Hazel's Theory of Evolution

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  And what if it happened again?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Rowan.

  “I figured it was Mimi’s news to tell.”

  “She said she’s four months pregnant. That means she conceived in”—I counted backward—“May. She’s been waiting all summer to tell us. Mom hasn’t said anything, either.”

  “Can you blame them?” said Rowan. “They probably wanted to make sure they’re out of the woods. Think about it. This is around the stage Lena died.”

  “Miles didn’t die until six months,” I said, glowering. “So much for being out of the woods.”

  I started to push the chair again, spinning it one direction and then the other, faster and faster. Rowan stretched a leg off the bed and planted his foot on my knee. “Cut it out.”

  I ignored him. Back, forth. Back, forth. At this rate, I would break my ten-year no-vomiting streak.

  Rowan stood. He hoisted me by my arms and dropped me facedown on the bed, knocking my glasses off in the process. He knelt on my back as I flailed under him.

  “Let me go!” I yelled, my words muffled by the bedclothes.

  “If I let you go, will you listen a damn minute?”

  “Mmmph!”

  Rowan climbed off me. I pushed myself up and wiped my hair away from my face, feeling sweaty and gross. I was also feeling like I might cry, my throat sore and swollen. I fumbled for my glasses, wiped them on my shirttail, and shoved them back on.

  “Listen,” Rowan said. His brown eyes fixed on mine. “I’m sad about Lena and Miles, too. Obviously. But it’s not like Mimi did this by accident.”

  “What about us?” I said. “What about Mom?”

  “I guarantee you Mom and Mimi talked about it. They probably talked about it for hours and hours. For months and months. They’ve probably been talking about it ever since Miles.”

  “How could they talk about it for two whole years and decide this was the right answer?” My chin crumpled. “This is bad. Really bad.”

  “Did you tell Mimi that?” Rowan demanded. “Because so help me, if you say anything about this new baby that’s less than kittens and rainbows, I’ll tie you to the railroad tracks.”

  “I didn’t. I won’t. Jeez. Why do you think I came to you?”

  He sat back. “All right. Because the last thing Mimi needs is your BS.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.” I slid off the bed and gave Rowan an angry salute before marching toward the door. His music started raging again before I’d even had a chance to slam it behind me.

  Kittens and rainbows. How was I supposed to manage that? I was terrible at lying. Mimi told me my emotions were always written on my face in neon letters.

  I tried once again to smile, just for practice. Yes, I’m overjoyed about the new baby! Just like I was overjoyed about the last two before they died. Nope—my cheeks wouldn’t budge. It felt like there were weights attached to the corners of my mouth. I couldn’t pretend to be happy.

  But maybe I could pretend it wasn’t happening at all. I thought again of bats, dangling from the ceiling of their caves in suspended animation. Why shouldn’t that be me? I could follow the same plan at home as at school. I’d live in the house, eat dinner with my family, and pretend none of this was happening.

  Because I’d been through this before. I knew how things went. When your family wanted a baby, each moment after the appearance of that pink line on the pregnancy test you got more excited, and the whole thing felt more real. Hope was a huge hill you climbed higher every day. And when something went wrong, it was like getting pushed off a cliff. The higher you’d climbed, the farther you fell, and the more broken you were when you hit the bottom.

  But maybe if you refused to set foot on that path into the clouds—if instead you found shelter under the hill—then no matter what happened outside, you’d be safe. It might be dark, and you might be alone, but you’d make it through winter unscathed.

  At least, it was worth a try.

  Of course, now everyone else was talking about the new baby. By dinner, Mimi had officially delivered her news to Rowan. As we ate, she told us how her first few checkups and ultrasound had been normal, and how she’d gotten the results of her amniocentesis today and everything had come back clear. I kept not meeting her eyes, saying, Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.

  Mimi said, “Hazel, please pass the string beans,” but when I did, she didn’t take the bowl. It hung heavy in my hands. I looked up. Her expression was somewhere between sad and angry. I didn’t say anything. Neither did she. She took the beans. She stopped talking about the baby.

  I was just finishing the dishes when Becca called.

  My moms were weirdly old-fashioned about certain things, one of which was that I couldn’t have my own phone until high school. Even Becca had gotten one when she turned thirteen, and she was one of the last in our grade. All the kids we knew were constantly messaging each other or sending each other pictures and videos on their phones. I was stuck with our landline, which barely got reception by the time I carried it from its base in the kitchen to my third-floor bedroom.

  “Hey,” I said as I climbed the stairs, Arby at my heels, “what’s up?”

  “Just wanted to check how my best friend’s first day went.” Becca’s voice crackled with static.

  As my door thudded shut, the full weight of the day’s events slammed down on me. It wasn’t even eight o’clock, and I was exhausted. I sank onto my bed. “Not great,” I admitted.

  “Oh no! Do you want to talk about it?”

  Arby jumped up beside me, and I stretched out a hand to stroke her velvety ears. She collapsed against me, letting out a little moo. “Honestly, I don’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know. But I thought Finley would be . . . regular. Boring, maybe, but not horrible.”

  The baby. You have to tell her about the baby.

  No. There is no baby, remember? Not until it gets here.

  “Mostly I’m just tired,” I mumbled.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it? It might help.”

  “No, I know, I just—can we talk about everything on Friday? I’m still coming over, right?” Biweekly sleepovers had been part of our routine almost since the day we met.

  “You better be,” Becca said. “And of course. We’ll talk about everything then. But Hazel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I hope your week gets better. I’ll be thinking of you.”

  I knew it wasn’t just something she was saying to be polite. She actually would be thinking of me. That was why Becca was worth any number of friends. She was literally the best.

  Chapter 4

  Back in the middle of third grade, lunch brought Becca Blumberg and me together. She’d just moved from Chicago, and her whole first morning she’d stared at her hands. Her fingernails were gnawed to stubs. Her long, dark hair curtained her face. She barely said a word, and when she did, it was in a whisper.

  When our class went to the cafeteria, I went to my usual spot in the corner with my brown-bag lunch, alone. I watched all the kids from the hot-lunch line file in with their orange trays of square, flat pizza or breaded fish sandwiches. Nobody wanted to sit with Goat Girl. After two and a half years, I was used to that. I didn’t like it, exactly, but I was used to it.

  Becca stood at the edge of the room, fear all over her face. Nobody had asked her to sit with them. Nobody even looked her way.

  Then I thought, Why not me? There was plenty of room at my table. Plus, she was so new she might not realize—or care—that I was an outcast. This might be my chance to finally make a friend. I stood and waved.

  Becca looked confused at first. Then her expression changed to relief. She shuffled over with her tray. “Um. Did you mean me?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I meant you.”

  That was the beginning. The beginning of having a lunch buddy, and someo
ne to pass notes with in class. The beginning of having someone to partner with, when we had to partner up, instead of being put with whoever else was left over at the end. The beginning of having someone to make play dates with myself, instead of going to play dates arranged by my moms. Becca was my first real friend. We chose each other.

  When it was time for lunch my second day at Finley, I was under no illusion that anyone would call me over. And that was fine. I’d spent the whole morning hibernating. I hadn’t raised my hand or done anything that would call attention to myself. I’d only responded to direct questions from teachers and hadn’t talked to other kids at all. Lunch ought to be easy.

  I got my brown bag from my locker and made for an empty table at the far end of the cafeteria. No one noticed as I walked past. Their eyes skipped over me as if I were a wad of gum stuck to the floor—a wad of gum that had been walked over so many times it was no longer gooey and looked like yet another speckle in the linoleum. Just like I wanted.

  I reached the last table and set down my lunch. Except, I realized a split second later, the table wasn’t empty after all. Yosh was there, his wheelchair parked at the other end. I couldn’t believe I’d missed him. His green mohawk glowed like it was radioactive. Maybe it had burned out my retinas.

  Beside his lunch tray lay a sketchbook and a package of markers—the expensive kind the hobby store kept in a locked cabinet. Part of me wanted to know what he was drawing. The other part wanted to turn around and find another table. With everyone I didn’t know at Finley, why did I have to share a table with him?

  “Hey,” Yosh said, “why the long face? Not enough seats for your imaginary friends?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Or let me guess: you’ve got hair envy. You can’t stand it that I’m a splendiferous peacock and you’re, shall we say”—he scrutinized me, tipping his head—“a turkey.”

  My hand unconsciously inched upward to touch the frizzy end of my braid. “If I don’t want to sit with you, it’s not because of your hair. It’s because you’re rude.”

  His eyebrows popped up. “What did I do?”

  “Besides accusing me of having imaginary friends and bad hair? You gave me a dirty look the second I walked into H and HD yesterday.”

  He took a swig of his juice. “Don’t take it personally. I give everyone dirty looks.”

  “And you made everyone think my question was yours.”

  He did a spit-take. “Seriously? You wanted to be known as the girl who worships earthworms?”

  “I don’t worship earthworms. I admire them. There’s a difference.”

  “Oh. My sincere apology.”

  His apology didn’t sound sincere. It sounded amused.

  “And for your information,” I said, “you don’t look like a peacock. You look like a turaco.”

  “Is that like a turducken?”

  A turducken wasn’t in Grzimek’s because it wasn’t a bird. And you wouldn’t find it in the wild. You’d find it on somebody’s dinner table at Thanksgiving, crammed full of stuffing. By Yosh’s teasing smile, I was pretty sure he knew that already.

  “Just look it up,” I said.

  He sighed. “Fine, Hazel Britannica-Wellington. Now are you going to sit down or what?”

  The rest of the cafeteria had filled enough that it would have been weird if I’d walked away from a nearly empty table to squeeze in among strangers. Without looking at Yosh, I perched on the bench as far from him as I could, opened my lunch bag, and started eating. I was halfway through my sandwich when a third person approached our table.

  It was a girl, spindly and timid as a fawn, with light brown skin and sun-streaked hair that barely came to her chin. Her overgrown bangs were clipped to one side with a turquoise butterfly barrette. Her shirt was turquoise, too. Something about her was familiar, but I didn’t know why.

  She looked at me, and the strangest thing happened. She took a step back, as if she’d noticed a snake on the path and wasn’t sure whether it was poisonous. She looked over her shoulder, as if considering leaving to find another seat. In other words, she looked as thrilled to see me as I had to see Yosh. But why? What had I ever done to her?

  Her gaze moved to Yosh, and he lowered his marker. “Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys,” he said cheerfully. “We hope you enjoy your stay.”

  I’d seen Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer enough times to recognize the reference. It was the island where all the toys rejected from Santa’s workshop—like the Charlie-in-the-Box, the square-wheeled train, and the spotted elephant—were exiled.

  The girl sat down at the exact middle of the table. The three of us sat in silence, except for the sound of our chewing and the swishing of Yosh’s markers across the paper, together but not together, for the rest of lunch.

  I was still stewing over Yosh’s Island of Misfit Toys remark on the bus ride home. I could see the impracticality of a train with square wheels, but who cared if a guy living in a box was named Charlie instead of Jack? And what was wrong with an elephant having spots? It wasn’t the elephant’s fault. “Elephants, spotted” belonged right after “earthworms” in that hypothetical encyclopedia of misunderstood animals.

  The more I thought, the more steamed I got. By the time the bus rumbled to a stop in front of the house, I’d decided: I’d write that book myself. I knew plenty already, and I had Grzimek’s and the internet to help me fill in the blanks. I wouldn’t include imaginary species like spotted elephants, obviously, but I’d write about earthworms. And, since Yosh had brought them up as an alleged example of nonsplendiferousness, turkeys. There were plenty of animals that could use someone sticking up for them.

  Out in the half-ton, I pulled my H&HD notebook from my backpack and ripped out the first page, which was the only page I’d written on so far. On the cover, I wrote BROWNLEE-WELLINGTON’S GUIDE TO MISUNDERSTOOD CREATURES, compiled by Hazel Maud Brownlee-Wellington. Then I flipped the book open and began.

  People use “turkey” as an insult. If someone calls you that, meaning loser, the obvious implication is that actual turkeys (MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO) are losers. You’d think a bird that gets eaten on major American holidays would get more respect.

  Turkeys may not be the smartest bird, but they’re impressive in other ways. They can run at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour and fly more than twice that fast. And they don’t just gobble. They have eight different vocalizations, each with a different meaning. Turkeys are gentle, social creatures. Benjamin Franklin called the turkey a bird of courage.

  As you may know, male turkeys have colorful plumage—just like peacocks. As you may NOT know, the Spanish term for peacock is PAVO REAL, which translates to royal turkey. I guess the joke’s on Yosh.

  I was about to flip the page and start another article when Mom called from the barn.

  “What?” I yelled back.

  “I need you!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so, darling child.”

  I sighed and slapped my notebook shut, shoving it into my backpack. I crossed the pasture and presented myself to Mom, arms crossed over my chest. “I’m here.”

  “And you’re beautiful. Come on. I want you to help me with the milking.”

  “Evening milking is Rowan’s job. Rowan milks. I do my homework. You cook dinner.”

  “Yes, except when I don’t feel like cooking. He’s inside, making that pasta you like. Besides, is it wrong to want to spend some one-on-one time with my favorite daughter?”

  “I’m your only daughter,” I pointed out, and then remembered Lena and wished I hadn’t. I turned quickly so I wouldn’t have to see her face and mumbled, “I’ll call in the goats.”

  I stood at the doorway and clapped my hands, yelling, “Heeeeere, goats!” The herd started moving, Kali pushing her way to the front.

  I let them through the internal gate from their hay-littered loafing area into what Mom called the green room, where the does waited to be milked. Pax, of course, st
ayed behind. I slipped through the next gate into the milking parlor with Mom and helped gather the supplies: fresh grain for the feeder, one- and five-gallon stainless steel pails, a strip cup, and a container of homemade disinfectant wipes.

  “All right,” Mom said, “let’s roll.”

  I unlatched the gate, and Kali shouldered through it, nearly stomping on my feet. She jumped onto the milking stand, and Mom drew the head gate closed around her neck. Kali shoved her face in the feeder and started munching.

  Mom perched at the edge of the stand and wiped down Kali’s udder and teats with soapy rags. She handed me the dirty rags for the laundry. Next, she gave three squeezes of each teat into the strip cup, flushing any old milk left from the morning milking. Mom took out its strainer, making sure there were no lumps caught in it, then held the cup to the light to make sure the milk inside was creamy white. Finally, I handed Mom the smaller pail. She positioned it underneath Kali’s udder and began drawing milk from her teats.

  “So,” said Mom as milk spurted against steel. “I’ve been experimenting with new scent blends for fall. I love the idea of using more clove—maybe with orange, or anise? And a customer suggested bergamot and fir. She’s got something similar from another brand but says she prefers the feel of my lotions. What do you think?”

  “They have a good feel,” I agreed, wondering what I was doing there. “Not greasy at all.”

  “No, what do you think of bergamot and fir? When I think fall, I think cool weather, I think about wanting to be warm and cozy. Fires in the fireplace, cookies baking. I just wonder if the combination of mint and evergreen would be—I don’t know—too fresh?”

  I thought of drizzly fall mornings in the pasture and the woods beyond, my shoes getting soaked by the fallen leaves. I liked wood fires and cookies, too, but mint and evergreen were two of my favorite smells. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as too fresh,” I said.