Free The Second Life of Abigail Walker by Frances O'Roark Dowell

remembered putting her lunch bag in her locker when she’d gotten to school that morning, and she didn’t think anyone else knew her combination.
    â€œMaybe you gave your combination to a friend, but forgot?” Jafar suggested.
    â€œBut even if that were so,” Anoop countered, “why would her friend take her lunch?”
    Jafar thought for a moment. “She was hungry. Or maybe she needed to take a pill. When I take my allergy medicine, I always have to eat something, or else I get dizzy.”
    â€œThen why didn’t she eat her own lunch?” Anoop asked.
    â€œMaybe her locker is on the other side of the building.”
    â€œWell, if this is the case, Abby’s friend should have come forward and offered to buy Abby another lunch. I don’t think her friend is much of a friend.”
    While Anoop and Jafar argued across the table from her, Abby observed them, as if she were going to draw their pictures next to the birds in her notebook. Anoop was neat. He parted his dark hair on the side, so you could see the thin, pale line of his scalp. His white shirt was buttoned at the collar, and he had folded his sleeves twice so that they rested mid-forearm. His fingernails were very clean, his posture impressively straight. If he were a bird, he would be a shiny black raven.
    Jafar reminded Abby of her little brother, Gabe. His hair was shaggy, his smile lopsided and friendly, and his Atlanta Braves T-shirt had food stains on it. When she showed up at lunch on Friday, he’d exclaimed, “Excellent! Finally someone who will listen to my jokes without making old-lady faces.”
    Jafar, she was pretty sure, would be a hummingbird, filled with happiness.
    She was amazed how easy it was to sit with them. For one thing, she wasn’t always trying to figure out the right thing to say. With girls, you had to be careful; if you said something wrong, it could set off a chain reaction that would leaveyou sitting by yourself while everyone else hung out by the monkey bars and laughed louder than normal, just so you’d be sure to hear how much fun they were having without you. But while Anoop was irritable, he wasn’t mean, and Jafar reminded her of a puppy who was just happy to be with people.
    Is this how it is with boys? Abby wondered as she bit into her dosa . You just talk about stuff?
    She peered across the cafeteria, wondering if there were girls she could be friends with as easily as she’d become friends with Anoop and Jafar. After all, Claudia had been an amazing friend, nothing at all like Kristen or Georgia.
    She could still remember the day after Claudia moved, in the very middle of fifth grade. Abby had gotten on the school bus and hadn’t had a single, solitary person to sit with. She’d spent the bumpy ride to school thinking about how lonely she was going to be for the rest of her life without Claudia. No friends. No one to write notes to or have sleepovers with. No one to build shoe-box apartments with.
    As Abby looked around the cafeteria, her eye fell on Marlys Barry, who was sitting by herself, writing in a spiral notebook. She remembered with a twinge how Marlys—poor Marlys with the name no one could say, who had to explain at the beginning of every school year that it was pronounced Mar-liss, and still the teachers forgot—had invited her to eat lunch with her a few days after Claudia had moved, and Abby was going to, only Kristen had overheard their conversation and took Abby aside.
    â€œListen, you really don’t want to eat lunch with her,” Kristen had whispered, holding tight to Abby’s arm, squeezing it a little bit. “You should eat at my table. And why don’t you sit with me on the bus home?”
    Abby had found Kristen’s offer impossible to refuse. Kristen lived in her neighborhood, but they’d never been friends, not really. Kristen had had too many sharp edges for Abby to feel comfortable around her.