“It’s Ab—”
Abby started to say her name was Abby, but something stopped her. Maybe it was the tingling near the spot on her hand where the fox had bitten her.
“It’s Abigail,” she finished.
“It is?” Anders looked confused. “I thought you said—”
Abby nodded. “It’s Abigail. My mom and dad call me Abby sometimes. Abby’s like my childhood nickname.”
Matt nodded. “My folks used to call me Mattie. Got to a point where it drove me nuts.”
The hives didn’t look like what Abby had expected. She’d imagined lumpy domes, like oversize wasps’ nests, but instead Matt’s beehives were more like file boxes piled one on top of another. As they got closer, Abby could hear the buzzing from inside the hives. She glanced anxiously at Matt. “Are you going to open the hives up?”
Matt laughed. “Not without a smoker and protective gear. Nah, I just wanted to hear ’em. This is a strange time of year for bees. Most of the flowers have stopped blooming, and their work’s about done. But they’re not quite down for winter. I like to check in with them every few days, just to make sure everything’s cool.”
The three of them stood at a distance from the hives and listened. “Bees have an amazing way of communicating with each other,” Matt told Abby. “They dance. They dance to tell each other where the food is, and whether or not it’s good food, how much there is. Who knows what they’re in there telling each other right now?”
“You’re not scared of them?” Abby asked, unable to believe that what Anders said was true, that bees didn’t make Matt nervous at all.
Matt shook his head. “Bees are predictable. Every once in a while there’s a swarm, but most of the time bees do what they’re supposed to do, unlike, say, people or horses. You don’t know what’s going to spook a horse”—and here he looked at Anders—“or when it’s going to happen.”
Anders turned away, and Abby saw him roll his eyes. “Some horses spook,” he told his dad when he’d turned around again. “Nervous horses spook. Grandma’s horses do not spook.”
“Snake shows up in the grass, a horse is going to spook,” Matt argued. “I don’t care how steady he is the rest of the time.”
Matt had seemed cheerful and happy only a moment before, but now his expression darkened. Abby looked at Anders, who had his eyes closed, as though he were trying to steady himself.
Abby wished she could think of something to say that would get them back to the dancing bees. She wished standing so close to Matt didn’t make her feel uneasy. Most of the adults Abby knew stayed the same all the time. Her mother was always worried, even when she tried to cover it up by acting extra cheerful, and her dad was always bossy in his joke-around way. But Matt seemed to change all the time. One second he was happy-go-lucky, and the next he looked like he might explode.
I think I need to go home, Abby practiced saying in her head. Or, Sorry, I just remembered I had homework to do! Homework. That was it.
“I bet you’re scared of horses too.”
Matt stood in front of Abby. “I mean, you seem like a reasonable person to me. And reasonable people stay away from horses, am I right?”
There was an edge to Matt’s voice. He was smiling, but his smile wasn’t friendly. And although he was looking straight at her, he didn’t seem to see her.
“They’re pretty big, it’s true.” Abby took a few steps back. “But I like them. In theory, I like them a lot.”
“But they scare you, don’t they?” Matt pressed. He sounded like a lawyer on a TV show.
“Dad.” Anders stepped between Matt and Abby. “Dad.”
Matt shook his head, as though he were waking up from a nap. “What?”
“Dad,” Anders repeated. “Leave Abby alone.”
Matt’s eyes and mouth suddenly sagged. “Oh, yeah. Man. Abigail, I’m sorry.”
Abby stood very still. She thought she might cry, but she held it in. She shoved her hands into her pockets so no one would see them shake.
“We better go back now,” Anders said. “Abby probably has to go home.”
They started walking, Matt lagging a little behind, Anders urging him to keep up. Abby looked at the trees and bushes on either side of the path, looked up at the darkening sky. She wished Matt would move faster. She didn’t want to have to walk back down through the woods to the creek in the dark.
She thought about George Shannon lost on the prairie and wondered what it was like for him at night, with the million stars above and coyotes howling in the distance. Scary, probably. And lonely. Did he know how to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together? Did he lean back against a rock and sing, trying to make it sound like there were a bunch of people there, not just one seventeen-year-old boy?
Abby slowed her pace to let Matt catch up. Reminded herself that George Shannon had found his way back. He didn’t stay lost forever.
the fox’s hackles unexpectedly shot up, and she felt them even before she saw them—the girls. The scrawny raccoon girls were back. She watched them from her field as they slunk around Abby’s house, peering in the first-floor windows.
“I bet she’s inside, but she’s pretending like she’s not home,” she heard one of the girls say from the front porch. “She was on the bus.”
“I still don’t get what we’re supposed to say,” the other girl complained. “I bet Abby’s made up a bunch of lies about us to tell her mom. They probably won’t even invite us in.”
“First we’ll say we’re coming by to tell them that we saw a fox in the neighborhood and my mom called animal control, but they haven’t found it yet. And then we’ll figure out some way to make Abby’s mom ask us in.”
The girls disappeared into the backyard, and the fox could hear their footsteps crunching through the woods. She knew that Abby wasn’t inside the house. She’d come to the field after school and sat in her chair for a while, drawing pictures in a book. And then she’d set off for the creek. The fox had followed her for a while, but then she’d smelled purple berries—a fat, juicy smell that pulled her back into the field.
Really, being a vegetarian wasn’t so bad, not when the berries were still sweet.
The fox nipped at a branch and caught a berry between her teeth. Animal control, eh? Did anyone think animal control had a chance against her? All she had to do was make a set of tracks going to the left, and another going off to the right, and the poor fools would be so confused, they wouldn’t know which direction to head in. They’d walk around in circles for days, months, years.
No, animal control wasn’t a problem, only a nuisance. But these girls. These raccoons in training. Or perhaps weasels? Because raccoons were clowns, but weasels were mean. Low-down. The fox never trafficked with them if she could help it.
The weasel girls were after Abby.
The fox began pacing in circles. Maybe there was something she could do. Something more than just watch.
The fox had always watched. She was known for standing to the side and letting the action unfold. Observing, always observing. She was not unaffected by what she saw (the children standing by the bedside, their mother covered with pox; the great ship sinking into the frigid waters; the line of men waiting for a cup of soup and a chunk of bread), but she didn’t step forth. Didn’t try to make things different from what they were.
Maybe it was time.
Maybe then the nightmares would stop.
the first thing Abby thought about when she woke up on Saturday was the migrating pronghorn, also known as the pronghorn antelope, even though it wasn’t an antelope at all, but a species of artiodactyl mammal, which is to say, an even-toed ungulate. Pronghorns, Abby now knew, had wandered the face of the earth for more than two million years, if the fossil record was correct. And why wouldn’t it be?
Abby yawned and stretched. She couldn’t believe she’d woken up thinking about this stuff. She stumbled out of bed and pulled on the jeans she’d worn yesterday, grabbed a shirt from her dresser. Looking
at herself in the mirror, she blinked a few times. Who was this person with a million animal facts clogging up her brain? And what was she doing in Abby’s body?
“I’m going to take a walk,” she told her mother at the breakfast table, slurping the last bit of milk from her bowl. “Get some exercise.”
Her mother’s expression was a complicated mix of worry and relief. “Exercise! Great! Now, where are you going to walk, exactly?”
Abby shrugged. “Just around the neighborhood. Nowhere special.”
On her way out, she grabbed her jacket from the hall closet, in case it was chilly. She didn’t really know where she was going. The Bentons’? The field across the street? She really just wanted to—well, what? Stop thinking for a while, maybe. Her head had become a zoo of strange animal facts, and last night she’d actually dreamed she was rowing a canoe down a river and looking for moose. She was pretty sure that wasn’t a normal dream for an eleven-year-old girl to have.
The sky was so blue, Abby thought about going back inside for her camera so she could take a picture of it. Only she thought maybe if you took a picture of an all-blue sky, it wouldn’t capture the beauty, just the blueness, and it might as well be a picture of a blue wall. It might depress you later, to look at your blue sky picture, because what you would be remembering was something grand, and what you would actually see in the picture was not grand at all, just flat and lifeless.
So she continued on across the street to the empty lot that wasn’t empty at all, of course, enjoying the rambling nature of her thoughts. She liked the sensation of her mind running free in one direction, then another. Her beach chair was still parked behind the large oak, but it was damp from the morning air, so Abby walked through the weeds, thinking about how she should draw a map of the lot, show where all the trees were located, and the wisteria vines and the hydrangeas that sat on the edges of where the house used to be. They seemed to Abby to be waiting patiently, as though they expected the house to come back any minute.
Maybe she could do more than a map. Maybe she could actually build a model of the lot and make a house—out of a cardboard box or balsa wood, something light and easy to glue—to put on the lot, the house she’d build if the lot was hers. She could take pictures and do sketches in her drawing notebook and make lists of all the plants and the trees and the birds that had settled there after the house had been torn down. Maybe she would see the fox again and take its picture too. And then she’d figure out what she needed to build models of the trees and the flowers, the birds and the fox. Sculpey clay, pipe cleaners, toothpicks, paper clips—what else? What could she use for flowers? Tissue paper?
Clapping her hands as she ran, she headed back to her house to get her drawing supplies and her camera. Her mind bloomed with a dozen more ideas—maybe she could make furniture for the house, and maybe she could—
Abby froze in the middle of the street.
Kristen and Georgia were sitting on her front steps.
Abby’s heart thudded in her chest and a strange roaring filled her ears. Her mind, which had been running along at fifty miles an hour just a second before, came to a complete halt. She couldn’t think of what to do, so she just stood there, half wishing a car would come whizzing down the road and hit her—just barely—so she could be whisked off in an ambulance to a faraway hospital.
“Hey, Abby, we were hoping you’d be back soon!” Kristen called out. “Your mom said we could wait for as long as we wanted.”
Abby opened her mouth. Nothing came out. This must be a bad dream, she told herself, the kind where you try to scream, but you don’t make a sound.
Abby’s mother peeked out the front door. “Oh, good! You’re back,” she called cheerfully. “Look who’s here!”
Abby took a deep breath and ordered herself to say something. “I see.”
Abby’s mother frowned. Clearly, Abby was not excited enough. “I think it’s awfully nice of Kristen and Georgia to come by. It’s such a beautiful morning.”
Which has now been totally ruined, Abby thought as she forced herself to cross the street and straggle up the sidewalk toward her front steps. “What do you want?” she asked, looking at Kristen.
Kristen smiled brightly. “Just to talk, Abby. You haven’t been hanging around much lately. To be honest, we’ve been sort of concerned.”
“Kristen says you’ve stopped eating lunch with them,” Abby’s mom reported, coming out onto the porch. “She’s worried about you. So is Georgia.”
“No, they aren’t,” Abby said. She stood in front of them, wondering if she could get up the steps without one of them grabbing her ankle and pulling her down. “They really aren’t.”
Kristen’s mouth dropped open. “God, Abby, how can you say that? You’re one of my best friends.”
“Mine too,” Georgia offered unconvincingly. “I’ve been totally worried about you.”
Abby sat down on the bottom step. She thought she might be having an out-of-body experience, and sitting down was probably the best thing to do.
“We just think maybe something’s wrong,” Kristen explained, turning to look up at Abby’s mom. “Sometimes that happens when kids start middle school. They change. Like, Abby has completely stopped hanging out with us, and she’s friends with some really weird kids. And I’m sorry, Abby”—and now she turned to face her—“but Anoop Chatterjee? Jafar Ross? Please.”
Georgia let out a dramatic sigh. “Let’s go, Kristen. Abby’s just not interested in being friends with us anymore.”
“Wait!” Her mother held up her hand, as though ordering the girls to stop. “Abby, these are your best friends, and they care about you. The three of you should go upstairs and talk. I just pulled a tray of carrot muffins out of the oven. Why don’t I bring some up?”
“C’mon, let’s talk, Abby,” Kristen echoed Abby’s mother. “We want to help you.”
Abby followed Kristen and Georgia upstairs to her room, like it was their house and not hers. Like she was the intruder. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that she wasn’t against anyone, not even Kristen and Georgia.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Kristen said as she looked around at the mess Abby had left that morning. “Clean it much?”
Abby took a seat on her unmade bed. She made her voice sound friendly. Cheerful. “Why are you here?”
“We’re concerned about you, didn’t you hear?” Georgia asked in a nasal voice, Georgia being prone to allergies in the fall. Once she’d sneezed during a gymnastics meet and fell off the balance beam. Remembering this now, Abby almost laughed, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to be like them, laughing at things people couldn’t help, like sneezing at the wrong time or being a terrible runner.
So instead of laughing, she looked at Georgia and said, “You should be friends with people who actually like you instead of just use you.” She pulled her stuffed leopard, Perd, out from under her pillow and stroked him on his spotted head. “You’d probably be a lot happier.”
Georgia shook her head, either in disgust or sheer disbelief. “When did you get so weird? Are you on drugs?”
“Enough.” Kristen pulled out Abby’s desk chair, turned it so it was facing the center of the room, took a seat. “You’re both so totally immature sometimes. Of course Abby isn’t taking drugs. She’s just going through a difficult stage.” She smiled a snaky, grown-up smile. “She’ll grow out of it.”
Then she leaned toward Abby, face serious, like a concerned camp counselor. “So what’s up, Abby? We’re all really worried about you. On top of everything, you look like you’re getting fatter. You’re going to cross the line into Christine Boggs territory if you’re not careful.”
Christine Boggs was famously fat. While Abby was officially chubby, even “had issues with her weight,” as her mother would put it when her concern about Abby’s weight was at its peak, Christine was obese, and she walked through school with her head down. Abby didn’t think she’d ever seen Christine look at another human bein
g.
Little waves of shame began to slap at her ankles. She clutched Perd and looked at her thighs. They reminded her of bread dough. She glanced at her stomach, where a roll of fat peeked over the waistband of her jeans.
She tried to think about something else. She tried to think about the house she was going to build, and how she could make the birds look like they were really flying. With wires, maybe? Or else the birds could sit in the hydrangea bushes, their wings spread, like they’d just landed.
Abby glanced out the window, wondering if the fox was across the street. It could be looking up at her right this very second. Suddenly she knew that the fox was definitely across the street and definitely trying to tell her something. Don’t listen to them, Abby, the fox was calling. Don’t listen!
I won’t! Abby called back in her mind.
She turned to Kristen. “I’m on a diet,” she lied, clutching Perd so Kristen couldn’t see her hands trembling. “I’ve already lost two pounds.”
Kristen smiled a great big fake smile. “That’s great! You should come walk with us at lunch-time. We’ve started doing laps around the blacktop.”
“That’s a great idea,” Abby said, smiling her own fake smile. “Maybe I will.”
Her mother tapped on the door. “I’ve got muffins!” she exclaimed, carrying a tray into the room. “Oh, Abby, your desk is such a mess! Where am I going to put this?”
Kristen cleared off the desktop and took the tray from Abby’s mother. “These look delicious, Mrs. Walker,” she said. “You’re the best cook!”
“Why, thank you, Kristen,” Abby’s mother said, clearly pleased. “You know, I wish you’d come over more often. I was so happy when you and Abby started spending time together last spring.”
“Me too,” Kristen said. “In fact, I’m going to come pick up Abby on Monday so we can walk to the bus stop together. We haven’t spent enough time together lately.”
The Second Life of Abigail Walker Page 7