The Second Life of Abigail Walker (2 page)

When the bell rang, Abby had blinked several times and shaken her head, surprised to find herself in Mr. Lee's classroom instead of
her apartment, which seemed much more real to her, even if it only existed in her imagination. The other kids scurried out of the classroom. Only Anoop Chatterjee took his time, carefully inserting his notebook and pen into his backpack. When he saw Abby watching him, he smiled at her slightly and nodded.

Abby gave a weak smile back and stood up. She took in a big breath and let it out slowly, preparing herself for what she knew was coming.

She could
have gone to the library instead of the cafeteria. Mrs. Longee, the librarian, liked her. She was recruiting her for Battle of the Books. Abby hadn't told her yet that she wasn't going to do it. She loved the idea of being on a team of kids who read for fun, but she was afraid she wouldn't read the books on the list. She had a bad habit of not reading books she was told to read. She liked to choose her own.

But she was hungry and she wanted chocolate milk with her sandwich, and she figured she might as well get it over with.

“I'm thinking about going on a diet,” Kristen
announced as soon as Abby sat down at the table. “I'm getting so fat. My jeans are really tight.”

Everyone rushed to assure Kristen she wasn't the least bit fat. Abby held back for a moment before joining in. She wanted to seem sincere. “You look great, Kristen. You're probably too thin, even.”

Mistake. Kristen was
not
too thin. She was not too fat. She was just right, and to suggest otherwise—well, you just didn't do that.

“So, have your parents ever put you on a diet?” Kristen asked Abby, sounding concerned. “Because I've heard that one of the worst things you can do when you have an overweight child is to force her to diet. It's how girls get bulimic. Although, if you ask me, bulimia sounds like a great diet plan. Eat whatever you want! All you have to do is throw it up later.”

The other girls giggled. Abby felt her cheeks grow hot.
I'm not even that fat!
she wanted to yell. And it was true. They'd been weighed two weeks ago in gym. Abby had weighed one hundred and five pounds. Kristen had weighed
eighty-eight. So what? Seventeen pounds wasn't that much more.

Abby looked around at the six girls at the table. Kristen, Georgia, Rachel, Casey, Myla, and Bess. They all weighed around ninety. They were all medium girls. They were medium smart, medium good at sports, their families had a medium amount of money. Kristen was the most important, and Abby was the least. She knew to stay quiet most of the time. To keep her opinions to herself. She was doing her best to be the most medium of the medium girls so that no one would notice her.

Abby knew she needed to be careful. If she said the wrong thing now, that would be two strikes. Then she'd probably do something stupid on the bus and Kristen would say, “Strike three!” and give her that dead-fish-eye look that meant Abby was all the way on the outside again. Then she'd have to sit at the very end of the table at lunch while everyone gave her the silent treatment, depending on the occasional sympathetic glance from Bess or Casey to get her through the period.

Abby looked down at her sandwich. It was tuna on homemade wheat bread. Her mother put two more teaspoons of honey in her dough than the recipe called for, so the bread was a little extra sweet, but not too sweet. Abby's mother wanted her to be friends with Kristen and Georgia. Abby's mother wanted her to be happy.

This bread makes me happy
, Abby thought.
Being friends with Kristen doesn't.

“Well?” Kristen said in a voice that suggested she was ready for Abby to show her the proper respect so they all could get on with eating their lunches. “Don't you think throwing up is a way you could lose weight?”

Abby opened her mouth to give the answer that would satisfy Kristen. But different words, unexpected words, came out. “I think it sounds sick. Like something you would have to be mentally ill to do.”

Everyone at the table grew very, very quiet. Georgia, who had been crumpling a chip bag, stopped mid-crumple.

Kristen smiled, unconcerned. “Well, I think
fat people are mentally ill. In fact, I read an article that said that.”

“Or, like, emotionally stunted,” Georgia added. “You know, nobody loves them, so they eat all the time.”

Abby almost said,
Maybe.
She almost said,
I think I read that article too.
She almost said the sort of thing she always said, so no one would be mad at her. But she didn't. Instead she slowly put her sandwich back into her lunch bag. She stood up. Her legs felt shaky. The skin around her eyes and nose was cold, as though she'd just dipped her face in ice.

“What are you doing?” Kristen asked her. “Sit down.”

Abby didn't reply. She thought that if she opened her mouth, she might throw up.
What's gotten into you?
she could hear her mom cry out. Abby wanted to cry back,
I don't know!

She started walking toward the cafeteria exit. Something hit her in the back of the legs. When she looked down, she saw Georgia's crumpled chip bag.

Well
, she thought, pushing open the door with her shoulder.
I guess that's that.

And for the rest of the afternoon, until the last bell rang, little sparks of light flashed from her fingers. No one else could see them, but she could.

riding the
bus home that afternoon was an exercise in sitting very still while a swarm of bees hummed behind her ears. Kristen and Georgia were buzzing about Abby's turncoat behavior, how she was lucky they'd been her friends at all, and now nobody would be her friend, who would want to be friends with a fatty like Abby?

Abby squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. The girl next to her, a fifth grader named Sonya, scootched closer to the window, and Abby flushed, wishing she didn't take up so much
space. She squeezed her thighs closer together, sat up straighter, sucked in her cheeks.

“Did you hear her say ‘medium' when Mrs. Moser asked her what size shirt she needed for the chorus recital?” Kristen asked in a super-loud voice. “Medium! That's a joke! Extra large would be more like it.”

Abby stared intently at the head of the boy in front of her. He had three cowlicks that she could see, and one was sticking straight up. Did he care? Did he stand in front of the mirror in the morning and rub hair gel on top of his head to try to make the cowlicks lie down? Did it bug him when someone asked him what size shirt he wore? Did he lie about being a medium, even when he knew he was really a large? Did he dread the day in PE when they got weighed like pumpkins at the state fair and everyone listened as hard as they could when the teacher told her assistant what numbers to write down in the record book?

Probably not. First of all, he was a boy, and Abby was pretty sure boys didn't care about stuff like hair and shirt sizes. She had two brothers, so she knew this from firsthand experience. And
second, from what Abby could see, he was a regular-size kid. He probably didn't give it a second thought when they got weighed in PE. What would that be like, Abby wondered, not to care? To walk up to the scale, still joking around with your friends behind you, not noticing as the PE teacher fiddled with the marker, pushing it farther to the right, and then a little farther, the number getting higher and higher. She bet he didn't stand there with his eyes shut tight, his stomach churning, praying that he'd magically lost ten pounds overnight.

“I don't know why we started being friends with her in the first place,” Kristen said from behind her. “What a waste of time.”

“Are they talking about you?” Sonya whispered out of the side of her mouth, like she was an undercover agent in a movie.

Abby shook her head. “No, it's this girl in their homeroom they don't like,” she whispered back.

“Named Abby?”

Abby nodded, and Sonya turned back to the window with a snort.

Okay, maybe walking away from Kristen's
table hadn't been such a great idea. Really, what had Abby been thinking about? She should have just said yes, throwing up was a way a person could lose weight. She should have said she was going on a diet that very afternoon.

A part of Abby was desperate to turn around and swear she'd only been joking. But she knew it was too late. She was tired of doing things and saying things just to make other people like her. She wanted to do and think what she felt like, even if nobody ever talked to her again. It was terrifying, but that's what she wanted.

Finally the bus pulled up to the corner of Ridge Valley Road. Abby scurried down the aisle and practically leaped out the door to the pavement. She needed to make a getaway.

She ran.

“Who are you running away from?” Kristen called after her. It sounded like a threat, but what kind of threat could it have been? Did she want to fight? Abby outweighed her by seventeen pounds, as Kristen had pointed out at least ten times on their ride home. If nothing else, Abby could squash her.

Her feet pounded down the hill toward her house. When she reached her front yard, she stopped. She didn't want to go inside. Her mother might have just made cookies. She was the kind of mother who did that kind of thing when she was home from work, baked treats thirty minutes before her children got home, so the house would smell warm and inviting when they walked through the front door.

She couldn't go into her sweet-smelling house with this pack of jumbled feelings—
I'm free! I'm doomed!
—on her back. Her mother would sense it. She'd want to smooth things out. But Abby didn't want smoothness. She wanted rough edges. She wanted to feel whatever it was she was feeling.

She stood for a moment in the yard across the street from her house. The jungle, her father called it. It was the strangest story. The summer before last, the people who'd lived there had gone to Japan for a year. They paid a man to mow the lawn, but nobody ever went into the house while they were gone to check on things. The roof sprang a leak, probably sometime right
after the owners left the country, and when they returned a year later, the house was contaminated with toxic mold.

For two weeks in July, Abby and her brothers John and Gabe had watched from their front porch as men in white suits, with
HAZMAT
printed across the back, tore the house down, brick by brick, board by board. It was like watching a movie run backward. It might have sounded boring, but it was almost impossible not to look.

Really, it was like watching something die.

“I think you children ought to watch from inside the house,” her mother had fretted nearly every morning when she found them sitting on the porch steps, licking dripping Popsicles as they peered across the street, still in their pajamas.

“They'd tell us if it was dangerous, Mom,” John had insisted. “I think they sprayed everything before they started tearing it down.”

When the men were done, nothing but the driveway was left to give a hint there'd been anything there other than a weedy patch of dirt.
All the neighbors had wondered what would happen next. Was the ground contaminated? Could another house be built on the same spot?

If the ground was contaminated, it didn't stop a million weeds from sprouting on the lot almost overnight. Wildflowers sprang up. Saplings took root. A flock of dandelions landed in what used to be the front yard and made itself at home. Abby's father threatened to go after them with a tank of weed killer, but he was too scared to get close enough. What if mold spores were still flying around?

Abby loved the new wild place across from her house. Every morning it seemed there was a new flower standing on a spindly leg, some yellow speckled bird that couldn't be from around here—but where else could it be from? In August she checked out a copy of the
National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America
from the library and began making a list.
Junco, oriole, hummingbird.

The yard across the street was the opposite of her yard. Abby's mother was an indoor person. Her father worked eighteen hours a day. They
paid a professional lawn service to keep the grass cut and the weeds down. In the late fall, a landscaper would come by to prune the azaleas and the boxwoods that guarded the front porch. Everything was symmetrical and neat. No wild things allowed.

Standing in the empty lot, Abby noticed the weeds were now up to her waist. What would be left at the end of the world? Some people said cockroaches, but her money was on the weeds. She wanted to walk through them, part them down the middle like a greeny-brown sea. But she didn't want ticks. Ticks, like the idea of leeches, made her shudder all the way down to her toes. Anything stuck to her skin and sucking her blood she found highly problematic.

So she didn't part the sea of weeds, but she did walk around the edges.