Read Write Before Your Eyes for Free Online Page B

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