Danger and Wonder by Bonnie E. Carlson

Danger and Wonder 


In the middle of February, a new girl shows up for the first time. She trudges in slowly, head lowered, posture stooped. She plops her soft body down in a taupe metal chair. Everyone looks up. Some kids sitting around the circle smile. The new girl doesn’t even raise her head, staring instead at her phone. Her short blond curls fall over her face, obscuring her eyes.
    “Heads up everyone,” says Todd, the leader. “Let’s get started. Today we have a new member, Wren Marshall, joining the group. Please, everyone, join me in welcoming her.”
    In unison everyone says hi.
    Still, Wren just sits there, nose in her phone.
   “Would you like to introduce yourself, Wren?” Todd asks.
   She lifts up her head, revealing a broad, plain-looking face, flat nose, and pale skin. She shakes her curls. “Not particularly. Don’t plan to be here long.” That’s about as polite as she can be under the circumstances.
   “Okay, that’s all right. The way we usually begin is by going around the circle with everyone giving a quick update. Then someone suggests a topic and people share on that topic. So, let’s start with … Emma.”
  Emma looks up with a startled expression. “Um, sure. Not much to report. Things are okay at school and home. I think my pipsqueak brother, Rowan, finally gets it. Mom’s not coming back.” She sighs. “So, my dad’s relieved. That’s it for today.” 
  After everyone takes a turn, Todd turns again to the new girl. “Wren, how about you? Would you like to say a little about yourself now?”
  She crosses her arms over her chest, her face sullen. Looking around the circle, she glares at the other kids. Her wideset eyes narrow. “My stupid Aunt Josie can force me to come to this stupid group, but she can’t make me talk.”
  Whoa. Silence. Not unusual, this angry response when kids first get there. “We all kind of felt that way at first,” says Lily, a petite fifteen-year-old with amber eyes, her long auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I know I was super pissed off. Maybe after a few times it’ll be easier to tell us what’s going on.”
  Todd flashes Lily a smile.
  After the meeting, outside the community center, Lily and Avery chat with Ashlyn and Gordon while everyone waits for their rides. Wren shambles away to sit on a bench, texting on her phone.
  “I sure hope she decides to open up pretty soon,” Lily says to Avery. “She looks totally miserable.”
  “I remember what that’s like,” says Avery, a slender high school sophomore, with luscious mocha skin, a broad nose, and pale blue eyes.  “No friggin’ fun at all,” he adds in his British accent.
  A gray-haired, middle-aged woman drives up in an older Ford SVU and stops across from the bench. Wren gets up slowly, slides into the front seat, and slams the door way too hard.
                                                                                                                                       ***
  Two weeks later, they go around the circle again for check-in at the grief group. It’s Wren’s turn. “My single mom died six weeks ago. Complications from multiple myeloma. No dad. So, yeah, that makes me an orphan. Then I had to move to Arizona from Madison, Wisconsin, a very cool, very liberal town. Ha! To a friggin’ red state.” Her voice brims with disdain. “Now I live in Scottsdale with my aunt, my mother’s spinster older sister, who couldn’t even acknowledge much less accept that my mom was gay. Totally sucks.”
  No one says a word. Wren is sure no one can relate.
  Gordon brings up the topic that day, anger, so common it resonates with everyone. A couple of kids talk about things that still make them angry, aside from losing a parent, like parents who are too strict or their surviving parent being overly focused on a sibling who’s in bad shape.
  Time to put your big girl pants on, Wren thinks, and her hand shoots up. All eyes pivot in her direction. Her green eyes flash. “Anger? Okay, where to start? Let’s see. Well, Aunt Josie’s a miserable religious nut who I barely knew before I was forced to come live with her. She’s making me go to this stupid religious school run by her mega-church. How can she even do that? My mom would have hated it!” By then she’s waving her arms around. “We have to wear skirts to our knees. Can you believe that? No jeans or shorts. Needless to say, no one wants to hear that my mom was gay.”
  She pauses. “That’s just for starters.” She runs her hand through her blond hair. “I guess I’m done for now.” She crosses her arms over her chest and lets out a big exhale.
  Several kids tsk and shake their heads in sympathy. The girl next to her, Irelyn, slides her arm around Wren’s shoulders.  
  “I had to move across country too,” Lily says, “and start in a new school. Leave all my besties in Maryland. And Avery moved all the way from London. It sucks, it really does. But having to go to a really conservative school like that? That’d be worse.”
  After group ends everyone goes their separate ways. Some hop on bicycles or drive their own cars, while others wait outside for rides. 
  Wren trudges over to the bench where she usually waits for her aunt.
  Avery nudges Lily, “Let’s go say hi.” 
  They saunter over. “Sorry to hear about your situation,” Avery says. “Really does sound bloody awful. Hey, I was thinking, maybe you’d like to get together with Lily and me. Sometimes we go for coffee after the meeting, and we do other stuff together. My pronouns are he/him, by the way.” Tiny dyed blond braids cover his head.
  “Are you guys a couple?”
  “Nah, friends,” Lily says. “Yeah, wanna get some coffee? My pronouns are she/her. How about you?”
  “She/her, I guess. Still figuring that out. Right now, my sexuality’s a big ol’ question mark. Bet the other kids at my school don’t even know about the pronoun thing. They’re stuck in the last century. I’d love to go with you guys, but Aunt Josie’s gonna be here any minute.”
  “Can you text her, tell her we’ll drop you off in a little bit?”
Wren bites her lip. “Maybe. She’ll probably be pissed off. What the hell, she’s always angry at me anyhow.” She pulls out her phone and texts.
  “Yep, totally annoyed. She’d already left and had to turn around. But she said okay.”
  They stroll the three blocks to their usual Starbucks. Avery’s driver will pick them up in an hour since Avery and Lily don’t drive yet.
  On a quiet Wednesday night, they have the place pretty much to themselves. 
  They stand at the counter to order. Avery says, “I’m treating tonight in honor of Wren joining us for the first time—”
  Wren protests. “Oh no, you can’t do—” 
  Avery has to shout over the whine of the coffee grinder. “Sure, I can.”
  Lily laughs. “Just let him, it’s not worth arguing.” She holds her hand over her mouth and whispers into Wren’s ear, “It’s okay. His father’s filthy rich. He can afford it.”
  They order their drinks, coffee for Avery and Lily, green tea for Wren, and grab a table in the corner.
  They sit down and Lily says, “I love your name, by the way.”
  Wren laughs. “My mom, Annie, was a birder. Those cute little wrens were her favorite.”
  Lily blows on her hot mocha. “That was brave of you to open up today. It’s so hard in the beginning. I was in pretty much the same place you were. Both my parents were killed in that terrorist attack last July.”
  “Oh my God!” Wren says. “That is totally terrible. I’m so sorry.”
  “Yeah, sucks.”
  “Who do you live with then?” Wren asks.
  “My grandmother. She’s okay if you happen to be an orphan.”
  “And I might as well be an orphan,” Avery says. “My so-called father’s a total arsehole.”
  Wren tells them about losing Annie to blood cancer and how cool it was to live in Madison. “I totally miss it. No dad, because Annie got pregnant through a sperm bank. I s’pose I could try to find the guy, but what would be the point?”
  “Might be better than your aunt,” Lily suggests.
  “Or he might turn out like my so-called father,” Avery says, “who actually was no more than a sperm donor. And now I’m stuck with the wanker.”
  Avery talks more about his situation, losing his black Jamaican mother to breast cancer, and having to move in with a stupid-rich white father he’d never met from a different continent. “Thank God he travels all the time and is never around.”
  “How does that work then?” Wren asks. “If he’s never around.”
  “My awesome housekeeper, Catalina, takes care of me. And I have a driver, Bruno, who takes me wherever I need to go.”
  Hmm, that’s different, Wren thinks.
  The previous weekend Avery had talked Lily into a bike ride at Scottsdale’s Indian Bend wash, a lush greenspace the city built for flood control.
  “Okay, so I went with you on that bike ride,” Lily says. “Have to admit, it was fun. Now it’s my turn. I think we should take a hike. My grandma dragged me on one last weekend, and it was kind of great. I think you’d like it.”
  Avery sips his coffee. “Londoners don’t hike.”
  “This would be a good time to remind you that you haven’t been a Londoner for a while now,” Lily says.    
  Avery lowers his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.” 
  “Come on. I took that bike ride with you. We live in the desert now. Embrace it. Wren, how about you? You in?”
  “Absolutely. Maybe it’ll help me drop a few of these pounds I’ve gained since
Annie passed away.”
                                                                                                                                    ***
  The following weekend, in late February, Avery’s driver drops them off at the four-mile Taliesin Overlook trailhead in the forever-wild McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
  “Fantastic day,” Wren says. “Perfect for a hike.”
  A hawk screams overhead in the cloudless sky as they start off.
  “Look at that sky,” Avery observes. “It’s so blue it doesn’t even look real.”
  Five minutes later Wren says, “Wow, there’s so many plants growing here. I thought it would be, like, all sand. And huge. How big is this place?”
  “Um, something like thirty thousand acres, maybe?” Lily said. “Belongs to the city. There’s actually mountains in here.” She points north, where a range of mountains looms in the near distance.
  A short way into the hike Wren notices a bunch of twigs nestled into the pale green, almost fuzzy-looking arms of a cactus. “Look at that,” she says, pointing.
  “Must be a bird’s nest,” Lily says, glancing around. “Actually, a bunch of those kind of cactuses have twiggy nests in them.”
  “How do the birds get all those little sticks in there?” Avery asks.
  They hike for an hour and are on their way back, gabbing nonstop about school and life and losing parents. Wren can’t believe her luck in finding Avery and Lily.
  Always an expressive speaker, Wren is waving her arms around while she talks about Madison’s lakes. Suddenly, she ends up with two clumps of pale green cholla cactus on the back of her hand and lower arm. 
  She yelps and tries to shake them off. The tenacious spines hold those clumps right where they are. 
  “Oh my God. What are these things? It feels like needles sticking into my hand and arm.”
  She grabs one with her hand, a natural impulse, which succeeds in removing the clump. But now the spines are stuck on her fingers, too.     
Dozens still pierce the back of her hand and arm, making it look like a porcupine.
  Avery tries to help and ends up with spines jabbed into his hands. “What the fuck? What are these bloody things? They do feel like needles.”
  Wren starts to shriek at Lily who watches, aghast, with no clue what to do. As they stand on the trail, yelling and generally freaking out, an older woman approaches on foot accompanied by a fluffy little black and white dog on a leash. 
  Wren thrusts her hand out toward her, the two-inch cholla ball stuck to her forearm. “Can you help us?” she wails. “Do you know how to get these things off? Fuck, this thing hurts!”
  The gray-haired woman, slender and muscular, stops. “Okay, calm down, let’s see. I think I’ve got what we need to take those evil things out. Whatever you do don’t touch it—” 
  Avery moans. “Too late for that—”
  “Those are teddy bear cholla balls,” she says, her wrinkled tan face frowning. “That’s why some people call it ‘jumping cholla.’ ’Cause those little branches seem to jump right off onto you when you even get near them. They don’t, of course, but…” 
  She takes Wren’s arm to have a closer look. “Unfortunately, those spines have to be pulled out one by one, and it’s going to hurt like hell.”
  “It already hurts like hell,” Avery says.
  Tears well up in Wren’s eyes. 
  Just then two guys on mountain bikes come barreling down the trail, blocked by Avery, Lily, Wren, and the old woman. Their fancy bikes spray dirt and stones as they skid to a halt inches before hitting the group. 
  The guys, both young and buff, dismount. One says, “Hey, what’s going on?”
  “She’s had a close encounter of the worst kind with a teddy bear cholla,” the old woman says. “I’ve got just the right tool for repairs.” She rummages around in her fanny pack and pulls out a two-inch metal gadget that turns out to be a pair of folding, needle-nose pliers.
  “The ends of those spines looked pointed,” she tells them. “But the ends have microscopic barbs, little hooks. That's why they hurt to pull out.” 
  One by one, she removes the cholla spines from the back of Wren’s hand. Wren winces as the woman pulls one out, each removed spine leaving a drop of blood in its wake. Soft whimpers escape from Wren’s lips as she tries to stay still with each little needle removal. 
  It takes seven minutes.
  The mountain bikers hang around to watch. The one who hasn’t spoken yet, wearing a black and red helmet, says, “Rough break, dude. Happens to mountain bikers all the time when we wipe out. Hurts like a son of a bitch.”
  The woman continues to pull out the spines. “My pliers are too small to pull out this other ball in her arm. You guys got anything in your pack we could grab it with?”
  They search inside their packs to no avail. The first guy says, “I think your best bet is to fold up a tee shirt a few times and grab that thing.”
  Wren whimpers. 
  Avery steps forward, strips off his shirt, and hands it to the guy. 
  “You’re gonna have to sacrifice the shirt though,” the guy continues. “You’ll never get the cholla out of it.” 
  “No problem,” Avery says. “Don’t need any reminders of this day.”
  The bike guy folds the shirt a few times and carefully grabs the cactus ball, managing not to stick himself. 
  But Wren squeals. “Jesus that hurt!”
  “Yeah, I know,” says the biker. “Sorry. And you still have to have all those little suckers pulled out.”
  Lily stands off to the side, silently watching the whole fiasco. “You guys are never gonna hike with me again.” 
  Avery glares at her. “Great idea, Lil, hiking.” He shakes his head. “Can’t wait to do it again.”
  The woman pulls out the last spines and puts her tool away.
  Lily wraps her arm around Wren. “I'm so, so sorry.” She turns to Avery. “Let’s get out of here.”
  “Thanks so much,” Lily says to the woman. “I don’t know what we would’ve done if you hadn’t come along.”
  They hike the last mile in silence. Avery’s driver is waiting at the trailhead.
  Wren looks at Lily. “Don’t even think about asking me to hike again.”
  Lily’s eyes sting. 
  Epic fail.
                                                                                                                             ***
  When Bruno stops at Lily’s house to drop her off, she says to Wren and Avery, “Why don’t you guys come in for a minute.”
  They troop in. “Grandma, this is my friend Wren, from the grief group.”
  “Very nice to meet you, Wren. I guess that means you’ve had a major loss like Lily and Avery.”
  Wren’s eyes glisten. “Right, my mom.”
  “I’m so sorry—"
  Lily interrupts. “Wren, tell her what happened on the hike.”
  She tells their tale of woe and thrusts her arm, covered with tiny red dots, toward Grandma.
  “Oh, dear. Yeah, those chollas can be nasty. I’ve never had anything that bad happen, but my dog Tucker’s gotten them stuck in his paw. One time he got some stuck on his nose and we had to take him to the vet.” She sighs. “Sorry that happened on your first hike.
  “Probably better use alcohol on the places where the spines were pulled out. Don't want ’em getting infected. It’ll sting though.”
  Wren winces. “Crap.”
  “Now they’re never gonna hike again, Grandma” Lily says. “And they’re both mad at me.”
  “Oh, they’ll forgive you.” She glances at Wren and Avery. “Won’t you?”
  Solemn nods.
  “Why didn’t you warn us, Grandma?”
  “It honestly didn’t cross my mind. The desert’s a wild place. Zillions of things going on out there. Not just cactuses. Rattlesnakes and Gila monsters and desert tortoises. The desert was there thousands of years before we arrived and will be there thousands more after we’re gone. Unless we destroy it first. Full of danger and wonder, just like life.”
  Wren looks at Lily and Avery. “Danger? You mean like my homophobic aunt?”
  Avery and Lily nod. 
  Grandma looks puzzled. “But wonder too,” Grandma says, “like making new friends.”


​
Bonnie E. Carlson lives and writes amidst the saguaros and chollas in the Sonoran Desert. Her stories have appeared in magazines such as The Broadkill Review, Across the Margin, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fewer Than 500, and The Normal School. Her novel Radical Acceptance is forthcoming.