C h a p t e r F o u r t e e n
The Wild Ones
When we left Mrs. Rivet’s house, I had completely forgotten about Felix’s birthday. When we got back to town, he and Henry were already upset about us disappearing for a day. Felix especially, though I tried to convince him I didn’t really forget about his birthday.
“You did too.”
I sighed in defeat after my second attempt, and looked around for support but no one said a thing. Felix sat under a tree, his arms crossed stubbornly.
“I’m sorry, Felix. Really.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I am sorry, I am,” I said in a pleading voice, feeling desperate. “I don’t like to forget things. I would never choose so.”
“You do too and I refuse to believe you. You’re just fibbing and won’t admit that I’m right and you’re wrong.”
It took strength to push down the impatience that was rising inside me like a wave. “Felix,” I said in a strained voice, “I’ll make it up to you. We’ll make it up to you. I promise.”
Henry and Artie nodded to confirm my oath.
Felix loosened his arms and sighed a long sigh like he always did. “Fine.”
“Good!” I exclaimed joyously. I turned back to the others. Claudia and Charlie were practicing some sort of handshake in the background. Artie and Henry looked at each other and chuckled.
“But first, answer me this,” Felix stopped me. “Why don’t dinosaurs talk?”
“Hmm…” I turned back to the boys for support.
“Um,” Henry scratched his head. “I don’t know.”
Artie narrowed his eyes. “Cause, they’re dinosaurs, not people.”
“Why, Felix?” I asked him.
He said the answer through wheezing breaths. “Because they’re dead!” He fell back onto the grass and laughed until he gasped for air.
Me and the others waited patiently for the boy to recover. When he was finished, I stepped forward.
“What do you want to do first?” I bent over and waited for Felix’s response.
Felix cheered up rather swiftly after he had his laugh. I supposed he was no longer angry at us. “Can we have a mud fight? A really big one? With forts and bases and teams and everything? Oh, it’d be capital!”
“A mud fight…” I considered this and though I knew I had something else I had to attend to, I hoped I could join them when I was finished, because it did sound rather amusing and fun.
“That sounds inexplicably pleasurable and diverting, but I am afraid I cannot join you, not yet.”
I think Felix knew what I had in mind so he didn’t complain. In fact, he looked rather sly, like he had discovered some important secret.
I had made a quaint little chocolate cake with a sugary glaze drizzling down the sides and the top of it. It wasn’t too nice to look at, as I had limited recourses in both ingredients and in knowledge to make a cake. But I prayed Felix wouldn’t be too disappointed.
When I got to our meadow, as I guessed they would certainly be there, the war was nearing its finish. I had the cake in a basket under a cloth and I held it under my arms securely. I approached the children and set it down on the ground.
“Did you have a nice mud fight?” I asked them good-naturedly, feeling a little speck of jealously that I tried to push away.
They were covered, and I mean covered in thick dark mud. I could barely see a clean part of them, except their eyes. Their eyes were shining with glee and delight.
“Claudia!” I cried in bafflement when I saw my usually “prim and tidy” sister overtaken by the mud. “After seeing you covered in such mud I will be surprised at nothing.”
“It’s not that bad,” she came to me and I rightly backed up, my hands prepared for defense.
“I’m sorry, but I’m much too clean and you’re much too dirty.”
Claudia crossed her arms like a mad hen.
“I’m clean, so I might as well stay so.”
“Prissy, prissy Annabelle,” Felix jibed, wagging his head side to side with each word.
“Prissy?” I shook my head with disproval. “If you don’t wash up then who will eat the cake?”
I turned around and saw Artie put down a clump of mud that I knew had been meant for me. I frowned at him, but I meant no sore feelings. “I’m going down to the river.”
“Come on then,” Henry called Felix and Claudia. Henry fell in step beside me.
I was still recovering from the sight of their clothes, their hair—everything on them. To think my well-brought up English brothers and sister—I wasn’t mad, of course. It was Felix’s birthday. I wanted him to have a day of fun. I was just surprised. Especially at Henry.
“What flavor?” he nodded to the basket.
“Chocolate with a surgery glaze.”
Henry looked content. “Since when have you been able to cook, Annabelle?”
My lips froze and I didn’t answer right yet. It felt so strange that Henry called me Annabelle now. Everyone did. Hardly ever was I called Ingrid. It felt like a sign. A symbol of some sort. Henry was letting go of Mother by calling me by my name. He wasn’t hiding from the pain behind the name Ingrid. He was facing it instead. He was changing. He wasn’t so shut up and hurt anymore. He seemed happier. And I hoped he truly was.
“Um…Miss Cate,” I said, referring to the children’s old schoolteacher back at home.
We came to the miniature beach near Charlie’s big tree, and right away they ran to the river and splashed each other clean.
“We’re the wild ones,” I whispered to myself. “We’re the ones who play in the woods and throw mud at each other and then laugh about it.” I sat down on the sand and spread a white, partly torn piece of fabric on the ground. I had found it just lying in the upstairs of the Lovingale, and I didn’t have anything else to use just then.
“If Aunt Vicky could only see us now,” I sighed and set up the cake. “And she isn’t even our aunt. Simply an old mother of Father’s business friend from thirty years ago. She’s tried to practically raise us even though she has no right.” I didn’t know who I was talking to. I was alone. The children were by the river.
I shook my head and finished. “Come over here and cut the cake!” I hollered to Henry.
They dashed over and Felix rubbed his hands together gingerly and nearly hovered over it.
“You must sit down right so we can all fit,” I advised. But then I looked down at the basket.
“Where’s the knife and forks?”
“I don’t know, you were in charge,” Henry shot back fiery. In that moment, I was sure the sun was spitefully shining on me the hardest, and I was so hot and so tired. But after a moment of mourning, I was on my feet to go down the long path through the woods to fetch silverware.
“You don’t really mean to go all the way down,” Artie asked as if I were crazy. He noticed the weariness held in my expression.
“Well…I…” I didn’t finished.
Felix grinned cheekily.
Don’t you dare.
“Felix Eli Phoenix—” I stopped.
“Charlie, I give you the pleasure,” he said with charm, waving his hands with a flourish, like he had seen the ringmasters do at the circus.
Charlie’s eyes lit up and he reached his palm into the cake and ripped off a big clump of it with his hand. He ate it with his fingers and I gaped at him, astonishingly.
“Wh-what? Wait—” I stuttered, unsure of what to do. “My cake,” I sighed tragically.
Felix followed his lead and soon all of them were eating the cake with their hands, right back to filthy again, all of them except Henry and me.
“Well, you had a mud fight with your hands, didn’t you?” I asked my brother. “I guess some cake wouldn’t hurt.”
He shrugged. “I guess not.”
So Henry and I dug in sharply along with the others, and we nearly devoured that cake, but someone got an idea, and before I knew it, we were throwing those clumps of cake at each other and I dived behind a tree for cover.
A wet, hard-packed fistful of sand exploded against my back and I looked up at Charlie who was dangling off a branch of the tree I was near. In his pockets, he had wet sand and he was balling them in his palms like a snowball.
“How did you get up there so fast?”
“You’d better run away!” he taunted and another one hit me.
The others caught on and in an instant the cake fight had blossomed into a lovely “sand-ball” battle.
We were worn out after that. Felix loved the cake, so I didn’t much mind the price I had to pay, especially with Felix having so much fun.
And I must admit, it was a bit fun.
We laid side by side in a long stretch on the sand. First me, then Charlie, then Claudia and Henry, and at the end Felix and Artie.
Charlie inhaled deeply and stared up into the blue sky, the same blueness as that of his eyes. Charlie was one to dream, just like me. I could tell it as I watched him look into the sky.
“I take it that you like the clouds,” I stated softly, so the others wouldn’t hear. “I like that you like the stars and the clouds,” and I looked up at the sky too.
“Mama’s up there is what I’ve figured,” he said in a firm, decided voice. “Cause if she’s not, then where could she be?” His voice drifted off dreamily at the question.
“I…I’m not entirely sure.”
“Mama’s up there with the angels.”
“Mine is, too,” I said wistfully, and he looked at me.
“Maybe they’re friends.”
“Maybe.”
“So!” Felix sat up like he was raised from the dead and made me flinch. “What’ll we do now?”
Henry yawned. “Is it still your birthday?”
Felix crossed his arms and towered over Henry, falling asleep on the ground. “As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Would you be so divine as to tell us our next—undertaking?” I asked, my hands crossed behind my head.
Felix looked excited again, and I dreaded what was to follow. “I want to build a raft,” he declared honorably. “We can use those bamboo stalks over there, and some sort of rope if we have it.”
For a minute, I held a glimmer of hope in my chest that we wouldn’t find any rope, and instead the children would clean themselves again and we would do some relaxing thing. But that was all in vain.
“I have rope,” Charlie said mischievously, almost immediately, and pulled a thin but long rope out of his fabric satchel that he had brought to the beach. Some of that rope was frayed and worn, and it looked so rough it would tear one’s hands, to be sure.
“Oh Charlie,” I sighed, and then remembered how I said that nothing would surprise me after the mud fight. “How is it that you happen to have a rope in your bag this very moment?” I had thought I’d somehow get out of this next event, but now I knew that I must proceed. I laughed my sleepiness away and Felix and Charlie went right to work.
I sat down next to Artie and watched him flick the sand with his finger and stare at nothing in particular.
“How did he even fit that rope in that raggedly satchel?”
“He fits a lot of things,” Artie said blankly. “He fits whole worlds in there.”
“Come again?”
Artie looked at me very seriously. “It’s true. He pulls out a piece of cloth, ties it around his neck, and all the sudden he’s a hero in a different dimension. All the sudden we’re realms apart.”
“Do you ever join him?”
Artie looked too miserable to respond just then. “I’m not as wild as Charlie is.”
“I think you are.”
“Humph,” was his kind reply, accompanied by a lazy shrug.
“I think we all are,” and I looked ahead to the river. “All of us are born with it. That one wild streak.” My eyes grazed passed his again and back to the river. “We mustn’t lose that about us.”
It was almost an eternity before he spoke, and when he did, he brought up Mrs. Rivet again, so I went along with it.
“Mrs. Rivet was very kind yesterday,” I said tenderly, hoping that I sounded as sincere as I felt.
“I knew you’d like her. You know, she never comes down.” He locked his eyes with me and appeared anxious for a second. “Never.”
“Really?”
“I think she’s afraid of what others will think. The last time she came down to the village a few boys stared at her when she walked by, snickering and whispering, “Ribbit, ribbit,” and jumped like a frog, trying to make fun.”
“How distasteful,” I said bitterly. “There’s not many children here, is there?”
“Not too many. Me and Charlie here pretty much run this place anyway.”
I glanced at the boys and it looked like they were almost finished. It had taken a lot of time, but the makeshift bamboo raft didn’t look that bad. Henry was in charge of the paddles, which were already laying in a corner near an old rowboat that Artie said had been there “longer than forever.”
Sometime while I conversed with Artie and my eyes were diverted, Felix and Charlie had balanced on the raft, and weren’t aware of the fact that it was slowly drifting away.
I looked their way and blinked, wondering if my eyes were playing a momentary trick on me, hoping that they were playing tricks on me.
“Felix, you’re drifting!” I sat up and cried in alarm, my finger poking the air in front of me.
Felix looked back at me and gasped, then chuckled sheepishly. “Oh! Um…what can we do?” he cried, his figure becoming smaller and smaller. He panicked a little but I could see and hear Charlie laughing himself into the next century, sitting on the edge, taunting and pointing at us.
I ran to the surface, ankle deep. “Charlie, don’t, you’ll fall in!”
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