Wish Girl (4 page)

T
he next day, I wished I'd never met her.

It all started when I went back to the pool. I knew I shouldn't have gone. Even though nobody seemed to have missed me at home the day before, three days of disappearing was probably stretching my luck. But the valley was a special place. And the girl had called me phenomenal. And amazing. No one had ever called me anything like that before.

When I got there, I was alone. But there were a whole bunch of bugs—water striders skating across the top of the pond and tadpoles underneath, wiggling small black teardrop bodies around the edge of the water. I watched them for a long time, certain they were moving in patterns the longer I stared, making shapes, dancing almost—before I realized the girl was back.

And she was sketching me again. “Don't move,” she called out softly when I reached up to scratch an old mosquito bite on my neck. “I've almost got it.”

Her voice broke the morning stillness and scared off a few of the birds that had hopped closer to me through the underbrush.

I sighed. I'd been right. She was going to turn out to be one of those noisy kids.

“Listen, wish girl,” I said. I still didn't know her real name. She fixed that.

“Annie,” she answered, slapping her sketchpad shut and scrambling across the rocks. She had some sort of material wrapped around her ankles, navy blue like the kind the sporty kids wore when they'd hurt themselves playing. She saw me looking and took the ankle supports off as she spoke, the sound of Velcro chasing one last sparrow away from the pool. “I'm Annie Blythe. Do you live around here?” She stuffed the wraps in her bag.

“Yeah. Unfortunately. But what I was going to say was, I wish you would—”

She didn't let me finish. “Hang out with you? Yes, I will. I could tell the first time I saw you that you could use some company. I'm intuitive that way.”

I almost laughed, but I didn't want to give her the wrong idea. “No, I don't need company. I was trying to be quiet.”

“Oh, were you meditating?” Annie flopped down next to me, folded her legs impossibly into a pretzel, closed her eyes, settled her hands on her knees, and began to chant. “Ommmmmm.”

I'd never heard an om that loud. They could probably hear her in Tibet.

“No,” I said. “I just want to be alone.”

That only made her om louder.

It was no use. No matter how much I wanted to tell her to bug off, make her go, it wasn't going to work. I would have to leave. “Nice to meet you, Annie,” I lied.

“Oh, come on,” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me back when I stepped away. “I'm sorry I ruined your little bug-infested interlude.”

“My what?” I shook my head and shook her arm off. “Never mind. I've gotta go.” I started down the rocks, wondering if there were more ponds nearer the valley floor. Ponds that didn't have annoying, noisy girls by them.

“Ouch,” I heard. I looked back. Annie was leaned over, holding her head. Well, her hat. She had on the brown cap again. It made her head look like a giant acorn.

“Are you okay?” She'd fallen over; her sketch materials were scattered all around her. I sighed and headed back up to help. “What happened? Did you hit your head?”

“No,” she said, and I noticed her eyes were crinkled around the edges and her lips were drawn tight.

“Did you trip? Maybe you need to put those ankle wraps back on.”

“My ankles are fine, really,” she whispered, pushing herself up and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet slightly. “It's my head.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Just a headache. I get them.”

“Me too.”

“Oh?” Annie managed after a few seconds. I could tell talking really hurt, though. “Why do you get headaches?”

“Noise,” I said. “Constant noise.” I thought of Carlie and Laura and Mom. “Mostly noisy girls.”

Annie smiled a little, but only for a second. “Here, try this,” I said and grabbed her hand. There was a spot my mom had showed me once, in between the thumb and pointer finger, on the web part of the hand. If you pinched it just right, for long enough, sometimes the headaches would go away.

“It's not working,” Annie said, watching me rub her hand. Probably thinking I was weird. “This isn't the acupressure-fixing kind of headache anyway. But thanks for trying.”

“Oh, sorry.” I let her hand drop. “Well, my dad always says, nobody ever died of a headache.”

Annie burst out laughing, holding her head at the same time, like each laugh was a knife through her brain.

What had I said?

After a few seconds, she stood up, put the art supplies I'd handed her in her bag, and said, “Let's go then. Where are we going, by the way?”

I sighed. How did I put this?
No offense, but I sort of want to be by myself. Can you find somewhere else to go? Like the North Pole?

No, that would be rude. An argument would be way worse than just leaving. I had a thought as I started back down the hill. “Are you out here alone?”

“Are you?” she shot back, following me across the rocks.

“Yeah,” I said. “So you live around here? Which house?”

“I don't live here. I live near Houston. I'm going to camp over the hill at Doublecreek Farm.”

“There's a camp near here?” I couldn't remember seeing anything as big as a camp.

“Well, it's a small camp. Only twenty kids. It starts tomorrow.” She didn't seem excited.

“How long is it?” How long was she going to be hanging around the valley, I meant.

“Two weeks.” She sounded miserable.

“That's short. Do you miss your mom or something?”

“I wish.” Annie rolled her eyes. “She came along.”

I couldn't help smiling. “Seriously?” I thought the whole point of camp was for kids to get independent. Although that didn't seem to be a problem for her.

“Well, only for the weekend,” Annie said. “She'll drive back to Houston Sunday night.”

“Doesn't she care that you're just . . . wandering around?” I wondered if I should tell her about the rattler. Maybe that would scare her off.

“No. I mean, she didn't yesterday. But I told her I met a friend, an older kid, and we were hanging out. I hope that was okay.”

She'd told her mom about me? “Older? I'm only twelve. Well, almost thirteen. How old are you?”

“Twelve. So?”

“So, you lied. We're the same age.”

Annie shrugged. “No big. Age is just a number. I think I read that on a birthday card.”

“So she was okay with you being gone all the time?”

“Yeah, she'd pretty much let me do anything I asked for.” She paused, and her lips got tight. “Well, almost anything.”

“Even hang out with some older boy she's never met? I guess she
will
let you do anything.”

“Well, she made me take my phone for emergencies. Of course, she probably doesn't realize you can't get any signal out here. Oh, and also I told her you were a girl.”

“A girl?”

“A Girl Scout, in fact.” She skipped ahead of me while I sputtered. “Named Jasmine Penelope.”

“Wait, what? Why'd you say that?” I chased after her. She was fast, and she moved almost silently over the rocks. “Why Jasmine Penelope?” Did she think I looked like a Jasmine Penelope? It sounded like a brand of potpourri.

“Well, what was I supposed to say? ‘Mom, I'm going to go hang out in the countryside with some stranger boy I met yesterday? And yes, he's probably an ax murderer?' Trust me, she was much happier with the Girl Scout story.”

I could see her point. “Good call.” I hesitated. The rocks had gotten flatter and fewer, and she had started moving through brush. Poison-ivy-looking brush. “Um, where are we going?”

“To the bottom of the valley, of course,” she said. “I figure we'll find a stream or something. Keep up, will you? I'm going to see if I can get a sketch of you covered with leeches or bees or wasps or something. I wonder how many scorpions live down there.”

“What?”

I thought she was kidding. I hoped she was. I followed anyway, waving mosquitoes away from my face, listening to her hum “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” wondering where my quiet day had gone. Wishing Annie hadn't come along. She was nice, I guessed. But weird and bossy. And a liar. For all I knew, she really was planning to sketch me covered in fire ants or something. And even though it had been cool to be drawn the first time, it had gotten old fast. I hadn't come out here to be watched or studied. I'd come out to . . . well, to see what I could see, just like Annie was humming.

I wasn't going to see anything with her making all that racket.

But then, when we reached the bottom of the valley and found the waterfall, we both stopped in our tracks. The waterfall glittered and shone like a cascade of diamonds and sapphires, singing against the stones as it fell, thrumming against the ground so that I could feel it in my feet.

It was stunning. Even Annie got as quiet as I was, quieter than she'd ever been. I think that was the only reason we were able to hear the gunshots over the sound of the falling water.

“W
hat was that?” Annie reminded me of Carlie in a thunderstorm, scared, chewing on her lower lip. I just hoped she wasn't going to freak out.

“Guns,” I said. “Someone's shooting.”

In San Antonio, I'd heard gunshots a few times. There, it meant someone was getting shot at. I didn't think it meant that out here. “They're probably hunting,” I whispered. The shots had come from up the hill, in the direction we'd been walking, maybe a little to the left.

“For what?” Annie said, the sass back in her voice. “Deer? Dove? It's June. This is nothing-at-all season, Peter.”

“Target practice?” I tried. I started walking again, in the opposite direction of the gunfire. It was strange: As I walked I noticed all the mosquitoes and even some wasps flying as fast as they could up the hill. Flying toward the shooting, like they were late to something.

“No one lives here,” she said. “This entire valley belongs to the Colonel's wife.”

I swear, I spent the whole time with Annie wishing she'd go away or wondering what she was talking about.

“Who? What colonel?”

“A dead one,” Annie said, examining the waterfall. Once I looked at it closer, I realized it might not have qualified as a real waterfall. It was only about three feet tall, and it fell into a streambed that couldn't have been more than knee-deep. There was a steep stone cliff on one side, and the water seemed to come from someplace right above the fall that I couldn't see. Maybe there was some sort of spring. The rock was all limestone around here, and I knew from science class that meant caves and underground streams.

The trees on the sides of the stream were oaks, but I could see a few small cypresses with their roots stuck in the water like skinny brown legs.

“A dead colonel,” I repeated, following Annie as she crept to the top of the fall on slick rocks. She slipped once. I almost reached out to catch her, but she gave me a look that said
hands off
. Oh, well. If she slipped and fell, it was her fault.

“Yeah, a dead colonel,” Annie said eventually, once she'd climbed over a bunch of branches, scaring up a cloud of gray moths that had been resting there. “Mom said I couldn't run around here unless it was okay with the Colonel's wife. Mom went by yesterday morning.” She stopped. “Didn't you get permission?”

“Um, no,” I said. Was it my imagination, or did the moths land on the trunk of an oak tree in a pattern that looked a lot like an old man's face?

“You didn't get permission?”

I shook my head. “I didn't know this land belonged to anyone.”

“You dirty little trespasser,” Annie crowed. “I can't believe you didn't get caught.”

“You said the Colonel's wife owns it?” I said, feeling slightly nervous. Colonels were military. She probably had a lot of guns. “Do you think that was her shooting? Maybe I'd better go.” I didn't like the idea of being shot as a trespasser down here, miles away from a hospital.

“Nah, she wouldn't shoot you. She's crazy, but not murderously crazy.”

“Then crazy how? By the way, that's not very nice.” The kids at my last school had called me crazy, too, just because I didn't like to do the things they did. They thought anyone who didn't run around screaming and playing football was an idiot, I guess.

Annie stopped, climbed on top of the biggest branch she found, and sat there, swinging her legs.

“Well, don't blame me. My mom's the one who said she was crazy.”

“Why?” I climbed up next to her. We had a great view of the whole streambed from here. I let my legs swing, too.

“The Colonel's wife said something about how I could come down here if the valley would let me. Like it wasn't her decision. It was the land's.” She laughed. “Weird, huh?”

“Okay, slightly crazy.” I remembered, though, the feeling from the day before. Like I was being tested. I wondered, if I had moved—if I hadn't stayed quiet—would the valley have done something to make me leave?

Would the snake have bitten me?

Maybe the Colonel's wife wasn't all that nuts. But I wasn't about to say so to Annie.

“I don't care one way or the other, just so long as I can run around down here. It's so beautiful. It inspires me.” She smiled again, a weird little twist of her mouth that didn't look particularly happy. “Anyway, she wasn't exactly going to say no, was she?”

My mind spun.
No
was pretty much a mom's favorite word, in my experience. “Why not?”

“Well, you know. I am a wish girl. That's what I'm doing here. Going to camp. It's my wish.”

“Your wish?” I almost laughed. I swear, this girl was as crazy as they come. “I can't even understand half of what you're saying. Are you sure your brain is all there?”

The smile dropped off her face. “Well, for now,” she whispered. Her voice was stripped bare of all the laughter.

I turned to face her, but she wouldn't look at me. She was tracing the line a termite or something had made on the branch, a crazy, looping half tunnel that meandered through the bark.

“What did I say?”

“I told you I was a wish girl,” she said. “Get it?”

“Um, no,” I said. A wish girl? I thought she'd just been joking around. What did she mean? From the sound of it, nothing good. “Like wishes that come true?”

She hopped down, agitated, and started back along the side of the stream, her strides stirring up dead leaves and dust.

“No,” I heard her say, even though she wasn't speaking loudly for the first time all day. “The kind that don't.”