Write Before Your Eyes (4 page)

So much for that earlier moment of sisterly bonding.

“Believe me, normal people cheat,” Jen went on. “But Alex, seriously, have a little style. You don’t get every answer right. That’s like wearing a neon sign around your neck. You have to miss a few on purpose.”

“What, you’re coaching him on how to cheat?” Gracie was appalled.

“Gracie, get over yourself.”

“Don’t tell Dad,” Alex said. “Okay?”

“Your secret is safe with us,” Jen said, before Gracie could say anything.

Jen took the driveway at twenty-five, slamming on the brakes just before crunching into the garage door. They piled out of the car and dragged their stuff inside.

Mom usually didn’t get home until after six. Dad had left a note on the counter:

Kids,

I have gone to an out-of-town job interview. Won’t be back until day after tomorrow. Do your homework. Listen to your mother!

Dad

Alex breathed a sign of relief when he read the note.

“Out of town?” Gracie said. “If the interview is out of town, does that mean the job is out of town?”

“I dunno,” Alex mumbled, opening the refrigerator.

“No clue,” said Jen as she climbed the stairs.

“What good would it do for Dad to get a job in a different town?”

No one answered Gracie’s question. She dialed Dylan’s number, and when the answering machine came on, she said, “Dylan, it’s Gracie. It’s
urgent.
Meet me under the weeping willow.”

Oh, wait.
How foolish of her. She’d forgotten, Dylan was indisposed. He was busy striking his hot iron with Lindsay Jacobs.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Okay, things were really getting out of hand. No doubt what Gracie had written about the Chesterville Soup Kitchen and the Red Cross was at this very minute getting messed up in some diabolical way that would be on tonight’s news or the front page of tomorrow’s paper. Maybe someone would donate a truckload of canned goods that had gone bad and the entire homeless population of Chesterville would get botulism. Or legions of people donating blood to the Red Cross would have the Ebola virus or bird flu and spread it. Or the blood would be the wrong type and people’s bodies would reject it. There was no way of knowing exactly how things would go wrong, but Gracie knew they would. And who would believe her if she tried to tell them?

Well, maybe there was one person. She pictured Ms. Campanella’s long white fingers, remembered the way she spoke with such passion about writing. Gracie had wanted to talk to her and had forgotten all about it in the confusion with Dylan after class. She ran into the computer room, went to the school Web site, and e-mailed Ms. Campanella.

Dear Ms. Campanella,

I have been thinking a lot about what you asked in class today about whether what happens in the world makes sense.

I was wondering, have you ever heard of someone writing something which later came true? This has been happening to me lately with a journal I’ve got and I’m scared. Should I stop writing in it? What should I do?

Gracie Rawley, fourth block English

As she sent the e-mail into cyberspace, Mo suddenly leaped onto her shoulder, poked his nose deep into her hair, and, purring loudly, licked her earlobe.

“Mo, stop it!” Gracie sat up and tossed him on the floor. He jumped right back up and nudged against her, still purring. Cats were so
contrary.
If you wanted to hold them, they wanted nothing but to get away. If you wanted them to leave you alone, they’d pester you to death.

Upstairs, loud, wrenching emo music came from Jen’s room, and Alex’s minibasketball rhythmically thumped against the backboard suspended from his closet door.

Gracie suddenly remembered the way that little old lady had said, “Not that one! She mustn’t take that one!” She dumped Mo onto the floor, grabbed the journal, and raced out the back door. Maybe Gracie needed some extra instructions or something. That was all. Maybe Gracie and the thin-faced man should have paid Miss Alice more attention. Gracie hurried with the blue journal down the street, across the golf course, and toward the cul-de-sac with the crumbling Tudor-style house.

She arrived and stood by the mailbox, staring. The house was gone. In its place: A bulldozer, a red clay mound, and a house-sized hole. Fresh yellow lumber lay neatly stacked in the yard. Gracie turned in a circle. Had she come to the wrong place? She clasped the journal tightly to her chest as goose bumps prickled across her scalp. Not only was Miss Alice gone, her house was too.

And then, atop the mailbox, came a grinning cat’s mouth with large, square, uncatlike teeth, then a nose and sleepy cat’s eyes. Slowly, ears appeared, as if they were unrolling all the way to their tips. At last there was a full head, and a fat striped body with a question-mark tail.

“Yes?” said the cat. The voice sounded hollow and faraway, as if the cat were speaking from inside a tall glass. The cat was terrifyingly realistic. Except for its teeth, which looked human.

Trying to let her breath out slowly, Gracie took a giant step backward. “Are you talking to me?” She really hadn’t slept that well last night. She closed her eyes and opened them again.

“Whom else would I be talking to?” said the cat.

Gracie looked around again. “Are you the Cheshire cat? Like from Alice in Wonderland?” And was the cat here because of what she had written in the journal and then erased?

“What do you think?” said the cat.

Gracie couldn’t get over it. Here she’d gone her whole life, thirteen boring years of it, without magic, and now she was being bombarded with it from every direction. Maybe she should have taken her temperature this morning. Maybe she was delirious. That had happened to Alex once. He’d practically destroyed his bunk bed trying to fight a dragon one night when he had strep throat.

“Do you…” She hesitated, then held up the journal. “Do you know anything about this journal? About it being magic?”

“It would depend…on what you mean by magic,” said the cat.

“Well, everything I write in it comes true.”

“Hmm,” said the cat.

“But even though things come true, they aren’t coming true in the right way.”

“And what is the right way?”

“The way I
meant
them to come true.”

“Hmm,” said the cat, exactly as before. It seemed to knit its brow, though Gracie couldn’t be sure.

“A lot of things are getting messed up,” Gracie said, encouraged. “Some girls took their shirts off right in front of the school, and my brother got in trouble for cheating. Plus, Dylan is making out with Lindsay Jacobs, my dad might be on his way to interview for a job that’s out of town, and my sister has a date with the Fridge, who might just be trying to get into her pants.” Gracie took a breath and shifted her weight from one foot to another. “I was thinking, maybe there is a separate set of instructions that I need? And I’m in kind of a hurry, because, well, all that stuff really needs to be fixed.” She shrugged in what she hoped was a friendly but persuasive way.

“Place the journal in the mailbox and come back tomorrow,” said the cat.

“What?” Gracie wished Dylan were here. Her fingertips were damp and shaky.

“In the mailbox. Right away.”

A bolt of fear coursed through Gracie’s chest. She took another giant step backward. “Give it back? I wasn’t thinking about giving it back. Just getting instructions. I mean, I think I can get the hang of it. Really, I do.”

“Right away.” The cat began to fade.

Gracie’s heart pounded. “But wait! How do I fix the stuff I already wrote?”

“No time to lose.” The cat grew fainter and fainter until all that was left was the grinning mouth.

“You haven’t answered my questions!”

The grin faded to a pale line of teeth, then a few faint white sparkles like stars. Then the cat completely disappeared.

Gracie stared at the mailbox for long seconds. She realized she wasn’t breathing. And she couldn’t make her fingers stop shaking.

With sudden vehemence, she turned and stalked away from the mailbox, hugging the journal more tightly, tucking it under her chin. Maybe Dylan would be at the weeping willow by now. Mom wouldn’t be home until six. She cut through the woods, her feet crashing through fallen yellow leaves, and sprinted down the path beside the golf course to the weeping willow by the edge of the creek.

She pulled aside a screen of willow fronds, like strings of yellow-green beads hanging in a doorway, and ducked inside the small, dappled room they formed. Her heart was beating all out of time and the inside of her head roared. She couldn’t catch her breath. Whew, that cat had been scary. She sat on a hump formed by the tree’s scaly gray roots, hugging herself and rubbing her T-shirt against her body to absorb the sweat trickling down her side.

Gracie examined the cover of the journal. She opened it and ran her fingers over the spidery words on the onionskin flyleaf as she reread them.

Remember what the dormouse said.

Okay, face it.
She didn’t want to give the journal back. She’d been waiting her whole life for real magic and here it was. Long ago she’d read
Half Magic
by Edward Eager, and those kids made a lot of mistakes at first with that magic coin. But eventually they figured it out. And Merlin, in Jane Yolen’s books, was unsure how to use the power of his dreams when he was a boy. He had to learn. And then there was Sparrowhawk, the young wizard of Earthsea, who was so rash about using his powers at first. And, of course, Harry Potter. He and the others at Hogwarts needed seven years of training to properly learn magic. Mistakes while you were learning were expected. Somehow she had to get a better handle on this. She wouldn’t give the journal back. Not yet. Not until she’d fixed the things she’d messed up.

Hurried footsteps approached and Dylan’s elfin face appeared through the willow fronds. He stepped inside and sat on the other tree root without a word.

“You’re here!” Gracie said. She could never stay mad at him, so she was silent as he sank his chin in one hand. She searched his face. “So?”

“So…what?” Dylan drummed his fingers on his knees and examined a thread hanging from the hem of his khakis.

“How’d it go? With Lindsay?”

Dylan shrugged. “Fine.”

“That’s it? Fine? I’m not a pervert or anything, so I don’t need gory details, but I guess I thought you’d be happier.” Gracie’s heart began to pound. Something had gone wrong again, she could feel it. But hadn’t she actually been hoping for it this time, deep down inside? She had a vision of Dylan kissing Lindsay, of Lindsay’s dark hair tumbling over his arms. She blinked it away.

“Well…” Dylan sighed with what Gracie thought was an exceeding amount of drama. “We got caught.”

“Oh no!” Gracie grabbed his wrist. “Who?”

“Ms. Vowell, the
former
schoolboy crush of my life.” Ms. Vowell had played Titania in the community theater production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and given Dylan rides to and from rehearsals for two months. His crush had actually intensified after he found out she had two children in elementary school and a long-haired live-in boyfriend who competed in triathlons. He and Gracie had even invented an exceedingly clever code name for Ms. Vowell: Ms. Consonant. “I’m suspended for three days. Ms. Vowell said she had never been so disappointed in a student.”

“Ooh.”

“Yeah, you know, when they berate you, it’s not that bad. It’s the I’m-so-disappointed-in-you routine that tends to arouse hideous feelings of guilt. Although I did see her once last summer in a fond embrace with her triathlete. In some circles, by the way, that’s called hypocrisy.”

“Well, she
is
a grown-up.” Gracie blurted out her real worry. “Before you and Lindsay got caught…I mean…was it worth it?”

Dylan shook his head. He licked his lips. Gracie wondered if they looked chapped. The vision of him kissing Lindsay shoved its way into her consciousness again and she pushed it out.

“She doesn’t like me, Gracie. I mean, she wanted my notes. I tried to put my arm around her and she was trying to slide away and…well, maybe I got carried away…. Then Ms. Consonant…Just forget it. I feel like a jerk. Like Macbeth. Out, out, damn spot.”

Gracie tried not to show her relief. “Sorry, I—”

“
Lady
Macbeth, if you want to split hairs.”

“Dylan, I am so sorry all of that happened.” But didn’t she feel a teeny bit glad that Dylan had gotten into trouble, to pay him back for liking Lindsay Jacobs? “Listen, a lot of bad things have happened from the things I’ve written. I need you to help me.”

Dylan wasn’t listening. “My dad’s going to kill me. If you’ve ever been suspended, you can’t be inducted into the National Honor Society. And he’s expecting me to get in.”

Dylan and his dad didn’t get along. Dylan’s dad always seemed to be disappointed in Dylan, though Gracie couldn’t figure out why. Dylan was so brilliant and entertaining and got straight As! His dad was a big-time lawyer and had wanted Dylan to join the debate club instead of the drama club, which he hadn’t, but that was all she could think of.

Gracie ran her fingers over the suede on the cover of the journal. The sun dropped lower in the sky, a cool breeze threaded through the willow branches, and the narrow leaves glimmered and swished in the fading light. Gracie knew she should go home soon. She needed to get Mom or Jen to take her to the soup kitchen, the animal shelter, and the Red Cross to try to fix whatever she’d messed up. But maybe, before she went, she could write something to keep Dylan from getting into trouble with his dad.

“Hey, what if I write something in the journal about Clueless Chet reconsidering your suspension since you have no previous violations of school rules and your grades are so good?”

“No—that wouldn’t be fair to Lindsay. I mean, we were both guilty. That would be favoritism. I can’t let you do that.”

Why not be unfair to Lindsay? Gracie thought about Lindsay’s high cheekbones and the haughty way she walked down the hall at school. She probably didn’t care about being suspended anyway.

“Okay. Well…I could write that your dad never finds out about the suspension.”

“But then he’ll wonder why I don’t get into the National Honor Society. I wonder if you can write retroactive entries—say, completely erase the entry about Lindsay and me?”

Gracie’s heart quickened. She’d love to! The fact that he wanted it never to have happened was a very good sign. But she had to act nonchalant about it.

“I could try.” She opened the journal, then drummed her fingers on its smooth pages. Forming her words carefully, she wrote:

Dylan McWilliams and Lindsay Jacobs did not kiss on Thursday afternoon. There was nothing between them.

“Well? Do you think that covers it?”

Dylan looked at what she had written and narrowed his eyes critically. “Uh…depends on what you mean by ‘nothing between them.’ Does that mean there were no feelings between us, or that there was nothing separating us, i.e., clothing?”

“Oh, right! How embarrassing. Well…was there?”
Oh, God, why did she ask that?

“Jeez, what do you think? Of course there was. Gracie!”

“Okay, okay.” Gracie erased
There was nothing between them.
She then wrote,
Nothing went on between them.
She looked at what she’d written. “Better?”

Dylan nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Gracie shut the journal. They waited a few seconds. She searched Dylan’s face. “Well, if the journal works retroactively, I guess you should go ahead and go to school tomorrow. Do you feel any better?”

Dylan considered. “I think so. It’s kind of weird to think that I can remember every second of being with Lindsay, but now it never happened, huh?”