Blindly she pats the dirt. “Come on, boot,” she mutters. “Come to Mommy.”
The boot snuffles, and Katie-Rose yelps and scrambles frantically backward. Because boots don’t snuffle. So what did? A raccoon? A rat? A wild pig, rooting for truffles?!
“Hey!” she says. She fumbles for the first boot and uses it to whack the bushes. “Get out of there, you . . . thing!”
The thing snuffles again. It’s actually a very human-sounding snuffle, and the base of Katie-Rose’s spine tingles. She crawls cautiously forward and peers into the shadowed network of leaves and branches.
Milla lifts her hand. Her eyes are puffy, and her hair is a mess. There are twigs in it. Twigs.
“Milla?” Katie-Rose says. “Why are you hiding in the bushes?”
Milla shrugs.
“Well . . . get out!”
Milla shakes her head.
Katie-Rose briefly closes her eyes. A remarkable calm descends upon her, and when she opens her eyes, she knows she was born to be here at this very moment. She was born for other things, too—she has many many moments of greatness ahead of her—but right now her job is to get her shoeless, tearstained friend out of the sagebrush.
She gazes levelly at Milla and extends her hand. “Come on.”
Milla starts crying. “I killed St-stewy! I st-stepped on him!”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“Nuh-uh, I killed him! It’s not okay at all!”
“I know. You’re right. But I need you to get out of those bushes now.” She beckons with her fingers. “Come on. You can do it.”
Milla wants to, Katie-Rose can tell. If she’s been here all day—omigosh, she has, hasn’t she? Well, she’s got to be starving. She’s got to be desperate for a bathroom, too. Unless she peed in the sagebrush?
Not the time to ask.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Katie-Rose says. “You’re going to come out of there—come on, take my hand—and we’re going to have a memorial service for Stewy.”
Milla does take Katie-Rose’s hand. Milla’s is cold, while Katie-Rose’s is warm.
“But Stewy’s dead,” Milla wails. “And I don’t know what Max did with . . . his body. And I’m not going to ask!”
Katie-Rose twines her fingers around Milla’s. “Then we’ll bury your boots.”
Milla sob-laughs. Katie-Rose tugs at her, and she scoots inch by inch over the dirt. When she’s nearly there, she lets go of Katie-Rose and crawls out into the open air.
“You’re a mess,” Katie-Rose remarks. She lifts her eyebrows, deciding not to tell her that there’s actually a roly-poly making a home in her tangled blonde hair. Instead, she says, “I mean, wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so . . . nature-girl-y.”
Milla glances fearfully at Max’s house. “I need to get out of here,” she whispers.
“Of course.” Katie-Rose gets to her feet and pulls Milla up. “We’ll go to my house. We’ll get you cleaned up. I’ll make you hot cocoa, okay?”
Milla takes a shuddery breath. “I should probably call Mom Joyce and Mom Abigail, too.”
“Yep.” She aims Milla toward her house and gives her a push. “You go on. I’ve got to get my bike, and . . . yeah. But I’ll be right there.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
She watches Milla dart across the street. She waits until her mom has ushered Milla in—with a hug and a look of concern—and then she worms her arm back into the sagebrush and grabs the second boot. When she pulls it out, a bramble scratches her forearm.
She climbs awkwardly onto her bike, using one hand to steer and the other to hold the boots. In the garage, she shoves the boots behind a grass seeder her dad never uses. She starts to leave, then returns and throws an oil-stained burlap blanket over them, just in case.
If some day in the future Milla decides she does want to bury her boots—whether it’s days, weeks, or months from now—Katie-Rose will help her. She’ll even volunteer to give the eulogy. And if that’s not something Milla chooses to do, maybe Katie-Rose will bury them herself, to pay her respects to Stewy.
after dreaming of spiky things and crumbly Vanilla Wafers and being trapped in mud, squelchy, greedy mud that sucked at her bare feet and tried to pull her under.
She sits up in bed and shivers. It’s dark out, which means it’s still night, which makes her pull the blankets tighter around her. She hates being awake in the middle of the night. Hates having to fall back asleep by herself, and anyway, she never can. It’s too freaky.
But when she looks at her “Fatally Addicted to Cute” clock, it says five thirty, which means it’s not night, but the next day. And not only that, but later than five A.M. the next day—and that means she doesn’t have to be alone. The rule is that after five o’clock, if she absolutely can’t get back to sleep, she’s allowed to go crawl in with Mom Joyce and Mom Abigail.
She feels a gut-wrenching twist of relief. She slips out of bed and tiptoes downstairs to her parents’ room. She pads over to Mom Abigail’s side of the bed and whispers, “Mom? Can I get in?”
Mom Abigail, who sleeps through beeping alarms but wakes up at the least little Milla-sound, groggily opens her eyes. She squints at her clock.
“Sweetie, it’s two in the morning,” she says.
“It is?” Milla looks at her mom’s clock. Sure enough, it is. She must have flipped the two into a five, up in her own room.
“Go back to bed, sweetie,” Mom Abigail says, closing her eyes and blindly patting Milla. She draws her arm back into the warmth of the covers and pulls the covers up under her chin. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Milla says.
She doesn’t leave.
Mom Abigail cracks one eye.
“Can I get in anyway?” she asks.
“Sweetie, you know the rule,” Mom Abigail says. “Otherwise, you’d be down here every night. You’ve got your own bed, babe.”
But it doesn’t have you guys in it, Milla thinks. It really is dark, here and in the rest of the house. Especially upstairs. How could she have thought it was five thirty?
Mom Abigail sighs, scoots farther toward the middle of the bed, and lifts up the baby pink comforter.
Milla happily crawls in. She wiggles her spine up against Mom Abigail, and Mom Abigail wraps around her. On the other side of the bed, Mom Joyce shifts and makes a funny sleep-noise that makes both Milla and Mom Abigail quietly giggle.
“That woman, I swear,” Mom Abigail whispers. She strokes Milla’s hair. Milla loves it when her mom does that. She’s warm and cozy now, like a baby bunny snuggled safely in its bunny den. Only—
She tenses.
“What’s wrong, baby?” her mom asks.
Baby. Baby bunnies. Stewy. It all comes back.
She burrows her face into her mom’s pillow. Her words come out muffled. “I’m feeling sad about Stewy.”
“Mmm,” her mom says. “That’s normal, Mills. You’ll probably feel sad for a while.” She keeps stroking Milla’s hair, separating the strands and gently untangling them. “You didn’t mean to, though, baby.”
“I know.”
“And Max knows you didn’t mean to.”
“I know.” No, he doesn’t.
“Everyone knows you didn’t mean to. You’re going to survive this, sweetie.”
Well, no, probably not, Milla thinks.
After Milla got home this afternoon, there’d been a lot of talking. Mom Abigail and Mom Joyce talked to Milla, of course, telling her how much they loved her and how she wasn’t a bad person and how she should never ever skip school again. Ever. Then Mom Abigail got on her phone and talked to Max’s mom, and Mom Joyce got on her phone and talked to Ms. Westerfeld, the principal of Rivendell, who said she would talk to Mr. Emerson, Milla’s teacher. The grown-ups were kind and understanding, though firm about the skipping-school part. They all said everything would be okay.
But grown-ups say stuff like that.
Her mom?
??s breathing slows. Her hand drifts from Milla’s hair to the base of her neck, where it nestles in like a small animal, like a—
No, Milla tells her brain.
She closes her eyes. She listens to her moms’ sleeping sounds, and she tries to feel sleepy herself. She really tries.
Her eyelids pop open.
She moves Mom Abigail’s hand out of the way and flops onto her back. Then to her other side, so that she’s facing her mom. She squirms to get her pajamas unwrinkly beneath her, and Mom Joyce makes a mmphygrummphy noise.
“Whoever’s wiggling, stop,” she says grouchily.
Milla holds still. She tries again to fall asleep. It’s not happening, though. It’s just not. In order to keep her eyes shut, she has to scrunch her forehead muscles, and then, when she tries to unscrunch her forehead, her eyes fly open.
It’s more than scrunchy muscles, of course. It’s Stewy, and Max, and knowing she’s a terrible person who brings sadness wherever she goes.
Grrrrrr! Think about something else! she commands herself. Think about . . . about Yasaman and her Snack Attack. That’s a good thing, right? A way of making the world better instead of sadder? Not that she’s contributed much to the campaign other than the Jelly-Yums, which weren’t a hit.
She scratches her nose. She wants to come up with something big. But what? To come up with more ideas, she needs to know more about the problem, so she carefully-carefully turns over and scooches toward the edge of the bed. Her Mom Abigail’s iPhone is on the bedside table, plugged in and charging, and Milla reaches for it. She holds it low so its screen light won’t wake anyone. She goes to Google and types “trans fats,” “Cheezy D’lites,” and “badness” into the search bubble.
She’ll start with that. If she doesn’t find anything, she’ll keep searching, even if it means staying up till dawn.
though not as early as Milla. She gets up at seven instead of seven thirty and does a vigorous, two-minute stretching-and-jogging-in-place routine. Then she gets dressed: denim miniskirt, a T-shirt with a daisy on it, and mismatched leg warmers with pompoms at the top. It’s a power outfit, and Katie-Rose has chosen it with care, knowing that Milla is going to need every ounce of her strength and support today.
Milla’s going to need all her flower friends today. Katie-Rose hopes that Natalia, for once, has the sense to simply stay out of the way.
Katie-Rose is ready before her mom or brothers, so she goes outside for a moment of solitude. Only it’s not solitude if there’s another person with you, or near you, or across the driveway from you, sitting in a forlorn way on his front steps.
“Hi, Max,” she says, going over to him. She reaches out to touch his shoulder, then feels awkward and doesn’t. She puts her hands behind her back. “I’m really sorry about Stewy.”
“Thanks,” Max says.
“Milla didn’t mean to do it, you know.”
Max nods.
“Was he . . . in pain?”
“I don’t think so,” Max says. “My mom called a friend of hers who’s a doctor, and the doctor said Stewy probably died right away. The doctor wasn’t there, so she couldn’t say for sure, but . . . yeah.”
“Oh.”
Max swallows. “But his legs kept moving. Afterward.”
“What?” Katie-Rose says, alarmed.
“My mom’s friend said that sometimes happens, though. Because of brain signals still being sent out. But it doesn’t mean Stewy was still alive, or that he was suffering.”
Katie-Rose is suffering just hearing this, and also from seeing Max so wrecked. She hesitates, then asks, “Are you mad? At Milla?”
“No,” Max says. Katie-Rose can see he’s telling the truth, and she feels ashamed for every petty thing she’s ever done.
“I called her,” Max goes on, “but she wouldn’t come to the phone.”
“Well, she’ll be at school,” Katie-Rose says. “You can talk to her there.”
“Yeah. But if you see her first, will you tell her?” He lifts his head and meets Katie-Rose’s eyes. “That I know she didn’t mean to kill Stewy, and that I’m not mad?”
Katie-Rose’s throat tightens.
“Katie-Rose!” her mom calls. “Come on, sweetie!”
“I’ve got to go,” she says. “But of course I’ll tell her.”
She walks back to her own house, promising silently to be a better person from this day forth. She knows now how fragile life is. It’s stupid to get worked up over small annoyances, and so she won’t, not ever again.
math is by silently going over what she learned on the internet at three A.M. Oh, and also by putting up an invisible wall between her and Max. She feels him looking at her, but she cannot and does not look back.
Factory farms, she says to herself. Cramped cages, genetically altered chickens, mean people who work at slaughterhouses. Not everybody would connect Cheezy D’lites to such horrors, but Milla discovered that Cheezy D’lites are just one small part of the problem. The real evil lies with Happy Healthy Farms, the company that makes Cheezy D’lites. There is nothing happy or healthy about Happy Healthy Farms.
Milla is not a girl who usually fights for things, but today she will, one way or another. Yasaman’s cause is worth fighting for. Animal rights are worth fighting for. And in Milla’s mind, though she can’t exactly explain it, the Snack Attack has morphed into something bigger: a way to say sorry to Stewy.
Someone is saying Milla’s name. It’s Violet. Milla emerges from her fog and sees the other fifth graders lined up by the door that leads to the playground, bouncing off one another with the hyperness of imminent freedom.
“It’s morning break,” Violet says, standing over Milla.
“Right,” Milla says.
Violet tugs on her arm. “So get up.”
But Milla resists. Other than Violet and herself, only one other person isn’t goofing off with the other kids. He’s at the end of the line. His socks are pulled up too high as always.
Violet follows Milla’s gaze. “Oh,” she murmurs, releasing Milla’s arm. She waits with Milla until everyone has left the room, including Max. Then they go outside.
Milla sticks close to Violet and says, “We need to find Yasaman and Katie-Rose. I have something important to tell you guys. It’s about the Snack Attack.”
“Seriously?” Violet says “I mean, wow. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought . . . given everything that happened . . .”
“Uh-huh,” Milla says to make her stop.
Milla spots Yasaman near the swing set. Yasaman comes forward and immediately gives Milla a hug.
“Milla . . .” she begins.
“Thanks,” Milla says, gently leaning away from the embrace. “Where’s Katie-Rose? We need Katie-Rose.”
“Here I am,” Katie-Rose says, hurrying over. “What’s up?”
“So I’ve found out some stuff, and it’s bad,” Milla says.
Yasaman’s eyes grow round.
“Not about Max or Stewy!” Milla says. “About the Snack Attack, and Cheezy D’lites, and the company that’s in charge of Cheezy D’lites.”
“Happy Healthy Farms,” Yasaman supplies.
“Right. And Happy Healthy Farms isn’t a nice company. They make other stuff besides Cheezy D’lites, like frozen chicken nuggets, and also Munchy Lunchies.”
“I brought a Munchy Lunchy today,” Violet says. Munchy Lunchies are prepacked lunches, like for taking to school, and they usually include chips, fruit, a drink, and some sort of main thing, like mini-corndogs or do-it-yourself pizzas.
“What kind?” Milla asks.
“BLT,” Violet says.
“Well, you’re going to have to throw it away,” Milla says. “Because what is bacon made of? Pigs. And guess what? The pigs they use are treated really badly. They’re taken away from their moms when they’re babies, and since they can’t suck on their moms’”—she grimaces—“you knows, guess what happens?”
Violet looks alarmed. “What?”
“They s
uck each other’s tails. The baby pigs are crammed all together in a pen, and they want to suck on something, so they suck each other’s tails, but then they get infected, because they chew on them and stuff, too. So do you know what the Happy Healthy Farms people do?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Violet says.
“They cut them off.” Milla looks from face to face. “They just cut the baby pigs’ tails off no matter what—and they don’t use any kind of antiseptic. Anesthetic.” She groans and presses the palm of her heel to her forehead. “They don’t use painkillers is what I’m saying. Isn’t that awful?”
Violet looks ill. “Will someone share their lunch with me?”
Milla plows ahead. “And there’s other stuff, too. Like, the chickens they use never get to see the sun, and they give them hormones to make them grow fast, only then they grow so fast that their legs break, because they can’t hold up their own fat bodies.”
“That’s awful,” Yasaman says.
“I know,” Milla says. “So I totally agree with the Cheezy D’lite ban, because we shouldn’t be buying stuff from Happy Healthy Farms, period. I think we need to get the whole grade in on it and do a protest or something. Maybe tomorrow, during assembly?”
The girls look at one another. Every Friday, both fifth-grade classes gather in the commons before morning break. The teachers make anouncements, kids give presentations, sometimes Ms. Westerfeld brings in special guests. Stuff like that.
“I bet everyone would want to know how phony Happy Healthy Farms is,” Violet says. “Not just us.”
“We’d have to be polite, though,” Yasaman says. “We couldn’t march around or dye anyone orange.”
Milla never imagined kids marching around dyeing one another orange. She was just thinking someone would make a speech, and then all the fifth graders could thrust their fists in the air and say, “End the suffering!” Or something like that.
“Um, agreed,” she says.
“Let’s do it,” Violet says passionately. “Let’s round everyone up and have a secret meeting.”
Katie-Rose claps her hands, almost like a cheerleader. “Okay, then.” She turns, opens her mouth wide, and yells, “Hey! People! Get over here!”