The Most Perfect Thing in the Universe Read online

  But she had a bad feeling, and not only because she was so disappointed and hurt. The tundra could be dangerous, even in summer. The terrain was uneven and boggy, making it easy to sprain an ankle or fall into icy water. It was plagued by biting insects. Global warming made everything highly unpredictable. What had her mother said about the predators? And going alone! She’d never done that before. It was against all expedition rules.

  In the tundra, even satellite phones didn’t always work, and Mama often forgot to recharge hers. There was no telling when they’d be able to talk again. Loah gave an even louder sob.

  Hissss.

  She bolted upright. What in the world was that? She held perfectly still, listening. There it was again—a raspy sound, like someone dislodging something from a throat.

  A dusty, mummified throat.

  Quietly, Loah rose to her feet. Looking up, she saw nothing. A dark, dank nothing. She tried to tell herself it was the wind between the old crumbling stones. Except there was no wind.

  Now she heard it again, closer this time.

  She yanked on the door. It refused to budge.

  Fear can sometimes endow a person with superhuman strength. This, however, was not Loah’s experience. Fear made her go as weak as a pimply, just-hatched bird.

  She whimpered. When she tried again, the door took pity and opened. Out in the corridor she leaned against the wall. What had just happened? Should she tell Miss Rinker? No, she’d only scold Loah for going near the turret. She’d say Loah was being hysterical and then make her drink warm milk.

  Loah shut the door and, still hiccupping (she always hiccupped after she cried), hurried down the hallway to the safety of her own room. On the wall above her bed hung a framed print of a female loah bird. She was a tiny creature, weighing less than an ounce, with a head barely bigger than a hazelnut. Except for that streak of gold on her wing, her feathers were the color of dingy snow.

  “It’s all your fault she’s not coming home,” Loah accused the picture.

  Which, unsurprisingly, did not reply. Loah sank onto her bed. On the nightstand was a photo of her and Mama. Mama was a small, plain woman, just the way Loah was a small, plain girl, but in this picture, with her arms around Loah and her chin resting on Loah’s head, she looked radiant.

  Holding her breath to stop the hiccups, Loah pulled what was left of her old baby blanket out from under her pillow. She’d mended it many times, but by now it was little more than a scrap of wool with a silky edge. She was rubbing that edge against her cheek when someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in, Theo.”

  (It had to be him. Miss Rinker never knocked.)

  “Look here.” Theo tiptoed in, pulling a bag from under his shirt.

  Gummy worms, their favorite. Miss Rinker—surprise, surprise—did not approve of candy, so Loah and Theo had to sneak. She chose a red-green one, Theo a yellow-orange. They ate solemnly, without speaking. Loah’s mouth filled with rubbery sweetness.

  “I’m sorry your mama’s not coming home.” Theo’s hair was white as milkweed down. He cupped her hand in his old, spotty one. “I’m sure she would if she could.”

  Theo was so kind. Loah’s mother could come if she chose, but he’d never say that.

  “We’ll just have to keep the nest warm till she gets here,” he said.

  Loah smiled. Theo was as much a homebody as she was. He set another gummy worm on her pillow, rocked back and forth a few times, and launched himself upright. Loah listened as the hallway floorboards creaked beneath his feet. Step, step, stop. Step, step, stop. Had he always moved so slowly?

  Loah curled up with her baby blanket. Crying took it out of her, and she dozed off till a noise woke her. An odd, woody thunk. She sat up, listening, and heard it again, distant but distinct, like a buried heart. What was it? Her own heart raced.

  Loah’s heart, unlike the rest of her, was very athletic.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next day, no part of Loah felt right. Not her heart, not her head, not a single part. To keep from thinking about her mother, she busied herself with home repairs. Dr. Londonderry, accustomed to the spare rigor of an Arctic field station, tended to overlook problems like leaky faucets, cracked windows, and dubious electrical wiring. Theo was officially in charge of home repairs, but he was old and so was the house, and since time only runs forward, not back, they both just kept getting older. Loah would have died rather than hurt Theo’s feelings, so she tried to do things surreptitiously, replacing a lightbulb here and tightening a loose screw there. It was hard to keep up, though, even with the small things. Big things like the crooked turret—well.

  Loah had been hoping that when Mama got home, she could be convinced to get to work saving their own habitat.

  Now Loah carried her Godzilla Glue and a broken cereal bowl (Theo had dropped it on the kitchen tiles) down the corridor to the house’s library. The shelves overflowed with books on birds. Her mother had written many of them, including the one she was best known for, The Egg: Nature’s Greatest Feat of Engineering. On the cover was a quote from someone named Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “I think, that, if required, on pain of death, to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg.”

  Loah set the broken bowl on her mother’s desk, which was awash with a sea of journals, papers, unopened mail, and books; baggies containing feathers, eggshells, or bird poop; three pairs of binoculars; the red wooden bird call; and more papers, invitations to speak, thank-yous for speaking, awards, and certificates Mama never bothered to hang and had probably forgotten she ever received. On the very edge, lined up like dominoes, stood Loah’s framed school photos, in which, year after year, her mouth frowned and her eye wandered.

  In the center sat their other landline phone. This one was programmed with Dr. Londonderry’s satellite phone number, which Loah was only to call in case of emergency.

  Sitting down in her mother’s chair, Loah absently reached for a shard of bowl and—ouch! A bright drop of blood bloomed on the tip of her finger. The sight of blood always made Loah woozy. She really, truly preferred blood to stay inside, where it belonged. She abandoned the bowl, wrapped her finger in a tissue, and went to the window seat, where her books from the public library were neatly stacked. She discovered one she hadn’t read, a biography titled Ferdinand Magellan: Circumnavigator of the Globe.

  Loah knew about the Magellanic penguin, so she’d been curious. Now as she read, she discovered that the bird was named for a sixteenth-century explorer in search of a route to the East Indies. Magellan was the hopeful sort, but things went all wrong. He ran out of supplies, and his men began dying of starvation, thirst, and various horrible diseases. Did Ferdinand Magellan turn back? He did not.

  Ferdinand Magellan was making Loah nervous. Skipping to the book’s end (something she never did), she read how he got mixed up in a tropical-island feud and wound up dead. His crew, what was left of it, forged on until, to their own surprise, they had sailed all the way around the world.

  What to make of this? Magellan had led an expedition that discovered how immense the earth really was, not to mention proved that it was round, but only by accident. Plus, he’d gotten himself killed before it was over and missed out on most of it. For a great hero, he didn’t seem to know what he was doing half the time.

  She thought of her mother, alone at the top of the world. Which was so upsetting she slapped the book closed, stuck it under her arm, and went outside.

  The yard was cool and leafy. Dr. Londonderry loved the trees because they sheltered the birds and sequestered carbon, but Loah loved the trees for themselves. A tree never went anywhere. It was always where you expected. It lost its leaves, but never its courage, and steadfastly grew new ones year after year. Try to name another living thing more patient and loyal than a tree, and you will fail.

  Yet today Loah wandered among them like a ship lost at sea. She circumnavigated the mud-brown house. She peered up at the turret,
with its two narrow windows (one had a broken pane) and its roof shaped like a witch’s hat. Sunlight hit the windows and turned them white, like the eyes of the very old dog who slept all day in a corner of the town hardware store.

  Did something flicker behind the glass?

  Bony fingers clamped her shoulder. Loah spun around with a startled cry. Miss Rinker frowned at her.

  “You’re brooding again,” she accused.

  “No,” said Loah, who knew too well Miss Rinker’s cure for brooding. She held up Ferdinand Magellan. “I’m reading.”

  Miss Rinker took the book and skimmed the first page. Her lip curled. Her dentures glinted. She handed it back, saying, “Explorers! All they do is discover things that were already there.”

  This was true. But was it possible to discover something that wasn’t there?

  “What you need is exercise. A vigorous walk or a punishing bike ride.”

  “But… it’s so hot. And sunlight causes cancer.”

  No use. Miss Rinker produced a tube of sunscreen. Also, her latest Bargain Blaster find: a metal water bottle that said THANKS FOR BEING YOU on its side.

  (As if a person has a choice! Who else could you be, like it or not?)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Loah’s plan was to pedal out of sight, find a shady place to sit for an hour, then ride back. She put the water bottle in the mesh pocket of her photo-realistic snowy owl backpack (a birthday gift from her mother), snapped on her helmet, and wheeled her bike into the road.

  Where a car, engine idling, sat in front of the house. The car had an official-looking seal emblazoned on its door. Behind the wheel, a man in a red baseball cap was furiously writing on a clipboard.

  Loah hesitated. Should she ask him what he was doing? See if he needed assistance?

  Probably. But remember how much Loah hated talking.

  Instead she quickly pedaled away, and before long she realized that the day wasn’t hot. It was breezy and mild, the kind of summer day that many people call perfect. The perfume of roses and lilies wafted from gardens, and sprinklers shot up rainbows. Leaves flickered and glowed as if the trees were thinking happy thoughts. Something about the day urged her on, and she kept riding.

  Loah stopped thinking about her mother. She stopped thinking about the turret. She stopped thinking about anything whatsoever and watched a red-tailed hawk trace circles against the blue sky. She stood on her pedals to climb a hill. She turned off the main road and onto a smaller one that twisted and turned between green-gold fields. When she reached a fork, she hesitated. Should she turn around? She’d already gone much farther than she’d meant to, on roads that were unfamiliar. She was—she smiled to realize it—acting like a fearless, foolish explorer, off to discover wonders that might or might not be there.

  The road on the left, she thought. Just a little bit farther.

  She hadn’t gone far at all when she hit the brakes. At the foot of a dirt driveway, an angry mob of handwritten signs shouted warnings.

  KEEP OUT

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  ATTACK DOG ON DUTY

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED OR WORSE

  That last one was riddled with round holes.

  A small boy with spiked-up hair the green of a monk parakeet rushed into the road.

  “I hate you!” he hollered over his shoulder. “I hate your face! I hate you so bad I could kill you!” He skidded to a halt, spun around to face the way he’d come, and crossed his arms on his scrawny chest. “Try to get past me! Just try!”

  Following his gaze, Loah saw a girl almost hidden by the signs. Thin, with colorless hair and flat, dark eyes, she looked about Loah’s age. A beat-up, bulging backpack drooped from her shoulders. She wore rolled-up jeans, and her T-shirt was too faded to make out the picture on it. The toe poking out her sneaker wiggled, the only sign of life.

  Behind the girl, the dirt driveway sloped upward, then dropped out of sight. Meadow grass and wildflowers blanketed the hill. It would have been a lovely, peaceful spot, except for those furious signs, the hollering boy, and the flat-eyed girl. None of this was Loah’s business. Whatsoever. Except that, when she looked again, she saw that the girl’s eyes were red. She’d been crying. Loah hooked her kickstand down. She slid her snowy owl backpack off and hugged it to her chest.

  “Are you—” she began, but the boy suddenly charged her, snatched the backpack from her arms, and put it on. He strutted around triumphantly.

  “Can’t you read?” He pointed at the sign that said TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED OR WORSE. “You ever heard of buckshot?”

  Loah had, but only in books set in pioneer days.

  “I—I’m not on your property,” she said. “I’m on a public road. And I thought…” She looked at the girl, who rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and swiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt, then once again went still. “I mean, is everything okay? I thought you might be in some kind of trouble.”

  The boy laughed. “Us Smiths make trouble, birdbrain!”

  Being teased was nothing new to Loah. She was used to whispering and snickering. At school she’d been called Haunted House Girl. Also Googly-Eye Girl, as well as other names not worth mentioning. She’d been asked if she’d ever considered going on a diet. Usually she hunched her shoulders and walked away with as much dignity as she could muster. She’d gotten pretty good at it.

  But now she wanted her backpack.

  Also. Also, there was something about this girl. Who was she, anyway? She didn’t go to Loah’s school. She was silent as an egg, but things were going on inside her. Somehow, Loah could tell. Inside the girl was a commotion, a hubbub of feelings tumbling around. The girl kept quiet, but her toe wiggled, as if trying to send Loah a signal. As if she was sure Loah would reply.

  Loah drew a breath.

  “Actually,” she heard herself say, “if you compare the ratio of brain weight to body weight, birds have bigger brains than we do. Their brains have significantly more neurons than primate brains of the same mass. So birdbrain may be a compliment.”

  The corners of the girl’s mouth quirked up. Loah smiled back.

  “Give me a break,” said the boy.

  But now he lost some steam. He slid a look toward the girl, checking to see what she was thinking. Big sister and little brother, thought Loah. He took a long drink of THANKS FOR BEING YOU water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Loah noticed that, on the bottom of the sign saying KEEP OUT, a different hand had written Keep in, you weirdos.

  Weirdo was one of the insults Loah had gotten good at ignoring.

  The girl’s toe wiggled again.

  “Is your house over the hill?” asked Loah. “It reminds me a little of my house. I mean, of course I can’t see your house, but that’s my point, in a way. My house is hidden, too, only by trees. My mother loves trees. Well, I do, too. Though it’s very nice out here, with all the unobstructed sky.”

  Parakeet Boy stared, then laughed. The girl’s smile grew. A small, happy silence opened out, and then Loah heard what sounded like baaa baaa on the other side of the hill. She looked up, expecting to see sheep. She saw nothing, but now, out of sight, a dog started barking. From the sound, it was approximately the size of a school bus.

  A man’s voice bellowed what sounded like Squirrel. The girl flinched and threw a nervous glance over her shoulder. How could a squirrel make someone so angry?

  “That’s it, possum butt,” the boy told his sister. “You’re in big trouble now.”

  “Shut up!” she said.

  Loah’s adventurousness, or whatever it was that had brought her out here, began to fade. A cat with a bird struggling in its jaws raced across the road and vanished in the tall grass. The man shouted again, and this time there was no doubt his fury was directed at a squirrel.

  What was going on over that hill? Nothing good. The barking grew louder. Time to get out of here.

  “Please.” Loah tried to sound brave. In vain. “Give me my backpack.”


  Quick as could be, the girl darted forward, snatched it from her brother, and handed it to Loah. Their eyes met, and the girl’s were no longer flat. Instead, they sparked. They flashed as if she and Loah shared a secret. A secret so secret Loah had no idea what it could be, and yet her heart quickened. The girl looked at her as if Loah had a surprise in her pocket or a trick up her sleeve.

  People rarely, if ever, looked at Loah that way.

  With a roar, an enormous dog crested the hill. For one impossible second it hung there in suspended animation, then hurtled toward them. Its cinder-block head was lowered. Its ears were flat. It wore a spiked collar. A cartoon dog, only three-dimensional.

  Maybe your parent has advised you what to do in case you get lost, or a shady stranger offers you a granola bar, or some other emergency arises. Loah’s mother had explained what to do should you come face-to-face with a polar bear:

  Keep an eye on the bear at all times, though do not—repeat not—make eye contact. Draw yourself up as big as possible and say, in the sternest voice at your command, Get out of here.

  Never scream, Dr. Londonderry cautioned. This scares predators and causes them to attack for sure.

  Do not scream, Loah told herself. Do not…

  Some advice is impossible to follow.

  “No!” she screamed, shutting her eyes. “Stop! Help!”

  “Bully!” The girl’s voice was astonishingly loud. A scrabble of claws. A high-pitched doggy whimper. When Loah dared to look, she saw the dog—was it really named Bully?—flat on the ground, eyes upturned, meekly watching the girl.

  “Thank you,” Loah whispered.

  The humiliated dog swiveled its eyes and growled deep in its throat.

  The man on the other side of the hill continued to shout. Would he come hurtling into view next? Something told Loah the girl wouldn’t be able to handle him the way she had Bully.

  “Come on.” The boy grabbed his sister’s hand and tried to haul her up the driveway. “You better come now. Before you get in really big trouble.” When the girl shook him off he latched back on. “Come on. You wanna make Mama cry?”