The Jack-o-Lantern Box

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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 8

by Karen Joan Kohoutek

The best day of the week, at least at school, was when they went to the library. Jessy and Karma had a vendetta against the old librarian, who always kept them from checking out books because they weren’t in the right grade for them. She looked over their selections and decided if they were too advanced. But she didn’t even know them, so she really had no idea what they could read.

  On one visit, after having some of her books rejected, Jessy tried to check out a book she’d really liked when she was little, full of pictures of kittens, and when that had been rejected as too young for her, she almost got into trouble for being sarcastic. After that, she mainly checked out adult novels from the public library, where they never cared how old she was.

  Now they had a new school librarian, who was young and blonde and wore shortish skirts. They saw her at the Freezy Stand with her husband, acting like real people. She didn’t seem like a teacher at all. And she loved that Jessy and Karma liked to read, so she encouraged them to check out whatever they wanted.

  Everyone was supposed to get a book on a science subject, for a report, and apart from that, they could check out something for themselves. Karma wandered purposefully up and down the fiction aisle, trying to find a book she hadn’t read yet about girls in boarding school.

  Ever since they had read The Secret Language a couple of years ago, Karma had been addicted to boarding school books. Jessy suspected that deep down, she hoped she’d get sent to boarding school someday. Not that any of them had ever heard of a boarding school in any of the towns around there.

  Jessy had read a few of Karma’s books, and they were okay, but she didn’t think she’d like boarding school itself. The stories were always full of girls rebelling against the rules, and it seemed to her that they had more than enough rules in public school. Besides, Karma’s parents were great, much mellower than Jessy’s, so she didn’t know why she’d want to go somewhere you could never get away from the teachers. Just the idea of the teachers she knew telling her when to go to bed … Yikes. Life was hard enough.

  In the science section, one of her classmates, Kim, was scanning the shelves, looking for inspiration.

  “What's your subject going to be?” she asked.

  “Astronomy,” Jessy said without hesitating. That was her favorite part of science. She had a folder covered in pictures of constellations on the front, from this year's school supplies.

  “I wouldn't do a report on astronomy,” Kim said. “It's bad.”

  “What's wrong with it?” Jessy was puzzled.

  “It's a kind of fortune telling,” she answered.

  “Do you mean astrology?” Jessy asked. “Like your horoscope?”

  “It’s the same thing,” Kim said.

  Bad or not, Jessy grabbed a book about the Milky Way, and then continued wandering around the nonfiction, waiting for something to jump out at her. And it did. The hand of fate was always at work in the library.

  She spotted a matching series of tall, slim books with glossy black spines. They were like encyclopedias, but the volumes were full of pictures, so they were shaped differently. There were a bunch of sets like this on different subjects, but she had never noticed this one before. She slid the one called Magic, Numbers and Symbols away from its spot, and opened it right up to two pages about palmistry. There was a big line drawing of a hand, covered with tiny arrows and numbers and words, like an elaborate miniature map. The traditional Halloween potential of fortune telling clearly made it the right book for the Free Reading period of Reading.

  ****

 

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