A Little Bird
It was nearly 9pm when Zari decided to rearrange her bedroom. She liked to organise her space – scrolling and bookmarking on Pinterest for inspo, hoovering, dusting, endlessly reshuffling and aligning. It helped to quiet her mind and make her thoughts feel clear.
The bed was in the corner of the room where she had recently pushed it. Her pillows -were clean, white, and perfectly fluffed - arranged in a half-moon shape like a soft, white-sand cove. The fairy lights hung around the bed; the plants draped around the windows. Her posters and books were all perfectly placed, and not a speck of dust or a hair could be seen anywhere. Still, something felt wrong.
She heard a light tapping at the window, and, knowing exactly who it was, she pulled back the curtains and opened it.
Out of the warm starry night, a bright green owl flew over the luminescent moon for a moment, and came in.
“Hello Duo,” Zari greeted her old friend.
Who came first for Zari – Lily or Duo? She didn’t know, and there was no outsider who could verify. To her knowledge no one else could see Duo, and no one knew he existed. She may have mentioned him to her parents when she was very young – there was a memory that felt almost imaginary of this conversation and a response that meant it hadn’t gone down well.
She didn’t know who or what Duo was, in fact, she knew almost nothing about him. With most things in Zari’s life, she liked to be the best, to know everything, and she was an open book about nearly everything in return. However, in some cases, her experience transcended words. It was only in her religion and with Duo that Zari practised privacy and accepted a level of uncertainty, and though the two were entirely separate, like all the important people in her life, Duo did help to keep Zari on the right path.
The difference between Duo and the other important people who influenced Zari’s life, was that Duo was always pushing for something.
“I see you’re reorganising your bedroom,” he chirped.
“What do you think about the bed being over there?” Zari tried to ignore him.
“You know you only do this when you’re upset about something - what’s happened?”
“Nothing happened!” Zari said firmly.
“That’s not what a little bird told me.”
Zari started dragging the bed towards the window. She was tall and slim and only 15 years old, but with a blue belt in karate and weekly gym classes since she was a child, she was much stronger than she looked. Zari liked sports. She liked the feeling of control that being physically strong gave her; to feel her willpower move through her body and out to impact the object world around her.
“I’m still here you know,” said Duo. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s wrong.”
“Grrrr,” Zari pushed the bed into its new place, swung round and threw herself dramatically backwards onto the mattress. “I just feel like no one sees me!”
“What do you mean?” Duo flapped over and landed next to her on the bed.
Zari stared at the ceiling as she spoke, “I feel like I work so hard at school, and after school clubs, and with friends, and teachers - trying to do my best and make people happy and make people like me, and it’s exhausting. Lily doesn’t really care about any of it, and she doesn’t try at all, and she still does really well at everything and everyone loves her. Sometimes it makes me feel like no one sees me, you know?”
“Is this really about Lily? You love Lily and you love working hard at school. This doesn’t seem like you to be upset about this.” Duo sounded disapproving.
Zari’s eyes watered.
“It’s just, today when Miguel smiled at us, I thought, he’s not looking at me. People look at us and they never see me.”
Duo laughed, sounding almost like a hoot.
“So that’s what this is about!” He grinned. “How do you know people aren’t looking at you?”
“I guess I don’t,” Zari thought back to the incident with the chocolate box earlier that day. Had she jumped to conclusions when Miguel had walked past? What reason did she have to think Miguel had sent the chocolates, other than him being present and her own unreliable gut feeling? “If it wasn’t Miguel sending stuff to Lily, who was it?”
“You’re smart enough to get this on your own, Zari. There are hundreds of students at that school and it could’ve been any one of them.”
“Poor Lily,” Zari thought about her shy best friend in a sea of anonymous admirers. “I wonder who it could be?”
“That’s more like it! Maybe we can work with Lily tomorrow and try to find out?”
The two of them began hatching a plan to discover Lily’s admirer, they needed to speak to Lily as soon as possible. The night flooded into the little room, now perfectly still. Zari’s body started to feel calm, drifting slowly off to sleep, and Duo left through the window. That little owl always knew how to say the right thing.
