Chapter 6

As if seeing the bear wasn’t enough excitement for one morning, there’s more up ahead. Red and blue lights flash.

My brothers dash toward a cop car. A police officer has one of Kloche’s trucks pulled over. The officer is standing on the road, writing out a ticket.

“You truckers have got to slow down,” I hear him say to the driver. “This is not a demolition derby. You’re going to kill somebody!” He tears the ticket from a pad and reaches it up to the truck driver.

“Sir,” the trucker says, “I understand your position, but you should take it up with our boss. We get paid by the load, and we got to move these pipes. The boss says he’ll replace me in a second if I don’t make ten runs a day!”

The officer shakes his head at the trucker.

“Was he bad?” Mikko asks the cop. “Are you going to arrest him?”

“Can I help?” asks Alexi. “Can I do the cuffs?”

The cop ignores them and checks his watch. “Hey, you kids better hurry. Bell’s about to ring.” He uses his thumb to point toward the school.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “Sorry, sir.” I push Mikko and Alexi out ahead of me.

Alexi darts away from me and toward the officer. Before I can call him back, he’s telling the officer, “Give him a ticket for making the road all gloopy and for waking me up all the time, too.”

The truck driver releases some kind of air pressure from his brakes that drowns Alexi out. The police officer leans down, pats Alexi on the head, and turns him back around toward me.

“When I grow up, I’m going to be a cop and give tickets to all those guys all day long,” he tells me.

“That’s great, Alexi,” I tell him. “But first you have to pass elementary school.”

When we get to school, I drop the boys off at their classrooms and then head to mine. Even though it’s well past eight, Mr. Flores hasn’t started class yet. He doesn’t even look up from his laptop when I come in.

Alkomso glances up at me from her reading, then at the clock, and shakes her head. Of course, she’s going ahead of the chapters we were assigned in Hatchet. Her English wasn’t very good when she first moved to Colter, but now her best class is English. Whenever there’s a writing contest at school, Alkomso wins.

She smacks the book shut and cleaves it to her chest. “The next chapter is so exciting,” she says. “Brian gets caught up in a tornado. I’m dying to see a tornado. I can’t believe I’ve lived here four years, and still nothing!”

I want to tell her about the bear or Mark-Richard, but she keeps talking. “I hope he meets a girl out there in the wilderness. Wouldn’t that be a great plot twist?” Alkomso opens the book again and flips ahead a few more chapters, skimming the pages.

Alkomso talks about love, marriage, and babies a lot. She wants to be a romance novelist one day. Sometimes it drives me kind of crazy. But she doesn’t have as many things to worry about as I do.

Other than her love of love, we have a lot in common. Neither of us has a phone. Neither of us listens to the music everyone else does. We both have unusual families. Her dad is a taxi driver in a city four hours away. He stays there for four or five days and then comes home for a few days, then goes back to work. Her mom takes care of the kids and home while he’s gone.

Margot and her friends are smelling each other’s hair. “New shampoo,” says Margot. “Green-apple scented.” She looks over at Alkomso. “Sometimes I wish I could be like Alkomso and not ever have to wash my hair. I wish I could keep it covered up all the time, so no one would ever know if I did or didn’t wash my hair.” Margot’s often got a snake tongue, but lately she’s been extra venomous.

Alkomso pushes her chair back as though she’s going to stand up and let Margot have it. But before she can, Mr. Flores stands. “Okay, okay,” he says. “Boring business stuff first.” He picks up the attendance pad and scans the heads in the room, stopping at Mark-Richard’s empty desk and chair. “Hey, where’s my main man, Mark-Richard?”

Margot raises her hand and flails it around. “Mr. Flores, I know where he is.”

“Where’s that?” Mr. Flores scratches his head with the pencil.

“In foster care,” she says, acting proud that she has inside information. “Mark-Richard burned his own house down.” She rolls her eyes like Mark-Richard is the biggest idiot on the planet.

“What?!” Mr. Flores says.

“Shut up, Margot,” says Alkomso.

But Margot keeps talking. “Mark-Richard’s mom ran away. So Mark-Richard’s dad went to bring her back home.”

Sometimes I wish Margot would fall into a snake pit. I give her my worst dirty look.

“Don’t look at me like that, Fern,” she says. “You’re probably just worried because everyone knows you might be taken away next.”

My face burns.

Alkomso slaps her desk. “I mean it, Margot. You better be quiet.”

“Hey!” shouts Mr. Flores. “Knock it off!”

I’m furious and curious and scared all at once. I want Margot to shut up, too, but I also want to know what happened.

“How did he burn his house down?” asks another kid.

Margot puffs up with importance. “Well,” she says, “my mom says that Mark-Richard sat his cat on the couch and put a candle flame to a wood tick on its ear. But Mark-Richard didn’t know that his mom had doused the couch in kerosene to kill bedbugs. The cat leaped off the couch, knocked the candle out of Mark-Richard’s hands, and up went the flames. Mark-Richard got Gary and the cat out, and they all got picked up by the county lady.”

That would be Miss Tassel.

“Poor Mark-Richard,” Alkomso whispers.

“Yeah,” I say. “I saw the house this morning.”

“Oh no!” says Mr. Flores. “I wish I had known. I’d adopt that little guy in two seconds.”

Margot taps the toe of her shoe on the floor. “You can’t do that, Mr. Flores,” she says. “My mom says you have to have a nice house to have children. You can’t just live out of a camper.”

Margot’s mom has been trying to get Mr. Flores fired because he showed us a video filmed inside a hogging operation where all the pigs were full of sores and dying from disease and mistreatment. Margot Peterson’s dad owns the fifth-largest hogging operation in the country.

Mr. Flores sighs. “Let’s move on to the next thing—topics for the STEM fair. Has everyone decided on theirs?”

“I have,” Margot says. “I’m going to make a volcano.”

“Booor-ing,” says Mr. Flores. “Pick something else. Really think. Think about something that affects you or your family or your community.”

Mr. Flores explains that the STEM fair will be held at the end of the month, and parents and neighbors are invited to attend. He asks a few other kids and writes some topic ideas on the whiteboard and nearly loses his mind with excitement when one boy says he’s going to take apart a carburetor and explain how it works.

“Awesome,” he says. “I dig it completely. I love when I get to learn something from you brainiacs.”

“I’m think I’m doing fracking,” Alkomso says. “My dad is getting a new job with Kloche’s, so he can be closer to home.”

The corners of Mr. Flores’s mouth turn down. Then he opens his mouth, but no words come out.

“He is?” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Alkomso shrugs. “I just found out this morning. He starts in a few weeks. My mom is so happy. And Dad says he’ll have more time to help out around the house.” Alkomso has a new little sister. Kaltumo is her name. She’s pretty much the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. She’s also a lot of work.

But that means that Alkomso’s dad will be working for the company that plans to put the wastewater pond right in Millner’s woods.

“What about my grove?” I say to Alkomso. “Kloche’s wants to cut it all down.”

“Well, my family needs my dad home more.”

“But my family needs the woods for food.”

Alkomso and I stare into each other’s eyes. Several seconds pass.

Margot coughs a fake cough. “My dad says fracking is going to bring lots of new jobs to Colter,” she says. “Fern, maybe your dad should just get a job with Kloche’s, too.”

Alkomso’s eyes widen. Mine do, too. It’s almost like, for a brief second, Alkomso and Margot are on the same side.

And I am on the other side. I turn around in my chair and face the front.

“Fern?” says Mr. Flores.

My face gets hot. I hate being called on. “Yeah?”

“Your project. Have you decided on one?”

“I don’t know yet,” I mumble.

“You keep thinking.” He points at me with his pen. “I know you’ll think of something great. You’re a born naturalist.”

I muster a tight smile. I don’t know what a naturalist is exactly, but it sounds like someone who loves the outdoors.

“Anyway, let’s move on and hit the bird-watching trail. Everybody ready?” He puts a pair of binoculars around his neck.

Alkomso stands and pushes in her chair. “This is going to be so fun, isn’t it?”

I try my best to smile.

“Are you mad at me because my dad got that job?” she asks. “Because you shouldn’t be. Everything is going to be fine.”

I nod even if I don’t believe it. “I’m not mad at you. I just have a lot on my mind.” I look over at Mark-Richard’s empty desk. “I feel bad for Mark-Richard.”

“Me, too,” she says. “But he’ll be back, I’m sure.”

She puts her arm around my shoulder. It feels heavy.