The Second Life of Abigail Walker Read Free

shook her head. “No, it’s this girl in their homeroom they don’t like,” she whispered back.
    â€œNamed Abby?”
    Abby nodded, and Sonya turned back to the window with a snort.
    Okay, maybe walking away from Kristen’stable hadn’t been such a great idea. Really, what had Abby been thinking about? She should have just said yes, throwing up was a way a person could lose weight. She should have said she was going on a diet that very afternoon.
    A part of Abby was desperate to turn around and swear she’d only been joking. But she knew it was too late. She was tired of doing things and saying things just to make other people like her. She wanted to do and think what she felt like, even if nobody ever talked to her again. It was terrifying, but that’s what she wanted.
    Finally the bus pulled up to the corner of Ridge Valley Road. Abby scurried down the aisle and practically leaped out the door to the pavement. She needed to make a getaway.
    She ran.
    â€œWho are you running away from?” Kristen called after her. It sounded like a threat, but what kind of threat could it have been? Did she want to fight? Abby outweighed her by seventeen pounds, as Kristen had pointed out at least ten times on their ride home. If nothing else, Abby could squash her.
    Her feet pounded down the hill toward her house. When she reached her front yard, she stopped. She didn’t want to go inside. Her mother might have just made cookies. She was the kind of mother who did that kind of thing when she was home from work, baked treats thirty minutes before her children got home, so the house would smell warm and inviting when they walked through the front door.
    She couldn’t go into her sweet-smelling house with this pack of jumbled feelings— I’m free! I’m doomed! —on her back. Her mother would sense it. She’d want to smooth things out. But Abby didn’t want smoothness. She wanted rough edges. She wanted to feel whatever it was she was feeling.
    She stood for a moment in the yard across the street from her house. The jungle, her father called it. It was the strangest story. The summer before last, the people who’d lived there had gone to Japan for a year. They paid a man to mow the lawn, but nobody ever went into the house while they were gone to check on things. The roof sprang a leak, probably sometime rightafter the owners left the country, and when they returned a year later, the house was contaminated with toxic mold.
    For two weeks in July, Abby and her brothers John and Gabe had watched from their front porch as men in white suits, with HAZMAT printed across the back, tore the house down, brick by brick, board by board. It was like watching a movie run backward. It might have sounded boring, but it was almost impossible not to look.
    Really, it was like watching something die.
    â€œI think you children ought to watch from inside the house,” her mother had fretted nearly every morning when she found them sitting on the porch steps, licking dripping Popsicles as they peered across the street, still in their pajamas.
    â€œThey’d tell us if it was dangerous, Mom,” John had insisted. “I think they sprayed everything before they started tearing it down.”
    When the men were done, nothing but the driveway was left to give a hint there’d been anything there other than a weedy patch of dirt.All the neighbors had wondered what would happen next. Was the ground contaminated? Could another house be built on the same spot?
    If the ground was contaminated, it didn’t stop a million weeds from sprouting on the lot almost overnight. Wildflowers sprang up. Saplings took root. A flock of dandelions landed in what used to be the front yard and made itself at home. Abby’s father threatened to go after them with a tank of weed killer, but he was too scared to get close enough. What if mold spores were still flying around?
    Abby loved the new