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.”