Read Drizzle for Free Online

my ring in the lake. It’s probably gone forever, something Patricia never lets me forget. She flashes her ring in front of my face every chance she gets.
    Aunt Edith’s face is lit up, her eyes bright. “When I was a little girl, Enid used to bring me up here and show me all her books. Now I can bring you.” She steps over to one of the shelves, her long fingers tracing the spines of the books.
    “Why is it locked up?”
    “I locked it,” Aunt Edith tells me. “Only someone who can appreciate the power of words should be allowed in here.” She pauses in front of a book, shaking her head in amazement. “Here, look at this.”
    She gives me an old book with a worn blue cover. It’s called The Railway Children by someone named E. Nesbit.
    “I spent hours reading her books,” Aunt Edith says, looking at the book over my shoulder. “I’m jealous, Polly.”
    “Jealous?” I turn to face her.
    “To be able to read these books for the first time? What better cause for jealousy? You have hours of joy ahead of you.” She turns, curling her lips in, thinking. “But at least I have the honor of bringing these treasures to you. That’s something.”
    She goes back to searching through the shelves. There must be thousands of books in here, lining every shelf, hidden behind the ivy and the dust. I could read a new one every day for the next ten years.
    I close the Nesbit book and take a step toward Aunt Edith. At the same exact second, another cricket jumps out at me. This one’s slightly smaller, more like a chipmunk size. I leap out of the way, banging my knee against a shelf.
    “Polly,” Aunt Edith says in her clipped voice, not turning around. “They’re only bugs.”
    I can’t see where the cricket went, but I do see the clutter in the room: small, round, black-edged tables, with tiny colored squares circling around the edge. Dust specks glint in the sunlight that is now pouring through the rectangular window. Across the room, there are two more windows, hidden by heavy, dark red drapes.
    “What are you looking for?” I ask Aunt Edith.
    Before she can answer, a blue dragonfly swoops in through the window and flies around my head. It looks like the one that put on the show for Basford. My eyes dart from the dragonfly back to the ivy, which has lifted itself off of the ground and begun to move.
    I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The ivy stops exactly where the dragonfly flutters, like a bus pulling into a station stop, and the dragonfly perches on one of the ivy’s leaves. And then the squirrel-sized Monster cricket leaps out of nowhere to rest on another leaf. The ivy weaves its way through the air, carrying the bugs across the room, until it reaches one of the dusty tiled tables. It parks at the table, allowing its passengers to jump off. The Monster cricket leaps to an old notebook on top of a stack of books, and the dragonfly zooms over to me, skidding to a stop right in front of my nose. He hovers there, sparkling, wings moving so fast that they create a blue blur. For a second, I just stare at him. Then, without even realizing what I’m doing, I nod.
    And I swear the dragonfly nods back.
    “I’ll find it, I’m sure of it,” murmurs Aunt Edith, over in the corner.
    I nod again at the dragonfly.
    Slowly, the dragonfly nods back at me.
    This cannot be happening.
    “Can you speak?” I mouth the words, so Aunt Edith doesn’t hear.
    The dragonfly zooms closer and I think I actually lock eyes—my two, with his seven thousand and three—for a second. He starts to fly through the air, in deliberate movements. Straight up, then down-but-to-the-right, then straight up again. He hovers there, looking at me. Then he starts making a circle. A big circle.
    It can’t be.
    “No?” I mouth. Did this dragonfly actually just spell the word NO in the air?
    The dragonfly bobs up and down.
    “You can’t speak but you can spell ?” I’m whispering now, but Aunt Edith still doesn’t pay me any