Read A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic for Free Online Page B

Zain and I must be going,” Mrs. Haq announced. She bid everyone Allah hafiz and walked out into the hallway. Zain, smiling apologetically, said good night and followed her. But before he left and before Leila turned back to the table to sit down, he cast a look over his shoulder. It was a smile for Leila. She caught it, like a butterfly in a net. A moment later, he was gone, but a thought remained: This is it. My adventure! My romance! My future blog! I can’t wait to tell Aimee —
    But Leila caught herself. No, she thought. Not Aimee. I’ll tell Ta’Mara. Leila was still getting used to the ideathat Aimee was her ex-friend. It was like her jet lag; sometimes her heart felt like it had been left in a different time zone.
    A chair was brought for Mamoo and his hat and cane taken away. Everyone settled back down to dinner, and Leila recommenced picking at her food. She felt someone’s eyes on her, and when she looked up, she discovered that Rabeea was watching her. She wasn’t smiling. When Leila caught her look, Rabeea looked away.
    Chirragh stumped out and put a new pile of hot chapatis on the table.
    â€œLovely, Chirragh Baba!” Mamoo proclaimed, rubbing his hands together. “The best chapatis in Lahore.”
    Chirragh didn’t acknowledge that he had heard, but Leila caught a little smile on his lips as he turned toward the kitchen. For half a moment, he was Not Glaring. Naturally, Leila made a mental note of this. Was Mamoo evil, too? She hoped so! She could bust him in Blog Three: Villains Revealed!
    Things are happening, Leila thought as she took a red-hot bite of chicken jalfrezi . Things are happening all around me, and I don’t know what they are. Yet.
    But she didn’t mind. Every good story has a mystery, doesn’t it?
    A few hours later, Leila sat in the middle of a red coverlet in the guest bedroom, staring at the off-white wall. She had tried to Skype her mom, but got voice mail. Then she dialed her dad, and got voice mail. She left each of them an I-love-you message.
    Leila wondered what they were doing. Working? They both worked like crazy. Her mother was a freelance writer and editor who always took on five more projects than she could handle. She was really good at her job, and she loved it, and she had a hard time saying no.
    Her father did something with computers that involved a lot of blank staring at a screen and strong black tea.
    They were kind people, and had even considered coming along on the trip to Lahore, until they both realized that they had major projects in critical stages that could not just be abandoned for three weeks. Leila loved her parents, even though she sometimes wished they were a little more—extraordinary. Like the parents in books who always seemed to be absentminded geniuses, orsuper-spies, or evil, or dead. Because who could have an adventure with parents like hers? They were just so normal . . .
    But she missed them, anyway.
    Leila stared up at the ceiling, which was a different shade of white from the ceiling in her room at home, although she couldn’t quite say how. The bedroom was strange. It was too big. It had never occurred to Leila that a big bedroom could be a nuisance, but it was. For one thing, the large room made the twin bed and three-drawer bureau seem miniature. For another, it took her twenty-three steps just to get to the closet. Twenty-three! She had counted. That was a long way to go just to hang up a shirt, but her salwar kameez was too nice to just toss on the floor. With a sigh, she hauled herself off the bed and trekked to the closet. Then she changed into her fuzzy Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and an old Waffle Shack T-shirt. She felt better already.
    As she made the long journey back to the bed, she noticed the book she had carelessly tossed there earlier. The Exquisite Corpse . She had read through it earlier and decided that she had better return it to the library the nextday. With the