Wish Girl (12 page)

Annie would choose not to do the radiation at all.

Would she choose to just . . . die? Really?

I felt sick. I didn't want to think about what that meant, really didn't want to talk about it.

That would make me just like her mom. So I took a breath, wondering how to put this, wondering if there was any way I could not make it worse.

But I didn't have time to say anything. Annie stood up, wiped her hands off, and pulled me up, too. “We need art supplies. Let's go deeper into the valley and see what we find. I think I'd like to do something that takes a lot of hand-eye coordination.”

“Are you . . . okay?” A seriously dumb question.

“I'm fine now. Just needed to talk that out.” She forced happiness into her voice and rolled down her sleeves to cover the bruises. I wanted to ask her to stop. No matter how much we had to lie to people to get away, no matter how much we had to fake it—me faking who I was to make my dad happy, her faking how she felt about being treated like an actual leper, about being forced into a treatment no one would tell her about—down here, in the valley, honesty seemed like the only way to go.

Like it was important to be true down here. To each other and to ourselves. Even if we couldn't be true anywhere else.

Especially because of that.

T
wo hours later, I'd climbed more trees than I'd ever imagined and stripped more dead grapevines down than I had thought could exist.

“We're making a spider web,” Annie informed me when I finally had the breath to ask why we'd gathered a ten-foot-wide, three-foot-high pile of grapevines.

“A spider web?” I echoed. I wanted to ask how that was art, but thought better of it.

“Well, not today,” she said. “You'll see tomorrow.”

I looked up when a shadow fell. Dark gray clouds were stacking up on the rim of the valley. Rain, probably soon. It was time to go. Past time, maybe. “We'd better run, Annie, or we're going to be soaked.”

If Mom saw my wet clothes, I would be in huge trouble. I heard a rumble of thunder from far off, like the sky was agreeing with me.

“Yeah, let's get back,” Annie said. “I think I lost track of time.” She slipped out her camera and took a quick picture of the grapevine pile.

We ran back up the hill, Annie stopping a couple of times to hold her head. I guessed her headaches were back. At the top, she waved—“See you tomorrow!”—and darted off.

I saw the figure on the hillside again before I turned to run. It was closer—and it was definitely the Colonel's wife. She was working around some trees. It almost looked like she was cutting grapevines down. Had she been spying on Annie and me? Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she wanted us to invite her to make grapevine spider webs.

“Sorry, lady, this valley isn't big enough for all three of us,” I murmured into the wind.

A few seconds later, the Colonel's wife looked up, and I heard her yell, “I reckon it is. Now go home before I get it to sic the bees on ya!” The breeze rang with her laughter.

Whoa. I took a step back. How could she have heard me? And did she mean she could
talk
to the valley?

“Sorry,” I mumbled, and the wind caught that, too. The Colonel's wife made a motion with one arm, like she was brushing me off, and turned back to her cutting.

I turned, too, and ran home, hoping I'd get there before my parents did.

Even though Mom always said it was best to hope, she was wrong in this case. It would have been much, much better to stay in the valley.

Mom had come home early. She was waiting at the kitchen table, right inside the front door, when I walked in. I sort of understood her worrying about me. It was raining harder than I'd ever seen it—the drops had felt more like hail than rain as I'd crossed the yard—and I was soaked.

Mom had tear tracks on her face and a wad of tissues on the table in front of her. Had she been crying about me? I wanted to apologize, but she didn't give me a chance. She just started in on the yelling.

“What has gotten into you, Peter Edward Stone? What could you have been thinking? Running off, in an unfamiliar place, without telling anyone where you were going? Worse, lying about where you were?” In her hand was the crumpled-up note I'd left for Laura:
Sleeping, don't wake me up.
This time, I'd thought to put it on my door. Unfortunately, I hadn't done much more planning beyond that, figuring that Laura wouldn't have checked on me anyway.

“Did you even stop to consider what your sister would have done up here in this godforsaken wilderness if something had happened to you?”

Godforsaken wilderness?
It was the first time I'd heard Mom talk about our new home in anything other than positive terms.

“If you had gotten hurt, you could have died. We're forty miles of rough road away from the closest hospital, the phone lines were out for hours today for some reason, and our cell phones don't even work out here, for crying out loud.” She shook her cell phone at me like this was my fault.

“I'm okay, Mom,” I tried. I should have stayed quiet. It set her off again.

“It doesn't matter that you're okay
this
time. What about next time? Laura was worried sick about you. When she finally got a call through to me, I had to come home from work and miss two very important meetings, and for what? So you could go wandering on the hillside? Spending all that time alone—you were alone, weren't you?”

I had to tell her about Annie. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she would even help me figure out how to talk to Annie about her cancer. “No, I have a friend. . . . ” But Mom didn't even let me finish.

“Don't even think about lying to me! Laura told me what those boys said—that you haven't been hanging out at all. You didn't even go to their house.”

I couldn't believe it. Why had Laura picked today to tattle on me again?

“Well?” Mom shouted, practically in my face. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I wasn't sure she was even asking me a question. I sort of shrugged just in case she was. I had no idea what the right answer might be.

“That's it, no more,” she said. She pulled out a stack of pamphlets—brochures, it looked like—and waved them in my face. “You're too old for daycare, or trust me, I would have you in with Carlie in a red-hot minute. So it's camp for you.”

“Camp?”
The brochures in her hand were for summer camps?

“Yes, camp. Time with other kids, arts and crafts, soccer and football, camp songs. All that stuff you say you hate. I say you haven't given it a shot.”

“I don't want to go.” I felt my jaw hardening, clenching so tight it felt like my teeth would break. I couldn't imagine a worse summer than what she was planning for me. School was bad enough. This summer was the only time I'd ever gotten to be alone, be who I was, instead of trying to be like the rest of the world all the time.

“I'm sorry you don't want to go, but it's not negotiable. Your dad and I have been talking about this for a while. We don't have enough money for sleep-away camp, but there are plenty of day camps nearby, and heaven knows your father has enough time to drive you back and forth.”

They had been talking . . . for a while? About sending me away? It sounded like something Dad would like; he'd made it pretty clear from the time I was four that I needed “fixing.” Needed to be more like him. But I thought Mom . . . no. Those pamphlets had taken a while to collect. I felt my jaw click even harder. This wasn't just about today.

“You can pick which camp, but I'm done letting you waste your life. You'll end up a loner, an outcast—”

My stomach churned, but I had to speak up. “Maybe I like being a loner,” I interrupted. “Maybe I'm supposed to be an outcast.”

I really had to learn to keep my mouth shut.

“Maybe you could put some effort into understanding why this is so important to us! We're worried about you! And you don't even seem to care. Running off? Running away? After what you wrote last year in your journal?”

“I told you, that was just a story,” I reminded her. “You said we didn't have to talk about it.”

Mom's eyes filled with tears. “You wrote a story about a kid who ran away and . . . and . . . ”

I stood up, and my chair fell over backward. “I
told
you, it was just a story. You shouldn't have been reading my stuff anyway.” I was almost yelling. The sound made my head hurt, but at least it stopped Mom's rant.

“Peter,” Mom said, her voice soft now, breaking. I couldn't stand it; it was worse than her yelling. “You know how upset that made me—all of us. We thought it was because of those boys. That's why we're here, Peter. For you. But you've been getting more and more withdrawn since we moved.”

I
hadn't, I wanted to tell her. Not with Annie, not when I was in the valley. It was just at home. But I couldn't tell her that.
Camp.
She was sending me to camp. If there had ever been a sign that Mom didn't understand who I was, didn't care, this was it.

“What's wrong, Peter? Do you even know?” The rain on the roof picked up speed, and the pounding overhead matched the pounding of my heart. I had to get out of there. I could feel myself collapsing, like every word she said was pummeling me like rain, like hail, and soon I would be gone.

“What's wrong?” she repeated, and the two words she didn't say were as loud as the rest: What's wrong
with you?

I stood there, the papers in my hand feeling like a jail sentence, with Mom as my judge. She was waiting for an answer, and I knew she didn't want the truth. She wouldn't get it.

I knew exactly what was wrong. I said it, quiet but clear, before I went to my room to stay there, tearing the pamphlets into confetti-sized pieces for the rest of the night.

“I guess I was born into the wrong family.”

T
he rain kept me up that night. I think it was the rain, anyway. I heard Mom and Dad fighting again, and I woke up to what sounded like crying—Mom's. But maybe it was only rain.

The next morning, Laura was already hogging the bathroom. But she'd left a plate of cookies outside my door with a note:
Sorry.
I threw the cookies away.
Sorry
wasn't going to fix this.

At breakfast, Dad asked me if I'd chosen a camp.

I didn't even answer. I'd decided any words I used on my parents were just wasted. Just . . . mouth sounds. They obviously didn't have any meaning once they left my lips, anyway. Might as well stop talking altogether.

Dad asked again. I shook my head.

“Well, let's choose now. Where are the brochures?” I went to my room, gathered the pile of confetti, and returned to the kitchen. When I scattered it on the kitchen table, Dad didn't even blink.

“Fine,” he said. “I get it. You're mad. But you're going anyway. Your mom and I will choose.” He smiled at his coffee. “Horseback-riding camp, maybe. I always wanted to ride a horse.”

I don't
, I wanted to say.

Carlie was the only one who seemed to notice I wasn't speaking. She kept yelling, “Peep! Peep!” I actually whispered a few words to her when she started to get really distressed, whimpering, “Peep!” in a broken voice that tore at my heart. But I made sure no one else was near enough to see or hear me.

And I was being watched, that was for sure.

Laura, for one thing, couldn't keep away. I think she felt guilty. “I'm really sorry, Pete,” she said, looking up from the computer when I walked past. “I didn't know they'd get so mental. But it's weird, you know? We moved out here to get you away from those jerks. And it wouldn't be that hard to make new friends and get Mom and Dad off your back. There are those two boys who want to be your friends. You've just got to learn to reach out.”

I did break the silence then. “You want me to have friends who steal guns from their dad and aim them at me to scare me? Actually shoot them at me, in fact? You
want
me to die?”

Her jaw dropped, and she stopping tapping away at the keyboard. “Oh my gosh, are you serious? Pete, wait!” she yelled, but I was in my room with the door shut by the time she got to it. She could knock all day. I had no use for her. Carlie was the only one I cared about.

Well, and Annie. The rain had kept up, so I figured she wouldn't be in the valley the next day. But the day after, Friday, I was still stuck inside, Dad watching me with his patented “I don't understand Peter” expression on his face. Annie was there, I knew it, and I wasn't.

The next day was Saturday, and Mom was home. No hope.

Annie was only at camp for one more week. It wasn't fair. There was no way to get out, no way to help her make the last days before her treatment meaningful, and no one who cared enough to listen to me about why I needed to leave the house. Mom had figured out I was giving them all the silent treatment, and she told me the only words she wanted to hear were an apology for being disrespectful.

I wasn't ever going to apologize. I started dreaming about running away—not like Annie and I had been talking about, but really running away—when the doorbell rang.

Mom answered it, and I was surprised when I recognized the visitor's voice. It was the Colonel's wife. She and Mom chatted for a while, introducing themselves, and then she said, “Is that young man Peter here? Your son? I have a job for him, if he wants to earn a little money, and if you can spare him. My hands aren't as good as they used to be. Arthritis.”

My mom hesitated. “Well, he's grounded.”

“Ha! Grounded from helping an old lady with some grapevines? I promise you, whatever punishment you have devised for him here, I can top it. One day with me, and he'll honestly regret—what was it he did?”

“Running off without permission. And you're right, work sounds perfect,” Mom said. “And he'll do it for free. We are neighbors, after all.”

She sounded positively giddy. Probably delighted to get rid of me.

I was happy enough to go, even when the Colonel's wife handed me work gloves, a pair of wicked-looking clippers, and a water bottle the size of a milk jug. “You'll need this today, boy. We've got a lot of work ahead of us.” We both hopped into her go-kart. I ignored Mom and Dad, who were watching me with worried expressions. I think the go-kart had caught them off guard. Or maybe it was the helmets painted with flames.

“Never fear!” the Colonel's wife yelled as she backed out of the gravel driveway fast enough to make rocks spatter the side of the house. “I'll have him back by dinner. Maybe even with all his fingers!” She cackled as she drove off, ignoring my mom's startled “Wait!” that I could hear even above the engine's roar.

The Colonel's wife—whose real name was Mrs. Empson, she told me—wasn't lying about having work for me to do. She drove me up to the top of her hill, about a quarter mile from her house, handed me a stack of trash bags, and said, “I need you to cut every vine that isn't a grapevine. All that Virginia creeper and those sticker vines. Watch out for their thorns, they're sharp as knives—you cut them off at the base. I'd say dig out the roots, but that's no use. They're holding on to the limestone in the soil harder than a baby does her bottle.”

I stared down at the clippers in my gloved hand, then at the triangular peak of her house in the distance. “All the way?”

She laughed. “Yep, all the way. Just leave the bags as they fill—I'll come by later to pick 'em up. Don't forget to drink water. I'd say watch out for snakes, but I don't think you have anything to worry about.”

I wasn't sure what she meant by that. Was she referring to my boots? Or something else? But she was gone on the go-kart before I could ask. I got busy cutting. Bagging up the cut pieces was the hardest part of the job. Mrs. Empson was right about the sticker vines. They had thorns that stuck into the bags, making it almost impossible to shove them in. I ended up with scratches on my arms from trying to wrestle in the longest ones.

I don't know how long I'd worked, but I was sweating buckets. The sun was halfway up the sky, and I was wishing my mom had just lectured me to death two nights before, since at least then I wouldn't have to do unpaid, backbreaking labor for a crazy old lady all weekend, when a shadow fell over me.

“Guess I should have warned you about that poison ivy,” a voice said.

“Wha—”

Mrs. Empson was standing over me, wearing an enormous broad-brimmed hat that blocked out the light so effectively I couldn't see her face. But I could hear in her voice she was laughing at me.

I looked down. The vines in my hands didn't look like the others—but were they really poison ivy? I counted the glossy green leaves on each stem. Three. Oh, crud. And I'd been holding them in my bare arms.

I dropped the bundle. “I gotta go wash this off,” I said. I knew it shouldn't itch already, but the thought of how much of this stuff I'd been handling made me want to scratch myself bloody.

“Nah,” she said. “You're done here anyhow, just about. You go down to Pretty Pool and wash your arms off. You won't get any rash at all.”

“Pretty Pool?” I shouldered the final bag I'd cut and walked slowly alongside Mrs. Empson as we headed for her house. I was surprised at how close we were to finished—I'd done a lot of work.

“Well, I'm not sure what you and Annie—that's her name, right?—are calling it. Everybody who finds it names it something else, I reckon. When the Colonel passed and I started spending more and more time in the valley, I found it. Found out a few things about it over time. Suspect you will, too.”

The smile that flitted across her lips faster than a damselfly was as mysterious as anything I'd seen in the valley. Like she knew a wonderful secret.

“Just promise you'll stay quiet. The valley don't like too much noise. I don't want to hear you caterwaulin' around down there. Sound travels, you know.”

“I promise,” I said. I didn't tell her I'd already promised the valley the very same thing. I didn't want her thinking I was as crazy as she was.

“Hmph,” she grunted, like she could read my thoughts. “Smart aleck.” She dumped her bag and mine in a pile near a barrel that looked like it had been used to burn a hundred years' worth of trash.

I scratched at my arms. “Pretty Pool,” I whispered. I thought Annie's words—
effervescent
or
serendipity
—had been good. But the simplicity of
Pretty Pool
 . . . it was right.

“So, you think if I wash my arms off there, I won't get poison ivy?”

She shrugged. “You never know. The valley takes care of its own. Now you help me cut these last few grapes, and I'll let you run off for the next couple of hours. I think your little friend's been waiting for you.”

“Annie?” I wanted to run down now. “But . . . I'm grounded. Mom and Dad will kill me if they found out I went back there.”

“What, you gonna tell 'em?” She stopped at a large wicker basket and reached for her cutters. “Humph. I got a little overzealous here. Cut a few too many already. I'll just let you carry the basket up to the house, and then you trot on off.”

“Okay,” I said. She'd been cutting grapes? All the ones I'd seen had been green, nowhere near ripe.

I peeked into the basket. Crazy for sure. She'd cut green grapes. They weren't any good for eating, I knew that. I guess she could do what she wanted with them, they were on her property. Or her fence line, at least. But it seemed like a waste.

“You think loud, boy,” she said, breaking the silence. “Don't talk much, but you're always thinking, aren't you?”

After a second, I nodded. We'd reached the house. I wanted to step inside but glanced at my feet. “My boots are too muddy,” I said.

She shrugged. “Leave 'em here. I'll wash 'em for you while you visit with Annie.”

“But I need shoes,” I started, then let my sentence trail off.

She was looking at me like she was going to slap some sense into me. “No you don't,” she said. “You never ran barefoot down the valley? Try it. I promise. If you're what I think, then you won't get a single splinter.”

Okay, weird. No matter what she said, I wasn't going to take off my boots and go running across miles of cactus, thorn vines, and snakes with no shoes on. Sure, I'd taken them off at the pool before, but only on the flat rocks. Only a truly crazy person would think of running down the hill barefoot. But I was polite enough not to say so.

What had she meant about me, “if you're what I think”?

What did she think I was?

She opened the kitchen door, a solid wood rectangle that looked like it had been made a hundred years before. The kitchen was a wreck—green grapes, glass jars, and pots and pans everywhere. I didn't say anything, but I wondered if a woman this old and . . . well, not sane . . . should be living alone.

“I like being alone,” she said, even though I hadn't spoken out loud. “I like being able to decide what I want to do, when I want to do it.” Her voice got crabby. “I like being able to be my own self and not have to apologize to anyone for how I am, who I am.” She pulled off her hat and gave me a sideways glance. “You know that feeling?”

At first, I couldn't answer. Maybe she wasn't nuts; maybe she was psychic. She had just described the exact way I'd felt for . . . well, almost my whole life. “Yes,” I finally said. “I do know.”

“Run away, boy,” Mrs. Empson whispered. I looked up, startled.

She cleared her throat, winked, and said, “Run off, down to the valley. I'm done with you. Come back in a couple hours, I'll get you a sandwich and drive you back home. Now skedaddle!”

She didn't have to tell me again. I skedaddled.

Annie wasn't at Pretty Pool, but I stopped long enough to dip my hands and arms in. At the last second, I splashed my face, too. It felt good, even though I wasn't at all sure it would do anything for the poison ivy I'd been handling all morning.

I was at the flower meadow in minutes. When I came through the last of the oaks, I saw someone standing with her back to me—totally still—but this girl had white, fluffy hair. Angel-soft hair, in a cloud.

When I got closer, I realized it was Annie. Her hands were fisted at her sides, full of . . . dandelion stems?

And that's what was in her hair. Thousands of pieces of dandelion fluff. Maybe tens of thousands.

“Annie?” I said, after I walked around to her front and saw her eyes were open. She was standing totally still, smiling as wide as I'd ever seen, but tears were shining in her eyes.

“Look at me,” she said and giggled. “I'm art.”