“I can't do this!” I said loudly, emphatically.
Everyone looked at me, Sharpies paused, mouths open. And I hadn't really been talking about the assignment at all. But I found I couldn't do it either. I wouldn't do it.
“Blue?” Wilson questioned softly.
“I won't do this.”
“Why not?” His voice was still just as soft, just as gentle. I wished he would yell back.
“Because it's wrong . . . and it's . . . stupid!”
“Why?”
“Because it's incredibly personal! That's why!” I threw my hands in the air and shoved the labels onto the floor. “I could lie and write down a bunch of words that mean nothing, words I don't believe, but then what would be the point? So I'm not going to do it.”
Wilson leaned back against the chalk board and stared at me, his hands clasped loosely.
“So what you're telling me is you refuse to label yourself. Right?”
I stared back at him stonily.
“You refuse to label yourself?” he asked again. “Because it that's the case, then you've just passed this little test with flying colors.” A protest started up around me, kids feeling like they had been given the short end of the stick because they had done what they had been asked to do. Wilson just ignored them and continued on. “I want you to throw the labels away. Peel them off, rip them up, scribble them out, throw them in the rubbish bin.”
I felt the heat of confrontation leave my face and my heart resume a more normal pace. Wilson looked away from me, but I knew he was still talking to me, especially to me.
“We've written our histories throughout the year. But now I want you to think about your future. If you predict your future based on your past, what does your future look like? And if you don't like the direction you're headed, which label do you need to shed? Which one of those words that you've written to describe yourself should be abandoned? All of them? What label do you want for yourself? How would you label yourself if the labels weren't based on what you thought of yourself but what you wanted for yourself?” Wilson picked up a stack of folders. One by one, he began passing them out.
“I've combined every page of your history into this folder. Everything you've written from the very first day. This is the last page of your personal history. Now. Write your future. Write what you want. Shed the labels.”
Once upon a time there was a little blackbird who was pushed from the nest, unwanted. Discarded. Then a Hawk found her and swooped her up and carried her away, giving her a home in his nest, teaching her to fly. But one day the Hawk didn't come home, and the bird was alone again, unwanted. She wanted to fly away. But as she rose to the edge of the nest and looked out across the sky, she noticed how small her wings were, how weak. The sky was so big. Somewhere else was so far away. She felt trapped. She could fly away, but where would she go?
She was afraid . . . because she knew she wasn't a hawk. And she wasn't a swan, a beautiful bird. She wasn't an eagle, worthy of awe. She was just a little blackbird.
She cowered in the nest hiding her head beneath her wings, wishing for rescue. But none came. The little blackbird knew she might be weak, and she might be small, but she had no choice. She had to try. She would fly away and never look back. With a deep breath, she spread her wings and pushed herself off into the wide blue sky. For a minute she flew, steady and soaring, but then she looked down. The ground below rose rapidly to meet her as she panicked and cartwheeled toward the earth.
I pictured the bird teetering at the edge of the nest, trying to fly, and then falling and hitting the concrete below. Once I had seen an egg that had fallen from a nest in a huge pine tree near our apartment complex. A baby bird, partially formed, had lain in the cracked shell.
I threw my pencil down and stood up from my desk, breathing hard, feeling like I was going to crack too and severed pieces of Blue were going to rain down upon the room in a gruesome display. I grabbed my bag and ran for the door, needing to get out. I heard Wilson calling after me, telling me to wait. But I ran for the exits and didn't look back. I couldn't fly away. That was the kicker. The little bird in the story was no longer me. My story was now about someone else entirely.
I had been to Planned Parenthood before. I had gotten birth control there, though the latest round had obviously failed me. I googled all the possible reasons birth control could fail. Maybe it was the antibiotics I had been on after Christmas, or the fact that I had inexplicably had an extra pill and no extra days, meaning I'd missed one somewhere. Whatever the reason, the test was still positive, and I still hadn't had a period.
I'd called days before and made an appointment for after school – though running out of class had given me ample time to get there with time left over. The lady at the reception desk was matter-of-fact if not friendly. I filled out a medical form, answered a few questions, and then sat on a metal chair with a black cushion and turned the pages in a magazine filled with “the world's most beautiful women.” I wondered if any of them had ever gone to a Planned Parenthood. Their faces stared up at me from the glossy pages, resplendant in their colorful plummage. I felt small, cold, and ugly, like a bird with wet feathers. Enough with the birds! I pushed the thought away and turned the page.