Chapter 31 2006
We were fools. Dylan and I got lost in a contest of skipping rocks across the freshly thawed pond and only realized the time when we heard the second dinner bell through the trees. We hurried through the hole, raced back to the school, and slammed through the kitchen door.
Ivy took one look at us and frowned. “Aye, yai, yai! Hurry, give me your coats.”
We peeled them off.
“Boots,” she commanded.
We kicked off our snow boots, and Hawu handed me my Keds as Dylan grabbed his sneakers from beside the door.
“Hats!” Ivy said, holding out her hand.
She gave us a once-over. “Good. Go.”
I led the way through the swinging doors into the cafeteria at the exact moment Bart was picking up his tray. He looked at me, then his eyes shifted to Dylan, and I watched as he tilted his head. His eyes moved back to me, slid downward, and stopped on my knees.
I looked down, and my blood grew cold when I saw the wet patches peppered with pine needles and dirt.
He squinted as if trying to puzzle it out half a second before the corners of his lips curled into the smallest knowing grin.
My plan was to leave directly after breakfast the following day to cover our tracks.
I would skip morning prayer and walk every direction possible so, if Bart tried to figure out where Dylan and I had been, there wouldn’t be a path.
The hole was well concealed, and without our footprints, it was unlikely he’d discover it.
But the moment Bart walked into the cafeteria, I knew it was too late.
His eyes sought me out, and when they found mine, they danced.
He didn’t wait in line for his tray but instead walked to the table where Heddy and my classmates sat.
He and Heddy had been boyfriend and girlfriend for a brief time after Valentine’s Day.
They had been the first couple in the primary school.
She broke up with him, and it was clear he wasn’t happy about it.
He reached into the front pocket of his pants, pulled something out, and flung it onto the table.
Heddy squealed and leaped back so abruptly her chair crashed to the floor.
Bart laughed, and his hand darted out to snatch the thing back at the exact moment Dylan shot to his feet and charged.
He barreled into Bart’s chest, and Bart stumbled.
But Bart was twice Dylan’s size and easily recovered.
He tied Dylan up in a headlock, and it was then that I saw what he was holding—a mottled gray rabbit’s foot, its white tendons and bones sticking out from the skin.
I ran from the cafeteria and into the woods.
The bushes that concealed the hole had been ripped away. I scrabbled through, and when I reached the other side, sickness rose hard in my throat. Splayed on the flat rock, baking in the blazing spring with flies buzzing around him, was Nick, his head at an odd angle and his paws hacked off.
I slumped to the ground and dropped my head to my knees, grief and guilt overwhelming me. For two years, I’d done everything I could to protect him, and in the end, my reckless carelessness led to his death.
“Patch.”
I looked up to see Meryl walking down the knoll. When she reached me, she sloughed her backpack to the ground and knelt in the clover beside me. She pulled out a sweater and draped it over my shoulders.
“Did you see him do it?” I asked, my voice a rasp.
Meryl knew what happened in the clover patch because her mother had volunteered for the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union, an organization that researched and protected endangered birds, including golden eagles.
The MOU had installed a camera to keep an eye on an eagle’s nest in a pine tree near the clover patch.
The motion-activated camera transmitted to a laptop in Meryl’s mother’s house and pinged whenever it detected anything eagle-size or larger.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I only got home a few minutes ago and saw you.”
She rubbed my back, and I whimpered as tears continued to stream from my eyes.
“The boy with the grudge against your family did this?”
She knew about Bart and that he was the reason I’d found the pond in the first place.
I cried harder, and she wrapped her arm around me and pulled me close.
“Evil,” she mumbled against my hair, and I nodded.
While I’d felt the slithering feeling of what that word was, it was the moment I recognized what it truly meant.
What Bart had done was so foreign to anything I could imagine doing myself, it was as if he was a different kind of being altogether, one who didn’t think, act, or feel in a way I understood.
After some time, my tears ran out and she said, “What do you say we give Nick a proper burial?”
She stood and held out her hand to pull me up.
She attempted to dig a hole with the garden trowel she’d brought with her, but the ground was frozen solid.
“He probably wouldn’t mind if he was buried in the pond,” I suggested.
Profe had once told me Buddhists sometimes bury their dead in rivers because they believe water gives life and takes life back to the earth at death. I liked the idea of Nick giving life to something else, his wisdom carrying on in some way.
“That’s a good idea,” Meryl said. “But to do that I’m going to need to do something you might not like.”
I tilted my head.
“When a person or animal dies, gasses form in their stomachs, which means they float.”
She flicked her head toward the eagles wheeling above us.
“Oh,” I said, realizing what she was saying. If Nick’s body didn’t sink, the eagles would pick his body clean.
She pulled a pocketknife from the front pouch of her backpack, and fresh tears formed as I realized what she intended to do.
“Turn away,” she said.
I did as she asked, and a moment later, she said, “Okay. You can turn back.”
Nick’s body was gone, and I realized she’d put him in her backpack, so I wouldn’t need to see what she’d done.
“It seems like a nice place for Nick to be until the bunny angels find him,” she said, as if giving up her expensive backpack was no big deal.
In the months I’d known her, I’d come to realize that was her way. She did amazing things and always made light of them, almost as if embarrassed that she’d been caught doing them. I understood that, like Kai’s tough act, it was her camouflage. She didn’t want people to know how nice she was.
Meryl carried the backpack to the edge of the water.
“Is there anything you’d like to say?” she asked.
I thought a moment, then set my hand on the bottom of the backpack and said, “You were the bravest, smartest rabbit ever. Thank you for being my friend. I love you and will never forget you. Ever.” My voice hiccuped. “And I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”
Meryl smiled down at me, then offered her own words. “Thank you, Nick, for leading Patch to the pond and into my life. You were a very special rabbit, and we are going to miss you. I hope there are lots of radish tops in bunny heaven.”
She set the backpack in the water and gave it a firm shove. A few chunks of ice still floated lazily on the surface, and we watched as the backpack became part of them, drifting and colliding until eventually it began to sink, descending inch by inch until finally it disappeared.
Meryl turned to me, her face lined with deep concern. “How would you feel about coming with me to Prague?”