Wish Girl

by Nikki Loftin

  PRAISE FOR Nikki Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest:

  “Unusual, finely crafted story of loss, betrayal, and healing.”

  Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Magical realism meets coming of age in this sensitive and haunting novel. . . . Read this aloud and have both boys and girls alike utterly enraptured.”

  BCCB, starred review

  “Smart and beautiful by turns . . . Once you’ve read it, you’ll have a hard time getting it out of your head.”

  —Elizabeth Bird, School Library Journal Blog

  “It is Loftin’s skill in depicting both the human and the arboreal characters that will engage and inspire readers. The lyrical, descriptive prose and the hopeful ending will linger long after the final chapter.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Riveting . . . This is a book you’ll long remember.”

  —Lynda Mullaly Hunt, author of One for the Murphys

  “An extraordinary read—I had to tear myself away from it.”

  —Katherine Catmull, author of Summer and Bird

  “Perfectly captures the challenges of growing up and dealing with loss. Get ready to have your heart touched.”

  —Shannon Messenger, author of Keeper of the Lost Cities

  “Tugs and tears at the reader’s heart . . . lovely and magical.”

  —Bethany Hegedus, author of Truth with a Capital T and Between Us Baxters

  “Loftin’s eye for strange beauty in unexpected places often takes the reader’s breath away.”

  —Claire Legrand, author of The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

  “Will haunt your soul—and lift your heart.”

  —Kimberley Griffiths Little, author of The Healing Spell and When the Butterflies Came

  “A haunting, beautifully told story!”

  —Bobbie Pyron, author of The Dogs of Winter and A Dog’s Way Home

  “The kind of book I wanted to read slowly.”

  —Shelley Moore Thomas, author of The Seven Tales of Trinket

  “This is a work of tremendous heart.”

  —Anne Ursu, author of Breadcrumbs

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2015 Nikki Loftin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Loftin, Nikki.

  Wish girl / by Nikki Loftin.

  260 pages

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Peter has never felt at home with his noisy family, but begins to find the strength to live and to be himself when he discovers a special valley in the Texas Hill Country and meets Annie, a girl dying of cancer who knows and accepts him from the start.

  ISBN 978-1-101-61297-2

  [1. Individuality--Fiction. 2. Best friends--Fiction. 3. Friendship--Fiction. 4. Family problems--Fiction. 5. Cancer--Fiction. 6. Family life--Texas--Fiction. 7. Texas--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L8269Wis 2015

  [Fic]--dc23

  2014031004

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Mom

  Contents

  Praise for Nikki Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  If we had a keen vision and feeling

  of all ordinary human life,

  it would be like hearing the grass grow

  and the squirrel’s heart beat,

  and we should die of that roar

  which lies on the other side of silence.

  ~George Eliot

  Chapter 1

  The summer before I turned thirteen, I held so still it almost killed me.

  I’d always been quiet. I’d even practiced it: holding my breath, holding even my thoughts still. It was the one thing I could do better than anyone else, but I guess it made me seem weird. I got tired of my family saying, “What’s wrong with Peter?”

  There was a lot wrong with me. But at that moment the most serious thing was the rattlesnake on my feet.

  I’d just run away from home for the first time. Possibly the last time, too, I thought, staring down at the ground, blinking slowly, as if I could close my eyes and make the snake vanish.

  I stood as still as I could on the edge of a limestone cliff, the toes of my tennis shoes hanging off the hillside, my heartbeat thudding hard and fast at the base of my throat, my neck stiff, and my eyes on my shoes. On the diamondback rattler, gleaming brown and black and silver-gray, curled around both my feet, looped across the tops of my laces.

  Its head was unmistakably wedge-shaped, and its tail was light brown, decorated with eight rattles. I’d had time to count them; I’d been standing there for at least fifteen minutes, trying not to move a single muscle.

  My mouth had gone bone dry. I swallowed hard, and the snake’s head, which had rested on the top of my left sneaker near my bare ankle, bobbed up, black tongue tasting the air.

  I held my breath.

  For a moment, I thought of kicking the snake off my feet, running for it. Then I realized it was completely wrapped around my ankles. If I tried to kick it, it would bite me for sure. So far, it was just . . . smelling me, it seemed like. I remembered that from reading about snakes when I was little. They smelled with their tongues.

  I hoped it liked what it smelled, because I remembered something else. Rattlesnakes could strike at twice the length of their bodies. So this one, if it wanted to, could bite somewhere close to my throat.

  Boots. I should have worn boots. Or at least jeans, instead of my stupid gym shorts from sixth-grade PE.

  Dark spots swam before my eyes. I had to breathe. I did so, slowly, trying as hard as I could not to make any sound at all, not to attract the snake’s attention any
more than I had.

  The snake didn’t strike, or move, just continued to lick the air. And then, a centimeter at a time, it laid down on my feet.

  Like it was planning to take a nap.

  I breathed slow and easy, or tried to, and wondered how long a snake’s nap might take. How long was I going to be standing there, with a snake wrapped around my ankles, waiting to be bitten or to fall over?

  Someone would come looking for me, I thought. I wasn’t hiding or anything. They’d find me. If someone came over the hill and ran in the same direction I had for twenty minutes or so.

  Out here in the totally uninhabited countryside.

  I almost laughed. That was never going to happen. I was stuck out here, with nothing to do but wait, nothing to feel but fear.

  As I stood there, trying as hard as I could not to rock back and forth for balance, I felt my shoulders begin to relax. There was nothing I could do, right?

  Nothing but be still. Or die.

  Chapter 2

  I didn’t die. I didn’t even get in trouble when I got home four hours later. Turns out, it’s not running away when no one notices you’re gone.

  “What did you do today, Peter?” Dad asked, passing me the mashed potatoes at dinner. “You didn’t stay in your room again, did you, buddy? You know, some fresh air would do you good.”

  I didn’t answer for a minute. What could I tell him? “Dad, I ran away and spent the afternoon trapped by a venomous snake”? Maybe he’d feel guilty. He’d been the reason I’d left, after all. Well, his drumming anyway.

  Dad had lost his job and most of his hair in the past year, and he’d decided to relive his youth or something by playing the drums. He was “brushing up his chops” to audition for a band in Austin, he said.

  That afternoon, he’d tried to get me to join in, handing me cowbells and triangles and nodding at me when I was supposed to bang on them. Father-and-son time.

  I had told him the sounds gave me a headache.

  I wasn’t lying.

  “You’re so sensitive, Peter,” Dad had said, disappointed in me, as usual. “You’ve got to toughen up.”

  I’d only heard that a thousand times. But for some reason, that day the truth had hit me. I’d never be tough enough for him.

  I wondered if he’d believe I was tougher than a rattlesnake. I glanced up. Nope. He was wearing his perpetual “Why is my son such a weirdo?” expression. So I just answered, “I went walking.”

  “Oh?” Mom perked up and looked away from her lap, where she’d been typing something on her phone under the tablecloth. Probably trying to get on Facebook, even though it was practically impossible to get reception way out here. “Where did you go? Did you meet anyone?”

  I thought of the snake and smiled a little. I didn’t think that was what she meant.

  My older sister, Laura, stopped spooning baby food into Carlie’s mouth—or mostly onto her shirt and bib, as Carlie was sort of a moving target—and interrupted. “Are you kidding? Of course he didn’t see anyone. Come on, Mom. You moved us out to the butt end of nowhere. There aren’t any people for, like, fifty miles around.”

  “Laura, that negative attitude has to go,” Mom argued. “I’ll have you know, there are two boys Peter’s age who live at a house only a mile away. This is a great place for us. It doesn’t take any longer for me to commute in to the office, since there’s almost no traffic—”

  “Because no people,” Laura interrupted, leaning back in her chair and angrily popping pieces of okra into her mouth. “No civilization,” she growled through a mouth full of okra guts.

  “No tattooed boyfriends,” Dad added. “No potheads.” He winked at me. I tried not to smile. I was the only one who’d heard, since Mom had started up again.

  “Well, you’re hardly one to talk about being civilized, Laura Elizabeth Stone.” Mom raised her eyebrows. “Eating with your fingers? When you two go back to school this fall, I think you’ll want to act a little nicer—”

  That set Laura off again, on her favorite topic of having to attend a country high school where the biggest summer event was a rodeo, and 80 percent of the kids raised goats and steers for 4-H.

  It was really different out here in the hill country, that was for sure. Different from our apartment in San Antonio, where we’d lived for almost eleven years. We’d only been in the new house for a week, but I could tell it wouldn’t ever be home. There was nothing homey about it: a two-story, thirty-year-old wood-frame box with three different colors of vinyl siding and windows so loose they rattled in a stiff breeze.

  I hated it. I think we all did. But we hadn’t had much choice. Our old landlord had said that Dad’s drums and guitars were driving away his other tenants. “Driving them crazy,” he’d moaned the day he delivered the news that he wouldn’t renew our lease.

  I couldn’t blame him. The noise of my family was unreal. The TV was on all the time, turned up loud enough to cover Carlie’s constant tantrums and crying. My mom talked on the phone whenever she was home, or talked at the girls and me. When she didn’t think we were listening to her—which was pretty much always—she just talked louder.

  Like she was doing now, arguing with Laura. My head started to feel like something was squeezing it slowly, but hard. Carlie went from spitting food on her tray to crying. I picked at my meat loaf and thought of the valley I’d found that day. Where I’d met the snake.

  It wasn’t that far. Just across some fields of weeds, cacti, and a few scraggly trees and bushes that had more thorns than leaves. Then over the top of the hill behind that, past the fence made of railroad ties stacked diagonally on each other like enormous Lincoln Logs, and across the thin stretch of asphalt that was being retaken by grasses and wildflowers on both edges.

  Just far enough away that I couldn’t hear crying or yelling or drumming.

  It had seemed like a dream. For the first time in years, I hadn’t heard cars or trains, TVs or video games or people. Hadn’t seen a roofline or even a plane in the sky.

  I’d been alone for the first time in my whole life, almost. I liked it.

  No, I loved it. Out there, my heartbeat was as loud as anything in the world.

  Carlie shrieked. My head was the only thing pounding now. Well, that and Carlie’s feet on the bottom of the table.

  “Well, why couldn’t we get a better house at least? One with high-speed Internet?” Laura asked. “It’s like living on Mars.”

  “True,” Dad agreed around a mouthful of salad. “That part’s such a drag. Maybe we could get the cable company to hook us up—”

  “We’re on one paycheck,” Mom hissed. “Mine. Did you forget?”

  Dad lifted his chin in my direction, like I was supposed to say something.

  I knew better.

  But he didn’t. He rolled his eyes—at Mom. “Like you would let me for one minute. Nag, nag, nag.”

  I held still. Laura did, too. Even Carlie paused in her tantrum. Then the world exploded into noise as Mom and Dad went at it, throwing blame and insults at each other as fast as they could, like they each were trying to win some invisible food fight.

  And they didn’t care who got hit.

  “You chose this place without even consulting me, Maxine,” Dad yelled. “Just because I’m out of a job doesn’t mean I’m out of the family.” His next word was a bullet. “Yet.”

  Carlie was crying full-out now, and Laura picked her up, humming some lullaby but never taking her eyes off Mom and Dad. She looked as scared as I felt.

  Was this it? Were they splitting up?

  My parents had always fought a little, usually in their room at night, after they thought us kids were asleep. But since Dad had been laid off eleven months ago—the same week Mom had gotten promoted to assistant manager at the bank—the yelling had gotten lots worse.

  “You know we had to get away from
the city, Joshua,” Mom said, her voice low. “You know why.” I felt her eyes on me, their eyes.

  Maybe it was Dad’s fault we’d been evicted. But it was my fault we’d had to move out here, away from the city they’d all loved. I knew that. Laura made sure to remind me every day.

  Their stares burned into my skin.

  “May I be excused?” My voice was a whisper. Too soft; no one heard.

  The headache was getting worse, fast. It felt like something was splitting behind my right eye. Like my brain was under attack.

  I held every bit as still as I had that afternoon, and I wished I was back at the rim of the valley.

  And then, in my mind, I was.

  My skin prickled. Like something was watching me. Something invisible and mysterious and vast. It seemed like the valley was waiting to see what I would do. I stayed motionless for longer than I ever had, wondering what was expected.

  And then the valley took a breath.

  Wind moved across the bowl, shifting trees and bushes like the land was a giant cat being petted. It moved fast, faster. It was almost here, almost to me.

  Would the wind knock me over?

  The hot air rushed around me, and the clatter of leaves sounded like excited whispers in my ears. Sounded almost like . . . hissing?

  I smiled, remembering the rattler. I’d been so still, when it slid across my feet it had probably thought I was a tree or a rock. Thought I belonged there.

  I stood for hours, snake around my ankles, fear in my throat. The breeze rose back up, pushing strands of my hair past my ears. It reminded me of when my grandma was alive, and she would stroke the hair back over my ear, feather-gentle.

  The world around me came to life, like an orchestra tuning up. Somewhere to my right, a bird began to sing, a bunch of mixed-up trills. A mockingbird, I thought. Grasshoppers and frogs joined in. Something larger must have moved a little farther away, since I heard the sharp thud of rocks knocking together and sliding downhill.

  The sun beat on my face, and I saw the shadows of clouds moving across the sky even with my eyes shut, as the light behind my eyelids went from red to black to red again.