“What’re you looking at?” I huffed, slamming the book closed.
I tossed off the covers, got up, and peered out the window. It was all shadows and silence. There was only one good thing about living on the mesa: it was a hundred yards from a dead volcano (aka the Beast).
Having my own volcano was about the most interesting thing in my short life. (Up until that point, that is.) I’d even found a secret entrance into it last month. Rosie and I were hiking down from the top, and about halfway down I heard a strangled gasp. Naturally, I went to investigate, half expec
ting to find a hurt animal. But when I parted the scraggly creosote branches, I discovered something else: an opening just big enough to crawl through. It led to a whole labyrinth of caves, and for half a second I’d thought about calling National Geographic or something. But then I’d decided I would rather have a private place for Rosie and me than be on the cover of some dumb magazine.
Rosie leaped off the bed when she saw me slip on my sneakers.
“Come on, girl. Let’s get out of here.”
I went outside with my new warrior cane and limped past Nana’s grave (she died when I was two, so I didn’t remember her). I crossed the big stretch of desert, zigzagging between creosote, ocotillo, and yucca. The moon looked like a huge fish eye.
“Maybe I could just pretend to go to school,” I said to Rosie as we got closer to the Beast, a black cone rising a couple hundred yards out of the sand to meet the sky.
Rosie stopped, sniffed the air. Her ears pricked.
“Okay, fine. Bad idea. You have a better one?”
With a whimper, Rosie inched back.
“You smell something?” I said, hoping it wasn’t a rattlesnake. I hated snakes. When I didn’t hear the familiar rattling, I relaxed. “You’re not afraid of another jackrabbit, are you?”
Rosie yelped at me.
“You were afraid, don’t try to deny it.”
She took off toward the volcano. “Hey!” I called, trying to keep up. “Wait for me!”
I’d found Rosie wandering the desert four years ago. At the time, I figured someone had dumped her there. She was all skin and bones, and she acted skittish at first, like someone had abused her. When I begged Mom to let me keep her, she said we couldn’t afford it, so I promised to earn money for dog food. Rosie was cinnamon brown like most boxers, but she had black spots all over, including on her floppy ears, which is why I was sure she had dalmatian in her, too. She only had three legs, so she got me and I got her.
When we got to the base of my volcano, I stopped abruptly. There, in the moonlit sand, was a series of paw prints—massive, with long claws. I stepped into one of the impressions and my size-twelve foot took up only a third of the space. The paw was definitely too big to belong to a coyote. I thought maybe they were bear tracks, except bears don’t cruise the desert.
I kneeled to investigate. Even without the moonlight I would’ve been able to see the huge prints, because I had perfect eyesight in the dark. Mom called it a sacred ancestral blessing. Whatever. I called it another freak-of-nature thing.
“They look big enough to belong to a dinosaur, Rosie.”
She sniffed one, then another, and whimpered.
I followed the trail, but it ended suddenly, like whatever creature the prints belonged to had simply vanished. Shivers crept up my spine.
Rosie whimpered again, looking up at me with her soft brown eyes as if to say Let’s get outta here.
“Okay, okay,” I said, just as eager as she was to get to the top of the volcano.
We climbed the switchback trail, past my secret cave (which I’d camouflaged with a net of creosote and mesquite branches), toward the ridge.
When we got to the top, I took in the jaw-dropping view. To the east was a glittering night sky rolling over the desert, and to the west was a lush valley dividing the city and the flat mesa. And beyond that? A looming mountain range with jagged peaks that stood shoulder to shoulder like a band of soldiers.
This was pretty much my favorite place in the world. Not that I’d ever been outside New Mexico, but I read a lot. Mom always told me the volcano was unsafe, without ever really saying why, but to me it had always felt quiet and calm. It also happened to be where I trained. After the docs had said there was no way to fix my bum leg, I spent hours hiking the Beast, thinking if I could just make my shorter leg stronger, maybe my limp would be less noticeable.
No such luck. But by walking the rim’s edge I learned how to be a boss at balancing, and that’s a handy skill when you get shoved around by kids at school.
I set down my cane and began teetering along the rim of the crater while holding my arms out to my sides. Mom would kill me if she knew I did this. One slip and I’d tumble fifty feet down the rocky hill.
Rosie cruised behind me, sniffing the ground.
“How ’bout I pretend to be sick?” I said, still stuck on how to get out of Holy Ghost school. “Or I could release rats into the cafeteria….There can’t be school if there’s no food, right?” Did Catholic schools even have a cafeteria? The only problem was, my ideas would only buy me a day or two.