By Isabelle Correa Joe and I used to eat our lunches of jelly sandwiches and celery sticks by the pond. That was until the bird craze took over and Joe disappeared. It was our spot—a small concrete rectangle lined with white gravel, the same kind you put in the bottom of fish tanks. But there weren’t ever fish in the school’s pond and it wasn’t really a pond. It was a fountain with amputated spouts. Our principle, Mr. Smeed, had deemed the stone lion’s downpour as Intimidating and Excessive so it was removed and the fountain was silenced to a mere bubbling from a black plastic hose. There weren’t any frogs or tadpoles living there or anything else a bird might find to eat, so I don’t know why a white heron started to rest there, its long legs rooted every day in the synthetic rubble, staring into the water, waiting. Mr. Smeed sent a text to all of the students warning us of “the animal on site” telling us that we weren’t to feed the bird, talk about the bird, or look at the bird. The school had a strict policy against pets and wildlife because a few of […]