The Second Life of Abigail Walker (5 page)

the tiniest
sounds caused her to jump. Birds alighting on branches, squirrels rustling through piles of leaves in search of their stashes.
What, what, what.
The fox panicked, heart racing, head throbbing.
Who's there? What's happening?

The fox reminded herself that wherever she went, there was no avoiding the crack of a stick, a muffler's backfire, a blue jay quarreling with its mate. City or country, noises popped up from nowhere. No need to run for her life every time an acorn hit the tin roof of a backyard shed.

She calmed herself with mantras.
No sand here,
she'd tell herself, digging into the red clay dirt beneath her paw. No soldiers, no bombs, no trucks barreling toward the sandbags, no explosions thundering across the desert.

No. She was in her field. Flowers and tall grasses waved in the breeze, scattering seeds. Birds sang in the trees. And the girl. She belonged to the field too. The fox liked the girl, liked how her reddish-brown hair was as pretty as a wren's wing in the late afternoon sun, liked how she'd crouched down and tenderly reached out her hand. Who was tender to a fox? Other hands had taken aim at her, had been raised against her in fear, but not the girl's. The night before, waking from a nightmare, the fox thought of the girl, and her heart fell back into place.

The nightmare. It was the same nightmare she had every night. The soldiers stood outside the building—the soldiers who had looked like boys to her, six of them, laughing, cutting up, two of them acting out some scene from the night before. The fox had only just stepped into the story, drawn by the scent of sun on sand, the
succulent desert flowers, and the sound of young men laughing. She was sitting in the front seat of a Jeep, listening to the soldiers' stories, when a truck came barreling through the gate, picked up speed, and crashed through sandbags. And then the fox was watching from the air—she was flying through flames!—and there was a soldier flying with her, they were flying together, and then the soldier disappeared, and the fox was falling, falling, picking up speed, she was about to explode against the ground—

The fox always woke up before she hit. But even as her eyes opened to the world around her, the world that was now this field and its flowers and weeds and birds, she could still hear the thundering.

No sand here,
she told herself. And the soldier? Still flying, maybe. That was the most she could hope for.

abby's plan
was to spend most of Saturday in the yard across the street, drawing plans for the houses she might live in one day and thinking about things. She wanted to think about Anoop and why he had asked her to eat lunch with him. She wanted to think about the fox's bite, how it might have changed her. She felt different, though when she looked at herself in the mirror after her shower, she still looked exactly the same, with her doughy stomach and moon-round face.

She'd dragged a beach chair behind a wide oak
so that she couldn't be seen from the road, and placed a cooler filled with bottled water, her drawing pad and pencils, and frozen red grapes beside it. She liked how grapes tasted sweeter when you froze them, more like candy. If the fox showed up, she'd offer it one, or the whole bunch, if that's what the fox wanted. She'd promise the fox that the grapes weren't sour, the way they were in the Aesop fable. She would never give
her
fox sour grapes.

Abby sat down and studied the weeds around her. No one had planted them, no one stopped by and doused them with fertilizer, but here they were, growing like crazy. To Abby, the weeds looked triumphant. There had been a house here once, and now there was a .35-acre field of Queen Anne's lace and milkweed and tall grasses that Abby liked to imagine whispering,
We win, we win
when she walked past.

She looked at a weed with five purple petals. Why wasn't it considered a flower? Abby knew if her mom saw it in their yard, she'd pluck it out straightaway. This particular weed did look sort of sloppy, Abby supposed, and maybe flowers
had to be neat and even. Still, who got to decide these things? Who got to point at plants and say,
You belong in a beautiful garden, and you deserve to be pulled up by the roots and chucked in the yard-waste bin?

Abby popped a grape in her mouth and wondered if the people who bought this lot would mow all the weeds down. She frowned, already knowing the answer. If
she
bought the lot, she'd make a garden out of the weeds. She'd give them all beautiful names she made up, like
lapizuras azula
, and put a pretty fence around them. And then she'd build a house that looked just right surrounded by weeds.

What kind of house would that be, though? Abby pulled her drawing pad out of the cooler and set it on her lap. A tree house might be right for a yard full of weeds, only all the trees on this lot were at the edges. Could you have a tree house that stretched all the way across the yard, a tree house the size of a regular house? How would you get electricity to it? Abby definitely wanted electricity so she could watch TV and turn on lights at night.

Maybe another kind of house, then, one built lower to the ground. Maybe a cabin with a hole built right in the center of the floor so that the weeds could grow inside. She squinted her eyes, imagining, and started to draw.

After lunch,
Abby brought three chocolate chip cookies wrapped in a paper napkin back to the chair with her, and the
Field Guide to Birds of North America
, which she had now renewed three times, in case any new species had flown into the yard at the tail end of summer. She'd been staring intently at a small, black bird with a red head and yellow eyes when she heard Kristen's voice coming over the tops of the weeds.

“We both have to knock on the door,” Kristen said. “It would look weird if you were standing out here in the road.”

“But what if her mom answers the door?” Georgia's voice replied. “How am I supposed to act all friendly and nice when basically I think her daughter is a piece of dirt?”

“All you have to do is stand there,” Kristen insisted. “I'll do the talking.”

Abby heard them crossing the road to her house. She heard the sound of gravel crunching under shoes. She heard the sound of feet stomping up her front steps. She ducked low in her chair, just in case they looked across the street. She was hidden behind a tree, but Kristen was the sort of person who could sniff out a hiding place in no time flat.

The question was, who would answer the front door? Her father was working, and her mother had gone to meet her friend Mary Katherine for lunch. If Gabe answered, he'd yell Abby's name up the stairs a couple of times, then shrug at Kristen and Georgia when she didn't yell back. If they asked him where he thought she was, he'd shrug again and close the door.

But if John answered the door, he might try to be helpful. John had always been nice to Claudia when she came over, unless he was with his friends. When he was with his friends, he seemed to feel like he had to roll his eyes a lot and call Abby and Claudia twerps and dweebs and ask them why they didn't have boyfriends yet. On
his own, he was friendly as long as they didn't go into his room.

After John called around for Abby, he might offer suggestions. Had they checked over at Mrs. Vann's house? Sometimes on Saturdays Abby helped her sort her recycling. Or—and here he might look across the street and think for a moment—he'd seen her wandering around over there every once in a while. Maybe she was reading behind one of those trees.

The only thing Abby knew for sure was that she couldn't let them find her, even though she was probably just putting it off. Sooner or later they'd back her into a corner and—well, she didn't know what they'd do. She was dead, Georgia had said, and even though Abby knew that was only a figure of speech, still, a group of girls could kill you in their way. They could text evil rumors about you and make everyone stop talking to you, as though you didn't even exist. Abby had heard the stories.

She quickly folded her beach chair and stuffed the field guide and her sketchbook and pencils into the cooler. The back of the lot ran up against
a low wooden fence, one that a five-year-old could climb. She leaned her chair against a post—she could pick it up later—and dropped the cooler on the other side. No one would think anything of an abandoned beach chair, but she thought the cooler might look suspicious.

Abby climbed over the fence easily and hopped to the ground. Picking up the cooler, she wound her way through a stand of trees to the edge of the next yard, hoping no one would be outside. When she got to the driveway, she saw a man over by some rosebushes with a sprayer, but his back was turned to her. She quickly made her way to the street.

The street was called Blue Valley Lane. Even though her bus picked up kids here, she really didn't know any of them. She didn't know how long the street was. Did it run parallel to Ridge Valley Road, or did it start to curve off in some other, completely different direction?

Maybe Blue Valley Lane emptied out into some interesting place she'd never heard about, a shopping center with an ice cream parlor, or a pond next to a tree where she could look for new
birds. She turned right and began to hike along the sidewalk.

After she'd been walking for a few minutes, she noticed that a dog was following her. At first she made friendly noises at it,
hey, boy, good boy
, but it didn't come any closer. It stayed about ten feet behind her. She guessed it was some kind of hound; it had long ears and a brown nose and was speckled black and red, with freckles across its face.

The dog wasn't friendly or unfriendly. It was just there, and after a while Abby forgot about it and started looking around. The houses on Blue Valley Lane looked pretty much like the ones on Ridge Valley Road. They all seemed to be half house, half garage, and most of the houses were close to the street, so there was more backyard than front.

Abby glanced at the dog again, and that's when she saw Kristen and Georgia riding their bikes down the street in her direction. They were still about two blocks away. Abby didn't think they'd seen her yet, but her knees got wobbly anyway.

I've got to get out of here,
she thought, and looked wildly around, in case there was an obvious bush to jump under or a car to duck behind.

The dog seemed unconcerned. Without any ado, he trotted across the street and scampered down a driveway. Abby decided to follow him. Maybe this was where he lived. Maybe his owners would come to the door and invite Abby inside for a drink of water. She wasn't supposed to go into strangers' houses, but it had to be safer than letting Kristen and Georgia catch up with her.

But the dog didn't go to the house. Instead he led Abby to a steep hill at the end of the driveway. Abby crashed down after him into the woods, the cooler smashing into her leg with each stride. The air turned cool as soon as they crossed into the deep shade, and Abby could hear running water. She followed the dog for another fifty yards, and there it was, a creek.

And on the other side of the creek, a boy.

how do
you know Wallace?” the boy called to her from across the creek. He was kneeling by the water and poking a stick at something.

Wallace? He must have meant the dog. “I don't know him, actually. He's just been following me. And now I guess I'm following him.”

“He's a pretty nice dog,” the boy said. “I was afraid I'd be allergic to him, but I'm not. I'm allergic to a lot of other things, though.”

“My brother's allergic.” Abby set the cooler on the ground next to a large rock. She felt like
she was in a safe place now and could take a minute to rest. “But we got the kind of dog that allergic people can live with.”

“A bichon frise?”

“No, a cockapoo. He's really nice.”

The boy nodded. “My dad says hypoallergenic dogs cost, like, seven hundred dollars.”