Out on a Limb (12 page)

“Oh, you poor thing,” Kendra said, looking me up and down. “You must feel so totally
disgusting
.”

“Yeah,” said Sienna. “You must feel so
gross
.”

“Yeah,” said Twyla. “
Revolting
. Is that how you feel?”

“Where’s your special orange outfit today?” Kendra asked.

“Oh that,” I said. “I just had that for the day. It’s a costume.”

“For what,” Twyla asked. “A play,” I said.

“What’s your part,” asked Sienna.

“My part? Um. Radioactive waste.”

“Weird play,” said Twyla.

“Good casting though,” said Kendra.

“Hey Matt,” Devo said, lifting my jacket from its hook with the tip of somebody’s furled umbrella. “Flush this back
down
the toilet, will ya?”

“Yo.” Matt charged dutifully off, with my jacket speared on the umbrella. Oncoming hallway traffic scattered. Before I caught up he flung my jacket into the boys’ washroom. I heard it splatter on the tiled floor.

I turned to Devo. “Get it back,” I demanded. “Right now.”

“Sure,” Devo said. “All you’ve gotta do is get down on one knee and say ‘I worship Devo, my Supreme Master.’”

“As if,” I said.

“Okay then.” Devo shrugged and walked away.

I considered running into the washroom, but fear of urinals stopped me. I went to the classroom to find Bridget, but she wasn’t there. Several kids weren’t there. “It seems we’re decimated by
flu
,” Miss Rankle said during attendance.

I couldn’t wait for the day to end. Unlocking my bike after school, I was shot by rain. Coatless, I rode through a wind that could cut skin. Where the sidewalk met the path I stopped, and there I pulled my hideous cape out of my backpack. I was completely soaked, but the cape would help protect me from wind as I rode unseen through the woods. Just as I was putting it on a monstrous SUV drove by. From the passenger window Kendra looked down at me with comfortable curiosity. Cape snapping in the wind, I set off on the path through the woods. The plywood ramp over the stone wall was slippery-when-wet and I thought I’d never get over it. By the time I got to our meadow every muscle ached and I could barely climb the ladder to the treehouse.

Mom was home early that day. “Oh Rosie, look at you,” she said. “How did you get so wet under your cape? Where’s your jacket? Take off your things! Get into bed!”

I left my clothes in a puddle on the treehouse floor and climbed the wooden ladder. I tugged my quilt over me and flopped on my pillows, passionately in love with my bunk. Mom did not cross-examine me. She heated chicken broth on the cast-iron stove and climbed up to deliver it. The mug was nice and warm, but it seemed like way too much trouble to lift it to my mouth.

Pretty soon Dad brought Tilley home from Eveline’s. Tilley was still sensibly dressed in her hideous rain gear. Dad bent at the cast-iron stove and stoked the fire. It looked not quite real, and full of strange personality. It crouched and hid, and then leapt out in surprise flames of green and neon blue. I stared until it all fell to embers. When Dad went out to chop more wood my ears vibrated with the far-away whack of the axe. I didn’t climb down to the table for dinner.

The night turned to storm. On our roof, the rain burst like loud applause. The wind flung itself at the treehouse and shrieked down our chimney. Branches thrashed outside, and shadows lurched across our walls. As the treehouse rocked like a ship, I fell into a delirious sleep.

My delirium lasted three days, I was later told. I was told that my fever reached 104 degrees. A temperature of 104 degrees is enough to cause hallucinations, and supposedly I had some. Supposedly I screamed that there were pigs on my bunk, which freaked Tilley right out, even though she could plainly see that my bunk was pig-free. A temperature of 104 can cause not only hallucinations, but also permanent brain damage. It is therefore high enough to scare parents out of their wits, even casual parents like my mother. Mom and Dad were especially scared because there was no quick way of getting me to the hospital. How would they get me to the ground, they had wondered when my temperature reached its peak. In the dumbwaiter? Was that safe? And then what? Would the bike trailer take my weight? And how long would it take to haul me all the way down the path through the woods? Maybe it was better to break down Great-great-aunt Lydia’s so-called electric fence so that Dad could carry me through the curly iron gate to a taxi on Bellemonde Drive? Fortunately, my fever had dropped without emergency measures.

To me the really scary part was this: when I started getting better, I heard Mom and Dad murmuring in their bunk about whether we should keep on living in the treehouse. Dad wondered whether it was responsible. I decided to recover fast, to make my parents forget all their health-and-safety concerns. I declared myself well enough to go back to school, but my parents disagreed. “No, Rosie, we’d rather err on the side of caution,” Mom said, which didn’t sound like her at all.

“Mom, please, please, please don’t go all cautious on me,” I said, rearing up from my bunk. “Don’t make us move out of the treehouse. Promise me we won’t.”

“Did I say anything about moving out of the treehouse? We just want you to stay home from school until you’ve made a full recovery.”

Mom and Dad went back to university, leaving me to get better on my own. I was comfortably sick. Now that I was no longer friendless, I didn’t mind being alone. I nestled under my quilt, getting up only to throw another log into the cast-iron stove, or to heat myself a bowl of chicken noodle soup. I was still too weak to try decoding Great-great-aunt Lydia’s letter. A lot of the time I’d just stare out my porthole, watching the oak leaves twist free and fly off in the wind.A lot of the time I thought how pleasant it was to be away from Devo and Matt and Heath and Zach and Twyla and Nova and Sienna and Kendra.

For six entire days I did not leave the treehouse, not even to go to the bathroom. As an emergency alternative to the outhouse, the treehouse porch had what medieval castle-dwellers called a garderobe. “Garderobe” is just a fancy name for what is basically a hole in the porch. The fancy name does not help. A garderobe feels as primitive as it is. On day six I felt well enough to go back to using the outhouse. Over my pyjamas I put on the fleece jacket that Mom had retrieved from the Windward lost and found. I climbed down the ladder and crossed the meadow for the first time in a week. It was only when I was coming back from the outhouse that I saw something weird on the trunk of the oak tree. It was a bunch of dead plants, tied with a blue satin ribbon. The ribbon was skewered to the trunk with a small pocket knife. I stared, wondering when the bunch had been put there. Recently, I concluded. Very recently, or my family would have seen it while they were coming or going. I turned and looked around the meadow, but there was no sign of life. I pulled the knife from the bark and took the dead plants. There was more than one kind, but I didn’t recognize any of them. I sniffed at them cautiously. They smelled better than they looked. There was a whiff of something familiar. I stood straining to place it, the way you strain for a name that’s on the tip of your tongue. But I couldn’t get it.

I folded the knife into my jacket pocket, and stuck the dead plants there too. I climbed to the treehouse and got back in my bunk. If Great-great-aunt Lydia wanted nothing to do with me or my family, I wondered, why had she brought us dead plants? It was a very weird thing to do.

I got both of Great-great-aunt Lydia’s letters from my wallet. I read the letter Great-great-aunt Lydia had written in code, and I wondered about the word ‘CHHARM’. I read the letter Great-great-aunt Lydia had torn up and thrown in the stream. For the first time, I felt a twinge of the creepiness that Tilley felt about Great-great-aunt Lydia. For the first time, I wondered if my description of her as some kind of witch was entirely my own invention. Reading the torn blue strip, I wondered if it was about an
incant
ation, someday soon.

NOTEBOOK: #16

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: The Fight

When I displayed unmistakable
symptoms of health I was sent off to school again. I had dropped Tilley off and was a half a mile away from Windward when I spotted Devo. He was up ahead, riding his bike on the sidewalk, helmet dangling from his handlebars. There was a huge black Range Rover driving right beside him. The driver was a dark-skinned lady who yelled at Devo through the open passenger window. “Devon,” she yelled with a really heavy accent. “Devon! Helmet! Your helmet! Helmet Devon! Devon! Devon! Helmet! Helmet! I tell your mother! You hear me? Tell your mother!”

Devo had a nanny! From the way he pretended not to hear her, I guessed he was embarrassed. I caught up to him and coasted along. “Helmet, helmet Devon,” I said. I admit that this was not the slightest bit clever, but as long as it bugged him I really didn’t care. And it did bug him, too. I know because of the two words that he said back to me. I won’t repeat them in this notebook.

“Better not swear,” I said. “Or your
nanny
will wash your mouth out with soap.” Unsupervised, I pedaled ahead to Windward.

I joined the rest of my class in the hallway, where they waited for Miss Rankle to open the door. Kendra, Twyla, Nova and Sienna were together; Bridget was off by herself. She came to meet me. “You’re back,” she said. “Finally.” When Miss Rankle opened the classroom door, Bridget and I got bunched together with Nova and Twyla and Sienna and Kendra, but none of them spoke. Kendra just raised her chin and swirled her hair, and the others did too, as well as their inferior hair would allow.

“What’s with
them
,” I asked Bridget. She shook her head and rolled her eyes, but she didn’t explain. Creative writing was long and slow. Miss Rankle assigned a short story written from the viewpoint of an inanimate object. This did not interest me. The only thing that interested me at the moment was the fight between Bridget and Kendra. I could hardly wait until recess to get the details.

“So, how come Kendra isn’t talking to you?” I asked Bridget before the recess bell had even stopped ringing.

“’Cause I won’t talk back,” Bridget replied. “What are you gonna do for your short story?”

“Not sure. So why aren’t you talking to Kendra?”

Bridget shrugged and shook her head, to show she didn’t want to talk about it. “My story’s going to be about a diary,” she said. “This really frustrated diary. Like, the girl who owns the diary writes all her secrets and problems in it, right? And the diary can see that this girl is making some really big mistakes and the diary is just so totally dying to give her advice, but it can’t, cause it’s only inanimate, right?”

“That sounds good,” I said. “What are her problems?” “Haven’t got that far yet,” Bridget said.

“How about—she has a fight with a friend. That would be so interesting. A fight with a mean, snobby, popular friend.”

“Yeah, maybe,” was all Bridget said, and the whole rest of the day she did not mention Kendra.

When the final bell rang Bridget walked me to the bike rack.

“Are you going out for Halloween this year?” she asked as I unlocked my bike.

“I guess. Are you?”

“Definitely. I figure it might be my last year. My parents think I’m getting too old. It’s so unfair. Last year I was supposedly too young to go out without a parent, and next year I’m supposedly too old to go out at all. So I’ve gotta make this year count. Want to come with me?”

“You and—”

“Just me.”

“Sure.”

“Should I ask my mom if you can sleep over? Since Halloween’s a Friday?”

“Okay,” I said. I wrapped my cable lock around my crossbar and straddled my bike.

“Give me your number and I’ll call you later.” As Bridget was writing my cell number on a crumpled test paper, I saw Devo on his bike, way across the school grounds. I saw him but I paid no attention. He was meaningless at that distance. He bicycled toward us and then he entered my mental radar screen. I never realized before how much body language there is in bike riding. Devo was hunched and he was fast and he was, I somehow knew, full of criminal intent. He was close and he was speeding straight at us. He set a collision course. He tensed for the smash. Bridget fled in alarm, but I was stuck straddling my bike. Adrenalin jounced through me and I did something stupid. I screamed. I screamed, even though Devo had actually braked a split second earlier. I screamed, because I was too busy panicking to process the fact that he’d already stopped. I screamed, and everybody who turned to look saw I was terrified of a guy standing still over his bike, smiling.

Of course his smile wasn’t genuine. Devo never really smiled, just smirked. His mouth gave a farewell twist and he rode away down the hill, jumping over a little dirt bump at the bottom. His bike flew a bit off the ground. He made a tight turn and braked, totally pleased with himself.

Beyond the bottom of the hill the ground tilted up a couple of yards to the basketball court. It tilted really steeply: not quite straight up and down, but almost. As Devo stood there thinking how great he was, I buckled my helmet. “Talk to you tonight, then,” I said to Bridget.

“Bye,” she called as I pedaled down the hill.

“Chicken,” Devo yelled, when I didn’t aim for his stupid little jump. I pedaled until the pedals spun uselessly. I blurred down that hill and braced myself for what was coming. Except that you never realize just how steep a steep thing is until you’re actually on it, and that’s how it was with the rise to the basketball court. As my bike swooped up the rise I couldn’t see anything but sky. Then my wheels left the ground and I was in the sky. I couldn’t have been in the air more than a couple of seconds, but it was long enough to worry about landing. My front tire dropped. The sky vanished. The basketball court appeared. It rushed at me like a giant fly swatter. My front tire hit the concrete hard, then my back tire. My bike wobbled like crazy, and that was the scariest moment. But all that practice launching myself over Great-great-aunt Lydia’s stone wall paid off. I was still riding. I turned my bike and braked.