“The coach has pointed out that Lady Luck hasn’t been on their side, but that there has also been a dearth of team leadership,” Dad went on. “In an interview just last week, the coach was quoted as saying, ‘Someone has to step up and be the heart and soul of this team.’ We can only hope that is going to happen for them today.”
“Hey, Gracie,” Alex said while Dad was reading a commercial about speedy service at Tire Kingdom. “Is Dad going to live in Atlanta, like, permanently?”
“Course not. This is just temporary.”
Alex didn’t say anything else, but Gracie noticed bruise-like darkness shadowing the skin under his eyes.
“You know,” she added, “your friends are going to think it’s cool that Dad announces sports on the radio.”
“I guess,” Alex said.
That night, after everyone else went to bed, Gracie turned on her bedside lamp and reached for the journal. As she pulled it from beneath her pillow, and turned it this way and that, she decided to conduct a final test. She glanced at her bedroom window.
Mo jumped onto her bed with a friendly meow. Gracie opened the journal and scribbled:
Mo’s fur turned from black to white.
Mo, weaving his black tail through the air like a plume, sidled next to her legs under the quilt and preened his whiskers on the knuckles of Gracie’s hand. His fur remained black. Gracie listened to her heart beat for several long seconds, waiting. Mo grew bolder and bumped his nose into her knuckles again, entreating her to pet him. She ran her palm over his flat skull and scratched under his chin. He purred and preened. His fur gleamed bluish-black in the dim light.
The Cheshire cat was gone. And so was the journal’s magic. She heaved a sigh, feeling close to tears. She’d had magic, it had been in her hands. And now she’d given it away. Still, she knew it was the right thing to do.
She’d forgotten she had a story to write for Ms. Campanella’s class. Ms. Campanella had said that Owen Meany was a story about God and also a story about friendship, and the assignment was to write your own story, real or fictional, about one friend making a sacrifice for another
Using the computer, she wrote a story about a girl and a boy who met and talked about books and plays under a weeping willow tree. Their names were Jakob and Bliss. Jakob wanted more than anything for another girl, Alexandra, to notice him. And Bliss offered to write Alexandra an e-mail, pretending to be Jakob. After getting that e-mail, Bliss assured Jakob, Alexandra would like him. And she did write the e-mail, and Alexandra started liking Jakob, but once Alexandra liked Jakob, he lost interest, and Bliss had to tell Alexandra that too. Then he started liking another girl, and wanted Bliss to write an e-mail to her. And Bliss realized that she should never have offered to pose as Jakob and write that e-mail in the first place.
She had thought she might dream that night, and she did. It was a dream about Dad’s apartment, only it wasn’t an apartment, it was a boat, and the ship climbed the side of a roaring wave as big as a mountain, teetered on its foamy crest, and slid down the other side. The Cheshire cat was outside swimming, swimming, hating water the way cats always do.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Gracie awoke Monday morning and lay, without moving, losing herself in her Birth of Venus poster. Dylan called it Venus on the Half Shell. She pushed Dylan out of her mind because her throat felt all achy and swollen every time she thought of him.
She thought about the way Mom and Dad had entwined their fingers, like some sailing knot, in the airport lobby. Mo, still black, lay between her feet, purring. The tip of his tail lashed the bed, a silent metronome counting off time.
She thought about the journal, wondering if she’d still experience terrible regret, and felt a freedom that she hadn’t expected. She went to the window and scanned the yard and the branches of all the nearby trees, but, as she had expected, she didn’t see the Cheshire cat anywhere. She pulled the journal from under her pillow and looked inside.
Everything she’d written had disappeared. All that was left were the original words that were in the journal when she’d first bought it from the pointy-faced English man:
Remember what the dormouse said.
Thirty minutes later, dressed in her Chesterville Middle uniform, Gracie tossed Alex his Pop-Tart as he climbed onto the elementary school bus. Since Jen was grounded, they all had to take the bus to school for a month.
“Don’t get detention,” Jen yelled as he walked toward a seat in the back.
“I’m never making the mistake of getting a hundred again,” Alex yelled out the window. “Hey, guess what,” Gracie heard him say as he sat down with a friend. “My dad’s a sports announcer.”
A few minutes later, the upper school bus groaned and listed as it swung through the apartment parking lot.
“Gracie, check this out,” Jen said. They sat together on a torn seat up front, since all of the seats toward the back were taken. Jen dropped an e-mail printout into Gracie’s lap.
Dear Jen,
Want to hang out with me?
Yours truly,
Sean P. “the Fridge” Romanowsky (tight end)
“I’ll say he has a tight end,” Jen said, flashing her dimpled grin at Gracie.
Gracie smiled back, a bit hesitantly. This was strange. She was pretty sure she’d fixed that whole Fridge problem with the last thing she’d written in the journal. She’d written that Sean’s true feelings would return. Did that mean that Sean really did like Jen?
“That’s so great. But what about you being grounded?”
“He’ll wait.”
“Until the end of your natural life?”
“Mom will cave. After driving you and Alex around for only one week, I predict. So, see, he’s not what you think. He’s sensitive and caring, really,” Jen added. The bus lurched as it rolled out of their development.
“I can see from his e-mail that he’s caring.” Gracie nodded, grabbing a handrail.
Could that also mean that Dylan really did like Gracie? It was possible, wasn’t it?
Gracie wouldn’t see Dylan and find out how he really felt until lunchtime. It was the longest morning she had ever lived through. Normally she was able to concentrate in Mr. Eggles’s math class, but today, even though he dressed like Napoleon Dynamite to introduce the unit on perfect squares, Gracie’s mind wandered. She had been so excited about the global warming debate in Mr. Diaz’s earth science class. But today her brain felt like a helium balloon shooting up in the sky and being dragged all over by the wind.
She walked into the cafeteria slowly and gazed across to the corner where she and Dylan normally sat together. He was there, eating a sandwich and reading a book. She waited for him to look up, so she could catch his eye, but he didn’t.
The day’s pizza smelled like old greasy cheese, and the roar of everybody talking throbbed inside her head. It felt almost unbearable. She had no idea what she put on her tray. Jen walked by and poked her in the ribs, and then she sat down at a table with a bunch of juniors, next to the Fridge. The Fridge held out a french fry and Jen, laughing, ate it from his sausage-sized fingers.
Gracie smiled and nodded at Jen, and headed slowly across the cafeteria toward Dylan. His brown curls covered his eyes as he bent over his book. She slid her tray beside his. “Hey.” Her voice sounded high and hesitant.
Dylan looked up, and immediately blushed. “Hi.” He brushed his hair from his eyes. “Hey, guess what.”
Gracie sat down slowly. “What?”
“Guess who called me.”
“I don’t know. Who?”
“Emily Waters. Can you believe it? As in, Emily Waters, the queen of the seventh-grade dance?” His eyes had that glassy look again.
“Let me guess. She wanted your history notes.”
“I’ll give her my notes. I’ll give her one of my kidneys. She’s fabulous. She reminds me of Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Dylan’s true feelings had returned. He and Gracie were friends,
just like always. Gracie held her lips tight to keep them from trembling, and forced a light tone into her voice. “Hey, that’s great. Listen, I tried to find you Friday night after you ran out.”
“Oh.” Dylan waved his hands. “I was infuriated at Dad. I couldn’t believe he’d met with Dr. Gaston about me, behind my back! As if I was some social outcast or something. It was horribly humiliating.”
“Right,” said Gracie. She tried to swallow away the aching thickness in her throat.
“After I walked around for a while, I got into Dad’s car and lay down on the backseat.” Dylan popped a grape into his mouth, then picked at a loose thread on his khakis. “And he and I actually talked about it later, and maybe it was providential, because things are better between us. I told him, hey, maybe I’m not captain of the debate team, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to offer. I think we opened some lines of communication.”
“I thought you were mad about what I wrote.”
“What?” Dylan knitted his brows. He couldn’t remember.
“Oh, nothing. Never mind.” Gracie felt her heart beat three times while she fought the urge to cry, and she looked down at her tray, gritting her teeth.
“So, what did you do this weekend?” Dylan asked.
Gracie took a breath, blinked, pulled herself together. “Oh, nothing much. Went to the airport with my dad.”
“Excellent. Hey, maybe you could write something in that journal about me and Emily Waters having a tête-à-tête. Not the auditorium this time. Somewhere off-campus.”
“The journal doesn’t work anymore.”
“You’re kidding!” Dylan looked horrified for a second, then shrugged. “Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“Maybe it just doesn’t work for you anymore. Remember, in Edward Eager’s Half Magic, the magic coin stopped working for the kids in the book after a week, but it still worked for that other little girl?”
Gracie stared at Dylan. “I knew you were a genius for some reason.”
Dylan shrugged modestly, then dismissed her stare with a wave of his hand. “Or, you know what, maybe it never worked. It was probably our imagination.”
“But we were invisible.”
“We never actually walked up to someone and said, ‘Hey, can you see us?’ Maybe we weren’t really. I mean, anymore than the usual metaphorical invisibility based on our lack of status in middle school.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that, Dylan.” How could Dylan have forgotten the race through the cornfield after Jen-with-glow-in-the-dark-lips, with the Cheshire cat chasing them? But, strangely, the memories of having the journal were beginning to seem a bit fuzzy and dreamlike to Gracie as well. She couldn’t let go of the idea that Dylan had given her, though, that maybe it was time for the journal to work for someone else.
The bell rang. Lunch was over. She and Dylan stood up.
“Oh, hey, Dad’s picking me up early for a dentist appointment and I’ve got to miss English,” Dylan said. “Would you turn in my story to Ms. Campanella?”
“Sure,” Gracie said. “What did you write about?”
“You.” Dylan leafed quickly through his notebook. “I mean, you are my best friend, right, Gracie?” He handed her three pages jammed with his spiky handwriting. “Romantic liaisons come and go, but friends are forever,” he added. “Who did you write about? If it wasn’t me, I’ll throw myself off a bridge.” He threw his hands up in the air with great melodrama.
“It was,” Gracie said. She started to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. “I changed your name, though.” Gracie had made up her mind. She’d give the journal away. She couldn’t give it to Dylan; he’d end up with an STD or something. She had to choose someone else.
“Let’s talk about the power of the pen,” said Ms. Campanella. She stood at the front of the class. The sun slanted through the window and made the white sweater draped over her shoulders look like soft, folded wings. “How many of you think writing can change the world? And can you give me an example? Yes, Brian.”
Gracie glanced at Dylan’s empty seat, then turned around and listened to Brian Greentree, who was looking at his pencil while he talked. “I’m thinking about reporters in Iraq, who are embedded with the troops and are writing about conditions there. Or maybe someone who went to live in a village in Africa, and wrote about what it was like to help build a school. They can tell people what it’s really like to be there. Or someone who’s blind…writing about what it’s like so if you’re not blind, you have an idea what it might be like. It can open people’s minds to things about the world or about other people’s lives they might not have realized before.”
“Reporting can share reality and open minds. Excellent, Brian. Anyone else?”
Gracie’s heart was beating loudly and she could feel blood rushing to her face, but she raised her hand.
Ms. Campanella smiled, seeming surprised. “Gracie,” she said.
“Yes, writing can change the world,” said Gracie. “If I write a story that tells about my experiences, say, with my dad having to leave and get a job in another town, and someone else reads it, maybe they have some of those same feelings. And so that story changes the world a little because people learn they’re not alone in feeling what they feel.”
“Very astute, Gracie,” said Ms. Campanella. “You’re talking about the way writing can access universal human emotions. Excellent examples. Our next assignment in this class is to write a persuasive essay on a piece of writing that you believe changed the world. Maybe you’ll choose Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. Maybe you’ll choose a book, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Elie Wiesel’s Night, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Maybe a play, such as Proof or Driving Miss Daisy.” The first bell rang and people began gathering their belongings and Ms. Campanella talked faster. “Maybe you’ll choose a series of news reports or essays about scientific breakthroughs, cures for diseases, or about global warming, nuclear disarmament, or 9/11, about archaeological discoveries, or the war in Afghanistan or Iraq. At any rate, topic choices are due this Friday.”
“Attention, student body.” A nasal voice crackled over the loudspeaker. “Your attention, please. This is your assistant principal, Chet Wilson. I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Gaston has been cleared of all charges and will be returning to lead our school next week.”
A round of applause rose and broke like waves. Gracie’s heart quickened. Her memory of writing about Dr. Gaston in the journal was foggy, but she was pretty sure she had. So Dr. Gaston hadn’t taken the money! She was glad.
Gracie’s hands were still shaking a little from speaking out loud in class as she gathered her books. She saw from the corner of her eye that Brian was walking by, and took a deep breath.
“Hey,” she said. “I liked your comment in class. Do you want to be a journalist?”
Brian stopped and regarded her. “Yeah!” he said, then smiled. “What about you?”
“Umm…I don’t know.” Her brain went crazy, and she had a dozen answers for his question, and she was watching the way his eyelashes swept his cheeks, and she studied his eyes and saw earnestness there. She picked up her books and held the blue journal out to him. The night before, she’d carefully ripped out all the pages she’d written on. “Hey, I found this journal and I already have one. You want it?”
He looked at the journal, blushed slightly, seemed a little taken aback, and then his dark eyes took on a kind of spark. “Sure,” he said.
A faint tingle of static electricity coursed through Gracie’s fingers as the journal passed from her hand to Brian’s. He immediately smoothed his palm over the blue suede, so the nap would go the right way, just as she had. He opened it and saw the words on the first page.
“Oh, look at this quote,” he said, showing her. In thick, blotched Sharpie was chicken-scratched:
Buy the ticket
Take the ride
Gracie’s throat went dry. The quote had changed!
“Hunter S. Thompson,” Brian said. “The journalist. A freaking genius. My hero. He also said, ‘Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity.’ Wow! Thanks, I love this.”
Gracie suddenly felt with deep satisfaction that she’d done the right thing. “Call me if it causes any problems,” she said.
“Problems?”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Gracie said. “But if you want to call, you know, feel free.”
“Okay,” Brian said. “Thanks again, this is awesome. I’m serious.”
“Gracie and Brian?” said Ms. Campanella as they were leaving. “I liked your contributions to our discussion.”
They both said “Thanks,” and then Gracie said, “See you later,” to Brian. His return smile seemed encouraging. She stopped at Ms. Campanella’s desk. “Thanks for your e-mail,” she said. “It helped me a lot.”
“I’m glad,” said Ms. Campanella. “And I meant it when I said I’d be happy to read anything you write.”
“You know,” said Gracie, “sometimes when I write, it’s kind of hard to tell the difference between the reality I’ve created in my story and what’s really real.”
“What can be more real than what’s in our hearts and minds?” said Ms. Campanella.
A few hours later, Gracie sat in the fork of the oak tree in the backyard, her spine pressed against the scratchy trunk. Yellow and red leaves swirled to the ground and the late-afternoon sun angled through the trees in that wonderful eerie way it had of doing in the fall, as if there were magic in the air. Mom had given her a journal this afternoon after seeing her writing in the blue one. It had flowers embroidered on the front, in colors like the leaves that whispered around her in the tree. A friend had given it to Mom once and she’d never used it.
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