“We only have skim,” Sid told her, rolling his eyes. “My mom won’t buy anything unless it says low fat.”
Ashley wrinkled her nose. “Skim tastes like white water.”
“I know,” Sid grumbled.
Ashley stood and waved at Sid to get up. “Okay, let’s go.”
They hurried through the woods, and Ashley forced her legs to slow as they walked through the neighborhood back to her house. She wanted to sprint home, grab the milk and medicine dropper, and return to the woods. But if Sid did so much as a single jumping jack, he’d start sweating buckets, and then his mom would throw a hissy fit because he’d soiled his new shirt.
“Yes!” Ashley cheered, when she opened the refrigerator. A new gallon of whole milk sat on the top shelf. “My mom must have gone to the grocery store before work.”
Sid opened the freezer door.
“Fudge pops too,” he said, his eyes gleaming.
“I hope she got Ding Dongs,” Ashley said, glancing toward the pantry. “Last time she bought Twinkies. Those taste like cream filled cardboard.”
Sid got a faraway look in his eyes. “I love Ding Dongs and Twinkies.”
“I know you do,” Ashley said, filling a glass jar with milk and sticking two medicine droppers in her back pocket. She pulled an old blanket from the hall closet. “Grab us a couple fudge pops and let’s go.”
When they returned to the woods, the raccoons were where they’d left them, still scrambling around and making their little mewling-chirping sounds.
Ashley opened the jar of milk and nestled it between two large sticks on the ground. She filled her dropper with milk and plucked Alvin from the tree.
Sid held two fudge pops in his hands. His own, mostly eaten and Ash’s half-eaten one, which she’d given to him as soon as she spotted the tree.
She held the tip of the dropper near the raccoon’s mouth and depressed the rubber ball sending a trickle of milk over his little black nose.
“Open up,” she whispered, nudging the dropper against his muzzle.
It took a few tries, but when Alvin opened his mouth, he hungrily bit at the dropper. Some milk went into his mouth, but most of it streamed down his face into the grass.
Sid finished Ashley’s fudge pop and set the sticks on the ground. He filled up a medicine dropper and reached into the hollow of the tree.
“That’s Theodore,” Ash told him.
“You named them after Alvin and the Chipmunks?” Sid asked, grimacing as the little raccoon pawed against his hand. “Their claws are sharp,” he complained.
“Because they’re hungry,” Ashley told him.
“I’m pretty sure they’d be sharp even if they weren’t hungry,” Sid retorted.
“Quit talking and feed him,” Ashley said.
After several minutes, Ashley returned a damp Alvin to the tree. She pulled out Simon.
She glanced toward Sid and her mouth dropped open. He held Theodore cradled in his palm. The little raccoon clutched the dropper with both hands, and he drank the milk as if it were a bottle.”
“How’d you do that?” she asked.
Sid shook his head.
“I didn’t do anything. He did it. I guess he was hungry.”
They put a blanket in the tree and nestled the raccoons in before heading for home.
“Shit,” Sid sputtered, staring down at his shirt.
A smear of chocolate lay in the center of his chest.
“Dang, you’re in for it now,” Ashley agreed.
She left him at his road and walked another block to her own house.
She read the note her mom had left on the kitchen table.
Sandwich stuff in the fridge. I’ll be home late. Love you -Mom
Ashley flopped on the worn sofa, searching in the dusty cavern beneath for her copy of Interview with the Vampire, which was on loan from Sid, who had stolen it off his father’s forbidden bookshelf the week before.
Sid’s dad insisted he was too young to read horror novels. Little did Sid’s dad know, the kids in town had an entire network of books, magazines, and VHS tapes they passed between them, most of which came from Sid’s dad’s very own bookshelf.
Ash found her page, eager to find out if the child vampire, Claudia, had truly killed Lestat.
Wednesday afternoon idled by the same as most afternoons.
Her mother was waiting tables at The Rainbow Trout Grill. She’d pop in to change her clothes and then head to Sunny Meadows, an elderly care home downtown, where she’d work the midnight to eight am shift emptying bed pans, wiping wrinkled, old asses (Ash called them that, not her mom), and mopping piss from the sticky linoleum floors.
Ash ate toast for dinner, gulped a glass of milk for her mother’s sake, and gazed out the window into the warm, almost summer, evening.
In two weeks, school would let out for the summer, and Ash had never been so ready to pound down those cement steps outside Winterberry Middle School. It had been a rough year.
A few of the girls in her grade had gotten their periods, almost all of them had started wearing bras, and Ashley, ever-flat chested and frankly not interested in colored lip gloss and hair permanents, walked into school each day feeling like a daddy long-legs spider in a field of monarch butterflies.
She’d also gotten stuck with Ms. Fleming, the seventh grade teacher referred to as Ms. Flem-face, who gave demerits if you walked into class seconds after the bell rang. She lectured in a steady drone, putting you to sleep within two minutes of sitting at your desk. She only smiled on days when she was giving a pop quiz. Students of Flem-face knew if their teacher looked happy, they should not.
Ash had liked elementary school. She’d shared classes with Sid, her best friend. The teachers had been nice. Kids in elementary school went out for recess, had snack time, celebrated holidays with decorations and cupcakes. Middle school was a slap in the face after elementary.
Now they spent all day every day staring in dull contemplation at the white words chalked across the blackboard. Algebra and Shakespeare and the Civil War.
Each night when her mother came home from work, Ash offered a lie about her day, and her mother absently patted her head before falling into bed to sleep until the following morning.
Ash laid back on the couch, propping her feet on the end.
“But now we have raccoons,” she murmured, smiling. “Raccoons and summer vacation.”
2
“Hi, Mr. Wolf,” Tara Hanson called, peeking her head into his classroom. Her girlfriend, Kim, followed by Debbie, also stuck their heads through the doorway.
“Hi girls,” he said, offering them a distracted smile as he graded the last of the day’s five question quizzes. He put the quiz out every Wednesday. Four questions related to the coursework, which that week included an analysis of chapter seven in Jane Eyre, and one question was for fun. Today he’d opted for What are you afraid of?
“The Swirly Cone is doing two for one ice creams until Saturday for the last week of school,” Tara went on.
“That so?” Max asked, chuckling at Donnie Cleppinger’s answer: My ma’s undies.
“Yeah and their flavor of the week is cherry. That’s my favorite,” Tara added.
Her friends giggled, and Max looked up to find all three girls blushing.
He set his pen aside and wondered what he could say to send the girls skedaddling. They were nice girls, sure, but he had ten papers left in the stack beneath him, and over his dead body was he taking the damn things home to grade when he already had to appear at his mother’s Wednesday night dinner. On top of that, he’d rented Poltergeist the night before and he still had an hour left and wanted to watch it before the video store tapped him for another night at two dollars a pop.