The Water and the Wild

by Katie Elise Ormsbee

  Lottie’s eyes frowned at Pen, but her lips smiled. That was how things were done at Kemble School. Girls smiled when they were angry, and they pretended to be concerned when they were really being cruel.

  “I’d like to get my bike, please,” Lottie said politely, though she felt more like kicking a puddle of rainwater onto Pen’s perfectly pressed uniform, “and you’re in the way.”

  Pen moved out of the way, but as she did so, she caught Lottie by the shoulder. Leaning forward, she placed her lips to the curl of Lottie’s ear.

  “Hushed-up parents,” she whispered, “make for blushed-up girls.” Pulling away, Pen asked, “Do you know what that means? It means nothing good ever comes from filth.”

  “My parents,” Lottie said, “were not filth.”

  “Everyone knows that your mom wasn’t an islander,” said Pen. “She was from the mainland. Maybe even Canada. Doesn’t get much filthier than that.”

  Anger had been growing in Lottie like rising dough threatening to spill over the sides of its pan, and she knew what would happen if the dough did spill: she would have another one of her bad spells. Lottie called them bad spells, even though she knew that the real term for them was “panic attacks.” It was an ugly adult term that she had heard the doctor use at her last checkup.

  Lottie had gotten the bad spells since she was a little girl. First, they had only come at night, when she woke from bad dreams about her parents. They came oftener and oftener now. She didn’t need to feel frightened or inadequate anymore for them to brew up, just angry with Pen Bloomfield.

  “So,” Pen went on, “where’s your friend, Sir Coughs-a-Lot?”

  “Why?” Lottie’s hands trembled as she unlocked her bike chain. “You don’t care about Eliot.”

  “No,” said Pen, “I don’t. I was just hoping that he’d gone ahead and”—she snapped her fingers—“already.” It’s getting so tedious to have to listen to lectures over his wheezing. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Napoleon Coughaparte who was exiled to Elba, but that’s what I’ve got in my notes.”

  “Take better notes.” Lottie stuffed the bike chain into her backpack.

  “Come on, Oddy Lottie,” Pen snorted. “Can’t take a joke? I thought you’d be relieved to know that there’s someone more pathetic at school than you: that stupid Walsch boy.”

  Lottie turned calmly around. Then she rammed her head into Penelope Bloomfield’s gut.

  Pen’s friends shrieked in horror. Lottie felt dizzy but satisfied. She scrambled to get ahold of her bike just as Pen’s fist flew up and caught the side of Lottie’s mouth, knocking soundly into her teeth. Lottie ducked against the pain and pushed her bike out of the circle of girls.

  “Don’t you ever,” she sputtered, recklessly mounting her bike, “ever breathe another word about Eliot!”

  “Well, I won’t have to, will I?” Pen shrieked after Lottie, staggering back to her feet with the help of her friends. “Not for much longer! Not once he’s dead!”

  Lottie did not wait to hear more. She pedaled away.

  The sky had begun to clear. Lottie could feel patches of sun warming the back of her head in between the tangles of her hair, but even the fresh sunshine could not rid the chill shooting down her legs as she pedaled. She could feel something wet trickling down the side of her mouth. She pressed her hand against her jaw, and when she lowered it to the handlebar, there was a bright splotch of blood staining the lines of her knuckle notches.

  A horn blared and tires squelched. Lottie glanced up and swerved her bike, just missing an oncoming car. Trembling more than ever, she pedaled on and turned into a narrow street crowded with pedestrians. Up ahead was the familiar sight of a pale yellow storefront, over which a blue-lettered banner read: THE BARMY BADGER.

  Mr. Walsch, the owner of the Barmy Badger, was a plump, simple man with a face full of white whiskers who specialized in engraving and calligraphy. Though Mr. Walsch was not clever, he was kind, and Lottie liked his stories about his rough days as a cannery boy in Newfoundland better than any novel on her shelves back home. Today, though, Lottie wanted to know only one thing from Mr. Walsch when she burst into his office.

  “How is he? How’s Eliot?”

  Mr. Walsch gave a squeak of surprise. He sprung up in his chair, upsetting his carefully calligraphing hand. Black ink spattered on his button-up shirt in a dozen tiny pinpricks.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mr. Walsch, scratching his nose with his inky pen. “But that’s all right. I’d just begun. No harm done. No harm at all.”

  He did not look at Lottie, which she knew could only mean one thing: Eliot was worse. Something pricked behind Lottie’s eyes, wet and unwelcome. She gulped down air and swallowed the salty scratch of unshed tears.

  “What can I do?” Lottie said, blinking fiercely.

  “He’s still sleeping,” said Mr. Walsch, pulling out a fresh sheet of white paper, “or else you know what I’d recommend. There’s no one who can cheer up my boy like you, Lottie.”

  Lottie wished that Mr. Walsch would look at her, but she supposed that this was his way of warding off a cry, much like her own extra gulps of air. She left him to his calligraphy and trudged back to the front door.

  “Lottie?”

  Lottie turned around. Eliot stood at the top of the staircase. He looked as pale as a freshly opened package of flour, and by the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, he was out of breath.

  “I thought I heard you,” he said, taking Lottie’s hand in his hot one and towing her up the stairs. “Come on, come see! I’ve been painting.”

  Eliot was always painting. Even when he had started to get the headaches in second grade and the nausea in fifth, he still painted. Every few weeks, Eliot had a new masterpiece ready to frame, but since Mr. Walsch couldn’t afford any frames, Eliot had just hammered the paintings onto every spare inch of wall he could find in the Barmy Badger. Eliot’s first work of art, a big purple blob that he claimed was an elephant, rested atop the kitchen cabinet with utmost reverence. His most recent work, a skyline of spires and steeples and a setting sun, hung proudly in the stairwell; Eliot planned on submitting this one to the Kemble School art exhibit at the end of the year.

  Lottie looked around Eliot’s room for a new canvas, but there was none to be found.

  “Well?” she said eagerly, after her third circle around the room. “Where is it?”

  Eliot grinned. He pointed up. Lottie followed his finger to the bedroom’s slanted ceiling. Above, painted blues and yellows swirled into clouds and blurry stars. The stars circled around Eliot’s skylight, which was known to the two as “ye ol’ porthole.” Eliot’s telescope was propped beneath ye ol’ porthole, ready for stargazing.

  “It’s terrific,” said Lottie. “A masterpiece!”

  Eliot surveyed his ceiling with pride. “I had the inspiration last night, looking out of the porthole. You can’t see the sky on cloudy nights like we’ve been having this month. I thought, what’s the use of ye ol’ porthole if you can’t see the sky? That’s when I decided to bring the sky inside. Now we’ll be able to see the stars no matter how nasty the weather gets.”

  Eliot took a good look at Lottie.

  “Your mouth is bleeding,” he observed. “And you’ve got a toe sticking out of your shoe.”

  Lottie looked at her feet. Eliot was right. Her big toe was sticking straight out of her right loafer. She supposed that ramming into Pen Bloomfield and pedaling to the Barmy Badger like a mad hamster had something to do with her battered condition.

  “Here,” Eliot said. He heeled off his green sneakers and nudged them Lottie’s way. “Take my shoes for the ride home. After today, I don’t think I’ll be needing them anytime soon.”

  Lottie stared at Eliot. “What does that mean?”

  “Dad and I visited the doctor this morning. He said I’ve got to stay home all week.” Eliot shrugged. “He’s just overreacting. It’s only a cough.”

  “You, on the other hand,” Eliot went on, pointing
at Lottie’s chin, “could die from loss of blood if we don’t staunch the wound!”

  Eliot grabbed one of several tissue boxes resting by his bedside and offered it to Lottie. She took a tissue and dabbed the side of her mouth. Then she kicked off her shoes and began to lace on Eliot’s worn but sturdy sneakers.

  “Thanks, Michelangelo,” she said.

  Eliot beamed. “Don’t mention it.”

  When Lottie looked back up, a piece of candy was flying toward her nose. She lunged to claim it, one-handed, and tucked the neon green sweet-so-sour into her coat pocket. That day on the catwalk, when she and Eliot had made their great plan for the future, they had also come to the definite conclusion that sour candies were the solution to any trouble.

  “They give you something else to cry over,” said Eliot. “Your eyes start watering from the sour, not the bad, and you start to forget what was so awful in the first place.”

  Since then, Eliot and Lottie always kept a stash of sweet-so-sours around for swaps.

  “Nice catch,” said Eliot before sprawling on the ground. He patted the dusty floor beside him. “Why exactly are you all bloody?”

  “I got into a fight,” Lottie confessed.

  “With Pen Bloomfield,” guessed Eliot. “About what?”

  Lottie stared down at her new shoes. She wasn’t about to tell Eliot that it had been about him.

  “My parents.”

  Eliot did not say anything, but his chest heaved. Lottie could hear a dull sound of hrm, hrm, hrms. He was covering up his cough.

  “You’re not getting better, Eliot,” she whispered.

  Eliot frowned. “Sorry. Can’t hear you.”

  Lottie sank to the floor next to him, tucking her hands behind her head and gazing up at the muddied sky through ye ol’ porthole.

  “I said, I missed you at school today.”

  “I’m really sorry. I guess I’ve just worn myself out from too much painting, is all. I’ll be better faster than the doctor thinks.” He nudged Lottie’s ankle with his bare foot. “What about your parents?”

  Lottie grimaced. She had hoped that Eliot would drop that subject.

  “The same things,” she said. “Pen called them filth. It doesn’t matter. I know she’s wrong, and one day I’m going to find someone who can prove it.”

  “You mean the letter-writer.”

  Eliot knew all about the letters and the gifts that Lottie kept in her copper box. He did not know about Lottie’s most recent request, however, and Lottie did not mean for him to find out.

  “I don’t see,” said Eliot, “why you don’t just ask the letter-writer about it. He sent you your parents’ picture. He’s got to know something about them.”

  “I don’t want to bother him,” said Lottie. “He has to be a very busy person if it takes him a full year just to send back a birthday gift.”

  Though not the one birthday gift she wanted most.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I already know what my parents were like. Mom was terribly beautiful and smart. Canadian, I think, and she could speak the most butter-melting French you can imagine. She met Dad while he was studying on the mainland to be a world famous chef. They had big dreams. They just died tragically together in a subway accident in New York before they had the chance to live the dreams out.”

  Eliot coughed. “But Lottie, you made that whole story up. Not to mention, it’s different every time.”

  “It could just as well be true as not!” said Lottie. “Pen’s wrong. They weren’t filth.”

  “How can you know that, though?” Eliot said slowly. “What if that isn’t the way it happened?”

  “Are you siding with Pen Bloomfield?”

  Eliot readjusted his glasses. “I’m not taking sides. I’m just saying, what good is all your storytelling if you only see what you want to see?”

  Eliot closed his eyes and drummed his fingers slowly, one by one, on his chest.

  “Maybe you’re afraid,” he said quietly. “Maybe you’re afraid of what the letter-writer might tell you, because it won’t be the story you want to hear.”

  Lottie sat up, crumpling her bloodied tissue. “You’re one to talk about seeing only what you’d like to see.”

  Eliot’s tired face flushed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re broken, Eliot,” Lottie said. “Broken. You’re not getting better. You’re painting when you should be resting, and you’re missing school because you’re getting sicker. You say we’ll still go to Boston, that nothing’s going to stop our plan, but the truth is, you’re—”

  The anger that had been in Eliot’s eyes turned fearful.

  Lottie could not say the word.

  None of the doctors knew how to fix Eliot’s sickness, and not even the letter-writer could give her a cure for a birthday present.

  Lottie only now realized how strongly the room smelled of paint.

  “That fight,” said Eliot. “It wasn’t about your parents, was it?”

  “Don’t even think it was about you!”

  The room went silent.

  “Why don’t you leave?” Eliot suggested in a whisper.

  “Yes,” snapped Lottie. “Why don’t I?”

  She leapt to her feet and ran from the room, leaving the sound of Eliot’s hoarse, barklike coughs behind her. She took the stairs three at a time, heading straight for the door.

  “Lottie!”

  Lottie stopped on the bottom landing and brushed away an angry tear. Mr. Walsch stood in the doorway of his office.

  “How is my boy, do you think?” Mr. Walsch asked.

  “Well,” Lottie whispered, “he’s still painting. I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?”

  Mr. Walsch smiled sadly and nodded. “You’ve been a true friend to him, dear. That’s why I feel you ought to know.”

  Lottie clung to the banister. “Know what?”

  “Eliot had his appointment with the doctor this morning,” said Mr. Walsch. “The test results weren’t good. The doctor said that there are two, maybe three weeks.”

  Two, maybe three weeks of what? Lottie thought. She didn’t understand what Mr. Walsch was trying to say, or why he was looking at her in that strange way.

  “I should go,” she said, confused. She opened the door, and a harsh gust of wind blew in the first chill of autumn. “Take care, Mr. Walsch.”

  She heard a timid “goodbye” as she slammed the door shut, and the warm glow of the Barmy Badger disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In Which Oddities Begin to Occur

  LOTTIE PEDALED QUICKLY down the wet streets. She took the route from the Barmy Badger to Thirsby Square so often that she could have biked it blind, and in the current weather she might as well have been. The rain had picked up again and now drove so savagely into the pavement that the raindrops seemed to be bouncing straight back up into the sky. Lottie didn’t realize immediately that she was crying. When had she started crying?

  Sickly yellow streetlamps had begun to zap on, and with each new flicker of light came a new bite of remorse in Lottie’s gut. She had not meant to lose her temper with Eliot, and now—two, maybe three weeks. Tomorrow, Lottie decided, she would bike early to Eliot’s and apologize. That would fix their friendship, but it would not fix Eliot. Only the letter-writer, if anyone, could do that, and so far the letter-writer did not seem to care.

  Lottie sped past a stalled taxicab and cut into Skelderidge Park, where the trees would soften the rainfall. Her hands had gone raisiny, and Lottie braked to let out a shivery sneeze. She wiped her wet sleeve across her wetter nose and looked around. The park was empty because of the dark and the rain, but Lottie thought for a moment that she had heard voices. They were muffled, like voices coming from the earpiece of a telephone, but they were close.

  “Anyone there?” was what Lottie was going to call, but it turned into another sneeze.

  Then she heard a sound—not voices, but a rough, inhuman noise. It sounded at first, Lottie thought,
like a cracking egg. Then a cracking whip. Then a cracking tree, which was, in fact, what it turned out to be. The tall, gnarled tree under which Lottie had stopped her bike gave a great shudder and then, with no consideration as to where Lottie happened to be standing, it began to heave toward her.

  Lottie, like any red-blooded girl, had been taught to get out of the way of things like speeding convertibles and masked men with guns, but she had never expected to have a run-in with a homicidal tree. More than that, and what confused Lottie most, in the split second she had to realize that she was about to get smashed to smithereens, was that she had not seen any lightning. If she was going to be killed by a falling tree, Lottie thought in that last moment of cognizance, she wished it would have at least had the decency to get struck by lightning first. That would have been a much more dramatic way to go.

  Lottie’s hands were iced to the handlebars in panic. She closed her eyes, and a rushing sound filled her ears. She could feel the wet hair that had been plastered around her face blow back in a windy shock. Lottie thought of her green apple tree, of Eliot, and of her parents’ photographed, freckled faces. A hand clamped around her right arm. Then she heard one last thundering crack.

  A familiar smell tickled up Lottie’s nose. It smelled of home. She opened her eyes. She was not home. She was slumped against the cold iron of a park bench. It was still raining. Across from her lay the hulking silhouette of a fallen tree and, from where she sat, Lottie saw a glint of metal peeking out from under one of the tree branches. It took her a long, stupid minute to realize that the metal was all that remained of her bicycle; the rest of it had gotten a thorough pancaking.

  But I’m not pancaked! Lottie thought, shaking her legs out. They seemed fine. The only pain she felt came from her left arm. Lottie pulled back the sleeve of her periwinkle coat to see just how bad a bruise she had gotten.