The Second Life of Abigail Walker

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Really, Kristen and Georgia appeared to be total amateurs when it came to making someone’s life miserable. Still, Abby decided she’d better keep an eye on them. Who knew what lame-brain scheme they’d come up with next? Banana peels on the gym floor, or shaving cream in Abby’s backpack. Kindergarten stuff.

  Medium girl stuff, Abby decided. Boring, run-of-the-mill medium girl stuff. But a thought nagged at her as she hurried to science class—what if they were working up to something really terrible?

  She watched the medium girls’ table at lunch the next day, half paying attention as Anoop and Jafar discussed next year’s World Cup prospects. Not knowing anything about international soccer—football, Anoop insisted she call it—Abby was free to observe what Kristen and Georgia were doing. Nothing, it appeared. Kristen was peeling the crust off her sandwich, and Georgia was blowing into a straw wrapper and sucking the air back really quickly to make the straw collapse. Bess and Myla were rolling a grape back and forth to each other across the table. Casey was reading The Hunger Games, and it looked like Rachel was doing homework.

  Mostly it just looked boring over at the medium girls’ table. It didn’t seem like anyone was plotting some mastermind scheme against her. Abby bet that Bess, Myla, Rachel, and Casey didn’t even care anymore. Come to think of it, Myla had even smiled at her in language arts the other day. A regular, nice-to-see-you sort of smile, with nothing hiding behind it.

  Abby wondered what would happen if she went over to the medium girls’ table right now. Maybe Bess, Myla, Rachel, and Casey would make room for her, kick Kristen and Georgia out.

  Or maybe they’d all sigh with relief. At last they would have someone to be mean to again!

  Abby decided to stay put.

  “Why do you suppose this Anders cannot cross the creek?” Anoop asked suddenly, examining a baby carrot as though he wasn’t sure it was worth eating. “Do you think his parents fear him drowning?”

  Abby turned her attention back to her friends. She’d told Anoop and Jafar about the Bentons at the beginning of the lunch period, secretly hoping they’d be intrigued enough to join her and Marlys in their research, but they’d only seemed half-interested at the time, and Abby had dropped the subject. Now she could see that Anoop had been mulling it over in his careful way as he’d discussed soccer with Jafar and munched on his daily dosas.

  “It’s not that kind of creek,” Abby told him. “It’s only about four feet wide and six inches deep. But he says it’s beyond the safe perimeters, whatever that means. I think his dad’s worried that he’ll get lost if he crosses it.”

  “Maybe his dad thinks he’ll get kidnapped,” Jafar added, a gleam in his eye. “By pirates. Are there many pirates in your neighborhood, Abby?”

  Abby laughed. “Oh, yeah. Tons.”

  “My grandmother is very frightened of water,” Anoop told them. “She once fell off a ship. This is true. She was traveling from India to England to attend university. Just as the boat was pulling out from the dock, Grandmother leaned over to wave to her sister, and she fell into the water. She had on heavy clothes and was sure she would sink to the bottom, but a kind sailor saved her.”

  “So no crossing the creek for you,” Jafar teased.

  “Probably not,” Anoop agreed, crunching on his carrot. “We don’t even go to the swimming pool in our subdivision.”

  He lifted the flap on his lunch bag, peeked in, and shook his head sadly. “My lunch is all downhill from here, I am afraid. Perhaps we should go visit this Marlys who is helping with the animals. We might be able to offer some assistance.”

  Jafar looked confused. “I thought we were going to play soccer.”

  “Football,” Anoop corrected him. “And there will be time for that. But I am interested in Abby’s project.”

  “Really?” Jafar tilted his head. “How come?”

  Anoop reddened. “Because it is Abby’s project.”

  Jafar seemed to consider this. “Okay,” he said after a couple of seconds. “Let’s go.”

  Abby trailed her friends out of the cafeteria. She would never go back to the medium girls’ table, no matter how much yogurt they smeared in her locker. She wouldn’t go back if Kristen and Georgia apologized for how mean they’d been to her and begged her to come back. She, Abigail Walker, was good with Anoop and Jafar, good with dosas, good with long conversations about soccer-that-you-had-to-call-football.

  She was good with just the way things were.

  marlys, it turned out, was an obsessive note taker. The next time Abby took notes to the Bentons’ farm, she carried them in a three-ring binder.

  “I hope I’m not giving him too many details,” Marlys had told her on Monday, handing over a folder with at least twenty typed pages. “Let me know if I’m overwhelming him. Because he sounds like a person who could be overwhelmed pretty easily.”

  Abby worried about this too when she handed Matt the binder, which contained Anoop and Jafar’s notes too. Anoop’s notes were carefully outlined and included illustrations, and Jafar’s had peanut butter spots on them but were surprisingly thorough. There were three new pages of Abby’s notes, and she thought she was getting better at sifting out the important information from the stuff that didn’t matter so much.

  Marlys, on the other hand, had practically written a book.

  “I could tell her not to write so much,” she told Matt as he took the pages from her. “She’s just really into animals.”

  Matt had been sitting at the kitchen table. He looked more focused than the last time Abby had seen him, less sad. “I want to know everything,” he assured her. “All the varieties, all the different facts. You think about what it must have been like way back then, when Lewis and Clark went exploring. It must have been so clean. So . . . so—”

  “New?” Abby suggested, remembering what Anders had told her.

  “New!” Matt exclaimed. “Yes, new! Untouched. Just incredibly peaceful. I like to think of the animals walking around in the middle of all that peace.”

  Abby didn’t think it was a good time to mention some of the interesting facts she’d been learning about predators and attacks on nests and mama bears, facts that didn’t sound peaceful at all to her. So she just nodded.

  “It’s peaceful here, Mattie,” Mrs. Benton called from the living room, where she was watching TV and untangling bridles. “Peaceful in the here and now. When are you going to believe that?”

  “When I believe it, Ma,” he called back, and then grinned at Abby. “She won’t get off my case. Nag, nag, nag.”

  “I heard that!” Mrs. Benton yelled. Then in a voice more suited to the indoors, she called, “Abby, Matt’s got a new list tacked to the wall behind the couch in here. He thinks it’s great that you kids are helping out, don’t you, son?”

  Matt nodded. “Couldn’t do it without you,” he said, sounding distracted as he read through Abby’s pages. “These notes look great, Abigail.”

  Anders was in the living room, sunk down in a puffy blue easy chair with a book in his lap. He held up it up so Abby could see. Prairie Dogs: Community and Communication in an Animal Society. “It’s pretty interesting,” he told her. “It’s like prairie dogs live in this world of their own. Kind of like me.”

  “You’re in your own world?” Abby asked him. “Anders World? Like Disney World?” She smiled, to show him she was teasing, but his expression stayed serious.

  “Sort of. I mean, I don’t know any other kids who live like this, do you?”

  Abby pretended she didn’t know what he meant. “A lot of kids are homeschooled around here. There’s a bunch in my neighborhood.”

  Anders shut his book. “Yeah, but—”

  “But they don’t have to put up with their cranky grandmother all the livelong day, do they?” Mrs. Benton cut in.

  “Yeah,” Anders agreed. He tilted his head toward the kitchen. “Or—”

  “He’ll get better,” Abby said, even though she had no idea whether Matt would get better or no
t. “Just wait and see. And then your life will be totally normal.”

  Anders didn’t look 100 percent convinced.

  Abby walked over to the couch and scanned the bits and pieces of paper stuck to the wall above it, looking for Matt’s new list. Anders came and stood beside her.

  “Sometimes I wish we had a computer we could use for our research,” he told Abby. “Only, if we had a computer, I don’t think Matt would put everything on the wall. And having everything on the wall is pretty interesting. I mean, look at this,” he said, pointing to a drawing captioned “Lepus townsendii campanius—white-tailed jackrabbit.” “Matt drew that. Isn’t that cool?”

  Abby nodded, imagining the walls of her room covered with pictures of the birds and weeds that lived across the street, each with its Latin name written underneath. Latin names were dignified, she decided. Every weed deserved one.

  She found Matt’s new list and pulled it down. Carolina parakeet, Clark’s nutcracker, meadowlarks, Mississippi kite, the list began. Birds! She turned to Anders. “We’re doing birds now!”

  She stood a little taller, sucked in her gut. If anybody knew about birds, it was Abigail Walker. She was practically an expert.

  “There are rodents on that list too,” Matt called out. “And I want to know everything! No stinting on the details!”

  “I promise,” Abby called back cheerfully. “We won’t!”

  “He definitely likes the details,” Abby assured Marlys on the phone that afternoon when she got home, so it wasn’t surprising when Abby, Anoop, and Jafar found her in the computer lab the next day after they finished eating, printing out page after page on the black-tailed prairie dog.

  “They don’t hibernate,” Marlys told them. “Most prairie dogs do, but not the black-tailed prairie dog. Isn’t that weird? Now I’m trying to find out why that is.”

  “It’s a rodent!” Jafar exclaimed, reading over her shoulder. “Order: Rodentia; it says so right there. I thought it would be a dog.”

  “It looks like a rather large rat to me,” Anoop said. “Possibly more attractive.”

  Marlys laughed. When she laughed, Abby thought Marlys looked like an entirely different person. First of all, she had dimples when she laughed, and her eyes crinkled in a nice way and looked much bluer than they did when she was just sitting in front of a computer or walking down the hallway. Abby could see that one day Marlys would probably be pretty, even if she wasn’t pretty right now. You could just tell with some people. You could see their faces’ futures.

  “You want to come with me to my locker?” Abby asked her. She was asking because she didn’t want to be in the hallway alone during lunch period. But she was also asking because she thought it would be nice to be friends with another girl again. She thought she might be ready.

  “Let me just get all this stuff together.” Marlys began gathering the pages the printer had pushed out into a neat stack. She looked up at Abby. “Would you mind going to the bathroom first? I need to floss.”

  “Floss?” Abby had never heard of anyone flossing in the girls’ room before.

  Marlys went red. “It’s a promise I made my dad, that I would floss after every meal. He just spent the last year getting ten crowns on his teeth because he never flosses. So now he’s kind of obsessed with it.”

  “You could just tell him you flossed,” Jafar suggested. “I mean, how’s he going to find out that you didn’t?”

  “I have to take him the used floss,” Marlys admitted. “Yeah, I know. Gross. But, like I said, he’s obsessed.”

  “It’s nice that he cares,” Abby said sympathetically.

  Marlys smiled. “Yeah, I guess. He’s a nice dad. He just has rotten teeth.”

  “Well, since we cannot join you in the bathroom, we will go see what is happening on the football field,” Anoop said. “Come on, Jafar. I feel like showing Thomas how the game is played.”

  Abby and Marlys watched the two boys as they left the computer lab. Marlys looked at Abby. “Football? Really?”

  “Soccer,” Abby explained. “Everybody else in the world but us calls it football.”

  Marlys sighed. “Boy, do I hate soccer. My parents made me start playing when I was three. I hate most sports. Except for baseball.” She looked at Abby hopefully. “Do you like to play baseball?”

  Abby thought about it. “I think I might,” she said. “At least I’m pretty sure I don’t hate it.”

  Marlys smiled. “That’s good. That’s a good place to start.”

  no one was home after school, so Abby shoved a bunch of grapes into a bag and grabbed a sleeve of graham crackers from the pantry. She added a bottle of water and a book about animals she’d found in Gabe’s room, and then she put everything in her backpack. Just as she was walking out the door, the phone rang.

  “Ab? It’s Dad. Can you bring some bottled water up to the office? The water guy was supposed to bring a new five-gallon thing today, but he never showed. Two bottles ought to do it.”

  Abby grabbed the water from the fridge and went out through the mudroom door and up the stairs to her dad’s office. She hardly ever went up there because her dad didn’t like to be disturbed while he was working, and besides, there was nothing fun to do—no TV, only one computer, and her dad was always using it. Her dad used to have a fish tank that Abby liked to look at, but some disease wiped out all the fish, so there wasn’t even that anymore.

  Dropping her backpack at the top of the stairs, she tapped on the door. “I’ve got your water, Dad.”

  “Come on in, Ab,” her dad called. “I’m on the phone.”

  He was tipping back in his seat, his feet on the desk, wearing a headset. “Just put ’em on the desk, thanks,” he whispered to Abby, nodding to the one spot not covered up in papers. “Oh, just my daughter, bringing me something to drink,” he said into the little mic on his headset. “A man builds up a thirst after a long day of wheeling and dealing.”

  Abby rolled her eyes. Her dad developed and marketed computer software. It wasn’t exactly like he was some hotshot on Wall Street. Still, she thought it was sort of neat that he’d built his own business. Not just anybody could do that.

  “Okay, thanks, Ab,” her dad whispered, giving her a wave, like he was ready for her to go. She waved back and started to leave, but paused to look at the “rogues’ gallery,” as her dad called it, a collection of framed photographs of family and friends that took up most of the wall near the door. There was her dad when he was a high school football star, there were Grammy and Gramps on their wedding day. One picture showed Abby dressed up for Easter when she was two, another documented John and Gabe at the beach last summer, John buried up to his head in sand, Gabe with one foot on his chest.

  Abby hadn’t seen the beach pictures before. She smiled at the one of her mom sitting under a huge umbrella, a sombrero-size hat on her head, her nose smeared with zinc oxide. There was even one of her dad, which was rare, since he was the family photographer. But there he was, waist deep in the ocean, waving toward the shore.

  But where was Abby? Abby scanned all the beach pictures and realized there wasn’t one of her. In fact, there weren’t any new ones of Abby at all. She looked and looked, but the most recent one of her was from fourth grade, and she was standing behind a chair, so you could only see the top part of her.

  She looked over at her dad, who was laughing at something the person on the phone had just said. Did he even realize there were no new pictures of her? Was that a coincidence, or did he do it on purpose? Did he think, No pictures of Abby in my rogues’ gallery until she loses a little weight?

  Well, fine, just fine! Abby stuck her hands on her hips and glared at her dad, who wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to her. Tears filled her eyes, and she swiped them away. Just fine! Be that way!

  She turned back to the wall and grabbed a picture of herself, age four, on a pony. Then the Easter picture, and her third-grade school picture, and the one of her on Santa’s lap when she was five. “Fine
, fine, fine,” she muttered to herself. “Just fine.”

  “Abby!” her dad hissed. “What on earth are you doing?”

  She didn’t answer. She grabbed one last picture—herself on the merry-go-round at the second-grade picnic—and stomped out of the office. Outside the door, she dumped all the pictures in her backpack.

  “Be that way,” she snarled at her father through the door. “See if I care.”

  Of course she cared. She knew that she cared. She’d care if somebody punched her in the gut, wouldn’t she? Well, that’s what her dad had done. He’d punched her in the gut. Didn’t he know it would hurt?

  How could someone not know that?

  Outside, October had landed. Everything in the lot across the street was dying away, Abby knew that, but she also knew better. Seeds were everywhere. She couldn’t walk five feet without being covered by hitchhikers and burrs, all wanting a ride to somewhere else, to a good piece of dirt where next spring they’d take root.

  The afternoon was cool, but not cold. It was perfect weather for something. But what? Abby put down her backpack and set up her chair. She took out a graham cracker and began to nibble on it. The weeds rustled quietly in the breeze. Abby felt herself fill up with—what? Helium, it felt like, or rays of light. She thought if she wasn’t careful, she might start dancing in circles. She began to laugh. She twirled around a couple of times for good measure. She laughed harder, thinking about those pictures in her backpack. Who did her dad think he was, anyway? The fat police?

  On the third twirl, slightly dizzy, she came face-to-face with Wallace. The helium feeling turned electric. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  Wallace stood still for a moment, as though he wanted to make sure he had her attention, and then turned and marched toward the fence at the back of the lot, his tail wagging high in the air. Abby felt like he was telling her to follow him, but why? Maybe Anders was waiting for her at the creek. Maybe something had happened on the farm? Abby grabbed her backpack and scurried after the hound.