Chapter 10

I hadn’t ridden my bike since last fall. It hung in the garage next to Theron’s Giant. Theron had mowed lawns, shoveled snow, helped Sonya’s daddy paint houses, and tutored for an entire year for the money to buy his bike, and it was his treasure. How I wanted to ride it to the hospital, grip the same handlebars my brother gripped and slice through the wind just like he did. But Theron had a rule that only he could touch that bike he worked so hard to buy. And now, just like my bike from the Goodwill, his treasure was shrouded in dust and cobwebs.

After carefully unhooking my bike and wiping it down, I set off for the hospital, riding low so that no one would see me and ask why I wasn’t in school. Or worse, tell Mama.

“Bunch, Daniel,” say the nurse, a man with big pores and hair that stuck out like a brush, to his computer screen. “Room three-fourteen.”

It was only when I asked, “Which way is three-fourteen?” that he looked up at me.

His eye narrowed. “How old are you?”

“Twelve.” I added a year, because in some places that year made a difference between being allowed or forbidden to visit.

“You can’t visit without an adult,” he say. “Where is your adult?”

“My mama’s parking the car,” I say, which was a lie in every universe. “She told me to hurry and see Daniel before visiting hours were over.”

“Your mama does know that visiting hours don’t end until eight, doesn’t she?”

To stop myself from telling any more lies, like the one about Mama only understanding Portuguese and the one about us being from Alaska, I just stood there. He looked at me hard. I thought he was going to send me home, but then he pointed to the left. “Go on,” he say, “Three-fourteen’s down that way, end of the hall. You’re his first visitor.”

“Today?”

“Ever. I’ll send your mama there . . . after she parks the car.”

My legs felt like noodles and my pulse played drums in my ears as I walked down the hall toward Daniel’s room. It was my own fault I was here. I might not believe that Daniel was in the hospital because of Meadow Lark and me, but she did, and it was my duty as her friend to see how bad off he actually was. So I kept walking toward room 314 and wishing I wasn’t so scared.

Daniel Bunch’s door was open a crack, and I stood outside, breathing slowly and trying to stop shaking, not knowing what I’d see. I actually hoped Daniel would be nasty to me, like he usually was, because that would mean he wasn’t sick. It would mean everyone was wrong.

“Hello,” come a voice from across the hall.

“Hello,” I say. I couldn’t see anyone, so I walked toward the voice and looked in the room. “Do you need something—a nurse?”

A boy with a mop of sandy-colored hair half sat up in the hospital bed reading an Edgar Allan Poe comic book. A cast covering his whole leg hung just above the bed, aimed at the TV on the wall.

“Password,” the boy say, and lay his comic book down on his stomach.

“Hmm,” I say, and looked at the title. “Usher.”

His face grew a smile. “Impressive.” The boy’s teeth were so short that it looked like he didn’t have any, and his cheeks were patchy red, like they’d been rubbed with snowballs.

“Either you’re a genius or a mind reader,” he say. “Or perhaps the password is too obvious. I’ll have to change it as a precaution.”

“You could have just say I was wrong.”

“I could have,” he say, “but that would have been dishonest.” Then he took in a breath. “Are you here to visit someone? That boy across the hall, perhaps?”

I nodded. “The nurse say that’s Daniel Bunch’s room.”

“It is his room. Are you his . . . sister, a friend, a . . . ?”

“I go to school with him.”

“Oh. Has anyone ever told you that you have an unusual way of talking?”

Him too? I thought. “Yes, everyone say that.”

He crossed his arms. “And I’m sure you get teased about it.”

I shrugged. “I can’t help it,” I say. “I woke up one morning after my brother leave us and I start talking like this.” Then I glanced across the hall for a glimpse of Daniel. A glimpse was all I wanted of him at the moment. And then maybe another glimpse, and then I would have the courage to see him.

The boy scratched his chin and looked at the ceiling. “I’ve read about that. It’s rare, but it has a name. People wake up talking with a French accent or an Australian accent or a Japanese accent. You found your accent somewhere very far south of New Hampshire—I’d say from somewhere in the Carolinas.”

“Well, I wasn’t looking for it, so it must have found me.”

“That’s an interesting way of describing it,” he say, and picked up his comic book. “Just so you know, it’s rather charming. However, if you don’t like it, you can force yourself to lose it.”

“You talk funny too,” I told him. “You sound like a professor.”

When he finished ha-ha-ha-ing behind his comic book, he say, “Actually, you are a mind reader, because that’s what I’m called—Professor—by people who don’t understand me. My real name is Benjamin,” he added with a little bow of his head.

“I’m River,” I say, and bow back at him.

“Pleasure meeting you,” he say. “By the way, if you’re here to see Daniel Bunch, you’ll have to do all the talking, because he’s extremely ill.”

“Oh,” I say, suddenly agitated at the mention of Daniel, and I hoped Benjamin wouldn’t see my heart beating through my T-shirt.

“Sorry if that upset you,” he say.

“It’s just a big shock. Is he really that sick?”

“He might even be dead, but go see for yourself.”

So what everyone in art class say was true. And maybe what Meadow Lark say was true too—that it wasn’t a coincidence, and it was our fault Daniel was in the hospital.

I looked at Benjamin. “It’s time. I have to see him now.”

This wasn’t like when Theron had his 103-degree fever in the bathtub and I had the choice not to look. This was different. When Benjamin say Daniel was so sick, I began to believe that it was our fault, so I had to pay him a visit and report back to Meadow Lark.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” Benjamin say with another little bow, and I wandered out of his room and across the hall.

I knocked lightly on the door, and when there was no answer, I pushed it open and stepped inside.

The room smelled like rubbing alcohol and bleach. Daniel lay flat in the hospital bed with his eyes closed, as still as a corpse, and white as the pillowcase under his head. His left arm, now in a support bandage, rested on a rolled-up towel at his side.

Out of respect for his state of possible death, I drew the curtain closed around his bed. Then I stared at him for a minute or so, watching for a telltale eyebrow twitch and listening for a sigh or a stomach gurgle.

“Is he alive?” Benjamin asked from across the hall.

I waved my hand in front of Daniel’s eyes, but he didn’t move. “I’ll find out,” I whispered, loud enough to carry.

Daddy once told me that when he and Mama first brought me home, I slept so quiet and still that they were terrified I’d stopped breathing in my sleep. So Daddy would hold a little mirror under my nose. If he saw vapor on the mirror, he knew I was still alive. Remembering that, I looked around Daniel’s room for something to put under his nose.

A butter knife lay on a tray near the window. I grabbed it and turned back to Daniel. But just as I was about to slide the knife under his nose, the curtain rings screeched, and the nurse from the front desk stood there with his hands on his hips.

“Your mother must’ve gotten lost in the parking lot. Time to go,” he say. And then he saw the butter knife. “Hey, what’s that?”

At exactly that moment, Daniel come out of his coma, and saw the knife.

“She’s trying to kill me!” he screamed, sitting full up in bed. “She tried to slice me open!” Then, “Oww!” he shrieked, and clutched his throat, as if that dull little knife had actually touched him.

I ran out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and out the revolving door. Then I tossed the butter knife into some bushes, hopped on my bike, and took off.

Pedaling home as fast as I could, I felt glad about one thing—if Daniel Bunch was dying, it was certain he wouldn’t die that day. Because when he sat up and saw that knife in my hand and screamed at me like that, he looked like the same Daniel Bunch that told me in art class that my collage stunk.

If what Meadow Lark say was true—that we made Daniel Bunch sick by wishing it—then we had to make another wish to make him well again. And we would have to do it fast, before he got any sicker. We would go have to go down to the river and float a get-well wish for Daniel Bunch. Meadow Lark would be home from school when I got home, and Mama would still be at work. So if we hurried, Mama would never know we were gone.

When I got home, I carefully hung my bike back on its hook next to Theron’s and went into the house, expecting to see Meadow Lark on the sofa or in the kitchen. But the house was quiet.

“Meadow Lark?” I called, and when she didn’t answer, I went upstairs to our room. “Meadow Lark?” I say again as I pushed open the door.

She lay on the bed, rolled up with her back to me and shaking so hard that the bed jiggled.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

She turned over to face me, and when I saw her two puffy, red eyes, I knew different. Meadow Lark was crying.

“He’s gone,” she say, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“Who’s . . . gone?” I asked, and then a horror pierced my heart. “You mean Daniel Bunch?” Did she hear something after I left the hospital?

Meadow Lark shook her head and pointed to Mr. Tricks’s cage on the floor—his empty cage—and then to the window. It was open just enough for a pigeon the size of Mr. Tricks to strut through and fly away.