“Yeah,” Mark said. “It was amazing!” And he walked into the room and over to the bush. Chance watched from the cloakroom in horror. That bush had nothing to do with Mark. It was not Mark’s business. And now it was turning out that Mark had done it already. Two years ago.
“I’m ready,” Chance said, stepping forward. But both foster brother and teacher ignored him. They were standing together, gazing through the netting that would keep the butterflies from escaping, and talking together in low voices.
“I said I’m ready,” Chance said again, more loudly this time.
“Yeah, all right, Chance. Give me a break, okay?”
It was not okay, and it got worse. “We seem to have lost one,” Ms. Samson was saying.
“That’s awful!” Mark responded. “Remember when that happened to us? We were so sad.” Chance almost forgot his horror that Ms. Samson was telling Mark about the lost caterpillar in his shock that Mark could talk like that.
“No, no, none have died. At least I hope not! One disappeared,” Ms. Samson said.
That was it. This conversation had gone way further than it should have. Chance gathered himself together and spoke more words to his foster brother than ever before.
“We have to go right now, Mark. Angie said. We’re all going out somewhere or something. Remember? She said to set off right away after school.” Chance reached out and pulled on Mark’s sleeve while he spoke. Mark flicked his hand away in disgust. But he also stared at Chance in surprise at the insistence and at all those words.
“All right, off you go, boys,” Ms. Samson said. “Come back anytime, Mark.”
Chance hoped Mark had missed that last bit.
As they were walking together that day, Mark seemed to forget that Chance was beneath contempt. Or maybe he just forgot who Chance was altogether. He talked on and on at him about being in Ms. Samson’s class and about raising butterflies.
He was stealing the whole thing, doing it first, knowing everything already. At least he didn’t know about Matilda. Or so Chance thought.
“So, one of the caterpillars is missing. I’d be willing to bet you know something about that, kid,” Mark said.
For the first time in Mark’s company, Chance was too angry to be scared. “Yeah, so one’s missing. What’s that got to do with you?” he said, glaring up at Mark.
Surprise and sudden anger stopped Mark in his tracks. He looked around. They were walking by the overgrown vacant lot. No one was in sight. Without warning, he grabbed Chance by the shoulders and spoke again, this time in his slowest, meanest voice. With each sentence, his fingers dug deeper.
“I’ll say it has something to do with me. If you’ve done something to mess up Ms. Samson’s butterflies, that has a whole lot to do with me. And I can tell you that my mum and dad wouldn’t want a kid in the house who would do something to mess up a class project.”
With no warning, Chance head-butted him. Rage drove the top of his head right into Mark’s chest. Hard. Mark grunted and let go. Chance ran. He had only a block to go. Looking back when he turned up the walk, he could see Mark still standing in the same spot. He flung himself into the house, ignored Angie’s “hello” from the living room, took the stairs three at a time and shut his bedroom door behind him with a gasp of relief.
He pulled back the curtain and grabbed the box off the sill. No, Matilda was not attaching. She was curled up half under a leaf in the corner. She looked awfully still. He gave her a poke. But no, she was all right. She moved under his finger. Just sleeping, he guessed.
But a seed of worry planted itself in his mind.
He put the box on his bedside table, where he could watch it, and sat down on the bed, rubbing his head. It was sore where he had bashed it into Mark’s bony chest. Thinking of the impact, he grinned in satisfaction. That would teach Mark to leave him and his caterpillar alone.
Then he thought of what Mark had said. That Angie and Doug wouldn’t want him if they knew what he had done. No. Angie and Doug were keeper foster parents. If you were a baby, you could cry and cry. If you were older, eight years old, for example, you could break things. You could get three out of twenty on a spelling test. And you could keep a stolen caterpillar in your room. Angie and Doug didn’t send kids back. For a moment Chance wondered why he wanted to stay in this house anyway, with a screaming baby and a boy who hated him. Who could say? But he did.
A sharp knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. He leaped to his feet and was standing with Matilda’s box thrust behind him when the door opened. Doug stood there. Mark was hovering behind him.
“I’d like to see you downstairs, please. In the kitchen,” Doug said. The words were stern, but his eyes were warm. Chance was pretty sure that Doug knew that he wouldn’t head-butt Mark without some sort of a reason. Still, his heart pounded. He stood, hands hidden behind his back, and waited for Doug and Mark to turn and go.
“Hey, ask him what he’s got behind his back!” Mark said. “Come on, Dad. It’s that caterpillar. I’m telling you.”
But Doug would not be drawn in. “Chance is meeting us in the kitchen,” he said to his son. “You go ahead.”
So Mark was forced to lead the way. And Chance was able to put Matilda back behind the curtain before making his own way slowly downstairs.
Chapter 11
Mark was so angry that Doug got annoyed with him and sent him away. “Yes, I’ve seen the mark on your chest, son,” he said. “I agree that there’s no excuse for that, but I still want to hear Chance’s side of the story. Off you go, so Chance and I can talk together quietly.”
Mark stamped his way out of the kitchen, but he didn’t say a word in argument. Chance should have sensed danger. But he was worrying instead. Worrying about being sent away. These are keeper foster parents, he repeated to himself. Still, keeper or no, a foster parent was not the same as a real parent.
Chance kicked at his chair leg and kept his eyes on the table. It was that hard plastic stuff, and it had lots of interesting cracks, stains and scratches. Doug talked on and on in his gentle voice, and the words floated away, up, up and away. Like balloons, Chance thought.
Finally Doug reached out and gripped Chance’s shoulder.
Like son, like father, Chance thought, but he stopped kicking.
“Look at me,” Doug said, sharply now. Chance looked but gave another kick at the same time.
“We do not accept violence in this house,” Doug said. “Neither you nor Mark is permitted to hurt the other in any way. Is that understood?”
In answer, Chance wiggled his shoulder, still in Doug’s grip. He wasn’t holding on hard, but it hurt because of Mark’s earlier attack.
Doug let go. Chance nodded his head once.
“All right. If you refuse to tell me your side of the story, you’d best be off.”
And Chance was off, in an instant. Out the door, into the hall and up the stairs. As he neared the top, fear entered his heart. He could hear music from Mark’s room. His door was closed. Chance headed for his own room, but he already knew what he would find.
His own door, carefully shut behind him when he went downstairs, stood open. From the doorway, he could see that the curtain had been pulled back.
The windowsill was bare.
Matilda was gone.
Chapter 12
At least Mark’s door wasn’t locked. Chance opened it as quietly as he could.
Mark was sitting at his desk, hunched over something. Chance didn’t have to see it to know what it would be.
“Give her back,” he hissed. He did not want Doug to come upstairs to investigate.
Mark looked up. “It’s dying,” he said.
“Matilda’s not an it. She’s a she. And what do you mean? What have you done to her?”
“It. She. Doesn’t make much difference now. You starved her to death, Chance,” Mark said.
“No, I didn’t. I gave her leaves, real leaves. Way better than that goop at school.”
“But that
goop is made out of stuff that caterpillars like. I don’t know what these ones are, but anyone with any brains could see that they’re too thick and hard for a caterpillar to eat. Anyway, she’s not eating them.”
Chance had walked close enough to see Matilda where she was curled up now, in Mark’s palm. He didn’t try to take her back. He just stood.
He had thought that he had known everything about painted ladies. Everything. Except for the one thing he needed to know to keep Matilda alive, to let her become a butterfly. She was lying there starving, and it was his fault.
“She can’t die, Mark, she can’t. There must be some kind of leaves she likes. You have to help me.”
“It’s a little late for that,” Mark said, chewing on the side of his thumb as he spoke. Then he was quiet for a long time.
Chance burst into the silence, “I’m taking her back to school tomorrow. But there must be some leaves around here that she’ll eat. Come on, let’s go find all the kinds of leaves we can!”
“Not so fast, kid. You’ve done your bit, stealing her, starving her. I’m going to take her back to school tomorrow myself. If she survives the night.”
If Chance could have grabbed Matilda out of Mark’s hand right then, he would have, but Mark’s fingers were curled around her. Anything that Chance did might hurt Matilda more than it would hurt Mark. Every single thing that he felt like doing would only make things worse.
So he tried something that he didn’t feel like doing at all.
“Please, Mark,” he said, hating how raw the words sounded in the room. “Please don’t take her away from me.”
“I have to,” Mark said. “Ms. Samson would want me to.”
And then Chance knew what to say, because he knew that that wasn’t true. “No, she wouldn’t. She would want you to help me. She would want us to work together. And she would want us to bring Matilda back to school first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Well, you’re right about the last thing anyway,” Mark said, seeming to relent. “All right, you can help me get food for her. Then we’ll see.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’? She’s my caterpillar. You can’t do that.”
“Watch me,” said Mark. “You follow my rules, or just get out of here right now.”
Chance knew that he didn’t have much choice. “Fine,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to go find thistles,” Mark said. “I remember Ms. Samson said they like thistles and lots of other plants I can’t remember, but I remember the thistles. I thought it was weird. So prickly. But that’s what she said.”
“I bet there’re some in the vacant lot,” Chance said. And they were off.
The thistles were there. But they were small and green in May; it took Chance and Mark a long time to decide they were thistles at all. Finally they agreed to let Matilda be the judge.
Doug was in the front hall, holding Louise, when the two of them burst through the front door. He stood and stared, speaking not a word, as the two enemies ran up the stairs full tilt, hands full of greenery. Even Louise seemed to realize that she was witnessing something out of the ordinary. She was as silent as Doug.
This time Chance held Matilda, along with several soft, downy leaves, while Mark emptied the old leaves into the garbage and filled the container with the rest of the fresh ones. The little caterpillar lay curled in Chance’s palm, taking no notice of the food so close by. Chance picked her up and placed her right on a leaf and then lowered it into the container along with the others.
“Let’s just leave her alone now,” he said. “Maybe if we’re not around, she’ll eat.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I’m keeping her here, though, in my room. We’ll take her back to school together tomorrow morning, like you said.”
Chance stood for a moment, looking at Mark, seeing his determination. Then he looked at the container, Matilda invisible inside among the leaves, maybe eating, maybe not.
Well, Mark had to sleep sometime.
“All right,” Chance said and marched out of the room.
Back in his own room, he flung himself on his bed. As he rolled onto his back, he saw that Mark had followed him and was standing in his doorway.
“Maybe now you understand why you shouldn’t have taken the caterpillar, Chance,” he was saying, his words tight. Chance’s head throbbed. Whatever Doug might say, Mark had deserved that head in the chest.
“Get out,” Chance said, sliding off the bed. “We’re taking her back tomorrow, like you said. And she’s in your room right now. So just get out.”
“She’ll probably be dead by then,” Mark said. But he left.
Chapter 13
Chance slammed his door and spun around, fists clenched. No more did Mark make him freeze up inside. Now he made him mad. Pretending to help and then taking the first chance to attack. Trying to teach him a lesson. And saying she would die! She wasn’t going to die. She was probably munching away already. But Chance was not going to go back to Mark’s room to check.
He didn’t go down for supper either. Just ignored their calls. Maybe they would send him back. And maybe that would be best anyway.
Angie brought him his dinner.
She knocked, walked in and put a tray on his desk. “I don’t like a member of the family refusing to come to the table, but I won’t have you going hungry either,” she said, her words as brisk as her knock. Then her voice softened. “I know Mark’s hard on you, and that is the last thing you need to cope with.” She pulled out the desk chair, took a seat and said, “But he’ll come around. He doesn’t understand why we weren’t happy with him, why he wasn’t enough for us. It’s funny. It’s precisely because we love him so much that we wanted more children to love.”
Chance stared at her in astonishment, but she just smiled and went on, “Because we love Mark so much, we wanted to bring you and Louise into our home so we could love you too.” And with that, she stood, pushed in the chair, touched Chance briefly on the top of his head and left the room.
Chance was not sure that what she said made a particle of sense. But it certainly gave him lots to think about.
He left the food. How could he eat, when that tiny creature was wasting away because of him? He did sleep though, finally.
When he woke up, it was very late. The whole house had settled down, wrapped in flannel pajamas and nightgowns and sleepers. Chance was curled up on his bed, still in his jeans and T-shirt. The quilt had been tucked around him, and his dinner tray was gone.
He curled up tighter, hugging himself. They could tuck him in, bring him dinner and tell him their nice little theories all they wanted. None of it made any difference where Mark was concerned.
Then he remembered Matilda.
His own loneliness forgotten, Chance crept from his bed and out into the hall. He turned Mark’s doorknob. His skin crackling with fear and anticipation. He stepped inside.
Luckily the curtain wasn’t closed properly. Light from a street lamp fell across the floor. Mark was a softly breathing hump under the blankets, but his desk, where Matilda had been earlier, was bare. Chance took a slow, shallow breath and looked around, but it was not until he had tiptoed right to Mark’s bedside that he saw the Tupperware container pushed against the wall on Mark’s bedside table. He managed to reach the container without making a sound, but as he pulled it back, his elbow caught on the bendy neck of the lamp. He froze. The hump on the bed shifted. The breathing sounds changed.
No longer trying to be quiet, Chance took Matilda and fled out into the brightly lit hall and back into his own dim room. He sat for a long moment on the side of his bed, catching his breath, waiting for his heart to settle back into his chest. Finally he reached out and flipped on his light.
Then, about to pull back the plastic wrap, he paused. What if Mark was right? They might have been too late with the plants, and she might be dead. Curled up and dead.
Steeling himself, he peered into the container. First off, he sa
w that she wasn’t where she had been. One way or another, she had moved. He pulled the cellophane off the top and reached in, moving leaves aside with care. There she was in the bottom. Had she fallen there? Was she dead after all? But she wasn’t on the plastic bottom. She was on a plant. As he watched, she inched her way forward and munched. He saw her munch on the plant. Then her head raised up, curious, and waved toward the light.
Chance’s face split open in jubilation. He almost cheered out loud, but he stopped himself just in time. He did not want all those flannel figures rising from their beds. But he did have something to say to one. Dancing on quiet feet, he was outside Mark’s room in a moment. Once again, he slipped inside.
“Mark,” he hissed. “Mark, wake up.”
Mark sat up, hair on end, eyes full of gluey sleep and squeezed tight against the light from the hall.
“Hey, it’s the middle of the night! Get out of here.”
“No, you gotta come and see,” Chance said. “Come on.”
But Mark just mumbled “Get out!” again, flopped down and turned his back.
Chance reached out to yank his blankets off, but then he had a better idea. Seconds later he was back at Mark’s side.
“Mark,” he hissed again. “Look!”
Mark rose up, ready to fight, but between him and his target was a Tupperware container, held right under his nose. With his free hand, Chance flipped on the bedside light. Mark put his hands over his eyes and groaned.
“I told you she was going to die,” he said. “You killed her. I told you.”
Then he came fully awake. “And what are you doing with her anyway?”
“Just look,” Chance said.
So Mark took the container into his hands and looked. It took him a moment to find Matilda, but when he did, Chance watched his face light up just as Chance’s had.
“Hey,” Mark said. “She likes thistles, huh?”
Chance and the Butterfly Page 4
