I'm molting

The weird thing about him wasn't the yellow plastic duck that he carried around in the mesh pocket of his backpack all day long; yes, sure, that was a little strange for a sixteen-year-old high school kid, of course -- we all accepted each others' quirks and eccentricities, but inside somehow we all knew they were manufactured, that we simply had these quirks and eccentricities because we knew that we were supposed to, and by being so strange we were simply attempting to be cool, because, after all, that's what was cool then: strangeness.

No, the weird thing about Bryan was the way he talked about the duck -- he didn't talk about it at all. Not really. What was so strange was that he pretended that he was the duck; that the duck was a barnacle, a puppetmaster, a parasite that controlled the entity it attached himself to. Bryan would say things like, "God, these humans are such ungainly instruments. I'd love a good feather-ruffling right now, but you think this" -- he'd flop around one of his arms -- "does me any good? You think I'm able to preen with this?"

In the middle of a political science class (it was a very strange high school, yes), Bryan once stood up and ran quickly down the aisle between our desks, flapping his arms and quacking, like the ducks you see on nature videos that try running on water.

Bryan actually turned out to be our valedictorian, though, and you can guess how many ways the faculty tried to talk Bryan's parents out of the traditional valedictory address. When he stood behind the podium, Bryan uttered a single 'quack,' then shrugged out of his gown and ran naked from the stage, arms flapping as we were all accustomed to. The local paper ran a photo the next day -- blurred, of course -- beneath the headline: West Valley High School Valedictorian Molts Amidst Controversy.

A friend of mine bumped into Bryan a few days after graduation. They were both sitting in the lobby of a temporary employment office. Bryan was wearing short sleeves and a tie, and the duck was nowhere to be seen. My friend asked him what happened to the duck, and Bryan shrugged. "God, that was fun," he said. "While it lasted."