The Second Life of Abigail Walker (12 page)

“It's not very much,” Abby told him, feeling guilty. He was making such a big deal when she'd hardly done anything at all. “I'm going to do more. In fact, I'm going to ask my mom if I can use her computer tonight.”

Matt patted Abby's shoulder. “You've done plenty. I really appreciate it.”

“Anders is mucking out the stalls if you'd like to say hello,” Mrs. Benton said, smiling at Abby
as though the last few minutes had pleased her considerably. “I'm sure he'd like to see you. Seems all he talks about lately is ‘Abby this' and ‘Abby that.'”

“You've got a fan, that's for sure,” Matt said with a nod.

Abby didn't know what to say. She'd never had a fan before. “I guess I'll go find him. I could help him, uh—”

“Muck,” Mrs. Benton supplied. “A clumsy-sounding word meaning ‘dig manure with a pitchfork.' Builds character.”

Abby could hear Anders humming to himself when she reached the barn. Standing just outside of the barn door, she called out “Hey,” hoping that Anders would come out to see her. She didn't want to take a chance of getting too close to a horse. “I just stopped by for a little while. I gave your dad some animal notes.”

Anders shuffled out of a stall, a pitchfork in his hand, wearing rubber boots that went up to above his knees. “That's great! That's amazing! So you showed them to Matt already?”

Abby nodded. “They sort of cheered him up,
I think.” She pointed to Anders's pitchfork. “Do you mind having to do that? Mucking out stalls, I mean?”

“At first the smell got to me, but now I like it. I mean, I know it's poop and everything, but it's not like dog poop, which in my opinion really stinks. Horse manure, I don't know. It has this kind of comforting smell. I guess that sounds weird. My mom says I'm getting weirder now that I'm being homeschooled. She thinks I should move to Virginia and live with her. I'll be less weird that way.”

“My mom thinks I'm fat,” Abby offered. “She doesn't say it, though. Not directly. She says I have issues with my weight.”

“But you're not fat!” Anders exclaimed. He looked outraged. “You're exactly right!”

Abby, feeling pleased, tried to return the compliment. “Well, I don't think you're weird. So I guess our moms are wrong, huh?”

“I guess so.” Anders grinned, then motioned in the direction of the stalls with his pitchfork. “The horses are all out in the pasture, if you wanted to help me clean the stalls. I'm only
allowed to work in here if the horses are out. Matt's worried I'll get kicked in the head.” He rolled his eyes.

Abby followed Anders into the barn. She liked the thought of being the kind of girl who mucked out stalls. Who hung out in a barn. Back when she was trying to make Kristen and Georgia believe she was an expert equestrian, she'd read tons of novels about horses—
Black Beauty
,
Misty of Chincoteague
,
The Black Stallion
—and stories about girls who had horses that they loved more than anything else. Abby had pretended she was that sort of girl, a horsey girl, but what she really liked to imagine was her imaginary horse's stall, with all its hooks holding well-oiled pieces of equipment, and the clean, sweet-scented straw on the ground.

“You're right, you do get used to the smell, don't you?” Abby called over the stall wall to Anders a few minutes later, scooping a load of manure onto her pitchfork. “It's really not that bad.”

“I'd like to make it into a perfume, or an aftershave, wouldn't you?” Anders called back. He
paused, and then said, “Now you have to admit,
that
makes me sound weird.”

Abby giggled. “Yeah, sort of. But it's a good sort of weird.”

Another pause. “There's a good sort of weird?”

“Yeah,” Abby said. “I'm pretty sure there is. Don't you think there is?”

“I hope so,” Anders replied. “It would sure make my life a whole lot easier.”

That night
Abby sat at her mom's computer and typed “mule deer” into the search engine box. All during dinner, she couldn't stop thinking about how grateful Matt had been that she'd helped him with his research. And the more she thought about that, the more she thought about Matt—what was going on with him exactly? He'd been in the army, he'd served in Iraq, and now he was raising bees and blueberries on his mom's farm. And he was depressed—or mentally ill. Maybe he had that sickness that soldiers got after they'd been in combat, where they couldn't shake the war off their shoulders.

Abby leaned back in her chair. She wished she could ask Matt what was wrong with him, but she knew she couldn't. You just didn't ask people things like that. But she wanted to know—she
needed
to know.

She sat up straight. Deleted “mule deer” from the search engine box. Typed in “Matt Benton, soldier, Iraq War.”

And watched as the results tumbled down the screen.

the fox
hid in the bushes a few feet away from the chicken coop. Watching. She was just watching. She thought if she observed the chickens long enough, she would grow to like them, and if she liked them, she wouldn't want to eat them.

It was a theory, anyway.

She'd only eaten two mice this week. And a vole. She'd turned her nose up at the sparrows flitting across her field. Mere children. She did not eat children. She had a line she wouldn't cross. No children. And now: no chickens.

It was the noise of the killing she'd lost her taste for, the violent screeches and squawks. On the nights when she'd avoided mice and moles and voles, dining instead on berries and weeds, her dreams weren't as bad. She dreamed of other stories, old stories, stories of crossing the raging river over the spine of a fallen tree, or bundling her kits into the safety of a dank cave. Some nights, when all she'd had to eat was wild grasses, she dreamed of Crow, her old friend.

She wondered now if Abby was in the field. Sometimes the girl spent the entire afternoon in an old chair behind the wide oak, drawing in a notebook, writing things down. The fox had watched, envious. If only she could write things down! She could write down all the stories, especially the ones that had kept her awake at night. She would carry them with her in her teeth, instead of in her head.

A brown-and-orange chicken came to the edge of the coop and clucked a worried cluck. The fox sighed and trotted back into the woods. She would not scare the chickens. She would not eat them.

It was midafternoon. A flock of wrens had
settled into the trees and were now chirping gaily to one another, making their plans to fly south in a few weeks. They quieted when they noticed the fox, then burst back into excited chatter after she'd moved out of sight. The fox sighed again. Had she really been that bad? Was every little creature afraid of her now?

The fox shook off the feeling that the whole world was afraid of her—a ridiculous notion—and tried to concentrate on how best to help Abby. No more baring of her teeth, she decided. But there must be something she could do to keep the raccoon girls away once and for all. They were sneaky girls, nosing around Abby's yard when they thought no one was looking. What did they hope to find? the fox wondered. Weapons? Abby locked in the teeth of a snare trap?

Perhaps she should talk to that dog. The hound. Once the fox had tried to track him, only to find that the hound was on
her
trail. Disconcerting, to say the least. For a hound, he was quiet, covert. He knew things. Should the fox cross the creek and find him?

She had to admit she found the idea frightening. She'd spent more than one night up a tree, pinned there by a baying dog hoping to snag her in his teeth the minute she fell out.

Still. The hound seemed an intelligent sort. Reasonable. Maybe he knew something about humans that she didn't. Oh, she knew a lot. Maybe too much. But she didn't know much about helping them. She'd never tried it before.

She'd ask the hound. She'd make herself.

And if he tried to eat her for dinner, she'd tell him about the chickens, how her mouth had watered just looking at them. How she'd walked away.

thursday, after
she'd finished eating her lunch, Abby sat down at the computer next to Marlys's. She carefully laid out Mrs. Benton's list of animals to the right of her keyboard, the side closest to Marlys, and next to it she put the article she'd printed out from her mom's computer the night before.
FIVE U.S. SOLDIERS KILLED IN ATTACK ON BASE IN IRAQ,
the headline read, followed by the subhead,
ONE MIRACULOUSLY SURVIVES TRUCK BOMBING.

Abby logged on to her school account. She
checked her library page and discovered she had two overdue books. The only new e-mail in her in-box was from Anoop, reminding her that the Science Club's Rocket Fair was next weekend. She read the e-mail several times while glancing at Marlys, waiting for her to sneak a peek at her papers.

She felt rather than saw Marlys reading, and then she heard a little
hmmm
escape from her lips. What would Marlys make of it? She'd never be able to put the two pages together, the war story and the list of weirdly named animals. She'd
have
to ask.

Wait for it
, Abby told herself,
wait for it. . . . 

Marlys tapped on her shoulder. “I know it's none of my business—”

Abby shook her head, as though she'd been startled from her thoughts. “Huh? I'm sorry, were you asking me a question?”

Marlys pointed to the Iraq article. “Is that for a project or something?”

“Or something,” Abby said with a shrug. “Well, it's definitely a project, but it's not a school
project. It's this project I'm doing for a friend.”

“
For
a friend? Do you mean
with
a friend?”

“Well, it's sort of both, actually. For and with.”

Marlys scratched her nose. She sniffed, then clucked her tongue a couple of times. “Do you mind me asking what kind of project?”

Abby drew her finger along the part of the headline that read
ONE MIRACULOUSLY SURVIVES TRUCK BOMBING.
“That soldier? The one who survived? I know him. And he's writing a poem. About animals. And I'm helping him by looking up stuff about the animals.”

“Interesting,” Marlys said, scratching her nose again. “So that's why you're coming in here every day?”

Abby nodded.

“But you don't like to.” Marlys reached over and plucked Mrs. Benton's list from Abby's desk. “I mean, you're really terrible at it, anyway. I hear you moaning and groaning to yourself, and you've hardly gotten any material. What did you print out the other day? Two pages? That's pretty lame.”

“I'm the worst person at research in the world,” Abby agreed. “I'm totally pathetic.”

Marlys shook her head. She appeared to think something over. “Fine,” she declared finally. “I'll help you. My cousin is in the army. He's been to Afghanistan three times so far. And I happen to know a lot about animals.”

“You're going to be a veterinarian,” Abby reminded her. “You'd have to know a lot.”

Marlys looked at Mrs. Benton's list. “Have you done the California newt yet?” she asked, already typing.

“Not yet,” Abby replied cheerfully, stretching her arms over her head. Wow, talk about being on easy street! Now she'd have pages and pages of research to bring Matt.

Marlys smacked the back of Abby's chair. “Well, you Google it too,” she grumbled. “I'll help you, but you need to learn how to do this stuff. You'll never get into college if you don't.”

After lunch,
Abby went to her locker to get her science notebook. Some kids standing across the hall snickered when they saw her, and Abby
wanted to tell them to shut up. Didn't they know there was a war going on? When she clicked open her combination and saw the pink yogurt smeared all over her books, she turned, and sure enough, now they were doubled over with laughter.