This is actually the opening for the rewrite I’m working on, coming back to this book after a long time of working on other projects! If you wanna read the original, check it out right over here! It’s amazing how you can come back to old creative projects and say, “It was good at the time, but I can do so much better now.”
The Peregrine
There’s a photograph of the Peregrine that I guarantee you’ve seen. She’s in midair, partway through transforming back from some bird, the imprints of feathers still on her skin and her face lit up with that incandescent grin.
Jean Song won a Pulitzer for that photo, I think. It’s been in paper and books and on walls, copied, altered and parodied for years.
An hour before that photo was taken, its subject was standing in my kitchen, staring devastated at her favourite mug broken on the floor.
“Athenaaaaa,” she whined. “I killed Charles.”
I came out of my studio, where I’d been working. “Well, don’t fall to your knees in mourning; you’ll hurt yourself.” I sighed. “I’ll get a broom.”
“But Charles!” She looked at me pleadingly as though I could fix it with my mind, while I looked at the monkey-head mug shattered on the tile. One of its glassy eyes seemed to be looking back at me.
“I don’t think he can be saved, Jen.” I patted her on the arm. “He lived a long and fulfilling life.”
She was hamming it up, but I was almost sad to see Charles go, too. We’d found the horrendous thing at a secondhand store in Lynstone when we were and he’d held pride of place at my house, making visitors uncomfortable for a decade. Jenna’s parents wouldn’t let her keep it at her place; it upset the younger kids.
I thrust the broom and dustpan at her. “You broke him, you clean him up.”
She began gathering up the large pieces and putting them in one of my good kitchen towels.
“Just throw them out; what are you doing?”
“We have to have a funeral.” She said it like it was the obvious answer and really, knowing her, I should have expected it.
So, when the police scanner crackled something about a standoff with police, I was watching a solemn Jenna place Yankee candles on either side of a shoebox containing what was formerly Charles the monkey-headed mug.
“--611 at Canton and Iris, requesting backup--”
“I gotta go,” she sighed. “Where are my goggles?”
I pointed at the couch and while she hopped into her boots, I bit my lip with indecision. She looked so genuinely mournful, and she really did treasure the thing. I finally said reluctantly, “You know, we could probably find someone who can fix him. You know that Chinese repair thing, with the gold?”
She stopped hopping and stood one one foot to stare at me in wild hope. “You think so? Charles could live again?”
“Maybe. But aren’t you supposed to be at a shootout or something?” I reminded her sternly.
She grinned and pushed my window open.
“For Charles!” she cried before her mouth turned into a beak. Shec hopped up on the sill and fixed me with one yellow eye before spreading her winds and disappearing into the grey of the sky. You wouldn’t have thought a peregrine falcon’s eyes could twinkle, but Jennav managed it. When she dove into the fray with that grin on her face and Jean Song snapped her famous photo, the Peregrine’s grin was as much for Charles as for the excitement of the fight itself.
To the world, Jenna Neeraj is the Peregrine. To me, the Peregrine was just Jenna. She and the others were giants, larger than life, when they put on their masks, but I was there for all of it and I knew them as Jenna, Elias, Ollie, Richard, Gigi. You want a history of the heroes’ public acts and great achievements go read Simone Godot--I didn’t keep track of all that, even at the time. But when they came home and laughed and cried and argued; them I knew. Especially her.
Jenna always cared so hard about people it hurt to watch. Fair enough, I suppose, considering her mother is Eva Neeraj (yes, that Eva Neeraj). I first met Jenna because I was crying in a ditch and she came to make me feel better. We were four.