"Sooo?" Syiera sang when Melinda rejoined the group. "What haaappened? Anything innnteresting?"
"Nooothing," Lindy mimicked her tone.
"Why'd you talk for so long?" Ashley asked as Tricia was sitting on top of the desk behind her, braiding her hair into two long brown pleats.
"What'd he say?" asked Trish.
"Did he say anything about who he likes?" asked Ash. "Look at Sy, you know that's the only thing she cares about."
"He wasn't talking to me about that," said Lindy, borrowing Marina's seat for the time being and pulling it up next to the group.
Sy snapped her fingers and brought her hand down in an arc to show her disappointment. "Damn!"
Ash reached forward and patted Sy's arm without moving her head. "At least he's still not taken. You'll get your chance, Sy."
"So what did he talk to you about?" Trish asked as she was pulling a rubber band off of her wrist and tying Ash's first braid up. "Please, oh please, don't say somethin' boring like homework!"
"It didn't have anything to do with homework either," said Lindy stiffly.
"The braids look nice, Ash!" Sy complimented. "Trish, you should be a hairdresser when you grow up!"
"Ew, no way," said Trish, shaking her head vigorously. "Ashley and I've worked all'a this out already. She's gonna be an artist and I'm gonna be her agent and she'll make masterpieces and I'll get her in all the big art shows in Central and we'll both get rich!"
"Tell us what he DID say, then!" Ash demanded of Lindy. "You're not going to just make us guess all day, are you?"
"I thought your dad wanted you to get married and take over his farm," said Sy.
"Yeah, but that was before Emma was born," said Trish. "Now I can do whatever I want and Emma can get married and take over the farm, see how that works?"
"Lindy!" said Ash. "Say somethin'!"
Lindy was having trouble following both trains of thought at once, so she focused on Ashley. "Look, it wasn't that important, okay? Just forget about it."
Ash scowled. "It wouldn't be such a big deal if you would just tell me."
"Well, too damn bad," Lindy snapped.
"You shouldn't say bad words," said Tricia. "They make angels cry."
Lindy looked away. She didn't believe in angels.
Trish finished tying Ash's second braid and flung it over Ash's shoulder.
"Looks good, Trish," said Ash.
"Ooh, do Lindy next!" said Sy. "Lindy never does nothin' with her hair! I bet she'd be so pretty with a braid!"
"My hair is too short for a braid," said Lindy dismissively.
"It got a lot longer over the summer!" Sy argued.
"Let me braid it!" Trish begged. "Pleeeeeeeeeease?"
Lindy scoffed. "Oh, fine then, if it makes you happy."
Tricia came over to stand behind Lindy and started combing through Lindy's hair with her fingers. "Oh, you have really fine hair, don't you?" said Trish. "I'll only be able to do a single."
Lindy shrugged. She didn't care. It was around this point that Eli started speaking to her, so she zoned out of the conversation and became the scenery.
"I heard there's gonna be a new girl in our grade next week," said Ash. "I heard it from Lucy when I was at the diner with my family yesterday. Her name's Isabella, I think."
"When she comes to school, we need'a make friends with her and be really nice to her and stuff," said Sy. "We can't let Jessycah and Allison get to her first, okay? So be on the lookout!"
"God forbid Allison have any friends at all," said Ash dully.
"Hey guys, guess what?" Syiera exclaimed, forgetting the other topic immediately.
"What?" Tricia and Ashley asked simultaneously.
"I heard that the sixth-graders settled on their mural's theme this year! Brian Ryder told me the other day!"
"Oh?" said Trish. "What's their theme about?"
"They're doing clocks!"
"Clocks?" Ash repeated, snorting. "That's boring. Ours'll be way better than clocks."
"Why clocks?" asked Trish.
Sy shrugged. "Symbolicness, I guess. I think their real theme is like, 'there's no time like the present,' but they're doing it with clocks. And Brian told me they're going to do it like a wall of different clocks, you know, all with different times, I think."
Ash shook her head vigorously, her new braids flying. "That's gonna suck. We'll think of a way better theme than clocks."
"I hope we do something with landscapes," said Trish. "My two favorite murals on the Wall are the landscapes. Especially the four seasons one. And the stars with the horses. And the cityscape with the rain. Oh, and the flowers!"
"My favorite is the one they have up now!" Sy seemed to bounce a little as she said this. "I love the butterflies and the sparklies and everything!"
"My favorite is the surrealist one with the children and their backpacks climbing all over the boxes with different angles," said Ash. "I bet it took forever for them to make all the cubes look like they had different gravity on 'em."
"I don't like that one," said Sy, sticking her lower lip out. "It makes my eyes go all in circles."
"What's your favorite, Lindy?" asked Trish.
Lindy shrugged.
"That's not an answer!" Sy exclaimed. (Of course, exclamations were cheap to Syiera; any sentence that did not end in an exclamation mark was a wasted sentence in her book.) "Please! Tell us your favorite!"
Lindy shrugged again.
"You must have ONE that you like," Ashley insisted.
Lindy didn't say anything.
"Oh, you're no fun!" Sy complained.
"Your hair's done," Trish announced.
"Hmm, I don't know," said Syiera seriously. "Pulling the hair back makes her face look too harsh, doesn't it?"
"It's because she's so skinny," said Trish. "Honestly, girl, don't you eat?"
She drinks, Eli said viciously.
"Of course," said Lindy. "Everyone eats."
"I know what to do," said Ashley. She reached for Lindy's face and slid a finger between her hair and her scalp, fishing an inch-wide section out from the braid. She did it on the other side, then played with the hair to make it frame her face. "Now you don't look so... uh, pointy."
"It looks perfect!" said Sy as she was fishing out a mirror from her backpack.
"It looks so cute!" said Trish.
"It looks mature," said Ash.
"No way," said Lindy when Syiera had handed her the mirror. Lindy tried to tuck the two free locks back into the braid, and when that didn't work, she stuck them behind her ears.
"Why?" asked Tricia.
"I don't care how cute or mature it looks," said Lindy. "I am not going to let myself look like Edward Elric."
Maxmilian Ingalls was a fairly smart young man, or at least he thought so. He had the forethought to realize that he did not know what he was going to say, and that he was going to want to know that. He had sort of a general idea, of course—otherwise he would never have made such a bold suggestion to Lindy about meeting him tonight—but he hadn't put too much thought into it. There hadn't even been that much of a likelihood that she would accept in the first place. His father had explained this to him once, in a rare accidental moment of insight.
"Boy," he'd said, clapping his big, callused hand onto Max's shoulder with enough force to make him even shorter, "remember this, yeah? You don't bother t' count cards when you got a crap hand."
In other words, don't make complicated plans for the distant future when there's a fair chance the near future isn't going to happen like you want it.
But in this case, the near future was happening like he wanted it, and unfortunately he didn't know what he wanted of it.
Writer's block, for all intents and purposes.
As soon as he got home, Max dropped his school things beside the door and ran to the kitchen to see if there was any food to be stolen, but his mother was in there, so no dice. "Hey, Mom?" he said, realizing she might be of use.
His mother took an arbitrary glance at him as she was pulling tonight's casserole out of the oven. "How's it goin', honey? Have a good day at school?" To save time on memorizing which boy was which (every one of the Ingalls boys had the same color hair and general facial shape, which was why Max was always confused with his older brothers) his mother always called him 'honey' and his father always called him 'boy.'
Max hoisted himself up onto one of the counters and swung his legs. "Mom, can you help me with som'm?"
"'Z'it homework? I'm too busy to do that rah't* now, honey. Ask one'a your brothers to help you." (AN: "Rah't"="Right." It was tough figuring out how to spell it phonetically.)
"No, it's not homework, Mom," said Max patiently.
After burning herself on the casserole dish, Max's mother stuck the side of her hand into her mouth, scowling and muttering a curse that Max pretended not to hear. "What is it then, hon?" she asked with her hand still in her mouth.
"Tonight, I'm s'posed'ta be meeting up with this girl, and I need help feggerin' out what'ta say to her."
His mother shook her head promptly and adamantly. "No way. You know the rule: Mom don't deal with girl problems. Period. Go ask your father."
"It's not a girl problem," Max argued.
"Is it a 'problem'?"
"Yeah..."
"Is it a problem about a girl?"
"Yeah, but—"
"Then it's a girl problem. Go see your father."
Max sighed loudly, then hopped down from the counter. "Where's Dad?"
"Out back with Hannah," she responded vaguely.
"Out back"could refer to anywhere within three acres of their house (after four or so acres away, it was considered "the fields"), so Max walked outside with no real idea of where he was going. It wasn't that hard to find his father and four-year-old sister once he was out there, since the way their farm had been designed made it easy to see everything that was going on in the lesser buildings from the view of the back porch. He saw Hannah first, sitting on one of the wooden beams that made up the bull's pen, then he caught sight of his father, ten yards away, by one of the old-fashioned water pumps (obviously, they had running water inside, but it was no use letting the pumps go to waste either), cleaning out a big pile of tin buckets in various sizes depending on their individual uses.
Max jogged over to his dad, shouting "Dad!" to get his attention.
"Look, Dad, I'm gonna jump off the fence!" Hannah bragged.
"Don't fall," said her father, unimpressed (he had raised five sons, and his daughter was turning out to be far less creative than her predecessors in coming up with dangerous stunts). "How's it goin', boy?" he said to Max.
"I got a question for you, Dad," he said, glancing briefly at his little sister before judging her safe and turning his attention elsewhere. "Mom wouldn' answer."
"What's the question?" he asked suspiciously. "Why wouldn't Mom answer?"
"She said it was a girl question and told me to ask you."
"Girl questions?" Max's father stood up straight, dropped the bucket he was cleaning, and wiped his hands on his jeans, indicating that Max had his full attention. "Well, was it a girl question?"
"Not a'zackly... It was a question about a girl, though."
His father nodded. "I see. Well, let's hear it."
He fumbled for a way to explain. "There's this girl in my class, rah't? Her name's Lindy. Her brother died, over the summer, when everybody was sick, you know? She didn' even have any family to begin with. I don't really know what happened to her parents, though..."
"Uh-huh...?" his father prompted.
"Well, when she come back to school after summer break, she was... diff'rnt, I guess."
"How d'you figure?"
"Look!" Hannah shouted. "I'm gonna jump on the bull's side'a the fence!"
After checking to see that the bull was nowhere near where Hannah was playing, Max's father gave her an "Okay, honey, don't step in a cow-pie while you're over there" and again focused on Max.
"She don't talk, Dad, barely at all!" Max explained. "Even if you try to talk to her, she just glares at you until you can't hardly stand to be around anymore. It's like she's empty... or at least somewhere very far away."
"Sounds sad," he observed without vested interest. "So how'd you get involved?"
"I promised to meet her somewhere later tonight. I was hoping I could say something... I don't know, som'm about... Pat, you know? And then she might maybe feel better about her big brother, too. But I don't know what to say so it sounds... you know, smart." He looked away when he had to mention Patrick's name. Six years wasn't so long ago, and he hated to see the way his parents and older siblings still flinched.
"Dad, look! I'm gonna slap the bull's ass! Wanna see?"
"Run fast if he don't move; run faster if he does," her father reminded her.
"So what should I do?" Max continued.
His dad put a minute of thought into it, rubbing his stubbly chin with his thumb and forefinger. "Well, you want these ta be your own words, rah't?"
"Of course."
"Dad! Look! Dad-dy!"
"Ta try an' make Lindy feel like she ain't alone in the world, rah't?" his father went on, ignoring Hannah's whines.
"A'zackly."
"Then don't try ta make it some kinda big production, boy," his father concluded. He ruffled Max's hair playfully. "If you spend too much time coming up with beautiful Rattl'arrowean sonnets ta try an' impress'er, your message'll get lost in them iambic pentameters. The truth, boy: that's all she needs'ta hear."
Max beamed, looking more reassured than he felt, although he did feel the tiniest bit more confident. "Thanks, Dad."
"Dad!" Hannah screamed in real fear, no longer playful or whiny. "DAD!" Max's head turned fast enough to give him whiplash and he saw what the problem was: Hannah was now being chased by the bull.
"HANNAH! Stop runnin' in circles and get to the fence!" his father shouted, racing toward the fence and vaulting over it in one fluid movement.
"I cain't—" Hannah panted, "cain't g—... fast enough!"
"You'd sure as hell better!" his father responded while he jumped around and waved his arms, attempting to get the attention of the bull. His fear was coming out like anger.
Hannah's shoe get stuck in a muddy place, tripping her up. She almost fell but recovered, though her shoe stayed stuck behind her and was soon pushed deeper into the mud by the running bull.
"Stop screamin' like a banshee!" their dad ordered. "You're makin' 'im madder!"
Hannah couldn't seem to stop the shrieks from pouring from her mouth. "Daddy!"
They say bad luck gets worse before it gets better, but that good luck streaks are often bad omens. In any case, luck was clearly not with Max's little sister when she tripped for real this time and landed in the mud. His father ran straight for her immediately, but he wasn't superhuman and there was no way he could have made it there fast enough. The bull ran straight over Hannah, who continued to scream hysterically.
"BOY! GET HELP!" Max's father bellowed.
"Yes!" Without staying to find out how badly she was hurt, Max turned and sprinted at top speed for the house.
Melinda glared across the river in the direction she knew Max would come from, if he were really coming. She'd had the time to wait for an hour, fall asleep by the bank, wake up God knew how much later, and still Max was a no-show.
She stood up and brushed off her pants, ignoring Eli's taunts as well as her own self-flagellation.
She stared into the deep night for one long minute, hesitating, then blinked. The tears overflowed and tracked silently down her face without being wiped away.
She walked right up to the place where the water and the mud and the reeds joined indistinctly. She picked up a rock, or maybe it was an unsuspecting turtle, and examined it, turning it over in her hands a couple times and squinting through the vaguely starlit darkness.
Nope, not a turtle.
A drop fell on the rock, but it was already wet from the river and it made no difference.
Nothing made a difference anymore.
Crying out in frustration, Melinda threw her arm back and hurled the rock across the bank with all the force in her—let's admit it—emaciated body.
"IDIOT!" she screamed.
She never specified whether the idiot was him or herself.