Hazel's Theory of Evolution

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  Arby was sitting in the passenger seat beside Mr. Blumberg when we came back out to the car. She wagged her tail and barked when she saw me. I looked at Mr. Blumberg. “Are you sure about this?” I envisioned Arby shedding and leaving kibble crumbs all over the Blumbergs’ pristine home.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t think she should be alone tonight, either. I fed her and packed a doggy bag for tomorrow morning. Do you need anything else from the house? Toothbrush, change of clothes?”

  “I’ll run up and pack a bag,” I said.

  “Do you want me to come?” Becca asked.

  I hesitated. Part of me didn’t want to be alone in the house. But another part of me didn’t want Becca to see the evidence from the afternoon’s events: the broken glass, the phone in pieces. I didn’t want her to see my shame. I shook my head. “I’ll be quick.”

  But when I ran through the kitchen to the stairs, I saw I needn’t have worried. While we’d been in the barn, Mr. Blumberg had cleaned up. The shards of glass were gone from the linoleum. The phone was back in its dock on the counter, held together with duct tape Mr. Blumberg must have found in the junk drawer. If only every mess could be cleaned up so easily.

  At Becca’s house, Mrs. Blumberg gave me another huge hug. “I wasn’t sure how to help, so I’m baking cookies,” she said, and sure enough, Arby was already trotting down the hall toward the kitchen, following the warm, sweet scent of butter and chocolate. “It’s just as well you had dinner on the road. David and I were going to have leftovers, since Becca had plans.”

  “You had plans?” I asked Becca, surprised.

  “It’s no big deal,” she mumbled.

  “The cheer team’s having a pajama party,” Mr. Blumberg said. “But as we were about to leave the house, you called, and—”

  I frowned at Becca. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  She raised her eyes to meet mine. “This was more important.”

  There was a note of challenge in her voice, as if she were daring me to turn this into an argument. I wanted to prove her wrong. I said, “I’m sorry you’re missing it.”

  Her eyebrows rose a little. She shrugged. “I’ll see them all on Monday anyway.”

  “Why don’t you help Hazel take her things up to your room?” Mrs. Blumberg said. “You could both put on your PJs, and we’ll have our own pajama party.”

  “Maybe you want to take a shower, too,” Becca said as we climbed the stairs.

  I looked down at myself and caught a strong whiff of goat and my own sweat. “Good call.”

  When we dropped off my backpack in Becca’s room, I noticed the cream-colored kittens and horses and ballet dancers were gone from the walls. Now there was a poster of the Osterhout Otter, presumably strutting off to a football game, and one from some movie about cheerleaders, and another of a guy pouting into a microphone—some pop singer, I guessed. I didn’t comment on the change in décor, even though I didn’t like it.

  I headed to the bathroom. As the water heated, I sat on the toilet seat and peeled off my socks. The bottoms were dotted with blood. When I stepped into the tub, the steaming water stung my soles. Afterward I found some antiseptic and cotton balls in the medicine cabinet and swabbed at them, and they stung even worse. I figured it was the least I deserved.

  Later, Becca and I snuggled under blankets on the couch, watching The Princess Bride. Arby lay curled between us. Becca was petting her ears. I was petting her side. She was snoring. We’d just gotten to the part of the movie where Westley gets thrown in the Pit of Despair, when Mr. Blumberg’s phone rang. He answered, spoke to whoever was on the other end for a minute, then called, “Hazel, it’s for you!”

  It was Mom. “Are you back?” I asked. “Have you seen Mimi?”

  “Yes and yes,” Mom said. “She’s pretty zonked, but she’s stable.”

  “And the baby?”

  “We’re still waiting for her. I want to crash in a chair, right here, right now—it’s been a way longer day than I was expecting—but I guess I’d better get home to take care of the herd.”

  “No!” I said. “I mean, you don’t have to rush. I took care of them. I milked, and Becca helped. And we made sure they had plenty of water and food, and I closed the barn up tight. You don’t have to worry.”

  “All right,” Mom said. I could hear her smiling. “Then I won’t worry. Love you, Hazel, you amazing young woman, you. I’ll come by in the morning and give you a big hug, okay?”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said, embarrassed and guilty. “I’m fine. Stay with Mimi. She needs you more.”

  “I’ll have to go back home to take care of the milking all over again, anyway, and besides, what about me? I really need that hug!”

  Mr. Blumberg interrupted, “Tell her if she comes by at nine, I’ll have a steaming plate of challah French toast waiting for her.”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked Mom.

  “I heard. Tell him I’ll be there with bells on.”

  As Becca and I lay side by side in her queen-size bed that night, Arby the very happy filling of our sandwich, Becca said, “I’m sorry.”

  I jerked my head to look at her, though it was too dark to see her. “Why? You helped me even though we were fighting. Even though you had plans with your friends.” It felt strange and painful not to include myself in that number.

  “Yes, but . . .” She shifted. “Back when Lena died, I tried to understand what you were going through, but I never did. Not really. When Kirsten said you were crying over nothing—that Lena didn’t count because she’d never been born—”

  “Oh. That.”

  “All I could think was how my zayde had died that summer, and I’d loved him so much. I’d loved him all my life, ten whole years. It didn’t seem right that you should be so sad, when Lena had only existed for a few months, and you’d never even met her.”

  This wasn’t sounding like an apology. It sounded like the opposite, like she wanted me to apologize to her. I waited, trying not to get angry.

  She took a deep breath. “But that shouldn’t have mattered. I knew how awful you felt. I shouldn’t have let Kirsten say those things. Can you forgive me?”

  I reached out for Arby, running my hand over her ribs. “I forgave you a long time ago—as soon as it happened. And anyway, you’re right. Me losing Lena wasn’t the same as you losing your zayde.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It took me a long time to figure out,” I said. “I kept asking myself how I could love someone I never knew. How could I miss her? How could I feel sad?”

  “But you would’ve been heartless not to be.”

  “I guess . . . except this fall I finally figured out, with Bernadette—”

  “Who?” Becca asked.

  “I’ll explain later. Anyway, my point is maybe I didn’t love Lena, not as a person. It’s more like I loved the idea of her—of having a little sister or brother. Teaching them everything, helping them grow. When she died, it was like one of my dreams died.”

  “Oh,” said Becca. Then even quieter, “Oh.”

  “Maybe grief isn’t for the past,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the future. The future you’ll never know.”

  Becca didn’t answer. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep, until she said, “I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. When Zayde died, I couldn’t stop thinking about how he and Bubbe had promised to take me to see a play on Broadway—any play I wanted—for my birthday. I didn’t even care about the play! But the idea of turning eleven without him made me so sad.”

  I waited for her to say more, and she did. “When you called tonight, my parents freaked out. It was the first time it sank in for me. How scary this all is. How real it is. How it must have been every time.”

  “Mimi and the baby will be fine,” I said, pretending to sure of it. “That guy, Greg, said.”

  “But still. I want you to know I get it now. As much as I can.”

  I gathered my nerve. “Becca, I want you to
be in my future.”

  Becca was quiet a moment. Then she said, “I want you to be in my future, too. I like having more than one friend, but I want you to be one of them.”

  “But I still don’t understand how you can be friends with Kirsten.”

  I heard Becca nibbling at her hair. “At first it was out of survival,” she said finally. “I thought that with you gone, if I didn’t get on Kirsten’s good side, I’d have nobody.”

  “And now?”

  “There’s no doubt she can be a jerk. I wouldn’t trust her with my secrets. But she really did help me with the cheerleading stuff, and I’ve made other new friends because of it.”

  “Are you going to keep cheering forever?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll join the drama club. I think I’m going to try out for the spring musical.” She laughed. “Did you ever imagine me going onstage? Voluntarily?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. But the thought of going out in front of hundreds of people, acting like a fool, doesn’t terrify me anymore. I’ve been doing it all fall.”

  “I’ve made some new friends this fall, too,” I told her.

  “You have?”

  Her surprise—no, skepticism—stung like a paper cut, but I ignored it. After all, I hadn’t expected it to happen either. Sometimes it still caught me by surprise.

  “Just two. But they’re very interesting people. Good people. You know one of them already, actually, from Osterhout. Carina Robles.”

  “Carina Robles . . . wait, do you mean—?”

  “Yes. You’re not going to be weird about it, are you?”

  “Of course not. Give me some credit.” Becca paused. “Do you remember talking about her at the beginning of school? We were wondering if she was happier now wherever she was.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, is she? Happier?”

  In the darkness, I smiled. “Yeah. She’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her. She’s smart and funny and hardly shy at all.”

  “You sound close.”

  “I guess we are.”

  “That’s nice.”

  I was struck by Becca’s wistfulness. Was it possible that in spite of her new hobby and friends she was lonely sometimes? More than that, jealous of Carina and me?

  “She’d like you,” I said. “You’d like her, too. We should all hang out sometime, maybe.”

  “Yeah,” Becca said, “maybe we should.”

  I shut my eyes against the whole exhausting day. But I blinked as Becca spoke again. “Hazel? I know you think I’ve changed this fall. And I guess I have. But you’re different, too.”

  “No, I’m not,” I argued, though my heart wasn’t in it. “I’m the same old Hazel as ever.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” Becca said. “When we were fighting, I thought—well, honestly, I thought you were being a big baby. Like you were stuck in the past, wanting things to be the way they always were, instead of facing reality.”

  “That’s pretty accurate,” I said.

  “But it was easy for me to say, you know? I wasn’t the one going to a new school all by myself. I wasn’t the one whose mom was trying to have another baby after—well, you know. That stuff was hard, but you sucked it up and dealt with it. When Dad and I showed up at the hospital earlier, you were cool as a cucumber. Totally mature. I would’ve been a mess.”

  “You missed the part where I was a mess,” I said. “Trust me, it happened.”

  “All I’m saying is maybe . . . maybe being apart has been sort of good for both of us.”

  Becca spoke hopefully, as if she wanted my reassurance that the bumps in our friendship had somehow been for the best. I didn’t believe that. I could never believe that. Some people say your bones become stronger after being broken, but there’s no scientific evidence of that. The only difference is now you know how fragile they are. Now you know they can be broken again.

  But I also saw her point. Darwin knew the future of a species was entwined with the futures of species around it. Predators and prey. Parasites and hosts. Pollen producers and pollinators. And even though he hadn’t talked about them in On the Origin of Species, the same went for people—families and friends and archenemies, too. As long as Becca and I had been together, what happened to one of us happened to the other. This fall our evolutionary paths had diverged, but we’d each found new ways to survive.

  Still, I said, “I wouldn’t go that far. That redistricting thing was completely stupid.”

  Becca sighed comfortably and snuggled deeper under the blankets. “Okay, you’re probably right. As usual.”

  Except when I’m not. Except when I get things 100 percent wrong.

  Chapter 25

  The next day crawled by. After dropping by for her hug and French toast, Mom had returned to the hospital, promising to call with any news. Every time one of the Blumbergs’ phones rang, I jumped, my heart banging. But each time it turned out to be somebody else. We watched TV and played games and messed around online, but nothing truly distracted me from the seemingly endless wait.

  No news meant nothing had happened, good or bad, but it also meant anything could still happen. And despite Greg’s assurances, that anything could be bad.

  Rowan left the bazaar a couple of hours early so he could take care of the evening milking. Even so, he must’ve driven ninety miles per hour, and the state troopers must’ve been asleep on the job. It was barely six o’clock when he pulled into the Blumbergs’ driveway. The minute the Thimbleweed Farm van’s headlights shone through the living room window, I ran for my backpack and leashed up Arby.

  “Thank you,” I told Mr. and Mrs. Blumberg.

  “Any time,” Mrs. Blumberg said, hugging me.

  “Keep us posted,” Mr. Blumberg said, patting my shoulder.

  Becca and I hugged last and longest. “Everything will be okay,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll call you when there’s news.” Arby and I scrambled outside and into the van.

  “God, I’m exhausted,” Rowan said as we backed out of the driveway. “Two full days of people complaining about how much more expensive our soap is than Irish Spring. Or, on the other end, demanding to know if our goats are grass-fed and organic. What does that even mean? Yes, our goats are carbon-based life-forms. They are not robots. They produce milk, not . . . whatever comes out when you milk a robotic goat.”

  “So you didn’t sell much?”

  “What?” Rowan sounded surprised. “No, sales were great! Even better today than yesterday. I was a hit with the ladies.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  “Gross.” I slumped in my seat. I was exhausted, too—and, if I was being honest, extremely happy to see Rowan. He was the only person on the planet who perfectly understood what I was going through.

  “Did you eat?” he asked.

  “Yeah, we had dinner. Did you?”

  “I got a burger on the road. I’m sure I’ll be starving by the time we get home, though.”

  “There’s a lasagna,” I said. “Mimi and I were supposed to eat it last night.”

  “About that,” Rowan said. “You were with Mimi when it happened?”

  “Sort of. I was trying to keep an eye on her, like you said. But I guess I was getting on her nerves because she sent me to my room. And then—I’m sorry, Rowan.” My voice wobbled.

  He sighed. “It’s not your fault. It’s not like you could’ve stopped it. You were there to call for help. That’s the important thing.”

  “You didn’t see me, though. I freaked out. I told Mimi she never should’ve gotten pregnant again. It was the opposite of kittens and rainbows.”

  Rowan gnawed his lip. “Don’t worry. Mimi’s tough. She could take it.”

  “I just want this to be over! I want the baby to be born and Mimi to come home.”

  “I know. You’ll get your wish soon enough.”

  We rode in silence, leaving the town behind us, driving along the dark country
roads.

  After a few minutes, Rowan said, “I told Mom why I deferred.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t happy. But I think she got it.”

  More silence.

  “Rowan? Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

  “What, because I’m taking the year off, you think you get to skip?”

  “No.” Though since he mentioned it, it seemed fair. “With everything that happened, I didn’t get a chance to finish my homework.”

  Rowan thought. “I’ll make you a deal. When we get home, I’ll see what I can do to help you. If we finish, you go to school. If not . . . well, we can leave it up to the moms.”

  There was a good chance Mom would make me go to school regardless. That’s definitely what Mimi would have done. But having Rowan’s help would be nice. “Deal.”

  When we got home, Rowan went out to take care of the herd, and I turned on the oven to heat up the lasagna. Soon the kitchen smelled deliciously of tomato sauce, basil, and oregano. It almost masked my memory of the scent of Mimi’s sickness and my own fear. I knew I should check the status of the powder room, but I wasn’t brave enough.

  Rowan and I were halfway through our lasagna when the landline rang. Rowan dove for it. “Hello?”

  “Who is it?” I demanded.

  “Hey, Mom,” Rowan said.

  “It’s Mom? Let me talk to her!” I leaped from my chair and skidded across the linoleum in my sock feet. I really hoped Mr. Blumberg had gotten all the glass. I jumped to grab the receiver out of Rowan’s hand.

  “Hold on a sec, Mom, I can’t hear—Hazel, could you possibly stop attacking me? I’m going to put it on speakerphone.” Rowan pushed the speaker button and said, “Go ahead.”

  “Is Mimi okay?” I yelled. “Is the baby here yet?”

  “Let her talk!” Rowan roared.

  Mom’s laughter, tired as it was, was the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. “Yes, Hazy, Mimi’s okay. She’s better than okay. Because the baby is here. Dinah Clarice is here.”