Jane pulls out her big black sketchbook, and we walk into class. “Okay. Kate the pretty, pretty princess it is.”
“Don’t you dare,” I say loud enough to draw Sofia’s attention. She watches me take my seat and nods hello.
I nod back.
It’s such a cold, weird way to greet my best friend. I mean, Mom nods hello at strangers while she drives.
All morning, I reach into my sweater pocket to touch the magic hat waiting there. I want to believe Grammy, to believe that it will make that empty, aching silence in my heart go away and bring back the music, but it’s hard to imagine anything can do that, especially a simple hat.
When Miss Reynolds starts going over the list of people we can choose for our poems, I can’t help but take it out to see if I feel anything when I hold it. Maybe just a spark of magic.
“What’s that?” whispers Parker.
I almost jump out of my chair. Parker is getting close to the end of The Hobbit. The way he’s been flipping his pages almost fast enough to rip them out means it’s getting good. He usually never talks when he’s at a good part in a book.
“Oh, it’s just a hat I knitted. Or helped knit. It’s nothing, really.” The girl in front of me, Amy, peeks over her shoulder. I look away from Parker and stuff the hat back in my pocket.
“That’s pretty cool,” Parker whispers. “I wish I could do that.”
“Maybe I can … teach you.” The words almost stick in my throat. I wait for them to burst into flames or something horrible.
“Awesome,” says Parker.
All of a sudden, I think I can ace any presentation. Before we move to work with our partners, I reach into my pocket, pull the hat back out, and stuff it so hard over my head that a few strands of hair pull out.
“Okay, class. Find your partner, grab a laptop, and get to work!”
Jane comes to me this time. She’s holding a silver laptop and sits in the desk Parker just left. “Nice hat!”
I touch it. “Oh, thanks.”
Jane opens the laptop, turns it on, and passes it to me. “So I was thinking we should do our presentation on George Washington. Because I like to draw cherry trees.”
“Isn’t that a myth?”
Jane rolls her eyes. “Does it matter?”
“Probably.” I laugh.
“Okay, fine. Lots of blood and guts then. I’m good at that, too.”
“Eeewww.”
“Hey!” Jane points at me. “You wanted me to stick with the facts. The Revolutionary War wasn’t something from a Monet painting.”
“Okay, fine.”
Jane pulls out her black sketchbook and opens it, slowly, like each page is soaking into her thoughts. Finally, she says, “If you let me draw cherry trees … I won’t make you sing.”
“What?”
Jane shrugs. “I watched you when Miss Reynolds suggested it. And then when Sofia freaked out about it. I could see that you maybe didn’t want to.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sofia and Marisa pretending to dance in their seats, obviously planning to perform. If I sang too, maybe Sofia would think I was good enough for sleepovers and phone calls again. That hat on my head suddenly feels scratchy and a little tight. Is that what magic feels like? “Well, actually, I think … maybe I could try to sing.”
“Really?” Jane looks up from her sketchbook. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I mean … I haven’t done it in a while. But—” I touch the hat.
“Well, try now,” Jane says with a small clap. “Just really quiet so only I can hear. Ooohhh, we are going to have the best presentation. Maybe I can draw a whole mural. And you … you could put on a mini-musical about his life.”
“What about the poem we have to write for him?”
Jane waves her hands. “Details. We’ll work that in somewhere.”
Jane goes on and on. Her eyes get wider and wider and her ideas grow bigger and bigger, until I think she might decide to sell tickets if I don’t stop her soon.
“Maybe we should just write the poem first.”
Jane stops mid-sentence, her mouth hanging open, then says, “Good idea. After you sing for me.”
I pull the hat down over my ears.
“I promise to give you a standing ovation,” Jane whispers.
“Please don’t.”
“Okay. Sorry.” Jane mimes flipping a switch. “Rainbow Lab turned off.”
I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and wait for the magic.
I try to remember the words to a song. Any song. Instead, all I can think about is Mom sitting at the piano, opening up her music book with the cover falling off from being used so many times.
“What do you feel like singing tonight, Katydid?”
I twisted the knobs on the neck of my guitar, tuning my D string to get it just right. “I don’t know. What do you think, Dad?”
He was sitting on the couch. His eyes flicked up from his phone. “You have such a pretty voice, Katydid. Why don’t you do all the singing tonight?”
My guitar felt a tiny bit heavier.
Mom turned around on the piano bench. “Tony, are you sure?”
He shrugged. Didn’t even look up from his phone.
I pull the hat down tighter over my head and pinch my eyes closed even harder. “Come on. Come on. Come on,” I whisper.
“Come on, Elizabeth,” Dad said, pulling his guitar strap over his head and walking into the kitchen. “I’ve got to play some music today. I’ll go crazy if I don’t.”
Mom held out a letter. “We just got this. You told me you took care of it.”
Dad grabbed the letter and read it. “Oh, I … I forgot.”
“I asked you to do that at least five times.”
“I’ve been tired, okay?”
“And I’m not tired?” Mom snapped.
“Look, I’ll take care of it this time. I promise. Just come play the piano.”
“I can’t,” said Mom. “I have to deal with this because I can’t trust you to do it.”
“I’ll play with you, Dad.” I hopped down from the kitchen counter.
“No,” he said. “I don’t feel like singing anymore.”
A hot weight sinks to the bottom of my stomach. The space behind my eyes burns. A knot forms in my throat. If I open my mouth now, all that’ll come out is a sob. It’s right then that I realize Grammy is a liar. A big, fat, muumuu-wearing, hat-knitting liar. There isn’t a drop of magic in this hat. Not one.
I open my eyes and shake my head.
Jane reaches out her hand like she’s about to touch me and then pulls back. “It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to.”
We get to work researching George Washington’s childhood. The cherry tree thing really is a myth, but Jane says she’s still drawing and writing about it since everyone believes it anyway, and “Art isn’t just about things that actually happened.” She says this as she scribbles the words, I’m from a myth.
It turns out George Washington’s dad died when he was eleven. I wonder if maybe George Washington would have been something softer than a soldier if his dad had been around.
“We should talk about that in our poem,” I whisper to Jane. “About his dad dying.”
Jane nods and holds the pen above the paper we’re writing our first draft on. “How do you see or touch death … without being gross?” Jane asks. “Poetry shouldn’t be gross.”
I think about how things felt and sounded after Dad left. “Maybe talk about the sound of his mom crying.”
“Oh, that’s good! And there had to be a grave. Let’s mention that, too.”
Right before the lunch bell rings, Jane gives me her cell phone number so we can talk about our presentation after school. I give her my mom’s number.
“You don’t have your own phone?” Jane asks.
“No,” I say, embarrassed. “My mom says I can’t have one until I turn fourteen.”
“Bummer.” Jane folds the paper with my mom’s phone numb
er on it and puts it in her pocket. “I really do like that hat. It’s cool.”
I forgot I had it on. I take off the magic-less hat and look at the stupid orange stitches. Orange is the only color Jane isn’t wearing today, so I slide the hat across the desk to her. “You can have it, if you want.”
“Really?” She puts it on right away. “How do I look?”
“Colorful.”
Jane grins. “Perfect!”
Chapter 15
When I enter the cafeteria, I walk over to the table where Sofia is sitting with Marisa. Sofia doesn’t have any pink on today, and after the way she spoke yesterday about my singing, I can’t help thinking that maybe she isn’t mad at me anymore.
At the table, Marisa and Sofia lean into each other, and the air is abuzz with Spanish words. Their mouths move quickly, so quickly that I can’t catch on to a single word to figure out what they’re saying.
I clear my throat to cut through their bubbling voices. “Hi, Sofia.”
Both she and Marisa stop talking immediately and look at me like I walked in on a private moment. “Hi, Kate.” Sofia smiles, but I can tell she’s nervous because she reaches for her necklace.
“I’m … sorry about yesterday.” I wish Marisa wasn’t hearing this. But Sensei once said that the first person to apologize is the strongest person, and I want to make up for not being strong yesterday.
“Me too,” says Sofia. She pats the seat to her left. “Want to sit down?”
“Okay.” I pull the chair out slowly, trying not to let it screech along the floor and topple this peace between Sofia and me that feels like a wobbly tower of blocks. When I sit down, I pull my sandwich out of my paper bag.
“So,” says Marisa. She leans forward, and her long brown braid swishes onto the table. It has a pink ribbon tied to the end. “Sofia said your grandma just moved in with you because she can’t remember stuff anymore.”
I freeze with my turkey sandwich halfway to my mouth.
“Is that true? Is she like that movie my mom watches all the time … The Notebook? Do you have to read her life story to her every day?”
I cram my sandwich back into my lunch bag and stand up. “You told her?” I growl.
Sofia looks at Marisa and then at me. “I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“Of course it was a secret!”
“I’m sorry.”
I don’t even care that Sofia’s the stronger person this time for apologizing first, because she should apologize. But I can’t say it’s okay because that would be a lie, and Sensei says honesty is the only way to have any other virtue. So I march away from that table, away from Sofia, away from stupid pink ribbons, and across the cafeteria to where Jane’s sitting with Brooklyn and Emma.
I throw my lunch sack onto the table and fall into a chair.
“Well, hi,” says Jane. She’s holding a fork in one hand and a blue pastel in the other. Her sketchbook is open in front of her and there’s a Tupperware container to the side of it. “Nice to see you here.”
I don’t say anything.
Brooklyn and Emma stop chewing their sandwiches and look at me. They’re cousins and both pretty quiet, although I sat next to Brooklyn in class last year, and she can be really funny.
“Hi, Kate,” she says.
“Hi, Brooklyn.”
Jane puts down the pastel and waves her fork. “Anyone want some eggplant stir-fry? My grandma made it. It tastes better than it sounds, I promise.”
Brooklyn shakes her head, but Emma takes her own fork and tries some.
“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” I say.
Jane hands me an extra plastic fork and pushes the container towards me. The stir-fry is a little cold, and the eggplant pieces look different than the eggplant my mom grows, but it still tastes better than anything I’ve ever had at the Chinese restaurants in town. “This is better than Wonderful House.”
Jane laughs. “Of course it is. It’s real Chinese food. There’s a difference.” Then Jane alternates between eating, drawing, and making little jokes to Brooklyn and Emma, who are working on some kind of braided bracelets. I feel a bit left out with no project of my own, so I try to figure out what Jane’s sketching. But it’s not very clear right now, and if I ask, it might hurt her feelings. Artists think you should know what you’re looking at without asking.
After a few minutes, Jane sighs, smudges a few marks, and throws down her pastel. She leans back in her chair and pulls on the edge of that orange hat as she looks at me. “So I was thinking about your poem and …” She pauses. “I like the part about karate just as much as the part about music.”
“So I don’t have to sing,” I whisper.
Jane shrugs, “If you want. Or we could play a song on my phone or something for music instead. If you still wanted to focus on—”
“No!” I blurt out. “Karate’s good.” My shoulders relax and I take a deep breath. “I love karate.”
Jane stares at the ceiling for a minute, thinking, and then grins. “George Washington, karate master.”
Brooklyn and Emma giggle.
“It sounds silly when you say it like that.” I poke at the stir-fry and my mouth twitches upward.
Jane’s smile gets wider. “Maybe he didn’t need an axe to chop down that cherry tree.”
“Well, it could explain why he was so sneaky crossing the Delaware.”
That gets Jane going. For the rest of lunch, we keep trading ninja George Washington jokes. Brooklyn and Emma, who apparently watch lots of action movies together, start planning a script for a show with George Washington played by Jackie Chan. And I forget about the deep crack widening between me and Sofia.
As we’re walking back to class, Sofia and Marisa cut in front of us. I stop in my tracks, watching them enter the room.
Jane tilts her head to the side. “You guys used to be best friends, didn’t you?”
“We’re still best friends,” I say. “Things have just been … hard lately. We’ll work it out. She’ll come back around.”
Jane pulls a folded slip of paper out of her pocket, reads it, and then puts it back. “I don’t know. People who love you don’t need to come back around. They never leave to begin with.”
But I know that can’t be right, because what would that mean about Dad?
After school, when I cross the street to get to the road leading to my house, Parker runs up and joins me. “My mom’s at your place today,” he says. “Can I walk with you?”
“Sure.” I glance behind me, wondering if anyone from school sees us, but I don’t think anyone does. As we walk, his elbow keeps bumping into mine, and every time it does I have to press my lips together to keep from smiling.
“I saw Jane wearing your hat,” he says. “She really likes it.”
“I didn’t want it anymore.”
“My mom would be so mad if I gave away something she knitted. It takes a long time.”
“Your mom knits?”
Parker kicks at a pebble. “She used to. The baby doesn’t let her do much of anything these days.”
“Oh. Yeah. Does she cry like that all the time?”
“It feels like it some days.”
“Sorry.”
Parker shrugs. He opens his new book and reads while he walks. I can’t think of anything interesting enough to distract him from reading, so I don’t say anything.
We’re both silent as we pass the orchard. Only the bees are buzzing. Speaking must be harder when you’re human.
Before we even get to my house, we can hear Amelie screaming. Parker’s mom bursts out the front door the moment we start up the porch steps. “Come on, buddy! I have to get Amelie home.”
Parker and his mom both wave goodbye before getting in their van and driving away.
When I walk inside, Grammy calls from the living room, “Kate, how’d everything go today?”
That’s when I remember I’m still mad about the magic. Or the not-magic, really.
“Awful. The hat didn’t work.
There was no magic.” Grammy pats the seat on the couch right next to her. “I was afraid that might happen.”
“So you lied to me?” I throw myself into the couch hard. I want Grammy to know just how mad I am. But the leather gobbles up my anger, sucking me deep down in the cushions.
“Lie? Pish-posh. I didn’t lie. The magic is real. But you know me and my brain. I forgot the second rule of Everyday Magic.”
“Another rule?”
“Of course. What? You thought there was only one rule?”
I fold my arms and wait. I won’t be tricked this time.
“This morning when I had you help me finish the hat, I broke the second rule. You have to give the magic to someone. And since you helped finish the hat, well, you couldn’t keep it for yourself and have Everyday Magic.”
“Why not?” I ask. “What’s the point of magic if you can’t make it for yourself?”
Grammy clamps her hands on her legs and stands up. “Oh, don’t you think that when you give magic to someone else, a little bit of it will come back around to you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the magic yet.”
Grammy walks into the kitchen. “Good point. So where is this disappointing hat?”
“I gave it to Jane.”
I hear cupboards bang open and closed and metal bowls clanging around. “Who’s Jane?” Grammy asks.
“She’s a … friend.” I go to the kitchen and sit on a stool. “A new friend. Sofia and I got in a fight, so I sat with Jane at lunch today. It was fun, actually.”
Grammy straightens up. She’s holding a wooden spoon. “So you’re saying you gave the hat you helped make to this Jane girl, and then found comfort in your hour of need?”
I shrug. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Hmmm,” she says with a wink. “Sounds like magic to me.”
Chapter 16
I still think Grammy is lying about the Everyday Magic. “I don’t know,” I say. “It sort of feels like you’re making this up.”
Grammy points the spoon at her head and says, “Katherine, I can barely keep track of my truths, let alone make up some lies to remember as well. Now you might not believe me, but I’m going to prove it to you. We’re going to make some magic for your mother.”
The Three Rules of Everyday Magic Page 7
