The Second Life of Abigail Walker (13 page)

“Enjoy your lunch!” one of the boys called out, and a new burst of hilarity erupted.

Abby stood very still. She'd been so caught up in her research for Matt, she'd almost forgotten about Kristen and Georgia. Had practically forgotten they existed. Well, this was one big honking reminder, wasn't it?

Why did they care so much? The question played over and over in her head as she walked to the bathroom to get paper towels. Why did they care? Why did they care? She hadn't done anything to them, hadn't hit them or spit on them or talked behind their backs. All she'd done was walk away from their lunch table.

How pathetic
, Abby thought as she wiped the yogurt off her Spanish book. Was this the best they could do? She herself could think of a hundred worse things. If they really wanted to get her, they could make a website where they could
write mean things about her, they could spread rumors that Abby was retarded or had kissed a lot of boys behind the school. They could trap her in the bathroom and make her drink toilet water.

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 not. “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.”