The Second Life of Abigail Walker Read online

  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.

  And that’s when she met the fox.

  She wasn’t used to wild animals, unless you counted squirrels and rabbits, but they never made her hair stand on end. So when the small red fox suddenly appeared, its eyes searching her face, its delicate, pointed nose sniffing, sniffing, Abby had to stop herself from screaming. She was already shaky, newly escaped as she was from her life as a medium girl. And now, this fox, this creature. Would it kill her? Go for her jugular?

  The fox tilted its head to one side, as though wondering something. She—or he—was a small animal. Abby could have punted it across the lot. She had opposable thumbs, a highly developed cerebral cortex. She had the advantage here.

  But not really.

  Were foxes related to dogs? Abby racked her brain. They were, weren’t they? So why did this fox remind her of a cat? Sly as a fox, she thought, and then she thought of her dog, Bingo, who was smart when he needed to be, smart enough to hide under the couch when they made signs they were going out and about to crate him, but not sly. Not crafty.

  “Who are you?” Abby asked the fox. She squatted, held out her hand. Did she expect the fox to lick it? To rub its head against her fingers, hoping she’d scratch it behind the ears, the way Bingo would?

  The fox came closer, eyes still on her. “Do you live here?” Abby asked.

  Another step closer. Abby wasn’t scared anymore. She couldn’t believe how close the fox was getting. She held out her hand an inch from its snout. The fox opened its mouth. She thought the fox was yawning, she thought it might curl up at her feet and nap. And then its teeth came down on her hand. Lightly. As if to barely break the skin.

  Abby fell back, landed on her bottom, and watched the fox scurry off into the sea of weeds. The fox had bitten her! Her left hand began to tingle, and she examined the two small puncture wounds. Two tiny pearls of blood had risen on the skin. She knew she should wipe the blood away; if her mother saw it, she’d ask questions, rush her to the emergency room, have her stomach pumped, her appendix removed. She would forbid Abby to ever return to the empty lot.

  She wiped her hand on her jeans, then spit on it and rubbed the spit so that nothing was left to see except for two small dots. Fox dots, she thought, feeling oddly giddy.

  Abby’s mother, reading in the living room, only called “Hello” when she heard Abby’s footsteps in the hall, too involved in the lives of colonial America to give Abby her full frontal welcome. Once in her room, Abby flung her backpack onto her bed and opened her closet. She walked in and closed the door behind her.

  She always did her best thinking in her closet. When she was younger, she’d pretended her bedroom closet was her house. She drew pictures and hung them on the wall: a deliriously happy yellow daisy that towered over a pink cottage; a portrait of the sisters in Little Women, all in hoop skirts, like they’d gone to visit Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She tucked away snacks in shoe boxes. And candy, of course. Always candy.

  Abby had a secret candy life. The summer after fourth grade, when her father had told her mother to put her on a diet, she’d started hiding Kit Kat bars she bought at the pool snack bar in the pockets of her bathrobe and the navy blazer that her mother bought for her at a consignment shop, thinking it might look cute with jeans, and which Abby had never worn. After a day where her food choices had been low-fat yogurt, four-ounce chicken breasts, and Special K with skim milk, she slipped into her closet and dipped into her stash of chocolate.

  “She should be losing weight faster than this,” her father would tell her mother after Abby’s Saturday morning weigh-ins. “You’re not letting her snack, are you?”

  “People lose at different rates,” her mom would say, looking at Abby with a worried expression. Was there something wrong? Thyroid problems, maybe?

  Abby would shrug. “Maybe I should exercise more.”

  “We should all go bike riding!” her mother would exclaim, and her father would grunt—not a yes, not a no, more of a Get real. In order to go bike riding you had to have free time. Abby’s father had none. Wanted none was maybe more to the point.

  Sitting in her closet now, she could feel her hand throbbing slightly. Could the fox have been rabid? Maybe she should tell her mom about the bite. She didn’t want her arm to fall off, after all; she had enough problems without losing an arm. But that fox hadn’t been foaming at the mouth, hadn’t acted crazy. Crazy like a fox. Abby wondered what that meant. Well, she knew what it meant, sort of. Sometimes a person might act crazy to throw you off what they were really up to. Did foxes do that? They must, or why have the saying?

  After half an hour or so, the tingling stopped. Her mom called from downstairs that dinner was almost ready. Abby wondered if she would tell her about Kristen, how they weren’t friends anymore. She wanted to, but she knew she probably wouldn’t. Still, to be able to say, I am not friends with Kristen Gorzca, to make that declaration, it would have been like opening a door. Please come in, Abby would say to her mom. Meet the original Abigail Walker, a girl who does and says what she wants when she wants to.

  She stood, opened the closet door, and emerged. She looked at her hand. The marks were gone. She held out her arms, examined them, looked at her legs, patted her belly. All her parts looked and felt exactly as they had when she woke up that morning.

  But she was pretty sure she had become an entirely different person.

  poets thr
oughout the ages could not keep their pens off her sleek red fur, her thin, elegant nose. The fox reminded herself of this as she stood beside a chicken coop the next morning, contemplating an especially plump bird. She was too grand for this sort of thing—how common to rob a chicken coop! Leave the chickens to the raccoons, whom the poets had largely ignored and for good reason.

  Besides, enough carnage! Enough bones and blood, enough feathers flying without bodies to lift into the air.

  The fox moved away from the coop, which was in the middle of an ordinary backyard, not far from the field where she’d met the girl. She was taking the morning to explore the neighborhood, the green-turning-to-gold-and-brown neighborhood. She needed to look for traps, check the perimeters. It was, aside from the chicken coop and the empty field in the middle of all those houses, a run-of-the-mill kind of place. The houses were nice, but not mansions, and the yards were indistinguishable from one another. Boxwoods and broom shrubs, pyracantha. Mulch to keep down the weeds.

  The fox appreciated neighborhoods like this. If she kept her head down, no one bothered her, because no one was looking for her, and she was free to explore. For the most part, people stayed inside their houses, and when they came out, it was to get into their cars and drive somewhere else. They never thought about animals other than their own dogs and cats. Had no idea that their backyards and the woods were teeming with snakes and woodchucks, raccoons (horrible creatures) and mice and moles and voles. They would never guess in a million years that a fox was in their midst.

  On those mornings she desired attention, all the fox had to do was stand beneath a kitchen window. Sooner or later someone would look out, and then there would be a cluster of faces, fingers pointing, some oohing and aahing, an occasional scream. However people felt about her, her mere presence thrilled them.

  Of course.

  Taking a last, backward glance at the chickens, the fox slipped into the thin woods behind the coop and trotted in the direction of the girl’s house. The girl in the field. The fox had been careful to be gentle. All she had wanted to do was say, I’m here. I’m in your story now, and you’re in mine. Let’s see what happens next.

  That was the interesting part. You entered a story drawn by a scent, a rumor, a promising circumstance, and then you waited to see what came next. What came next for the boy in the covered wagon holding his baby brother and singing lullabies? For the president in his tall hat, sitting in his theater box, enjoying the play? What came next for the girl standing in the ocean of weeds, who held out her hand to the fox as though welcoming a friend?

  What came next for the fox?

  Back to the field, she thought, looking both ways before she crossed the road. Maybe she’d find a mouse scurrying in between the chick-weed and the thistles.

  One little mouse, she told herself. Where’s the harm in that?

  the next morning Abby strolled up the hill to the bus stop, a book about artists who painted flowers in her hand. It was part of an Art for Young People series that had been her mom’s when she was a girl. All of her mom’s childhood books and college textbooks were stored in the basement, and sometimes Abby liked to look through them and wonder what her mom was like before she became the sort of person who worried all the time.

  When her mom was nine, her older sister had died of leukemia. “That’s all I remember from my childhood,” she told Abby once. “Wendy sick, Wendy dying, Wendy dead. That’s all there was.” It was strange, Abby thought, that she had an aunt she’d never known. Aunt Wendy. Whenever she thought of Wendy, she pictured a grown woman like her mother, only Wendy had never grown up. She’d died when she was twelve. Abby would be twelve in April, and sometimes lying in bed at night she got a spooky, sad feeling as she imagined dying of leukemia before she even had a chance to be a teenager. Who would come to her funeral? What would they say about her? She imagined boys like Jay Franks and Reid Windersole telling everyone how much they’d secretly liked her, how she was really the nicest girl they knew, much nicer than popular Lily Sanderson and Hollis Holman.

  Sometimes when Abby read her mother’s old books she tried to imagine one of her brothers dying, but it was impossible. Last year John had run through the patio door trying to catch a football. The glass had shattered around him in huge shards, but he’d hardly even been scratched. And Gabe was always covered in scabs, but if Abby asked him did that cut hurt or that scrape, he just rolled his eyes. “I’m too tough to feel pain,” he’d say, which always cracked Abby up. Gabe was eight and wanted to be a hockey player when he grew up, even though he’d never ice-skated in his life. He just thought it was cool how hockey players were always beating up on each other and never getting in trouble for it.

  Abby was happy to be walking up the hill, reading a book about art and flowers and thinking about her brothers. She was happy that she didn’t have to worry if this was going to be a good Kristen day or a bad Kristen day. She was happy because she’d found a Kit Kat bar she’d forgotten about in her scrap paper drawer and snuck it into her lunch bag. Now that she wasn’t going to sit with the medium girls, she could have what she wanted. No one would be there making snarky faces as they checked out what she had to eat.

  When she got to the top of the hill, she glanced up from a painting of a sunflower so yellow that it practically glowed in the dark and saw Kristen and Georgia. When they saw her, they turned away. Abby’s stomach went icy cold, and then her skin got prickly hot because it infuriated her that they could make her feel scared and alone just by turning around. They weren’t the boss of her feelings! But a second later she thought maybe they were, because she suddenly wanted to change back to being someone who tried to get along with everyone else. She could beg. Or she could laugh. What a good joke! I can’t believe you took me seriously.

  Did her hand throb a little? She thought maybe it did, and she remembered the little red fox with its delicate nose and intelligent eyes. She hadn’t been scared of the fox, so why was she scared of Kristen and Georgia? She thought about how gently the fox had bitten her. It could have been so much worse! A fox could snap a chicken’s neck with its mouth if it wanted to. So maybe the fox was trying to tell her something by biting her. Maybe biting her was its crafty and sly way of getting her attention.

  Abby stood at the edge of the bus stop and kept thinking about the fox and what it had been trying to tell her. What could a fox know about her? Had the fox been sneaking around the edges of her life for a while now, noticing things, coming up with ideas to make Abby’s life better? Did the fox have some clever, foxy advice for what she should do about Kristen and Georgia?

  Even when the bus came lumbering down the road, Kristen and Georgia kept their backs to Abby. She started to giggle. There was something funny about how dramatic they were being, like actors in a movie about girls who didn’t like each other anymore. She had to hand it to Kristen, though. A lesser girl would have swung around and snapped at her—Oh, you think you’re so smart, so funny, so great—but not Kristen. Abby could see Georgia twitch. Georgia wanted to turn around and slap her. But Kristen put her hand on Georgia’s shoulder, and they stayed frozen in place.

  Abby got on the bus first. She took the seat behind the bus driver and returned to her book on art and flowers. One of the artists had been able to draw anything in the world from the time he was five years old, and people from miles around came to look at his pictures. When Abby was five, she’d built a Lego village under her bed and dreamed that one day she would be tiny enough to live in it.

  Kids filed by. One kid, the next kid, the next kid, the next, then Georgia, who stopped at Abby’s seat and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “You’re dead,” she hissed, and Abby felt confused. Really? Kristen and Georgia were going to kill her? Were going to have her killed?

  She blew into her fist. Her breath was warm. She wasn’t dead, and she probably wasn’t going to be dead anytime soon.

  “Okay,” Abby replied to Georgia. “That’s fine.”

  Mr. Lee was sit
ting at his desk when she walked into language arts, but when he saw her he stood and came over to her desk. Watched Abby wrestle her LA notebook from her backpack.

  “You doing okay?” he asked quietly.

  Abby wished he would just forget about what had happened in class yesterday. She was a different person now. Didn’t he know that?

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “Everything’s fine.”

  When Myla and Casey walked into the classroom, Abby smiled at them to see what would happen, and wasn’t surprised when they acted like they hadn’t seen her. She blew into her fist again. She still wasn’t dead.

  Don’t get cute, her father liked to tell her, and Abby heard him say it again as she waved goodbye to Myla and called, “See you later, Casey,” at the end of the period.

  Who was being cute?

  She crammed her books back into her backpack. She had PE next, and it was a dress-out week. She wondered if the bleachers would be pulled out from the wall in the gym. If they were, she might be able to hide underneath them, the linoleum cool beneath her legs. She wouldn’t have to spend the entire period pulling her shirt so it stretched enough to hide the tops of her legs in the stupid gym shorts that made her feel practically naked. Most sixth-grade girls had toothpick legs, skinny bird legs, but not Abby. She had Jell-O knees, marshmallow thighs. It was humiliating.

  A shadow fell across her desk. When Abby looked up, Anoop Chatterjee was standing in front of her. He was such a skinny, slim-jim kind of kid, she was surprised he cast a shadow at all.

  “I am correct that you have B lunch?” he asked, and when she nodded, he said, “Would you care to join me?”