Free Found Things by Marilyn Hilton

them?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Meadow Lark say, “except not coincidences.” She bit off some carrot and chewed it. “I call them miracles.”
    â€œYou and Mama should talk.”
    Mr. Tricks cocked his head at one angle and then another, as Meadow Lark spoke.
    â€œHe can’t be sick just because we wished it,” I say.
    â€œAre you scared that maybe he is, and it’s true?” she mumbled.
    Then she spit the chewed-up carrot onto her finger and stuck it between the wires of the cage. Mr. Tricks stretched his neck and pecked the carrot off her finger, then opened his beak and shook his head at her like he expected more. Mr. Tricks was in love with Meadow Lark.
    â€œI’m scared,” she say, answering her own question.
    â€œMe too,” I say. “I just don’t want to believe we made him sick.”
    Then Meadow Lark turned the lunch bag upside down and shook out a napkin, the same kind of napkin Mama put in my bag that morning. But in the corner of Meadow Lark’s napkin was a little red heart, just like the one I saw the first day we met.
    â€œLook, we don’t even know for sure he’s sick,” Meadow Lark say, wiping her fingers on that napkin with the heart drawn on it. “Kids exaggerate all the time.” Then she popped the rest of the carrot in her mouth. “Especially those kids.”
    â€œBut Mrs. Bertetti even say it was true.” I tried to hide that my lip quivered and my voice flapped just like Sonya’s when she heard that Daniel Bunch was in the hospital. Meadow Lark’s napkin had a red heart on it and mine did not. I never had a red heart on a napkin.
    Meadow Lark spit more carrot onto her finger and swallowed the rest. “It could just be a rumor and she heard it and believed it and told it to you.” Then she folded up the napkin into quarters, with the heart on the outside.
    I had something that was better than a red heart. I got up and opened my ballerina box and took out the little emerald ring and pressed it into the top of my thumb like a crown, and held it out to Meadow Lark. “See my ring?”
    Meadow Lark finished feeding the carrot to Mr. Tricks. “Pretty. Where did you get it?”
    â€œIn the river . . . I think. It’s my favorite thing.” Then I took off the ring and set it down. My head still hurt, and I lay back down on my bed.
    â€œSo, back to Daniel,” she say. “We have to find out if the rumor is true,” Meadow Lark say, as if I had interrupted her by showing her the ring. “One of us has to go to the hospital to make sure, or we’ll just wonder about it the rest of our lives. We can’t be scared forever.” She popped the last carrot in her mouth and put Mr. Tricks’s cage back on the floor.
    My stomach gurgled and I rolled onto my side to face her. “What if he is there? What if he is sick? Then what do we do?”
    â€œI don’t know—we’ll figure something out. Nothing like this ever happened to me before, so we’ll take it one step at a time.”
    â€œBut you’re the one who wrote the wish. I thought you knew all about wishes. And then you put it in the river. I thought you knew what you were doing.”
    â€œWell, one of us has to go to the hospital,” she say, “and it won’t be me. I’ve had enough of hospitals for a long time.”
    I knew she would be as stubborn about not going to the hospital as I was about not going into the water, so to save time I sat up and finished the ginger ale all at once, and then I worked out a burp that sounded like “I’ll go.” That’s how we decided.
    The fact was, I knew from the start it would be me. Unless I saw Daniel Bunch in the hospital with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe he was sick. Even if Meadow Lark went and come back and told me it was true, I’d still want to see for myself.
    â€œI just have to figure out