The Second Life of Abigail Walker (4 page)

Abby stood at the edge of the bus stop and kept thinking about the fox and what it had been trying to tell her. What could a fox know about
her? Had the fox been sneaking around the edges of her life for a while now, noticing things, coming up with ideas to make Abby's life better? Did the fox have some clever, foxy advice for what she should do about Kristen and Georgia?

Even when the bus came lumbering down the road, Kristen and Georgia kept their backs to Abby. She started to giggle. There was something funny about how dramatic they were being, like actors in a movie about girls who didn't like each other anymore. She had to hand it to Kristen, though. A lesser girl would have swung around and snapped at her—
Oh, you think you're so smart, so funny, so great
—but not Kristen. Abby could see Georgia twitch. Georgia wanted to turn around and slap her. But Kristen put her hand on Georgia's shoulder, and they stayed frozen in place.

Abby got on the bus first. She took the seat behind the bus driver and returned to her book on art and flowers. One of the artists had been able to draw anything in the world from the time he was five years old, and people from miles around came to look at his pictures. When Abby
was five, she'd built a Lego village under her bed and dreamed that one day she would be tiny enough to live in it.

Kids filed by. One kid, the next kid, the next kid, the next, then Georgia, who stopped at Abby's seat and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “You're dead,” she hissed, and Abby felt confused. Really? Kristen and Georgia were going to kill her? Were going to have her killed?

She blew into her fist. Her breath was warm. She wasn't dead, and she probably wasn't going to be dead anytime soon.

“Okay,” Abby replied to Georgia. “That's fine.”

Mr. Lee was sitting at his desk when she walked into language arts, but when he saw her he stood and came over to her desk. Watched Abby wrestle her LA notebook from her backpack.

“You doing okay?” he asked quietly.

Abby wished he would just forget about what had happened in class yesterday. She was a different person now. Didn't he know that?

“I'm fine,” she told him. “Everything's fine.”

When Myla and Casey walked into the classroom, Abby smiled at them to see what would happen, and wasn't surprised when they acted like they hadn't seen her. She blew into her fist again. She still wasn't dead.

Don't get cute,
her father liked to tell her, and Abby heard him say it again as she waved goodbye to Myla and called, “See you later, Casey,” at the end of the period.

Who was being cute?

She crammed her books back into her backpack. She had PE next, and it was a dress-out week. She wondered if the bleachers would be pulled out from the wall in the gym. If they were, she might be able to hide underneath them, the linoleum cool beneath her legs. She wouldn't have to spend the entire period pulling her shirt so it stretched enough to hide the tops of her legs in the stupid gym shorts that made her feel practically naked. Most sixth-grade girls had toothpick legs, skinny bird legs, but not Abby. She had Jell-O knees, marshmallow thighs. It was humiliating.

A shadow fell across her desk. When Abby
looked up, Anoop Chatterjee was standing in front of her. He was such a skinny, slim-jim kind of kid, she was surprised he cast a shadow at all.

“I am correct that you have B lunch?” he asked, and when she nodded, he said, “Would you care to join me?”

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.”