The Second Life of Abigail Walker Read Free Page A

wild place across from her house. Every morning it seemed there was a new flower standing on a spindly leg, some yellow speckled bird that couldn’t be from around here—but where else could it be from? In August she checked out a copy of the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America from the library and began making a list. Junco, oriole, hummingbird.
    The yard across the street was the opposite of her yard. Abby’s mother was an indoor person. Her father worked eighteen hours a day. Theypaid a professional lawn service to keep the grass cut and the weeds down. In the late fall, a landscaper would come by to prune the azaleas and the boxwoods that guarded the front porch. Everything was symmetrical and neat. No wild things allowed.
    Standing in the empty lot, Abby noticed the weeds were now up to her waist. What would be left at the end of the world? Some people said cockroaches, but her money was on the weeds. She wanted to walk through them, part them down the middle like a greeny-brown sea. But she didn’t want ticks. Ticks, like the idea of leeches, made her shudder all the way down to her toes. Anything stuck to her skin and sucking her blood she found highly problematic.
    So she didn’t part the sea of weeds, but she did walk around the edges.
    And that’s when she met the fox.
    She wasn’t used to wild animals, unless you counted squirrels and rabbits, but they never made her hair stand on end. So when the small red fox suddenly appeared, its eyes searching her face, its delicate, pointed nose sniffing, sniffing,Abby had to stop herself from screaming. She was already shaky, newly escaped as she was from her life as a medium girl. And now, this fox, this creature . Would it kill her? Go for her jugular?
    The fox tilted its head to one side, as though wondering something. She—or he—was a small animal. Abby could have punted it across the lot. She had opposable thumbs, a highly developed cerebral cortex. She had the advantage here.
    But not really.
    Were foxes related to dogs? Abby racked her brain. They were, weren’t they? So why did this fox remind her of a cat? Sly as a fox , she thought, and then she thought of her dog, Bingo, who was smart when he needed to be, smart enough to hide under the couch when they made signs they were going out and about to crate him, but not sly. Not crafty.
    â€œWho are you?” Abby asked the fox. She squatted, held out her hand. Did she expect the fox to lick it? To rub its head against her fingers, hoping she’d scratch it behind the ears, the way Bingo would?
    The fox came closer, eyes still on her. “Do you live here?” Abby asked.
    Another step closer. Abby wasn’t scared anymore. She couldn’t believe how close the fox was getting. She held out her hand an inch from its snout. The fox opened its mouth. She thought the fox was yawning, she thought it might curl up at her feet and nap. And then its teeth came down on her hand. Lightly. As if to barely break the skin.
    Abby fell back, landed on her bottom, and watched the fox scurry off into the sea of weeds. The fox had bitten her! Her left hand began to tingle, and she examined the two small puncture wounds. Two tiny pearls of blood had risen on the skin. She knew she should wipe the blood away; if her mother saw it, she’d ask questions, rush her to the emergency room, have her stomach pumped, her appendix removed. She would forbid Abby to ever return to the empty lot.
    She wiped her hand on her jeans, then spit on it and rubbed the spit so that nothing was left to see except for two small dots. Fox dots , she thought, feeling oddly giddy.
    Abby’s mother, reading in the living room, only called “Hello” when she heard Abby’s footsteps in the hall, too involved in the lives of colonial America to give Abby her full frontal welcome. Once in her room, Abby flung her backpack onto her bed and opened her closet. She walked in and