Flight Of The Puffin

Vincent wakes up dreading school and spends a few minutes with his mom as she gets ready for work. Vincent goes into the kitchen to have some of his favorite Puffins brand cereal and reads the back of the box, which has information about puffins. He learns that they ride the waves and use their wings to glide through the water. He admires puffins and wants to be able to “ride the waves” of his life with the same ease. After thinking about what to wear, Vincent decides to put his puffin shirt on again, not wanting to let the bullies feel like they won. He walks to school feeling confident and assured.

T can dress however they want now and wear eyeliner, but only because nobody cares enough to say otherwise.

Libby’s mom decides to be extra tough on her and says that she must start preparing all the family meals in the afternoons after school. She gives Libby a long sheet of instructions for the first recipe and tells her that she’ll finally be doing something useful. Libby’s first meal prep is for ratatouille, so she must cut up lots of different foods, some of which she doesn’t even like. Libby drops a tomato by accident and glares at it, imagining the other vegetables glaring at it, too. Rex comes over for dinner that night, and Libby notices how much attention her mother pays him. She always seems proud of Rex but never of Libby.

After dinner, Libby goes to her room and starts creating more art cards to put out into the world. She draws one with heart flowers on it that says, “I’m rooting for you” (70), and another with a flock of birds. She thinks about her family and everything they do that bothers her, like getting angry at strangers or bullying her, and she wants to do whatever she can to be the opposite of that. Libby sneaks out her window to put the cards in various places on the streets nearby, hoping to make people smile. She makes it home just in time to not be discovered by her mother.

At school, Jack enlists Joey’s help to get the petition started. He and Joey approach the teachers and tell them the idea, and Jack has their support. He photocopies several petitions and hands them out to the older students so that everyone can collect signatures together.

T sometimes visits a youth center to eat, but the food there is often expired (or nearly so). When the center gets a donation of several giant tubs of ketchup, they start putting ketchup on everything. T takes one of the empty tubs to use as a water bowl for Peko (T’s dog). They compare themself to the expiration date on food, noting how sometimes things can keep going long after they’re expected to expire.

Vincent tries to make his way through the day without running into Cal, but Cal finds Vincent in the locker room after gym class and tells him to change his shirt. He calls Vincent disrespectful for wearing the same shirt every day. Vincent tries to defend himself but leaves when he sees an opportunity. Later, Cal finds Vincent in the halls again and pulls his shirt off as several other students watch and laugh. Vincent stands with his chest exposed and runs from the school as fast as he can. Outside, a passerby gives him a spare shirt to wear.

Jack spends the day collecting petitions with Joey, who is always excited to help and spend time with him. Everyone they talk to happily signs, and Jack finds out that Joey doesn’t like hockey (even though he’s good at it) and that Joey, despite his young age, knows how to create metaphors (like comparing people to kiwis with prickly outsides). Jack thinks of Joey like a younger brother, though nothing will ever replace the one he lost. When Jack goes home, his mom wants him to put the ladder out on the driveway so that a neighbor can borrow it. He can’t believe that she would ask him to do that since it’s the same ladder that Alex fell from when he died. Jack remembers rushing out to catch Alex before he fell, but he was too late, and Alex died shortly after hitting the ground.

The drop-in center isn’t open on the first Sunday of each month, so T wanders around without a way to get a meal or warm up. They feel like they don’t belong anywhere and think about their family, who refused to accept their identity. T left home in an effort to preserve their sense of self against this prejudice.

Vincent hears his mom talking to a friend on the phone about the incident at school with Cal. She says that she wished he understood self-preservation. Vincent wonders about this and believes that self-preservation is more about being able to be himself than anything else. At breakfast, he reads his cereal box, learning that puffins are at risk because the food that pufflings (baby puffins) eat has migrated due to climate change. In an act of self-preservation, Vincent uses all his savings to buy a new button-up shirt. He leaves home in an undershirt and sweatpants, and a man drives by and throws a quarter at him, telling him not to waste it.

Vincent stops at a store on the way to school and picks out a shirt with perfectly triangular collars. He tries to draw a puffin on it, but it looks more like a UFO. He puts the shirt on anyway and keeps walking. When Vincent is nearly at school, a dog approaches him, growling and barking. Vincent then notices that the dog is with a kid around his age: the same kid who gave him the shirt the other day. Vincent looks at the kid and decides to run away but immediately feels guilty about doing so. Unable to bring himself to go to school, he turns around and heads home.

Libby’s father leaves home for a bit, giving her a chance to sneak out during meal prep time to dispense more cards. She checks on the ones she left the day before and finds a couple gone, a couple ruined, and a couple still there. Outside the art store, the woman who works there stops Libby to ask what she’s doing. Libby explains that she’s trying to send encouragement into the world for people who might feel alone, like those being bullied. The woman mentions that her friend’s child (Vincent) is being bullied at school for wearing the same puffin shirt every day. Libby takes the boy’s address and turns one of her cards into a postcard for him. She chooses the one with the flock of birds on the front, buys a stamp with a puffin on it, and then puts the card in the mailbox.

When Libby gets home, her mother confronts her about sneaking out. She lectures Libby and tells her that wanting to sneak out of the house for “coloring” is abnormal. Libby’s mother decides that she spends too much time daydreaming and takes away her pencil crayons, leaving Libby feeling hopeless and downtrodden.

Vincent’s mom agrees to let him stay home until Thursday but tells him that after that, he must go back to school. She also tells him that he should start dressing more “normally” and takes away his puffin cereal, hoping to rid him of his interest in puffins.

T thinks about their family and how it’s difficult to miss them when they were always in conflict with each other. Family dinners were tense and filled with bad memories.