The Second Life of Abigail Walker Read Free Page B

closed the door behind her.
    She always did her best thinking in her closet. When she was younger, she’d pretended her bedroom closet was her house. She drew pictures and hung them on the wall: a deliriously happy yellow daisy that towered over a pink cottage; a portrait of the sisters in Little Women , all in hoop skirts, like they’d gone to visit Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind . She tucked away snacks in shoe boxes. And candy, of course. Always candy.
    Abby had a secret candy life. The summer after fourth grade, when her father had told her mother to put her on a diet, she’d started hiding Kit Kat bars she bought at the pool snack bar in the pockets of her bathrobe and the navy blazer that her mother bought for her at a consignment shop, thinking it might look cute with jeans, andwhich Abby had never worn. After a day where her food choices had been low-fat yogurt, four-ounce chicken breasts, and Special K with skim milk, she slipped into her closet and dipped into her stash of chocolate.
    â€œShe should be losing weight faster than this,” her father would tell her mother after Abby’s Saturday morning weigh-ins. “You’re not letting her snack, are you?”
    â€œPeople lose at different rates,” her mom would say, looking at Abby with a worried expression. Was there something wrong? Thyroid problems, maybe?
    Abby would shrug. “Maybe I should exercise more.”
    â€œWe should all go bike riding!” her mother would exclaim, and her father would grunt—not a yes, not a no, more of a Get real . In order to go bike riding you had to have free time. Abby’s father had none. Wanted none was maybe more to the point.
    Sitting in her closet now, she could feel her hand throbbing slightly. Could the fox have been rabid? Maybe she should tell her momabout the bite. She didn’t want her arm to fall off, after all; she had enough problems without losing an arm. But that fox hadn’t been foaming at the mouth, hadn’t acted crazy. Crazy like a fox. Abby wondered what that meant. Well, she knew what it meant, sort of. Sometimes a person might act crazy to throw you off what they were really up to. Did foxes do that? They must, or why have the saying?
    After half an hour or so, the tingling stopped. Her mom called from downstairs that dinner was almost ready. Abby wondered if she would tell her about Kristen, how they weren’t friends anymore. She wanted to, but she knew she probably wouldn’t. Still, to be able to say, I am not friends with Kristen Gorzca , to make that declaration, it would have been like opening a door. Please come in , Abby would say to her mom. Meet the original Abigail Walker, a girl who does and says what she wants when she wants to.
    She stood, opened the closet door, and emerged. She looked at her hand. The marks were gone. She held out her arms, examined them, looked at her legs, patted her belly. All herparts looked and felt exactly as they had when she woke up that morning.
    But she was pretty sure she had become an entirely different person.

poets throughout the ages could not keep their pens off her sleek red fur, her thin, elegant nose. The fox reminded herself of this as she stood beside a chicken coop the next morning, contemplating an especially plump bird. She was too grand for this sort of thing—how common to rob a chicken coop! Leave the chickens to the raccoons, whom the poets had largely ignored and for good reason.
    Besides, enough carnage! Enough bones and blood, enough feathers flying without bodies to lift into the air.
    The fox moved away from the coop, which was in the middle of an ordinary backyard, not far from the field where she’d met the girl. She was taking the morning to explore the neighborhood, the green-turning-to-gold-and-brown neighborhood. She needed to look for traps, check the perimeters. It was, aside from the chicken coop and the empty field in the middle of all those houses,