The Second Life of Abigail Walker Read Online Free

a run-of-the-mill kind of place. The houses were nice, but not mansions, and the yards were indistinguishable from one another. Boxwoods and broom shrubs, pyracantha. Mulch to keep down the weeds.
    The fox appreciated neighborhoods like this. If she kept her head down, no one bothered her, because no one was looking for her, and she was free to explore. For the most part, people stayed inside their houses, and when they came out, it was to get into their cars and drive somewhere else. They never thought about animals other than their own dogs and cats. Had no idea that their backyards and the woods were teeming with snakes and woodchucks, raccoons (horrible creatures) and mice and moles and voles. Theywould never guess in a million years that a fox was in their midst.
    On those mornings she desired attention, all the fox had to do was stand beneath a kitchen window. Sooner or later someone would look out, and then there would be a cluster of faces, fingers pointing, some oohing and aahing, an occasional scream. However people felt about her, her mere presence thrilled them.
    Of course.
    Taking a last, backward glance at the chickens, the fox slipped into the thin woods behind the coop and trotted in the direction of the girl’s house. The girl in the field. The fox had been careful to be gentle. All she had wanted to do was say, I’m here. I’m in your story now, and you’re in mine. Let’s see what happens next.
    That was the interesting part. You entered a story drawn by a scent, a rumor, a promising circumstance, and then you waited to see what came next. What came next for the boy in the covered wagon holding his baby brother and singing lullabies? For the president in his tall hat, sitting in his theater box, enjoying the play? What camenext for the girl standing in the ocean of weeds, who held out her hand to the fox as though welcoming a friend?
    What came next for the fox?
    Back to the field, she thought, looking both ways before she crossed the road. Maybe she’d find a mouse scurrying in between the chick-weed and the thistles.
    One little mouse, she told herself. Where’s the harm in that?

the next morning Abby strolled up the hill to the bus stop, a book about artists who painted flowers in her hand. It was part of an Art for Young People series that had been her mom’s when she was a girl. All of her mom’s childhood books and college textbooks were stored in the basement, and sometimes Abby liked to look through them and wonder what her mom was like before she became the sort of person who worried all the time.
    When her mom was nine, her older sister had died of leukemia. “That’s all I remember from mychildhood,” she told Abby once. “Wendy sick, Wendy dying, Wendy dead. That’s all there was.” It was strange, Abby thought, that she had an aunt she’d never known. Aunt Wendy. Whenever she thought of Wendy, she pictured a grown woman like her mother, only Wendy had never grown up. She’d died when she was twelve. Abby would be twelve in April, and sometimes lying in bed at night she got a spooky, sad feeling as she imagined dying of leukemia before she even had a chance to be a teenager. Who would come to her funeral? What would they say about her? She imagined boys like Jay Franks and Reid Windersole telling everyone how much they’d secretly liked her, how she was really the nicest girl they knew, much nicer than popular Lily Sanderson and Hollis Holman.
    Sometimes when Abby read her mother’s old books she tried to imagine one of her brothers dying, but it was impossible. Last year John had run through the patio door trying to catch a football. The glass had shattered around him in huge shards, but he’d hardly even been scratched. And Gabe was always covered in scabs, but ifAbby asked him did that cut hurt or that scrape, he just rolled his eyes. “I’m too tough to feel pain,” he’d say, which always cracked