I was on the school bus when the second bird came out. The bus struggled up Trabuco Hill Road. Gears ground. This was the part every day when we all joked about getting out to push. Another year and I’d have my driver’s license. Then no more bus.

“Were you hiding that under your shirt?” Isabella Steinberg gasped. She sat next to me every morning now. When I got my license, I’d miss that. Everyone knew she wanted to kiss me. She always smelled like Fruit Loops in the morning and always wore the same cream-colored button-up sweater. I liked Fruit Loops. I liked cream-colored button-up sweaters.

The bird in question was a wren. Small, round, very plump—but insubstantial. A tiny puff weighing nothing. There had been a momentary sharp pain in my belly button—and then gone. I lifted my t-shirt. The wren hopped into my hand and rich red blood pooled in the cup of my navel, then trickled over, making a thin red trail into my waistband. The wren skipped to the top button of my jeans and dipped its beak in my blood.

“Ew! Vampire bird!” Isa noted.

“Stop that,” I said to the wren. I inspected my navel. It seemed fine. Aside from the blood, you couldn’t tell a bird had just pushed through. I snatched up the wren and wiped at the blood, and it kind of just smeared around on my pale belly turning it pink.

“You’re such a mess, Grayson Huff,” Isa scolded.

“I have birds coming out of me.”

She was about to say something else, but I shushed her because the wren was talking. Its little black eyes were wet and somber, and when it spoke a deep voice drove slowly but inexorably through my head like the wedge of a gas-powered log-splitter.

“It’s the end,” it said. “This is the end.” It collapsed in my hand and died.

The bus engine revved. The seat vibrated and it was giving me a violent erection. It was very uncomfortable, and I moved my backpack on my lap to hide it. But I was sure everyone knew. Especially Isa.

So that was Monday.

• • • •

I should tell you about the first bird that came out on Sunday. Cardinal. Not a red cardinal—those are the males. They’re very very red. You don’t know what red is until you’ve seen a male cardinal. Everything else that pretends to be red is ashamed to be seen next to them. This was a lady cardinal and very beautiful in her own right with sort of silvery-brown feathers and touches of red.

I think she came out of my mouth. The lady cardinal was on my pillow and sipping my drool when I woke up from a dream about choking on feathers, which moments before been a dream about Isa. The lady cardinal hopped around on my pillowcase, the one I refused to let go of because it had been on my grandmother’s bed and was old and soft and had a design of intertwining vines and flowers. I thought maybe I was still dreaming when the bird started talking. Not with her mouth. Just words in my head, a deep voice plowing into my brain.

“Everyone shall die,” she said. And then to prove the point, she died.

I panicked and felt weird and ashamed for some reason, so I wrapped her in grandma’s pillowcase and gave her a quick and unceremonious burial in the flower bed in front of our apartment.

• • • •

I’m not going to tell you where the third bird came out of. I was having some alone-time before school. Let’s just say it was a very tiny hole and it was a very big blue jay and I was very surprised.

All the blue jay said was doom doom doom over and over again in its squawking voice. You’d think a bird with a whimsical name like blue jay would sound prettier but it’s basically a blue crow. Then it stuck its tiny bird-tongue in my . . . uh . . . fluids . . . and died.

I decided to walk to school because I didn’t want to sit next to Isa because she would know another bird came out of me just by looking at me. I didn’t want to think about the things that came out of me right then.

But I really wanted to be with Isa.

I decided I was going to kiss her today. Maybe I would like it. Maybe I would drop dead like the birds suggested.

• • • •

The whole day I worried she wouldn’t be there. I thought maybe I was making a fool of myself. But when I arrived behind the library, a secluded space with an old bench and a puddle that never completely dries up, she was there.

This was my first kiss. I mean, I’d kissed a girl before, in the deep end of the pool once in third grade, but that was more of a little kid dare, a quick peck on the lips pressed hard together and cold under the water. It didn’t count as my first. After that kiss, I was still a child. But this one—I knew everything would change. It felt big.

I took her by the shoulders, and we didn’t so much pucker up as open our mouths and dive in. Awkward. Wet. She whimpered into my mouth. I felt her tongue poking around. It was a little weird. She tasted like Fruit Loops.

I opened my eyes. Birds fell from the sky. Dozens and dozens. Limp as discarded socks. They thumped softly into the grass, splashed into the everlasting puddle, pattered on the library roof. I kept kissing Isa. Somebody far away shouted what’s happening. Even farther, a scream. Isa opened her eyes and looked around, confused by the dead birds surrounding us, each a memory of innocence. I pulled her back close and she smiled, and I kissed her again and the birds kept falling.