Wish Girl (7 page)

I
was grounded for the rest of my life, Mom said. She sent me to my room for the evening. But then loudmouth Laura reminded Mom that was where I liked to be most, so she changed her mind, making me stay in the living room with the family.

The living room was the noisiest part of the house. Carlie had a set of wooden blocks she was using to clack together while Dad watched
Die Hard
at full volume. Mom was slamming around drawers on her filing cabinets in the corner of the room she'd decided to use for an office, and Laura had staked out the phone. How she could even hear what her friend was saying with all the noise was beyond me.

I had a headache, of course. And that reminded me of Annie. Her headaches must have been much worse. And I had made her feel awful. How could I apologize? Even though I knew where the camp was now, I couldn't get there since Mom would be watching me like a hawk.

I didn't understand why she cared about me being gone. I hadn't gotten hurt. And it wasn't like she had told me she'd planned some big family brunch in Austin. If I'd known she'd made plans that included me, I wouldn't have run off.

Probably.

I sighed and rubbed at the headache acupressure spot again. Even if I could get to Annie, I wasn't sure how to tell her I was sorry. She had looked so upset. Crying, I thought. I had made a Make-A-Wish girl cry. It didn't get much more awful than that.

I sort of deserved the headache.

The next day, I got more than I deserved: Carlie Stone, cutting two teeth, for nine hours while Mom went to work.

“Laura,” I repeated at the bathroom door. “Would you please come out? I have to get a spare diaper for Carlie.” My repeated attempts to dislodge Laura from the bathroom all morning so that I could use it had gone unanswered. I'd ended up using a bush outside, much to Carlie's delight. Of course, the possibility of outdoor peeing had made her so excited that she'd refused to wear a diaper since. Now she'd started shredding them the second I put them on her.

“I said just a minute,” Laura yelled.

“It's been an hour and a half!” I surprised myself by raising my voice. Surprised my dad, too, it turned out.

“Wow, was that you, Peter?” He fake-punched me on the arm as he walked down the hall, carrying an old amplifier he'd bought for Laura at a garage sale a few months before, so she could play while he drummed. “Try not to burst my eardrums.”

I glared at his back. That amp was one of the reasons we'd been evicted, I thought. I should have cut through the cord when Dad first brought it home. It would have saved me a lot of trouble.

“Peep!” Carlie had escaped from her playpen—her new trick for the day—and was standing at my side, buck naked.

“Carlie, really? Five diapers? I'm just gonna use a pillowcase.”

I had a thought:
Laura's pillowcase would do.

I had worked it halfway off her pillow when I heard Dad call out my name. “Peter? You've got company.”

Company? Annie!
I dropped the pillow, wrapped the pillowcase around Carlie and tucked her under one arm, then ran to the front of the house. The front door was wide open, and Dad was right outside, talking to someone.

It wasn't Annie, though. I could hear male voices. Boys?

“Here ya go, Carlie,” I whispered, plunking her down in the playpen and handing her a few graham crackers. She wasn't supposed to eat them outside of the high chair—Mom said they turned into cookie cement when she chewed them up—but I didn't have a diaper for her, and I wasn't going to meet strangers at the door holding a naked baby.

When I got to the door, I was even more glad I'd left Carlie behind.

Because the two kids right outside were holding a dead turkey vulture. They were the bird killers.

I didn't know what to think—besides
gross
. The kid holding the dead bird by its feet was taller than me, tall enough that the head of the bird just brushed the dirt as he held it. He looked older, too, maybe fourteen. The other kid was ten, maybe eleven, but he had a hard glint in his eye that I'd seen in some kids in San Antonio. Like he might want to punch me in the stomach to see what I'd had for breakfast. Definitely not a normal ten-year-old.

The guys looked me over, and I saw the older kid try to hide a smile. That was when I realized I was still holding Carlie's most recent torn-up diaper. I tossed it back through the doorway and stepped out into the sunshine.

“Hey, Peter,” Dad said, oblivious to the looks the guys were giving me—and him. “These two boys live just down the road a mile or so. I met their parents at the gas station when your mom and I checked the place out the first time. Remember I told you about them? Why don't you go play with them for a while?”

The younger kid laughed once and repeated, “Yeah, come
play
with us.”

“I'm grounded,” I reminded Dad in an undertone. I didn't even mention the giant dead bird the older kid was swinging back and forth, its reddish-pink head smearing the dust with blood.

“Well, you're ungrounded now,” Dad said, reaching behind my back to shove me out the door. I tripped over the stoop and almost fell forward onto one of the kids. “They invited you over to their house. What your mother doesn't know won't hurt her. Just be back by lunch.”

He shut the door before I could even come up with an excuse other than “These boys look like trouble,” which was what I was thinking.

“So, you're Peter,” the younger one said. “I'm Jake.”

“I'm Doug,” the other one said, swinging the vulture a little harder now, toward me. The head of the poor thing brushed my knee. I could tell Doug was waiting to see what I would do. If I would freak out. I just shrugged and stepped to the side so the vulture wouldn't crack me in the stomach on the next swing.

“You like to hunt?” Jake asked, stepping with me. I started walking down the driveway, but not too fast. Jake pulled something out of his pocket—a Twizzler—and stuck it in his mouth so it hung out like a cigarette.

“I don't have a gun,” I said. “Do you?”

“How'd you think we killed this buzzard?” Doug asked. He talked slowly, like he had to think over each word before it came out. “With our hands?” Then they both laughed.

“Let's try that next time,” Jake said. He looked at me, waiting for me to speak.

“I'd like to see that,” I lied. I couldn't imagine looking at a bird and thinking,
I'd like to kill that
. Birds just seemed . . . too fragile, and beautiful. Not that I would ever tell these boys, or anyone, I felt that way.

“What kind of guns you got?” I said instead.

“Pellet rifles,” Jake said. “Dad took our .22 away after the cat.” He darted that glance at me again, the one that dared me to say something.

The cat? I wasn't even going to ask. We kept walking, down the road and toward a street where I thought I'd seen some sort of mobile home. “So, you're supposed to be grounded,” Jake said, kicking at a rock. “Your parents just what? Take away your TV and stuff?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I get all the chores.”

“Just grounded, huh? Nothing worse?”

“Um, no.”

“Must be nice,” he mumbled and wiped his nose on his arm. “Wish my dad would stop with just grounding me.”

Getting grounded was
nice?
I wondered what happened to these guys when they got in trouble. I was going to say something, but Jake glanced up at me with a cold gleam in his eye that froze my tongue.

“What'd you get grounded for?” Doug asked. He hefted the vulture over one shoulder.

I swallowed. “I ran off.”

“Where to?” Doug asked, chewing on the Twizzler. He kept rubbing the end in his hands, twisting it around his nails and fingertips. His hands were covered with dirt and blood. From the vulture, I assumed.

“There's this valley,” I started, “with no houses—”

“The valley of death?” Doug hooted. “No way!”

The valley of death?
I shook my head, wondering if they meant some other place. My valley was anything but. “I don't think so. It was just a big valley with a stream at the bottom, some kind of big trees, and—”

“That's it!” Jake said. “Whoa, you got all the way to the bottom of the valley of death?” He examined me, cataloguing all the mosquito bites, scratches, and bee stings. Come to think of it, both the boys were covered with bites and stings, like they'd been attacked.

“Looks like you got stung up pretty bad down there, didn't ya?” Jake said. “Us too. Be careful. Bugs are the least of it. That valley's got the best hunting, but . . . ” His eyes cut to his brother. “Bad things happen to ya if you go down in it. Things that don't make sense.”

“I got that feeling,” I said. Then I remembered the gunshots from the day before. “Have you gone hunting over there?”

“Yesterday,” Doug said. “Rabbit. Almost got it. Until the bugs.”

The bugs?
I almost asked, but then I realized: When the mosquitoes and wasps had flown up the hill, like they were late for something . . . they were going to sting these kids. To chase them out of the valley.

So the valley
was
magic. It knew things.

I didn't say anything as we walked, but Jake kept talking, like I'd asked a question. “We found the rabbit on this side of the hill, but then it ran into the valley—they know they're safe over there.”

“Think it,” Doug said.

“Yeah, for now they're safe. But we figured something out with the buzzard here,” and Jake took one of the vulture's wings and stretched it out. “We climbed just to the top of the hill for this one. It was sitting on a dead branch barely down in the valley. We were so close—”

“So close!” Doug giggled.

“Shut up, I'm telling it. We were right over him. The wind was coming from the valley like it does. Didn't smell us. We weren't quite in the valley, see? So it couldn't get after us. And we went right up behind this vulture with our pellet rifles.”

“Bam!” Doug said, shaking the bird.

“What are you going to do with it?” I nodded toward the bird, wishing I didn't feel so much like throwing up every time I looked down at it. It wasn't a beautiful creature up close. It was scraggly, its head reminding me of an angry old man's. But I'd seen thousands of turkey vultures flying overhead, soaring on heat currents. To kill one just for fun . . . it was sick.

“Well, we ain't gonna eat it,” Doug said. “Turkey buzzard'll make ya sick.” He said it like he knew.

Jake nodded. “We're gonna go throw it up on Old Lady Empson's porch. The Colonel's wife.”

They were going to dump a dead bird on a harmless—okay, slightly crazy—old woman's doorstep? “Why?”

“Hate her,” Doug said as Jake peered off into the distance at something. “She got my gun taken.”

“Taken?”

“Told Dad I was shooting pets.”

“Oh,” I said, remembering his comment. “Did you shoot her cat or something?”

Doug didn't answer, just laughed, and swung the dead bird around his head like he was going to throw it at me. I ducked.

I was going to be sick if I hung around these guys for a second longer.

“Hey, I got a better idea,” Jake said. “Let's take it to the summer camp. We can throw it in the pool. They'll hate it.”

“The Make-A-Wish camp?” I wasn't sure I could get any more horrified. Who had raised these kids, Jack the Ripper and Freddy Krueger?

“Nah, it's Doublecreek,” Jake said, reaching for the final tip of Doug's Twizzler. Considering, he held it out to me. “Want the last bite?”

I think he was trying to be nice. I shook my head and muttered, “No, thanks.”

“Isn't the camp for kids with cancer, though?” I said after he'd given the last bit back to Doug, who stuck it in his mouth with the same hand he'd been using to hold the dead vulture. Then he licked his finger.