The Water and the Wild (4 page)

Sickly yellow streetlamps had begun to zap on, and with each new flicker of light came a new bite of remorse
in Lottie's gut. She had not meant to lose her temper with Eliot, and now—
two, maybe three weeks
. Tomorrow, Lottie decided, she would bike early to Eliot's and apologize. That would fix their friendship, but it would not fix Eliot. Only the letter-writer, if anyone, could do that, and so far the letter-writer did not seem to care.

Lottie sped past a stalled taxicab and cut into Skelderidge Park, where the trees would soften the rainfall. Her hands had gone raisiny, and Lottie braked to let out a shivery sneeze. She wiped her wet sleeve across her wetter nose and looked around. The park was empty because of the dark and the rain, but Lottie thought for a moment that she had heard voices. They were muffled, like voices coming from the earpiece of a telephone, but they were close.

“Anyone there?” was what Lottie was going to call, but it turned into another sneeze.

Then she heard a sound—not voices, but a rough, inhuman noise. It sounded at first, Lottie thought, like a cracking egg. Then a cracking whip. Then a cracking
tree,
which was, in fact, what it turned out to be. The tall, gnarled tree under which Lottie had stopped her bike gave a great shudder and then, with no consideration as to where Lottie happened to be standing, it began to heave toward her.

Lottie, like any red-blooded girl, had been taught to get out of the way of things like speeding convertibles and masked men with guns, but she had never expected to have a run-in with a homicidal
tree
. More than that, and what confused Lottie most, in the split second she had to realize that she was about to get smashed to smithereens, was that she had not seen any lightning. If she was going to be killed by a falling tree, Lottie thought in that last moment of cognizance, she wished it would have at least had the decency to get struck by lightning first. That would have been a much more dramatic way to go.

Lottie's hands were iced to the handlebars in panic. She closed her eyes, and a rushing sound filled her ears. She could feel the wet hair that had been plastered around her face blow back in a windy shock. Lottie thought of her green apple tree, of Eliot, and of her parents' photographed, freckled faces. A hand clamped around her right arm. Then she heard one last thundering
crack
.

A familiar smell tickled up Lottie's nose. It smelled of home. She opened her eyes. She was not home. She was slumped against the cold iron of a park bench. It was still
raining. Across from her lay the hulking silhouette of a fallen tree and, from where she sat, Lottie saw a glint of metal peeking out from under one of the tree branches. It took her a long, stupid minute to realize that the metal was all that remained of her bicycle; the rest of it had gotten a thorough pancaking.

But
I'm
not pancaked!
Lottie thought, shaking her legs out. They seemed fine. The only pain she felt came from her left arm. Lottie pulled back the sleeve of her periwinkle coat to see just how bad a bruise she had gotten.

But there wasn't a bruise. Where a bruise should have been, there was a handprint. A deep black handprint covered the crook of her elbow, and from it pulsed a hot, tight, uncomfortable feeling, like someone had tied a steaming tea bag too tightly around Lottie's skin.

A merry chirp shook Lottie's attention, and she looked up from the strange mark on her arm to catch a sight stranger still: a white fluttering of wings. A lone white finch was flying away, up into the nighttime rain, until Lottie could not distinguish it from the glaring white raindrops themselves.

Lottie did not want to think long on why her bike was under a giant tree trunk and why she was not. Instead, she pulled herself off the park bench and began running. That is, she meant to run but ended up doing more of a lollop-stagger instead. She stumbled on something round and slick—an apple—and realized that this had been the familiar smell of home. The tree that had fallen had been an apple tree. The scent of apples grew too strong and sour in the time it took Lottie to get her wits together, and she had to stop lollop-staggering a second time when her stomach lurched and she found herself vomiting an entire school lunch behind a shrubbery at the Skelderidge Park entrance.

Lottie left the park. The rain had slackened to a drizzle so that she could just make out signposts at the park corner. She did not recognize the street names. Lottie felt her stomach clenching again. Her legs screeched, her brain buzzed, and a dry, cottony creep was working its way around her tongue, her lips, and the roof of her mouth. She was so thirsty.

Lottie willed her feet across the street, toward a low hum of voices. She heard laughter, shouts, and tipsy-pitched singing. When she looked up again, she realized just where she was. Those shouts were coming from New Kemble's only pub, the Flying Squirrel. The warm pulse of the pub's frosted windows shone beneath its sign, a splintered gray squirrel raising a chalice in its paws. Mrs. Yates would murder Lottie on the spot rather than see her set foot in such an establishment. But Mrs. Yates was not here, and Lottie had just had an encounter with a lethal apple tree. Surely she was entitled to a glass of water.

A peeling sign that hung from the front door informed Lottie that no one under the age of twenty-one was permitted. Lottie did not look twenty-one. She hardly looked her real age of twelve. But Mollie Browne worked at the Flying Squirrel, and Mollie was one of Mrs. Yates' old boarders and had babysat Lottie as a little girl. Mrs. Yates had eventually evicted Mollie for playing an electric guitar at three o'clock in the morning and “forgetting” to pay her rent three months in a row. Mollie still liked Lottie, though, and she would always blow a kiss from the window when Lottie biked past the pub.

Lottie crossed both sets of fingers for luck, hoping that Mollie would be on shift. Then she went in, nudging into a mass of sweaty bodies swathed in a cheery, orange glow. If she were not so dazed, Lottie would have relished feeling wickedly rebellious. At the moment, though, she only felt wickedly sick.

“Excuse me!” Lottie piped up, trying to get the attention of a scraggly-faced man behind the bar counter.

The bartender didn't acknowledge her. Lottie tried to speak again, but a man who smelled of sauerkraut stepped on her foot and knocked her back against a metal stool.

That was when the bad spell began. At long last, one had caught up with her.

Lottie knew the symptoms very well. First came a sensation like her chest was folding in over itself like a bed-sheet, again, again, and again. Next came a tingle in her brain, her ears, her fingers. She choked in short, staggering breaths and closed her eyes, fighting hard against the pain. It would be over soon, she told herself. Bad spells always ended, no matter how bad they got, just so long as she fought back. She grasped on to the rough edge of the bar counter, trembling.

“Oi! All right there?”

Lottie's eyelids snapped open. She could breathe again. She gulped a few more times and nodded at the scraggly-faced bartender, who had just shoved a handful of peanuts into his mouth and did not look nearly as concerned as he had sounded.

“Could I have a glass of water?” Lottie asked.

Scraggly Man blinked blankly at her before revealing a crooked row of browned teeth. He snorted and jabbed a girl with dreadlocks standing next to him.

“Did you hear that, Molls? This little lost mouse has taken a wrong turn. Thinks we might be giving away free water at this high-class establishment.”

Lottie blushed furiously. The girl turned around. It was Mollie Browne, who looked just as shocked to see Lottie as Lottie was to discover that Mollie now wore dreadlocks.

“Shoo,” Scraggly Man barked at Lottie. “You're too young to be in here.”

“For the love of Hendrix,” Mollie huffed, tossing the bartender the glass she had been drying and swinging her legs over the counter. “Can't you tell she's dog sick?”

Mollie rested a firm hand on Lottie's shoulder and stooped to look into her eyes.

“What're you doing here, Lottie?” she said. “Does Mrs. Yates know where you are?”

“I fell off my bike,” explained Lottie, “and I'm feeling sick. I didn't think I could make it back to Thirsby Square without some water. Could I just have a glassful? I promise I won't be any trouble.”

Mollie bit down on her pierced lip, giving it some thought. “We've got an employee break room in the back. Let's get you back there, yeah?”

Lottie hadn't expected for Mollie to grab her, let alone swing her up onto her shoulders and barrel right past the man who smelled of sauerkraut.

“Out of the way, fellows!” she shouted, shimmying past burly baseball fans and shoving through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. The door swung shut, and the grizzled shouts of the Flying Squirrel disappeared into the dim dank of the break room.

“A bike accident, huh?” Mollie said, setting Lottie back on her feet. “Well, you look all right, just a little shaken up. Sure you're just thirsty? I can find a first-aid kit, if you need one.”

“I'm fine,” Lottie said, trying to smile. “Scrapes don't bother me much.”

Mollie grinned tiredly. “Yeah, I remember that about you, Lottie Fiske. That's what you said when you fell out of that apple tree.”

“Thanks for helping me.”

Mollie waved Lottie off. “I would stay, but I'm walking a thin wire with the boss as it is. If he found out I let in a kid like you, I'd lose my job.”

She pointed out a couple of cabinets with towels and glasses and then disappeared in another swoosh of the break room's swinging door. The room was small and poorly lit, but it had what Lottie needed. Lottie rinsed out a dusty glass under the sputtering tap water and finally raised a glassful to her lips. She chugged the water greedily, and another glassful after it. Then she began to wash off her numb, muddy arms.

She gasped at the sight of what was on the inside of her left arm. The handprint was still there. Unlike a bruise, the mark was not an uneven patch of brown, blue, or purple—just a thick black that ran against her skin in the perfect outline of a palm and five fingers. Though
no,
there weren't five fingers after all. Where the imprint of a pinky had been before, there was now only the slightest sliver of black.

As Lottie stared dumbly at the mark, she heard a commotion from outside, in the bar. She jerked off the faucet, the handprint momentarily forgotten, and peered through the slatted window of the break room door. There were shouts of anger and surprise as the crowd parted for a sight that Lottie could barely make out. It looked like one figure supporting another, and those two figures were making their way past the rowdy crowd straight toward—the break room door.

Getting discovered meant getting Mollie Browne into trouble, and that was no way to repay a favor. Lottie ducked down and frantically crammed herself into a forest of employees' coats that hung in a wooden alcove by the door. Just as she had swatted a prickly scarf away from her face and hugged her knees up to her chest, the door swung open. Shouts from the pub swam in with the sweet, sickly smell of beer. She heard footsteps, followed by the scraping of chairs. Then there were voices. Mollie was the first to speak.

“Well! She must've skipped out already. Poor girl. You kids have got a knack for getting scratched up tonight, haven't you? Never rains, but it pours.”

Lottie heard a dull thud and the sound of labored breathing.

“Ugh,” said Mollie. “He's a wreck. Gang brawl, was it? Serves him right. Who lets you kids carry around switchblades, anyway?”

“I wouldn't know,” said a boy's distracted voice. “Do you have any clean towels?”

“In the lower cupboard over there. I expect to get repaid for bloodied-up linens, though, got that? And this place better not look any worse for the wear. You're lucky I'm feeling like such a humanitarian tonight. Be grateful.”