The Second Life of Abigail Walker

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  If Anoop Chatterjee had asked her to marry him, she couldn’t have been any more surprised. “Uh, where do you sit?”

  “With my friend Jafar, near the teachers’ table. But Jafar is not here today, and I would like company.”

  He didn’t appear to be nervous. He didn’t appear to be madly in love with her. He looked at Abby in a calm and measured way, as though he was willing to wait many minutes for her answer.

  “Sure, okay,” she told him. “That would be nice.”

  He gave a slight nod of his head. “Yes. I believe so.”

  So she could do what she wanted to do, she thought as she trudged along C hallway to PE. Could eat lunch with Anoop Chatterjee. Could say yes. How funny. How strange. She looked around her. People banged closed their lockers and yelled across the corridor and shoved into each other and laughed in loud barks. They weren’t paying any attention to her. They weren’t checking out her socks to see if they matched her shirt or whispering about her behind their cupped hands. They had their lives, she had hers.

  That was all she was asking for.

  we do not know each other very well,” Anoop said when they’d taken their lunches out and begun to eat. “You may ask me a question about myself if you wish.”

  Abby bit off a piece of her Kit Kat bar, which she was treating as an appetizer. She tried to come up with the most interesting question she could think of. “Are you a Hindu?”

  “No, the people in my family are scientists, not Hindus,” Anoop told her. “My parents are completely rational. They think God is a nice idea, but an unlikely one. My sister goes to Catholic school, though, and she quite enjoys the mandatory services. She says it is very calming when the priest says the Eucharist. But she will not become a Catholic herself. My parents would disown her.”

  “Does she want to become a Catholic?”

  Anoop gave Abby an odd look. “No, of course not. Why would she?”

  She shrugged. “No reason, I guess.” She pointed to what looked like a rolled-up tortilla poking out of his lunch bag. “What’s that?” It felt rude to ask, but she was interested. She was used to medium-girl lunches, containers of pink yogurt, turkey and Swiss cheese sandwiches on honey-wheat bread. Lunchables.

  “That is a dosa,” Anoop informed her. “A kind of pancake. But it is made with rice and lentils instead of flour. Inside, chutney. My grandmother gives this to me almost every day. I have asked her for something else, but it makes her cry. She is very devoted to dosas with coconut chutney.”

  He eyed Abby’s turkey sandwich. “This is like what Jafar brings,” he said, pointing at it. “His grandmother doesn’t live with him.”

  After that, they were quiet. It was a nice quiet. Abby didn’t feel nervous, like she should make conversation, ask Anoop about the other items in his lunch. When both of them were finished eating, Anoop smiled at her and asked, “Shall we walk? We can see if any of the fellows are playing at the field.”

  They walked to the farthest playing field, the one that was always soggy around the edges, near the fence. A brown-skinned boy with a mop of black hair falling into his eyes called out when he saw them. “Anoop! Did you bring your soccer ball? Thomas just kicked ours over the fence!”

  Anoop held out his empty hands. “No, I left it at home. I had to bring in my rocket booster for science club today, and I didn’t have room for anything else.”

  The boy smiled a charming smile. A smile meant to woo. “Would you care to climb the fence to retrieve the one we lost?”

  “I don’t have the right shoes,” Anoop informed him, pointing to his soft leather loafers. “These would get torn. Besides, Thomas, it is against the rules.”

  “It’s not like we’re trying to escape,” the boy pointed out. “We just want our ball back.”

  Abby eyed the fence. Could she do it? The day before, she’d have said, no way, never. But maybe today was different?

  They’d had rock climbing in PE two weeks before, but when it was Abby’s turn, she’d slipped and slid and scrambled up three feet of wall before falling. She’d refused to try a second time.

  “Come on, Abby, you can do it!” Coach Horton had called from where she stood under the basketball hoop, a clipboard in her hand. “Don’t give up!”

  Abby had just shaken her head and walked over to the bleachers. She was tired of being Coach Horton’s pet project. “We’re going to get you in shape!” the PE teacher had declared at the beginning of the year, and she’d pounded Abby for three weeks with encouragement and positive feedback.

  Maybe if they’d started out the year with something other than gymnastics. Abby was famous for not being able to do a cartwheel. The most she could accomplish was a halfhearted roundoff. Even Cornelia Kidd, with her stick arms and skim-milk skin, the tiny vein you could see pulsing in her forehead whenever she was nervous, even Cornelia Kidd could do a cartwheel.

  But Abby failed cartwheels and handstands. She sprinted toward the vault and then veered off at the last second. “You can do it, Abby!” Coach Horton would cry, but by the time they got to the uneven parallel bars and Abby couldn’t hold on for more than ten seconds no matter how much chalk she put on her hands, Coach Horton had more or less admitted defeat.

  After Abby refused to try climbing the rock wall a second time, Coach Horton had walked over to the bleachers and sat down next to her. “You could climb that wall, you know. It just takes practice. Everything just takes practice.”

  “I don’t have any muscles,” Abby told her, leaning forward so that her nose was almost touching her knee. “I mean, look. I’m totally floppy.”

  Coach Horton shook her head. “You’re totally flexible. And you do have muscles. You just don’t have confidence.”

  “You’re right,” Abby agreed. “I don’t.”

  “Here, take this,” Coach Horton said, handing Abby her clipboard. “Why don’t you be my helper for a while? And maybe you could come to the gym during recess, when nobody’s in here, and practice a little bit?”

  “Okay,” Abby had told her, taking the clipboard. But when she’d gone by the gym the next day, some boys were already there playing basketball, and Abby decided she didn’t really care that much about climbing walls after all.

  Looking at the fence now, Abby thought of how it should be climbed. If you started with a running jump, you could hit it more than halfway up and would only have two more feet to go, she figured. If you could avoid the barbs at the top of the fence, you could plant your hands on the bar and pull yourself up, launch yourself over.

  Like you could do that, she heard Kristen’s voice say. Yeah, right. Like, maybe if there was an escalator leading up to the top.

  Abby’s hand suddenly throbbed where the fox had bitten her.

  “I’ll try it,” she told Anoop and Thomas. “I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m wearing sneakers at least.”

  The boys—there were seven in all, including Anoop, all of them skinny and scrawny or fleshy and round, tall for their age, short for their age, pale skinned, brown skinned, unmuscled—cheered Abby on as she ran toward the fence and flung herself at it. She grasped for a chain link, held on, poked the toe of her left foot into another link, pulled herself up.

  A fleeting thought: Were they looking at her butt? Were they thinking that it was big?

  Maybe they were, she didn’t know. But they cheered and they whistled. One boy yelled, “Way to go, Annabelle!” and Anoop snapped, “It’s Abigail, you idiot!”

  She felt for the top bar with her hand and made contact with a barb. It didn’t hurt, but promised worse if she applied more pressure. She moved her hand, groped for a better spot. Mid-grope, her arms gave out on her. Abby tried to hug the fence, but it was no good. She toppled to the ground.

  Several of the boys rushed over to her, patted her on the back, asked if she was okay. “You almost had it!” one of them exclaimed, and the others agreed.

  A small boy named Max Ortega, a sixth grader who rode Abby’s bus, stepped forward.
“I think I can do it. I think Abby had the right idea. You have to make a running start.”

  They all stood back and watched as Max Ortega sprinted toward the fence and landed two-thirds of the way up. In no time he was over and on the other side. “Now, where’s the ball?” he called to them in a cheerful voice. “Help me find it before somebody’s pit bull comes after me.”

  The ball was found, the game started over. Abby played goalie for Anoop’s team and blocked three shots. The first one she blocked by accident, putting her hands in front of her face so the ball wouldn’t hit her nose. But the second time she actually ran toward the ball and scooped it up.

  “You’ve got the hang of it, Abigail!” Thomas shouted. “Excellent!”

  “Jafar will be in school tomorrow,” Anoop told her as they walked back to the building for fifth period. “But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind it if you joined us for lunch.”

  “Thank you,” Abby said. She brushed some dirt off her jeans. “I’d like that.”

  Anoop bowed slightly. “Yes,” he said. “I very much agree.”

  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 suggestio
ns. 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.