Found Things (6 page)

“What happens if I wake you up?” I asked.

“There's no telling. So if I sleepwalk, just put me back in bed.”

I nodded. “And don't wake you up.”

“So, can I still stay here?”

“Why not?”

“Because it's a strange thing to do.”

It wasn't strange—it was another interesting thing about Meadow Lark, along with her eye and her leg and that she come from Arizona and was in the hospital four times.

As Meadow Lark went downstairs, I smoothed out the comforter where she had sat. Then I took one more look at the room to make sure nothing was out of place, that nothing was moved and nothing was different. Because I knew that changing Theron's room would change Theron. And that would change us.

Chapter 8

Daniel Bunch was not in
art class on Monday, and he wasn't in the quad at lunch on Tuesday to pester me. By Wednesday, the worry that had settled in me as I watched our wish slide down the river sat up and looked around.

“Where's Daniel?” Sonya asked to the middle of the art table.

When class began, Ms. Zucchero had put a pile of things on the table—a CrimsonCrisp apple with a brown bite in it, a tube of Colgate rolled up halfway, a Slinky with kinks in it, a picture of a brown-haired girl who looked a lot like Ms. Zucchero, a paperback book with the cover half torn off, and one of Ms. Zucchero's crocheted squares with a hook stuck through it.

“I liked your collages so much that I brought my own collection,” she say. “These are just some of the things I found in my car yesterday.”

Then she told us to draw what we saw without looking at our sketch pads—just let our pencils move across the shapes in our minds. So everyone was not looking at their sketch pads and not looking at one another, but talking to the pile in the middle of the table.

On the other side of the pile was where Daniel Bunch would be sitting if he were in school, and the gap he left was like when a tooth falls out. I kept wiggling that space with my eyes, to make sure he truly wasn't in it. Because even if Daniel Bunch was absent, in my mind he sat there just like always, watching me and waiting to pounce.

“Daisy Crumb said he's sick,” Kevin Kale say to the pile. “He has a hundred and four fever.”

“What's that mean?” Sonya asked.

All the water left my mouth, and my hand holding the pencil shook so to hear about Daniel Bunch being sick. I looked down at my sketch pad, and I had just drawn something that looked like a clump of hair in the bathtub drain. And the worry in my heart nodded at me and say,
Isn't that what you asked for?

Even before Kevin answered, I knew it was bad. Theron once had a 103 fever, and Mama put him in the tub with ice water until he cooled down. Even when he called to me, I wouldn't go into the bathroom to see him. I thought if I didn't see him, I wouldn't miss him as much after he died from that fever.

Kevin answered Sonya in the same voice he announced what page we were on. “Your brain can melt when you have a fever that high.”

“Which can only happen to people who have a brain,” Martin say. “So Bunch is safe.”

I wondered what Daniel would think if he knew how they talked about him when he wasn't there.

“Oh no,” Sonya say.

All during those three days he'd been absent, no one seemed to notice or care what had happened to Daniel Bunch. And now, no one seemed scared except me. I was the only person in the room who had wished that Daniel Bunch would disappear and then floated the wish down the river.

“Focus, people,” Ms. Zucchero say from her desk, “or we'll have quiet time.”

Everyone knew that meant no talking until the bell rang. Usually we listened to Ms. Zucchero when she had quiet time. I wished she had made quiet time before Daniel Bunch trashed my collage last Friday.

Martin slid his sketch pad across the table and stretched out his arms. “Anyway, he's at the hospital.”

Now my sketch pad trembled so bad in my hand that I let go of it, and it clapped to the floor. When I bent to pick it up, I had to swallow hard to keep from gagging.

“How do you know
that
?” Sonya asked, tossing her ponytail. “Did you see him go?”

When Martin didn't answer, she asked again, “Did you see him?” This time her voice sounded like it was flapping on a clothesline.

Fear slapped my chest and dribbled into every cell of my body. I stared at the picture of the brown-haired girl and tried to draw the smooth line down her cheek, but I felt my hand making a long squiggle on the page. If Daniel Bunch got sick before Meadow Lark and I made the wish on Friday afternoon, then we had nothing to do with Daniel's 104 fever and his being in the hospital. But if he got sick after we made the wish, then it might have been our fault.

I swallowed again, and without thinking I asked, “When did they take him to the hospital?”

“She talks,” Kevin whispered.

Just then Ms. Zucchero shifted in her chair. It was her signal for what was to come. “Okay, people. Quiet time now.”

Then Sonya say, “The fake-accent girl talks. Why would she care what happened to Daniel?”

She was a fly in my ear, and I waved her away and asked again. “Does anyone know when they take him?”

But Sonya just kept talking to the pile. “Maybe she likes him. Or maybe she knows more than she's telling. You gotta watch out for the quiet ones, because they're always listening. Maybe if we listen, we'll find out what she knows. Talk, fake-accent girl.”

My heart pounded, and I couldn't catch my breath. “Anyone know?” I asked, looking at Martin.

“Quiet, people,” Ms. Zucchero say to our table.

When she looked back at her crocheting, Martin whispered, “They took him on Sunday.”

Sonya must really like Daniel,
I thought, because she blushed deeper than that CrimsonCrisp in the middle of the table and say, “No, Martin, you're a liar.”

The next thing I remembered was feeling dizzy like when you get to the bottom of a roller coaster, and hearing a knock on the floor—which I later realized was my head—and then Ms. Zucchero looking down at me.

“River, can you sit up?” she asked, squeezing my arm. My head was buzzing. “We need to take you to Mrs. Bertetti's office. Someone bring her some water.”

Then Ms. Zucchero wheeled her chair over to me and helped me sit in it. I cried a little because she was being so careful with me and because everyone stared and say how pale I looked. Ms. Zucchero couldn't have wheeled me out fast enough.

She rolled me down to Mrs. Bertetti, the school nurse. The two of them talked and Mrs. Bertetti told me to lie down on the bed with my knees up.

“I hope you feel better soon,” Ms. Zucchero say before she left to go back to class.

Mrs. Bertetti took my temperature, which was normal, and then held my wrist with her fingertips while she looked at her watch. Her lips moved as she stared at it.

Finally she put my hand back down on the bed and asked, “Can your mother drive you home?”

I shook my head. “She doesn't drive. She stopped driving . . . a while ago.” Mrs. Bertetti didn't have to know everything. “But I can walk home.”

“Not after that tumble. What about your father?”

“He's in New York.” Daddy had left again almost as soon as he'd come back from Orlando.

“Your brother? Oh—” Mrs. Bertetti say, cutting herself off.

Everything today reminded me of Theron. I just wanted to go home.

Maybe she felt bad for bringing up Theron, so she went out of the nurse's office for a few minutes and come back with a glass of water and set it on the table beside me. “I called your mother. She'll find you a ride home.”

As she took my pulse again, I looked up at the ceiling tiles and asked, “Do you know Daniel Bunch?”

“I know all my students,” she say, and set my hand back down beside me. “Is Daniel your friend?”

“He's in my art class.”

“Then you must know he's sick.”

I was glad to be lying down, or I'd have probably fainted again. But I had to find out as much as I could. “Is he in the hospital?”

“Because he's your friend, I'll tell you that he is in the hospital. But I don't know anything more.”

Then Mrs. Bertetti sat down at her desk and started writing on a form. “What did you eat for breakfast?” she asked.

I sat up, propping myself on my elbows. “When did Daniel go to the hospital?”

She didn't take her eyes off her desk when she told me, almost in a whisper, “I heard it was Sunday. Now that's it. No more information, okay?”

“Oh,” I say, and my heart pounded so strong that I thought it would fling me off the bed. I sank back down onto the mattress. And then the worry nodded at me and say,
Wishes are powerful things.

Mrs. Bertetti stopped writing and looked up. “I'm sure it would make him very happy if you paid him a visit.”

Chapter 9

“It was just a coincidence,”
I say to Meadow Lark. “Nothing more than that.”

Meadow Lark was sitting W on her bed, and I was trying to sit crisscross, but it hurt the insides of my knees. I liked that she and I shared the way we sat and that, for a while at least, we shared the same room. It was like we were friends, almost like sisters.

She had set Mr. Tricks's cage on her bed and was making kissing noises at him. Mr. Tricks strutted headfirst over to the wires and blinked at her. “That was more than a coincidence, and you know it,” she say.

I slid the facecloth off my forehead and tossed it on the night table, next to the glass of ginger ale Mama had brought to me. When she first laid that cool facecloth across my forehead, it felt so good. But soon it turned warm and dirty-feeling, like a tea bag on a saucer.

“We make a wish, and then Daniel Bunch goes to the hospital,” she say, and kiss-kissed close to the cage. “That's not how coincidences work, is it, Mr. Tricks?”

“They happen all the time like that. You hear a word you've never heard before and the next thing you know, you hear it fifteen times. A song come into your head, and then the next person you see is singing it. Those are coincidences, just like Daniel Bunch just happened to get sick after we just happened to make a wish about it.”

“Things like that happen to you?” she asked.

“Don't they happen to everyone?”

“Not me. But that was no coincidence,” she say, and opened the paper lunch bag that Mama put together for her that morning. She pulled out a zipper bag of carrot sticks. “Want some?”

I shook my head and closed my eyes. The Cheetos I ate at lunch now sat on my stomach like a brick. They tasted good when I ate them, but that was before I heard about Daniel Bunch.

Meadow Lark kept harping. “Was it a coincidence we were put in the same homeroom?” she asked. “Or another coincidence that we went to the river at the same time? Or that we found Mr. Tricks just when he needed us?”

“I think so,” I say, though she had a point. “What do
you
call them?”

“I don't know,” Meadow Lark say, “except not coincidences.” She bit off some carrot and chewed it. “I call them miracles.”

“You and Mama should talk.”

Mr. Tricks cocked his head at one angle and then another, as Meadow Lark spoke.

“He
can't
be sick just because we wished it,” I say.

“Are you scared that maybe he is, and it's true?” she mumbled.

Then she spit the chewed-up carrot onto her finger and stuck it between the wires of the cage. Mr. Tricks stretched his neck and pecked the carrot off her finger, then opened his beak and shook his head at her like he expected more. Mr. Tricks was in love with Meadow Lark.

“I'm scared,” she say, answering her own question.

“Me too,” I say. “I just don't want to believe we made him sick.”

Then Meadow Lark turned the lunch bag upside down and shook out a napkin, the same kind of napkin Mama put in my bag that morning. But in the corner of Meadow Lark's napkin was a little red heart, just like the one I saw the first day we met.

“Look, we don't even know for sure he's sick,” Meadow Lark say, wiping her fingers on that napkin with the heart drawn on it. “Kids exaggerate all the time.” Then she popped the rest of the carrot in her mouth. “Especially those kids.”

“But Mrs. Bertetti even say it was true.” I tried to hide that my lip quivered and my voice flapped just like Sonya's when she heard that Daniel Bunch was in the hospital. Meadow Lark's napkin had a red heart on it and mine did not. I never had a red heart on a napkin.

Meadow Lark spit more carrot onto her finger and swallowed the rest. “It could just be a rumor and she heard it and believed it and told it to you.” Then she folded up the napkin into quarters, with the heart on the outside.

I had something that was better than a red heart. I got up and opened my ballerina box and took out the little emerald ring and pressed it into the top of my thumb like a crown, and held it out to Meadow Lark. “See my ring?”

Meadow Lark finished feeding the carrot to Mr. Tricks. “Pretty. Where did you get it?”

“In the river . . . I think. It's my favorite thing.” Then I took off the ring and set it down. My head still hurt, and I lay back down on my bed.

“So, back to Daniel,” she say. “We have to find out if the rumor is true,” Meadow Lark say, as if I had interrupted her by showing her the ring. “One of us has to go to the hospital to make sure, or we'll just wonder about it the rest of our lives. We can't be scared forever.” She popped the last carrot in her mouth and put Mr. Tricks's cage back on the floor.

My stomach gurgled and I rolled onto my side to face her. “What if he
is
there? What if he
is
sick? Then what do we do?”

“I don't know—we'll figure something out. Nothing like this ever happened to me before, so we'll take it one step at a time.”

“But you're the one who wrote the wish. I thought you knew all about wishes. And then you put it in the river. I thought you knew what you were doing.”

“Well, one of us has to go to the hospital,” she say, “and it won't be me. I've had enough of hospitals for a long time.”

I knew she would be as stubborn about not going to the hospital as I was about not going into the water, so to save time I sat up and finished the ginger ale all at once, and then I worked out a burp that sounded like “I'll go.” That's how we decided.

The fact was, I knew from the start it would be me. Unless I saw Daniel Bunch in the hospital with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe he was sick. Even if Meadow Lark went and come back and told me it was true, I'd still want to see for myself.

“I just have to figure out how. And with Mama around, we will need a miracle.”

Meadow Lark got up and crumpled the lunch bag and tossed it in the wastebasket. But I noticed she saved the napkin and slipped it into her bureau drawer.

“Mr. Tricks must hate being in that cage after being out in the wild all his life,” she say, opening the cage. Mr. Tricks looked at the open door and strutted right out like he owned the place.

“Okay,” I say, “but don't forget to put him back in and shut the door tight.”

Even though Meadow Lark warned me about her sleepwalking, she caught me off guard that night. Mr. Tricks cooed and woke me up, and when I got up to see what was wrong with him, I noticed that Meadow Lark wasn't in her bed.

“Meadow Lark?” I whispered, but she didn't answer.

Our door was open, so I stepped out. Meadow Lark was walking down the hall toward Theron's room. She stopped at the door and put her hand on the knob.

“Meadow Lark,” I say again, careful not to wake her up.

She must have heard me that time, because she turned around and, without looking at me, walked back to the room and got into her bed.

That was it, but I lay awake for a long time after that to make sure she didn't get up again.

Without realizing it, Mama helped me see Daniel the next day.

“Does your head still hurt, dear?” she asked as I lay in bed with the comforter up to my nose. Her hand on my forehead felt as cool as that facecloth did.

“Now it's my stomach,” I groaned.

Meadow Lark, all ready for school with her backpack over her shoulder and her lunch bag in her hand, stood a few feet behind Mama. For a second I wondered if she had another red heart on her napkin in that lunch bag.

Mama sat back. “I have to work extra hours today, which means I'll be gone until near suppertime. I could call in sick so I can stay home with you,” she say, but I knew she wanted those extra hours.

“You can't miss work, Mama,” I say, trying to make my voice crackle. “Besides, I'm old enough to stay home by myself now.” After all, according to Mr. Clapton, I was almost in high school.

“I'll tell school you're sick today,” Meadow Lark say, and widened her good eye as if she were telling me,
This is your miracle!
Meadow Lark seemed to have recovered from her episode the night before.

“Yes, you are,” Mama say, and smoothed out my comforter. “I sure hope you feel better by tonight. Daddy's coming home, and I'm making a roast.”