The Secret Grave

by Lois Ruby

  “Don’t bug her,” Scooter says. “I’m okay. Just … need … to catch my breath.”

  I know better. I should never have sent him into that closet where all that dust and cleaning stuff triggered his asthma. He’s doubled over, and his chest pumps like a panting dog’s. Hardly any air is hitting his lungs. I know the routine and fumble in his pocket for his inhaler: “Okay, Scooter, sit up straight. Take deep, slow breaths. In … out … in … out … in … out.” I shake the inhaler and hold it at his mouth. Three puffs, pause, shake, three more puffs. “You’re doing great.” Except he’s not. His face is the color of a whale: blue-gray.

  “Mom!” I screech, and she gets it right away, and bounds out of her office. She firmly pushes Scooter against the back of the rocking chair, tilting his chin up to open an airway. “Keep going, honey. Deep, slow breaths, that a boy. You’re coming around.” After about twelve more jagged in-and-outs, Mom says, “You’re my hero. You’re over the hump.” She shoulders away her tears of terror, which she only allows when the worst is over.

  I run for a cool washcloth for the beads of sweat dropping from Scooter’s forehead. “This stinks, doesn’t it?” He just nods; it’s too hard to talk. In a little while, Mom morphs into “Dear Bettina” again and returns to her office, but she leaves the door wide open just in case.

  Oh, Gracie! I forgot about her witnessing this whole thing. She’s smashed against the wall, clutching her panda and chewing the inside of her lip. Inching forward, she asks, “Okay, Shooter?” Then lays her head in his lap until his face pinks up. Gracie’s like a pup who senses when her human’s in trouble. Maybe she is part cocker spaniel, like Trick said.

  The afternoon clears up, and though it’s going to be a muddy bog in the forest, and I’ll be soaked by rain dribbling off the wet trees, I have to go back just to prove to myself that Cady exists. Franny’s working her shift at the Rib Shack today, and Trick is at baseball practice on the soggy field at Edwards Park. Mom and Dad are both working, Mom pounding keys in her office, and Dad in his third-floor architecture studio. It’s the perfect time to sneak away. But then …

  “Hannah,” Mom calls from behind her office door. “Do me a favor, honey. Put Gracie down for her nap, please. Round up a sippy cup of milk, her blankie, and her panda, and read her a book.”

  “Aw, Mom, do I have to?” I am not Gracie’s mother. Why should I have to put her to bed when I desperately want to get back to the woods?

  Mom frowns at her office door, waving pages hot off the printer. “Scooter can help if he’s feeling okay.”

  He’s downstairs, bouncing back from his asthma attack. He shouldn’t be climbing all those stairs yet.

  “Never mind, I’ll do it,” I whine. “Come on, Gracie, storybook time.”

  “Storybook!” Gracie flies down the hall. It’s lots easier to fool her into a nap than to fool Scooter into thinking there is truly a girl named Cady in the woods.

  I rock Gracie a while and plunk her into her crib with her lovies and run downstairs to where Scooter’s sprawled on the sofa with three stiff foam pillows behind him. Without even looking up from his Harry Potter book, he says, “What are you fixin’ to do about this Cady thing?” That’s Scooter, always getting right to the point, as though he hasn’t got time to mess around like regular people do. He’s a lot older than eleven on the inside.

  “Think I should go back and look for her?”

  Scooter shrugs. “Depends. Do you want to find her?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  Another page flips by. I wish I could read as fast as he does.

  “If you don’t know whether you want to find her,” Scooter says, “maybe you should just hang around here in Nightshade like a scared rat.”

  “I’m no kind of rodent, scared or otherwise. I am a woman who will make history!”

  Scooter continues reading while he talks. “You’re Rosa Parks. You’re Anne Frank. Hey, you’re the Queen of Sheba.”

  “I don’t have to be them. I’m me, Hannah Flynn. Now put that book down! You’ve read it six times already.”

  He tents the book across his stomach and gives me one of his penetrating wise-old-man looks. “Hermione would go looking in the forest.”

  “I wish you could come with me. I’m positive Cady will turn up this time.”

  “Tomorrow, or the next day.” He hides behind the book again, which tells me that he’s not quite back to his old self yet.

  “I’m going, with or without you. Don’t tell Mom.”

  Three fingers slide up from the top of the book. “Scout’s honor.”

  So I’m off into the forest, a message looping in my head over and over: Is it possible that I imagined Cady when it was dark and scary and strangely cold for a humid summer evening? That I invented her the way I just invented myself as the Ghost of Nightshade?

  A squirrel flips his tail from a tree limb at my eye level. He’s clutching an acorn, his yummy lunch, between tiny paws. He glares at me as if he’s saying, “I’m home. What are you doing here?”

  I slip between trees into the clearing. Pine needles crunch under my sandals as I move toward the lake. The humid air smells swampy. About twenty feet ahead of me, Moonlight Lake glimmers serenely in the midday sun. It’s so beautiful, so inviting, dappled with drops of water from a tree that hangs over the south shore of the lake. Cady’s here somewhere, I know it. In anticipation, my nerves tighten like guitar strings thrumming along with the insect song in the giant trees all around me.

  How weird! The tamped down path and stone bench are both gone. My heart sinks with disappointment. Or am I in the wrong part of the forest that I thought I knew so well?

  There’s no sign of Cady anywhere. And then suddenly there she is, peeking around the large trunk of a pine, but she looks totally different.

  “Hi!” Cady shouts. “You look surprised. You came here looking for me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but you don’t look the same—the cut-offs, the T-shirt, the flip-flops.”

  “I changed clothes.” Pointing to my blue cotton shift with the spaghetti straps, she says, “So did you, look at you.” She sounds angry. Why?

  Yesterday I wore cut-off jean shorts and that oversized T-shirt. Today’s a lot hotter, and dresses are airy and cooler. Why should she care what I wear?

  Her smile lights up the forest. “I just want us to be friends. See?” She pulls out the lower corners of her T-shirt so I can read the message: A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE.

  That echoes the shirt Sara and Luisa gave me.

  “Friendship, that’s what counts, not the clothes we wear,” Cady says.

  Really? Then why is she copying my clothes? At least her hair’s different from mine, an ashy brown still held on top of her head with those weird twigs, and curly around her cheeks. Mine’s dark and hangs down my back with some annoying waves that I’m always trying to straighten into Selena Gomez hair. Also, all that hair is sweaty. Maybe I should put my hair up like Cady does.

  I crack the awkward silence between us. “If we’re friends, shouldn’t I know your last name?”

  “Emerson? Conover? Gutierrez? Choose the one that fits me best.”

  I tuck my hair behind my ears, which I do when I’m nervous or I’m not sure what to say. “That makes no sense, Cady. Besides, you still haven’t told me where you come from and why you’re here in my forest.”

  “Your forest! Oh, that’s hilarious.” She throws her head back and offers a deep, throaty laugh. Some animal pokes out of a hollow in a tree trunk to see what’s going on. “A raccoon.” She answers the question I haven’t even asked, then leans over and pets the raccoon’s head and gently lifts out one of its babies, as cute and helpless as a newborn puppy.

  “Adorable! Can I hold it?”

  Cady pulls the raccoon away, lays it back into the tree-hollow den, and says, “Raccoons carry rabies and lots of other diseases that hurt humans.”

  “You’re human. You’re n
ot afraid.”

  Her pale eyes dim for a few seconds as she thinks that over. “Natural immunity. I suppose it’s because I live here; they know me,” she explains.

  “Live where, exactly?”

  Cady motions vaguely to someplace beyond the lake and invites me to sit beside her in a nest of soft pine needles.

  While I pluck away at a pinecone (he loves me, he loves me not, the he being adorable Garrett Flume), she turns to grab a picnic basket. For a flash of a second it seems her whole body in profile is as flat as a ruler. Must be the trees’ shadows playing tricks on my eyes, because when she turns to me again, she’s solid. A small rectangular bulge in her pocket is probably a phone.

  And then I automatically tap my own phone pocket, which doesn’t exist in my sundress, and realize, one, that I don’t have my phone with me, and two, even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to call for help if I were in trouble because the reception out here is nonexistent.

  I’m not in trouble. Cady is harmless. She holds the picnic basket on her lap. It’s the kind with lids that flap open on either side of the handle. She lifts the side farthest from me so I can’t see what’s in it.

  “Hungry?” She reaches into the basket.

  “What have you got? Oh, by the way, I told my brother Scooter about you.”

  “Why did you do that?” Cady snaps, slamming the picnic basket shut.

  Boy, she’s moody, but I can be just as snarky. “Because I tell him everything. Well, everything that’s important to me. But Scooter doesn’t believe you exist. He thinks you’re another one of my dumb tricks.”

  “Well, it just proves that Scooter Flynn doesn’t know everything. So, are we friends, Hannah-in-the-Middle?”

  “Don’t call me that. I hate it.”

  She nods with a faraway look, as if she’s sifting through mental folders to file away this piece of info. What a strange girl!

  “I understand what you’re saying about the middle thing,” Cady begins, “because I come from a big family, like you. A smart girl can be lost in a messy mob like that.”

  “Yes!” That’s something Sara and Luisa just don’t get, because there are only two kids in their families, not a whole tribe. They love the stop-and-go circus at Nightshade. Finally, somebody who understands me. Suddenly, I open like a sunflower.

  Honestly, it’s not like me to be such a chatterbox. Mom’s always having to coax me to talk. But she’s Mom; friends are different. I guess I’m missing Luisa and Sara, even though they just left yesterday. So before I know it, I’m blathering a mile a minute, and Cady’s listening as if she’s memorizing every detail, in case of a pop quiz.

  While Cady strips the stalks of a bunch of leaves, my mouth keeps running at warp speed.

  “My older sister Franny has these amazing long, colt-like legs. She looks fabulous in skinny jeans. But my legs are short, and I’m short-waisted, built more like my dad, so I wear dresses a lot. Jeans make me look stubby, and dresses are cooler in the summer anyway.” I stop suddenly, embarrassed that I’m rattling on so shamelessly. Cady gives me a spin of her hand that says, tell me more.

  “My mother and father both have offices at home. My dad’s an architect, so he travels to the site of wherever he’s building. Franny is the only one of us old enough to drive, but she works at the Rib Shack a bunch of hours, so she can’t take me anywhere. That dumps a lot of responsibility for my sister Gracie on my shoulders because Scooter has bad allergies and gets sick a lot, and my brother Trick is obsessed with baseball. It’s all he talks about and thinks about. He divides the food on his plate into first base, second, third, and home. I am so totally not a jock. It doesn’t matter to me whether the Atlanta Braves win a game, or even show up to play, or whether Trick gets to home plate at dinner.”

  “Same for me. Baseball, ugh.” Cady gazes at me, raises her eyebrows, encouraging more, which I give.

  “The thing about my sister Franny is that she just graduated, and she’s leaving at the end of summer. Going to college in Athens.”

  “Athens?” Cady asks with alarm.

  “Not Athens, Greece. Athens, Georgia, where the university is. I thought everybody knew that.” Where has she been? On Pluto?

  Again, I sense that Cady’s filing this information.

  “Franny’s a pain in the rear most of the time. She can’t wait to leave home, but I don’t want that time to come, ever. If you have an older sister, you know what I’m saying. Do you have one you hate and love at the same time?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “Which?”

  “I can’t say,” she replies, tilting her head as if she truly doesn’t know.

  “Isn’t that a little fact you’d remember about your family?”

  Quick as an eye blink, she changes the subject. “Tell me about your friends. Besides me.”

  A big sigh. “Luisa and Sara, my two best friends, are gone for the next few weeks. So’s everyone else I usually hang out with. They’re all at music camp, riding camp, or on exciting trips. One friend, Barb, stays with her father on a dude ranch in Montana all summer. Scooter’s it. But he’s a good it.”

  “Scooter,” Cady mutters. “Little brothers are a pain.” She pats my sweaty hand with my chipped blue nail polish. Franny usually does my manis and pedis, but she’s been too busy with final exams and graduation and her boyfriend, Cameron, and now her job. And she’s leaving in August.

  Cady’s hand is unnaturally cold, like she’s been juggling ice cubes, though today’s hot enough to fry an egg on the boulder I’m leaning against.

  “Bless your heart, you’re feeling a little lonely, aren’t you?” Cady says. “You don’t have to be. You have me, now, and I have lots of friends close by.” She motions toward that same vague area beyond the lake.

  I shift my eyes toward the water. “Don’t you just love Moonlight Lake? I do. Here’s something hilarious. Scooter calls that beautiful lake Pukey Pond. That’s a guy, for you!”

  Cady’s eyebrows nearly meet in a frown. She doesn’t like him? Everybody loves Scooter. She’s never even met him. Maybe she’s insulted by the Pukey Pond thing.

  “I’ll see if my friends would like to meet you,” she says, after a long pause.

  “Sounds great.” Who could she be talking about? I know every girl in Dalton between the ages of seven and seventeen. “You don’t mean boys, do you?”

  “No, no! Girls our age. You’d like them, I know you would.”

  Sheesh, I hope she doesn’t spill all my family secrets to her friends.

  “They’re a little shy about meeting a new person unless they’re sure she can be an honest and true friend.” She stares into my eyes, and I feel an electric charge zap through me. “Are you honest and true, Hannah?”

  “I am! I’m the most honest and true person alive!”

  “I believe that’s the truth,” Cady says.

  “Scooter thinks I’m—”

  She interrupts me. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “If it’s not pouring.”

  “Wear rain boots.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll be here. Will you?” she says abruptly.

  Boy, talk about rude! She listens like I’m the most fascinating girl since Katniss Everdeen (without the bow and arrow), then cuts me off cold. And that picnic basket. What’s that all about? She asked if I was hungry, but never offered me goodies from the basket, which she slammed shut before I could peek inside.

  What’s in that basket that she doesn’t want me to see?

  The next morning, I don’t waste a millisecond between breakfast and whatever Mom has in store for me, and I sprint back to the woods. This time Cady’s waiting for me just inside the entrance to the forest.

  “You been standing here since I left yesterday?”

  “No, just hoping you’d come this morning. Let’s go.” She weaves in and out of trees on bare feet, and I hurry to keep up, until we get to a nice, sunny clearing. She’s prepared it with soft leaves, which I sure hope are
n’t poison ivy.

  “What do you want to do?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Hide-and-seek?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair. I know these woods lots better than you do. I’d find you before you could say OMG.”

  It’s peaceful sitting here on these soft leaves, with my chin on my knees. For once, we’re dressed the same—Old Navy shorts and button-down shirts. Mom thinks it’s indecent to have these measly two inches of skin showing, so I don’t tie the knot above my waist until I’m out of her X-ray vision.

  “I know! Let’s play Truth or Dare,” Cady says, tying her shirt just like mine. She tucks her long hair behind her ears like I do. In fact, we look so much alike now that we could be sisters, or at least first cousins.

  “Sure!” I’ve played this game a million times at sleepovers.

  Cady drags a twig into the center of the leaves between us and spins it, which I never do for Truth or Dare, but whatever. The twig misses both of us, but a squirrel is watching us, maybe trying to figure out the rules of the game. “Okay, squirrel, choose: truth or dare?”

  “I don’t think she gets it. Spin again.” This time it points to me.

  “Truth or dare?”

  “Truth.” I might regret this!

  “Have you ever kissed a boy?”

  “On the cheek once at the sixth-grade picnic. It was a boy named Garrett Flume.” I feel my face flush at just the mention of his name. “Do you know him from school?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Garrett Flume had those tiny rubber band things connecting his upper and lower braces, and he opened his mouth so wide when my lips connected with his cheek that all the rubber bands snapped. Poor guy was so shocked that he swallowed a mouthful of rubber.”

  Cady has a great laugh. It feels so good to laugh together with a new friend who doesn’t already know every detail of my whole life.

  I spin the twig, rigging it so it points to Cady. “Truth or dare?”

  “Truth.”