by Nikki Loftin
“Um, no. I’m supposed to be grounded. I gotta get back home.”
“What were you doing down here anyway?” Jake asked, scratching at some bites on his arm. “Valley of death, we told you. You’re gonna get bit up, at least.” He’d walked around and seen the snake I’d made. It was really long, I thought. Dozens of feet. As I watched, Jake took the top of his tennis shoes and started kicking at the dried bits, sending them sailing back into the stream. Ruining it.
I tried not to show how bad I felt, watching. “Just messing around. It’s boring out here in the country.” An acorn fell on my face then, but soft. Not really, I thought. Not really boring.
Jake kept on. “Also, your sister wants to know where you are. We said we’d bring you home, safe and sound, little angel cake.”
I wasn’t sure what to say—was he calling me a name, or quoting Laura in a sarcastic mood?
“Ugh, sisters,” I said.
“Yeah, must suck,” Jake said. “Although your sister’s kinda hot. I was thinking maybe she and I . . .” My stomach churned as he went on. His words seemed like they were poisoning the air.
He finished what he was saying about Laura and raised an eyebrow at me. Waiting.
I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. There was no place—city or country—where it was okay to talk about someone’s sister like that. But Jake—and Doug—were both looking at me like they thought I was too much of a wimp to do anything about it.
They were right. I was a wimp. I was afraid. I’d never hit anyone in my life, even when it would have saved me from getting beaten up myself.
Beaten up again and again.
Watching the look of anticipation in Jake’s eyes turn into disgust, I could hear my dad’s voice in the back of my mind. Echoes from the summer before, in San Antonio. “Fight back, Peter. You’ve got to learn that sometimes you have to fight back. If you don’t, your whole life is going to be one long series of losing—maybe more than just fistfights.”
He’d put me in an after-school karate class until one of the other kids had given me two black eyes. Not on purpose, the kid had said. “Sorry, sir. He didn’t even try to defend himself.”
Dad had been too ashamed to look at me. He’d pulled me out of class that week.
Now, just like all those times, when I was faced with something I needed to fight, someone who was daring me to, I couldn’t move. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, exactly. I physically felt like I was being held in place.
Petrified by my own cowardice.
I remembered what Annie had called me the first time we met: Stone Boy. It was true, I thought. I felt like I was made of stone. Like my arms and legs were as heavy as boulders. And my heart inside was the heaviest stone of all. For a moment, I had a wild thought. I hadn’t been able to stand up for myself in San Antonio, had never been able to even think about it at the end . . . but maybe here, in the valley. Maybe here I could be stronger, better.
Maybe I could at least stand up for my sister.
I made a fist with one of my hands. If I could just lift it, just move that one arm . . .
But my arm was boulder-heavy with fear. With memories of what had happened the one time I had tried to fight back, the one time I had swung—and missed.
Memories of a group of guys picking up sticks and coming at my face; memories of punches and kicks that only stopped with the sound of sirens ringing in my bleeding ears.
Still, I had to try, for Laura . . . .
And then it was too late. I’d waited too long, and my courage faded as Jake sneered. “What’s wrong with you, man?” He started for me like he was going to punch me, to check if I’d fight back then, but Doug stopped him with a beefy hand on his arm.
“Maybe he don’t like his sister,” Doug said. With his free hand, he slapped at a horsefly that had landed on his shoulder. Jake paused, considering.
“Yeah,” I said, filled with a sick relief that Doug had given me an out. Even if it wasn’t true. Even if it meant betraying Laura. I swallowed a bitter mouthful of spit. “I can’t stand her,” I lied.
I can’t stand myself. “She’s the worst.”
I was the worst. The worst brother in the world.
Jake looked like he still wanted to punch me. But then Doug laughed, reached down, and splashed both of us, and Jake seemed to cool off.
“She must be,” Jake said. He wasn’t going to hit me, but the look he gave me said I’d failed his test or something. “Sounds worse than our dad. She hit you?”
“No,” I managed. “She’s just . . . ” I trailed off when he rolled up one jeans leg and showed me a small, round patch of skin. It looked like a burn.
“This is what happens when you screw up at our house. Count yourself lucky your sister don’t smoke.” I tasted bile. His dad had burned him? With a cigarette?
Suddenly, a lifetime of my dad’s disappointment seemed like not such a big deal.
Then Doug tossed a rock at Jake’s ankle. “Stop showing off your chicken pox scars. Let’s get out of here. The mosquitoes are biting harder than piranhas.”
Chicken pox scars? I didn’t know what to think, who to believe. I had never seen a chicken pox scar that looked like that.
“You coming, Petey?” Doug waved me ahead of him with one hand.
I nodded, though I hadn’t noticed the bugs. I’d been too busy trying to keep from hyperventilating.
A cool breeze brushed past my face, soft on my red cheeks. I hadn’t been bitten, not once, but Doug and Jake looked like they were mosquitoes’ favorite food. I pretended to swat at flying things the way they did, all the way up the hill. Jake and Doug slipped and slid as much as I had after I’d been mean to Annie. The valley did have ways of protecting itself.
But it couldn’t do everything. I thought about the momma pig down there, trying to take care of her little piglets, bleeding from her leg. I hoped it would get better. If I could have done anything more for it . . .
No. I was weak. A coward who wouldn’t even stand up for his sister.
Leaving the valley now was as close as I could come to doing anything right. Leaving and keeping these boys away from the pig. And away from Annie.
I could at least do that.
“Don’t be mad, Annie,” I whispered under my breath, thinking of her showing up here, spending the afternoon alone.
But alone was better than with these guys. Hey, valley, I thought, turning my head as we crested the rim. Maybe next time you could do a little something more to keep these idiots out? Mosquitoes are great, but you got any mountain lions? I was only kidding—only thinking. I didn’t expect an answer. But then, on my next step, I saw the rattlesnake—it had to be the same one, it was right at the same bush where I’d seen the first one—stick its head out and taste the air, its little black tongue flickering.
And the wind whispered a hiss—yessssssssss.
Chapter 17
The next day, Dad took Carlie to the daycare again. Turned out, Carlie really liked playing with blocks and dolls and stuff and not just watching TV in a playpen all day. Who’d’ve a figured, right? Dad had noticed Carlie’s crying, too, I guess. He’d even loaded up an old guitar he’d sold on eBay to get the money for the daycare. It sort of shocked me. I thought he only cared about his band stuff these days.
I was glad for Carlie. But I was stuck in the house worse than my baby sister in her playpen. Laura had gotten suspicious about where I was going. “Those boys said you haven’t been hanging out with them all week. What have you been doing?”
“Hiking,” I answered. Then I offered to do the laundry, her least favorite chore. I thought maybe she’d go online and get out of my hair. But it was two o’clock before Laura got tired of alternately spying and picking on me and went to join her weekly chat therapy group for teenage girls who didn’t already have enough drama in their lives. Or whatever
.
Once she left me alone, it felt like I could breathe again. The truth was, I couldn’t even look at her without getting queasy. I felt so guilty, thinking of what I’d let the guys say about her. I had to get out of the house, get away from remembering it.
Annie wasn’t at the pool, but there was a flower floating in the center of the water. She had to have gone down into the valley to look for me.
Sure enough, she was there, sitting by the stream, picking at some of the remaining snake clay with a fingernail.
She didn’t look up when I got there. Mad, I guessed.
“Hey, Annie,” I said, breaking the quiet. The insects stopped humming. “Did you see what I made? Well, some of it’s still here. I thought you’d like it.”
“You made what, exactly?” Ooh, frosty voice. Definitely mad.
I told her about my idea to make a snake out of mud that wound around the rocks—maybe even up trees—and all over the valley.
“What is it supposed to mean?” Annie said. “Art has meaning, Peter. I told you that.”
I stopped talking, stunned. She’d used the tone of voice my sister used when she called me an idiot. “What’s your deal?”
“Well,” Annie said. “You think you made art? Tell me why it’s art, then. Tell me what genius thought you had that makes this”—and she picked a chunk of snake up and pitched it across the stream—“something anyone would be interested in?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” I said, wondering what had gotten into her. This wasn’t like Annie. She was bossy, but not . . . mean. “Something about the way this ground—the earth here—is as alive as a snake. As me.” I couldn’t believe I had thought this would impress her. It sounded stupid when I said it out loud.
Obviously, Annie thought so, too.
She sniffed. “Safe.”
What? I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it couldn’t be good. I felt my ears start to burn, felt my cheeks heat as well. “Safe how? Just say what you mean.”
“Easy, predictable. Safe.” Annie stood up and stalked away, but I could hear every word clear as the birds in the trees around us. “It’s what happens when an artist is too scared to try something new, something real. So, were you scared, Peter Stone?”
Was I scared? Why would she ask that? Unless . . .
Oh, no. Had she been there the day before? Had she heard what Doug and Jake had said about Laura, what I had let them say?
“You were here, weren’t you?” I managed to whisper. “Yesterday. When I was down here for hours. You heard what the guys were saying to me. So you know the answer already.” I felt my face burning.
She’d watched it all. And she hated me now.
“Yeah, I was scared, all right? I’m a chicken, that’s all. I won’t bother you anymore,” I said, turning to go. “You can do your own dumb art.”
My chest ached. Maybe the boys that I’d met in the valley were mean, but they were cruel to everything. Annie was only cruel to me. I’d thought maybe . . . I had made a friend.
I’d thought wrong. My throat started to close up. It was time to run away again. Not that I had anywhere to run to.
I was just about out of the meadow, wondering why I’d even bothered to come in the first place, ever thought Annie was different, when I heard one word. “Stop.”
“I wasn’t here yesterday,” she said, and her voice sounded strange. Thick. “I didn’t hear anything.”
I didn’t mean to listen, but my feet just quit moving. “Then why did you ask if I was scared?”
“It wasn’t you. It was me.”
Wait. She had been scared? Why?
I heard the thickness in her voice clearer now. It was tears. I turned back slowly, feeling the anger drain out of me. Annie was perched up on one of the boulders we hadn’t made cairns on. Her shoulders were shaking so hard, I was afraid she might fall off.
“I’m sorry, Peter. I was being a jerk. The snakes . . . I bet the snakes were awesome. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“What’s wrong, Annie?” I asked. “What happened?”
“You didn’t wait for me. I came after you left, I guess. Why didn’t you wait?”
“I couldn’t! There were these guys, with guns. They’re bad, Annie. One of them almost shot me.” I remembered my fear the day before, the feeling of hollowness and sick in the pit of my stomach.
“Really?” Annie wiped her face with one arm. “Who are they?”
I let out a frustrated breath. Whatever was wrong with Annie, she would tell me when she was ready. In the meantime, I’d tell her about Jake and Doug and the wild boar. It would take her mind off . . . whatever. Make it less painful, maybe.
By the end of my story—even though I left out what Jake had said about Laura—Annie was still shaking. Only now it was with rage. “That’s hideous. I wish I had a gun. I’d show them how it feels to get shot.”
I almost laughed. She looked like a bristly hedgehog, with her short red hair practically quivering.
“I think I got pretty close to having a firsthand experience with that yesterday,” I said. “I’ll stay away from guns entirely, thanks.”
“I didn’t figure you’d be a hunter,” Annie said. “You have an artist’s soul.” I didn’t have a chance to ask what she meant. “I’ll tell you a secret,” Annie continued. “I’m the scared one. I’m a . . . a coward.”
“How do you figure?”
She shrugged. “I want to do something so bad, and I’m afraid.”
She wanted to do something bad? Or do something bad? I almost laughed. “Something really bad? Get me a shovel,” I said. “I’ll help you hide the body.”
She laughed at that. “No, not murder.”
“What then?” I settled at the base of the rock she sat on, staring up at her, even though the angle of the sun made it hard to see her features. She almost glowed.
“I want to run away. For real. But I’m not sure how to make it work.”
Back to that again. I guess she couldn’t talk about whatever was really wrong yet. And I understood. Planning my imaginary running away had taken my mind off Mom’s yelling before, so I figured it might take Annie’s mind off the thing that was making her so upset now.
“Well, you’ve got the sleeping bag and the canteen,” I said. “And the granola bars. I’ve got a water filter—it’s only the kind that goes in the fridge, but we’ll probably die from snakebite before we get E. coli poisoning. . . . ”
“Don’t make fun,” she grumped. “I’m serious.”
“E. coli is serious. But fine,” I said in the same voice I used when I was humoring Carlie. “For real. What else do we need?”
She held up one hand. “A compass, I think, and definitely a knife, maybe two—” She went on and on, and I could tell she’d really thought about this. Was she serious? She couldn’t be. But . . .
I interrupted her list. “No fish hooks?” I stood up so I could see her face. She was rolling her eyes at me, when I saw something more. Her arm. I walked around to the other side.
There were bruises on both her arms.
“What’s that, Annie?” I pointed at one of the marks.
“Nothing,” she said, tucking her arms behind her. “Just stupid camp stuff.”
As far as I knew, there wasn’t an activity you did at art camp that left bruises the size of fingers. “Did someone hurt you?”
“It’s for the best,” she said. “The other girls got mad when I critiqued their watercolors. One of them got more than mad. I bruise easily, anyway. So I told the counselor I was going to stay in my room for watercolor time.”
All the anger I’d felt the day before with Doug and Jake came racing back. “How is that for the best?” Someone needed to shake some sense into those girls. Leaving bruises on a kid with cancer?
Although, come to think of it, if Annie ha
d used that same tone of voice she’d used when she’d called me a coward, I could see how one of the campers might be tempted to leave a bruise or two.
Still, it wasn’t right. “Don’t they know you’re sick?”
“Yeah, they do.” Her voice got quiet. “And I hate it.”
“Why?”
She stood up, almost shouting. “Because I’m just Cancer Girl to them. I’m not Annie Blythe, future featured artist at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m just the weird kid.” She kicked a stone, and it tumbled across the ground, scaring up some small flying insects. “I hate it. Nobody even talks to me. They treat me like . . . like I have some sort of disease.”
The air between us hummed with cicadas, and the words I was NOT going to let myself say.
But I did let out a small laugh. “Um . . . ”
Annie laughed then, falling to the ground. “Okay, okay, I DO have a disease. But it’s not contagious. I mean, it’s not leprosy or anything.”
I shrugged and sat next to her. “Well, you did pet that armadillo. You could have leprosy, too, by now.” She shoved me, and I fell over to one side, groaning.
Annie rolled her eyes, then ran her hands through her short curls, like she was checking to see if they were still there. For a moment I realized that in not too long, they wouldn’t be. The radiation—or chemo, I wasn’t sure which—usually made people’s hair fall out. All the girls in my class in fourth grade had grown their hair out to donate to Locks of Love, to make wigs for cancer survivors. I wondered how Annie would look with plain, boring hair like those girls. Not right.
It wasn’t right.
“I’m not going to be that artist anyway,” she said into the silence. “I’m never going to have an exhibit in MoMA or anywhere. I’m not going to have enough brain left, probably, to make art.”
“Do you know that?”
“No,” she said. “But I’ve done some research.”
“On the net?”
She nodded. “Sneaking into my mom’s Lucky Leuks parent chatroom, actually. She doesn’t know I have her password. It turns out, when the levels are this high, for a second recurrence . . . well, let’s just say that I’d better come up with any good ideas I’m going to this week. Because in a couple of months, I’m going to be relearning how to tie my shoes.”