing right beside him arranging glue sticks in color-coded lines. The teacher says nothing as she eyes Jack holding up the toucan. He doesn’t dare blame her (not in front of her face, anyway). She lets him show off how big it is to the boys in class, their very own Rafiki on Pride Rock, before she plucks the toucan out of his hands, sticks a hook in its head, and hangs it from the ceiling with a rope.
Jack whirls around to face Penny and tells her, that’s how Ian Curtis died. He says that’s how all rock stars die. Penny thinks of all the times she’d danced with her own mom to the beat of She’s Lost Control. Her mom’s wild hair and liquid molten eyes, swaying in the dim light of dusk, tracing shadows across glazed windows. Students, stay away from the windows. There appears to be a severe thunderstorm heading in our direction. I repeat, stay away from the windows. The loudspeaker goes off and rain shoots through breaks in the windowpanes.
Penny shows Jack her scarlet macaw. She’s gluing on the last of it, when he whispers, you can get high off the smell, so she spends the rest of class trying and the teacher takes the macaw without its blue feathers. We are all born faulty. Penny sniffs. Jack whirls. A plumber enters to inspect the leaks. The building shouldn’t be falling apart. Not now! Not yet! The teacher is exhausted before the show has begun. The boys in class are jumping off walls of cracked plaster, their bodies on the verge of testosterone-addled anarchy. The set is almost complete.
Penny walks into the middle of the rainforest. She tilts her head just enough to see through the paper-green palms, past the toucan’s shiny beak and a knot of branches. She feels like she can touch the bird, relieve it of its misery. She reaches toward the sky and tugs. It falls apart and covers her in glitter. She hums along to Ian Curtis’s voice in her head, waiting for more. She waits her whole life, but the real deal is unlike anything she could have ever imagined under that first canopy, and she’s lost it, she’s lost control.
