Untitled (47 page)

  "Okay. And mine's Joan."

  "Look – I gotta go," she said. She was walking quickly, and I had to hurry to keep up. She seemed smaller than she did in the woods. She hugged her books to her chest as if she were cold. She didn't smile.

  "What's the matter?" I said. "Where are you going?"

  She didn't slow down. "I've got some stuff to do."

  "Hey, Joan!" I turned and saw Cindy Gordon and another girl, standing at a nearby locker.

  I touched Fox's arm. "That's Cindy Gordon," I said. "I know her. Let's go say hi." I walked toward them, but when I got there, Fox wasn't with me. I saw her back as she headed away down the corridor.

  "Hi, Cindy," I said.

  "Hi, Joan." Her friend was staring after Fox. "This is Sue. Sue, this is Joan."

  "Do you know that girl?" Sue asked me.

  "Yeah. Why?"

  She glanced at Cindy but didn't answer my question.

  Cindy closed her locker and said, "Joan just moved here from Connecticut. She lives right near me." She looked at me. "We're going to the cafeteria to get some lunch. Want to come?"

  Fox was no longer in sight. I shrugged uncomfortably. "Sure. I guess so."

  I ate a hamburger from the cafeteria at a table with Cindy and Sue and a couple of their friends. They asked me a few questions about Connecticut, but mostly they talked about the classes they were in and what their teachers were like.

  I walked to science class with Cindy and Sue. The teacher, Mr. McFarland, was a tall, skinny guy wearing plaid pants and a shirt with a pocket protector. He talked for a while then asked us to pair up with lab partners. When everyone was milling around, trying to find a partner, I saw Fox at the back of the class, standing alone. I left Cindy and Sue, who had paired up immediately.

  "Hey," I said to her. "Want to be partners?"

  She looked at me, frowning a little. "Don't do me any favors."

  I frowned back. "What's with you, Fox?" I said, very quietly. "Why are you acting so weird?"

  "Didn't your new friends tell you? I am weird."

  I followed her gaze. Cindy and Sue carefully looked away when I glanced at them. Then I looked back at Fox. "Look – do you want to be lab partners or not?"

  She bit her lip and shrugged. "I guess."

  For the rest of class, Mr. McFarland had us examine flowers and look for all the parts: the sepals, the petals, the stamen, the pistil. Fox worked with me, but she wasn't the same person that she was in the woods. She was quieter, more subdued. In the woods, she was in charge; she knew what she was doing. Here, she was out of place. At the end of class, Fox vanished into the crowd of students before I could catch up with her.

  After school, as I walked home with Cindy and Sue, Sue asked me about Fox. "How do you know Sarah?"

  "I met her when I was walking along the railroad tracks," I said, feeling uncomfortable. I knew that Cindy and Sue would never go wandering in the woods by themselves.

  "I heard that she and her father live in this junked-out house in the woods. Her father's really scary. He rides this big Harley, and he has all these tattoos."

  "I've been to her house," I said slowly. "It wasn't so bad. And I met her dad. He's a nice guy."

  Sue was looking at me like I'd said that I'd been to Mars in a UFO. "You've been to her house?"

  "Yeah, I've been to her house," I said, with a bit of an edge in my voice.

  "Hey," Cindy said, "what did you think of Mr. McFarland's pants. Weren't those wild?"

  So we talked about Mr. McFarland and how weird he was. I was grateful that Cindy had changed the subject. I got the feeling that she didn't like the way that Sue was trashing Fox. She asked if Sue and I wanted to come over for a swim, but I said I couldn't. "Gotta do some stuff at home for my mom."

  I went home, changed into jeans, and headed for the clearing in the woods. Fox wasn't there. I went to her house, and Gus said she hadn't gotten home yet. I checked down by the stream where the newts lived, then I went to the culvert.

  I listened at the opening. "Fox?" I called. No answer. The water was low now, just a trickle running down the center. I saw a couple of muddy footprints on the dry cement beside the water; they looked about the right size for Fox's feet. "Fox?" I called again.

  I headed into the darkness, walking on the curving cement side of the culvert, staying out of the trickle of water. My footsteps echoed the length of the tunnel.

  Every other time I'd been there, Fox had been leading the way. It seemed darker than it had ever been before. "Fox?"

  "Yeah?" Her voice was soft. She was just a little bit farther in.

  "I was looking for you."

  "Well, you found me."

  I bumped into her. She was sitting on the side of the culvert with her feet in the water. I sat down beside her.

  "You didn't wait for me after class."

  "I figured you wanted to hang out with those other girls."

  "You could have walked home with us," I said.

  "No, I couldn't. They don't like me."

  "They just don't know you," I said, knowing even as I said it that she was right. Cindy might accept her, but Sue wouldn't.

  She didn't say anything.

  "My mom's going to make me join that Girl Scout troop. If you joined the Girl Scouts, then . . ."

  "No thanks," she said. "Not interested. That wouldn't change a thing."

  I sat with her in the darkness, knowing she was right

  "Forget school," she said suddenly. "Let's see how far we can go in the tunnel."

  "Right now? We don't have flashlights or anything." The light of the entrance was very far away.

  "Come on," she said. "I think I know where it comes out."

  I followed her into the darkness, splashing through the water. She kept hurrying on ahead, in charge again. "Wouldn't this be a great place to hide a treasure if you had one," she was saying. "No one would ever find it in here."

  The light of the entrance disappeared behind us. The air smelled stale and muddy. We couldn't get lost – there was only one tunnel, and to get out all we had to do was turn back – but my heart beat faster and it was hard to breathe. At last, after what seemed like hours, I saw a pinprick of light ahead of us, getting bigger as we approached.

  When we emerged into the sunlight, Fox was grinning. We were on the far side of the orchard; we had walked almost a mile underground. "Wasn't that cool?" she said.

  I lay on the ground in a patch of sunshine, so glad to be back in the light of day. She sat beside me, hugging her knees.

  "Yeah," I admitted. "That was kind of cool. I couldn't have done it without you."

  She nodded, acknowledging her position and authority. She was, once again, the queen of the foxes.

That fall, my life was divided into two worlds.

  After school and on weekends, I spent as much time as I could with Fox in the woods. At school, I walked a narrow line. Sometimes I hung out with Cindy and her friends, and sometimes I hung out with Fox.

  One day, I walked into science class and found a glass aquarium tank filled with big green frogs. Mr. McFarland held a squirming frog and demonstrated how to stick the needle in the back of the frog's neck and sever the spine. "Now you'll all do the same," he said. "Each pair of lab partners will dissect a frog."

  When he asked if there were any questions, Fox raised her hand and said she wouldn't do it

  He nodded, and said that he would kill the frog for any teams that couldn't do it themselves.

  "No," Fox said. "I won't cut up a frog if you kill it. I won't have anything to do with this." She was almost shouting at him.

  Mr. McFarland got a little red in the face. "I guess you'll have to talk about that with the dean of girls," he said stiffly. "Joan, why don't you join one of the other groups?"

  "I won't do it either," I said quietly. "I guess I'd better go see the dean of girls too."

  Mr. McFarland looked surprised. I was, after all, a good student. But I couldn't abandon Fox, so we both went off to see the dean of girls. She looked at Fox sadly and at me with surprise. "Sarah, I'm sorry to see you here again – and Joan, I'm surprised to see you here at all."

  While Fox sat with her arms folded, looking miserable and stubborn, I did a lot of talking about cruelty to animals and respect for life. In the end, the dean of girls was sympathetic about what she called our "squeamishness." I suggested that Fox and I go to the library, do research on this type of frog, and write up a paper. The dean of girls and Mr. McFarland agreed on that.

  In English class, I wrote poetry that I knew Ms. Parsons would like. Stuff about clouds and rain and sad feelings. I'd always been good at figuring out what teachers liked and giving it to them.

  Fox just couldn't get the knack of that, although I explained it to her. "It's not honest, Newt," she told me once, when we were sitting out in the clearing. "You're writing stuff that will make her happy rather than writing stuff that you like. Why waste your time?"

  I shrugged. "I get good grades. It keeps my parents off my back."

  I thought Fox's poems were more interesting than mine, but they weren't about the sort of things that Ms. Parsons liked. Fox wrote about the peeling paint on her house, about the stink of the mud in the culvert, about the graffiti on the wall by the schoolyard. Fox wouldn't take the time to make sure that everything was spelled right, and she wouldn't bother to copy a poem over so that there weren't any cross-outs. Her handwriting was awful. Ms. Parsons took points off for spelling and neatness, but I think the real reason that Fox got Cs was because her poems made Ms. Parsons nervous.

  When Ms. Parsons got entry forms for a short-story contest sponsored by an organization of women writers, she gave me one. "They want imaginative stories from girls like you," she told me. "Why don't you write a story and show it to me. Then I'll send it in."

  At lunch that day, Cindy told me that Ms. Parsons had given her an entry form too. "I'm going to write about going rafting," she told me earnestly. "We found litter in the river and that made me think about nature." I nodded politely, though I couldn't imagine anything duller.

  After school, I told Fox about the contest. "Are you going to write a story about puppies and kittens for Ms. Parsons?" she asked me.

  I shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. Ever since Gus had given me the notebook, I'd been writing down stuff that I wouldn't show to Ms. Parsons, stuff I wouldn't show anyone.

  "You ought to write about something you really care about," Fox said. "My dad says that's where the best writing comes from."

  I shrugged again. "If I did that, I wouldn't want to show it to Ms. Parsons."

  "You don't have to show it to her. You've got the entry form. You can just send it in yourself."

  "Maybe you should write something," I suggested.

  Fox shook her head. "Yeah, right. Like those people would want to read anything I wrote."

  "Maybe we should write something together," I said. "What could we write about?"

  "Wild girls," Fox said, without hesitation. "The wild girls who live in the woods."

  "How did they get there?"

  She was sitting in the big chair, looking up at the leaves of the tree and squinting a little against the sun. "One of them grew up there."

  "Her mother was a fox," I said, "and her father was a wizard. The wizard loved the fox and turned her into a woman, but she was never happy so she went back to being a fox."

  "I guess the other one came along later," Fox said slowly. "She's a princess, the daughter of an evil king and a beautiful but stupid queen. She's traveling through the forest on her way to get married to a wicked duke. But she runs away and finds the wild girl in the forest."

  "Then they team up, and it's like Robin Hood," I said. "They steal from the rich and give to the poor."

  "And all the animals in the forest are their friends."

  We decided to write a story. I didn't tell Ms. Parsons; I didn't tell my mother. We told Gus, but he was the only one. He showed us where he kept his dictionary so that we could look up words. Otherwise he left us alone.

  A few weeks after we'd started working on the story my mother asked me about the contest. "Cindy's mother tells me she's writing a story for a teen writers contest. You do very well in English. Don't you want to write a story?"

  "I don't think so," I mumbled. "I'm really busy with school."

  "It seems like you have plenty of time to play in the woods every day," she said.

  "Sarah and I are working on a project for biology class. We're studying newts. Maybe we'll enter it in the science fair." The phone rang then, and I got away.

  After Fox and I had been working on the story for a month, Gus let us use his typewriter to type it up. He gave us stamps and a big envelope so we could mail the story in.

  For a couple of days after we sent it in, we didn't know what to do with ourselves. We knew that the story couldn't even have reached the contest judges yet, but we kept checking the mail anyway.

  In the clearing, we sometimes practiced reading the story aloud – because the contest winners would get to read their stories aloud. We figured out who would read which parts, how we would alternate lines of dialog.

  A couple of months later, Ms. Parsons asked Fox and me to stay after class. She had the strangest expression on her face – her eyes were angry, but her mouth was smiling a tight little smile. "You girls didn't tell me you were entering the teen writers contest," she said.

  I glanced at Fox and then back at Ms. Parsons. "Oh. Well, we did."

  "Your mother didn't even know you had entered, Joan. I called to tell her the news."