Graceful

by Wendy Mass

  “I don’t have anything against them, but I don’t really have anything for them.” I think about the ceramic bunny Amanda painted for me that sat by my bed. Maybe that would be good. But we’re in front of the store now, so spirit animals or lack of them will have to wait. “Ready, Tara?”

  She presses her face to the large glass window. “Can you see anything?” she asks. “I mean, like is anything strange or unusual going on in there?”

  I peer through the window. When Tara first showed me the store — the very first day I awoke from the coma — the objects told me their stories, just like the voices of all the people I’d heard at school. All the clothes, sports equipment, faded paintings, toys. I could tell where they’d come from, why they were brought here, and where they were headed. But on every visit since, the items have been annoyingly silent. I shake my head. “Looks the same as the last time we were here.”

  “That’s good, I guess,” Tara says. “So what am I supposed to look for?”

  “I bet you’ll know it when you see it,” Bailey says.

  “Maybe.” She starts to chew her nail, then stops. “Picked that up from Amanda. We hear the name Angelina and start biting our nails!”

  “You guys really think we’ll get in?” Ray asks, jiggling the doorknob.

  “Not that way.” I bat his hand away. “Hang on.” I hand Tara the pouch with the key. She holds it out in front of her like it’s going to bite.

  I reach up and put my hand on her shoulder. “If we get in there and you want to leave, we’ll leave, okay?”

  She nods. “Okay. Here goes.” She takes out the key and hands the pouch to Bailey, who tries to stick it in her pocket, but her pocket’s too small. All of Angelina’s postcards are still in there from when I hid them from Mom, so she tucks it in her sock instead.

  Tara closes her eyes, breathes, then puts the key in the lock, hesitates for only a second, and turns it.

  Click.

  Ray and I exchange a look of surprise. I think we were both thinking it probably wouldn’t work after all.

  Tara pushes open the door, and the four of us stand at the threshold. “You first,” I tell her. She shakes her head. “You.”

  “I’m game,” Ray says, and walks right through. I cringe a little, half expecting some force field to zap him, or a net to grab him and string him upside down by his ankles, but it’s pretty uneventful. He finds the light switch on the wall and flicks it.

  Nothing happens. He flicks it up and down a few times, but the room remains bathed in only the dusky sunset. “Guess Angelina forgot to pay the electric bill,” Ray jokes.

  “Well, that won’t make this any easier,” Tara says, stepping in. Bailey and I hurry behind her. Tara begins winding her way through the piles, running her hands along various objects.

  “I can’t believe I’m in here!” I shout. “I’m inside the store!” I wave my arms around and twirl. Bailey joins me and we do a part of our routine from Fiddler where we link arms and switch places like a square dance for two.

  “Whoa there, little misses,” Ray says, grabbing for a coat rack covered with hats and scarves that almost topples into the aisle. “There’s a lot of breakable stuff in here.”

  “Sorry!” Bailey says, righting a lampshade that had gotten caught on her foot.

  I look around the room, trying to make out what I can in the ever-increasing darkness. The stuff looks the same inside as it did from the window, only dustier. I pick up an old Magic 8 Ball from a bin full of dented plastic toys. Years ago, Connor and I found one of these in Mom’s old toy chest from when she was a kid. We played with it for a few months before Connor decided to smash it to see what was inside. The blue stain on Mom’s favorite rug is still there six years later.

  “Will Tara find what she’s looking for?” I ask the 8 Ball, then turn it right-side up.

  “What does it say?” Bailey asks, peering over my shoulder.

  I have to shine my phone light on it to read the response in the little round window. “It says, ‘Concentrate and ask again.’ ”

  “Figures,” Bailey says.

  But I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and picture a glow around whatever Tara is supposed to find. I open my eyes, intending on shaking the 8 Ball to find the answer, but I no longer need to see what it says.

  Because in the far corner of the room, underneath a rolled-up carpet and a giant polka-dotted stuffed giraffe, is a box. It looks like an ordinary cardboard box with TO DONATE written across the side. But the light shining out of it fills the room.

  “There,” I call out, pointing. Tara is too far across the room to hear me. I move toward her. “There,” I repeat, louder this time. She puts down the globe of the world she’d been admiring and follows my finger.

  “I still don’t see anything,” she says.

  Okay, so I guess the light is just for me. I still haven’t come close to figuring out the rules of why sometimes everyone can see what I see, and sometimes I’m alone in it all. But now’s not the time to dwell on it. I head toward the source of the light and the others follow.

  Ray lifts off the carpet, Bailey grabs the giraffe, and Tara slides out the box.

  “I’ve seen this box before!” she says, examining the outside. “See? It’s from a store back in my last town. And that’s my dad’s handwriting on the side. He must have donated this stuff when we moved, and it wound up here somehow.”

  “Why would Angelina want you to take your own stuff back?” Bailey asks.

  “No idea,” Tara says. “Let’s find out.” She lifts the flaps and holds them open. We all peer in. Ray and Bailey shine their phones down on it, but I can see the contents perfectly clearly thanks to the white glow still surrounding the box.

  “My dad’s old books?” she says. She pulls them out one by one and piles them on the floor beside her. “I saw him gathering these when we went back to the old house a few weeks ago. They’re just books from his office that he doesn’t need anymore. He has duplicates of most of them.”

  Bailey picks one up from the top of the pile. It’s a well-worn dictionary. I glance at the others. Mostly they seem to be paperback novels and some books on the kind of subjects you’d expect a science fiction writer to have: Life in the Universe, The Spaceflight Handbook, Things That Go Bump in the Night.

  Tara lifts the last two books out of the box and tries to separate them. Flakes of dried glue fall to the floor. She twists the books until they finally fly apart. One of the books looks like it has pages slipping out. Tara notices, too, and pulls at the pages. What comes away in her hand is a book made out of glued-together pages. Bailey shines her phone light onto it and Tara starts laughing. “It’s a book my dad wrote for me when I was in third grade! We all thought it had been thrown out by mistake years ago. It must have been stuck in here the whole time.”

  She holds the handmade book closer to the light and reads the brightly colored words on the cover: The Day Tara the Great Destroyed the Zombie Queen and Then Ate a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

  We all laugh at the title.

  “Dad used to let me illustrate the covers of the books he wrote for me,” Tara says, touching the picture of a girl in a multicolored dress stomping on an oozing zombie. The girl is adjusting her crown with one hand, while eating half a grilled cheese sandwich with the other.

  Tara lays the book on her lap. “It’s awesome to have it back, but is this really what Angelina meant?”

  “I guess it must be,” I say, glancing at the discarded books. “There’s nothing else in the box, right?”

  Tara looks back down at the handmade book like she’s not quite sure whether to be disappointed or happy that she got off easy. Ray steals away and starts swinging some golf clubs he found.

  “Can I see it?” Bailey asks.

  Tara hands the book to her, and Bailey starts reading through it.

  “Tara,” Bailey says slowly, “This is really, really good. Like publishable good. Like kind of brilliant and hilarious.”
/>   She smiles. “My dad spins a great tale.”

  “No,” Bailey says. “You do.”

  Tara begins putting the other books back in the box. “Pretty sure my artwork isn’t going to be hanging in museums one day.”

  “But you didn’t just draw the cover,” Bailey says.

  “Yeah, there are a few drawings inside, too,” Tara says.

  Bailey holds the book out to Tara. “I mean you didn’t only illustrate it, you wrote it, too.”

  Tara furrows her brows. “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” Bailey says, holding open the book to the first page.

  Written and Illustrated by Tara Brennan, age 9.

  Tara inhales sharply, then takes the book and starts reading it.

  “Do you remember writing it?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “No.” Then, “Maybe? I’m not sure. But if I could write like this, why would my parents keep that from me?”

  I sit beside her and touch the open pages. The whole story comes flying out at me. “Your mother hid it,” I blurt out. “Your dad was going to enter it into a national writing contest for kids. She was so used to trying to keep Angelina from finding you that she couldn’t take the chance that you’d win and be in the news.”

  Tara’s jaw drops.

  “Your mom always meant to tell you, but she sort of … forgot? No one could find the book, and it became easier to think she’d overestimated how good the book was, that it was probably just a typical story a smart nine-year-old would write. You hadn’t written anything since, so that made it easier to believe you weren’t interested anymore.” I let out a deep breath. “That’s all I got.”

  Tara is shaking her head. “I did write,” she insists. “Only they weren’t stories. I wrote letters. Dozens and dozens and dozens of long letters with stories about my childhood, or just life in general. My parents didn’t know about them, though.”

  She turns her attention back to the book and begins reading it to herself, laughing and crying and shaking her head. Bailey signals me to back away and give Tara privacy. She goes off to find Ray, bumping into a rocking chair and knocking over a shelf of plastic action figures. I head toward the counter in the back, where an object sitting beside the cash register has caught my eye.

  A silver ribbon encircles the top of a small gauze bag filled with what looks like tiny brown seeds. I lift it up and feel the nice heft of it. Under the bag is a card. Greetings from … Sedona, Arizona!

  That old gal gets around! I turn it over. There are only a few sentences:

  The wheels are in motion, and they will only move forward. I can see it all the way from here. Do not forget, life is a dance between making things happen and letting things happen. I do not envy you your choice.

  It doesn’t make any more sense the second and third time I read it over. I’m about to show it to the others when I feel a jolt, and the air ripples around me in invisible waves. I have to grab onto the edge of the counter to keep from falling over. The sensation lasts only a few seconds, and when it’s done the room feels … different somehow. What the heck was that?

  I take deep gulps of air to steady myself and scan the room for my friends. I see Bailey first, coming toward me. Before I can ask if she’s all right, she holds up a pink silk dress and asks, “Do you think I can have this?”

  When I’m too surprised to answer, she goes on. “I would take out these dorky shoulder pads of course, and I’d move the lace from the arms to the —”

  I finally interrupt her. “Didn’t you feel that?”

  “Feel what?” she asks, draping the dress over one shoulder.

  Ray joins us, the bag of golf clubs under one arm and a box with old theatre playbills under the other. Tara is next, clutching her book in one hand and the huge giraffe in the other. She holds it up. “I think my cousin Emily would like this.”

  Ray says, “Hey, Grace, how do you feel about giraffes? Majestic creatures, really. Did you know they have four stomachs? You could do a lot worse for a spirit animal.”

  I look from one to the other. “Hold on. None of you felt like you were caught in a wave of air just then? Like everything shimmered and then settled a little differently?”

  They each shake their heads, exchanging glances. “Are you okay?” Bailey asks.

  I nod slowly, not wanting to worry them. “Being around all this stuff must have made me dizzy. We should go.”

  The three of them make their way back to the front, following one another closely so no one trips in the dark. When they pass the coat rack that I almost knocked down earlier, Tara grabs a tall top hat and sticks it on Ray’s head. They all laugh. They definitely don’t sense anything is different. I still feel unsettled, though. Wish I knew what it was.

  The postcard is still in my hand. I stick it in my pocket and pick up the bag of seeds from the floor where I must have dropped them. I don’t know what happened back there, but it makes me even more determined to find the vortex. If wheels are in motion, I’ll need to know how to stop them before they crash into whatever they’re heading toward.

  I’m the last one out. I close the door behind me and check that it’s locked. Then I glance inside one last time. The glow around Tara’s box has faded, but when combined with the light from the street lamp, I can see inside pretty well. I gasp and drop the bag of seeds again.

  Half the items in the store are gone.

  Dear Diary,

  Something really weird happened a few minutes ago. I’m writing this in the car on the way home from seeing Stephanie’s gymnastics meet, so I’m sorry if it’s messy. I thought that going would help me take my mind off things, and I loved watching Stephanie compete (Ruby, not so much), and Tracy and Emma called me over to sit with them in the bleachers, which was really nice because I haven’t hung out with them in a long time. It felt like old times. But even still, I kept wanting to send Leo a video of Stephanie’s awesome back handspring or text him a picture of the bag of candy Emma brought with her. But I didn’t feel like I had the right to.

  Anyway, so right near the end of the competition, I felt this weird cold breeze, as if a door was open right next to me. But it’s not cold out. And there was no door. Then, after it passed, something felt sort of off, like kind of different. I don’t know how to explain it. I asked the twins if they felt anything, but they didn’t. I can’t shake it, though. Since our eleventh birthday, whenever anything magical has happened in town, like with Rory or Tara or Grace, Leo and I have been able to sense it. It felt almost like that, but not exactly like it. I guess Grace would have contacted us if anything big had happened.

  The pointer finger on my right hand is bleeding because I chewed the nail too far down. Grossness.

  Right now we’re passing through Main Street, past the diner and the paint-your-own-pottery place. Lots of memories at that place but I push them aside. I feel even more uneasy as Mom’s car nears the corner where you’d turn to walk down the alley.

  Okay, I had to put down my pen for a second to catch my breath. I’m sure my handwriting is even worse now because when we passed the alley, the car headlights shone down it a little, and I saw that the watch store on the corner was gone. Like, gone gone. Like, no longer there AT ALL.

  I have to tell the others.

  Or maybe stores close down all the time and it’s no big deal? I mean, I never saw anyone ever go into that store, or the barbershop, either. That’s probably it, just a store closing and they knocked it down because it was old and not structurally sound or whatever. Or maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me.

  We’re almost home, and I’m really tired. I’ll figure it out in the morning.

  Rory: You will NOT BELIEVE the cool thing that just happened!!!

  David: Try me. Takes a lot to surprise me these days.

  So Jake just called me.

  OMG! Jake Harrison the movie hottie? Total awesomesauce!

  Haha very funny. And it’s totes awesomesauce. But let me finish!

  Sor
ry, couldn’t resist. I’ve missed you!

  I know. I’ve missed you, too.

  Our lives sure have changed over the last year. Both of us going out with someone? I mean, I knew it would happen for you, but I figured I’d have my first date sometime around college!

  Lol. Tara is really great and I’m really happy for you and I’m really glad you and I are still friends.

  That’s a lot of “really’s,” but me, too. And I’m sorry that I was kind of self-absorbed these last few months with my dad and all, and a little hyper, but I’m just really happy. So ya gonna tell me what I’m not going to believe, or what?

  Oh yeah, so GET THIS! Jake had to go into the supermarket near his house to get something for his mom. She was stuck on an important phone call, otherwise he would NEVER go into a supermarket alone.

  Yeah, supermarkets can be scary places. I was at the Willow Falls Organic Market last week, and a frozen hamburger patty turned back into a cow and attacked me! Right there in Aisle 9!

  Sigh. Do you want to hear this or not??

  Sorry, yes, more than anything.

  While I’m pretty sure that’s not true, I’m going to tell you anyway. Okay, so there he is in the supermarket, and since this was a last-minute thing, he didn’t have any of his disguises or any bodyguards. So what do you think happened?

  Pretty sure I know this answer. He was mobbed by screaming girls while paparazzi swarmed around him taking pictures. Moms followed him through the aisles, piling up their carts with all the same things he bought so they could tell their teenage girls later that night that they’re eating the very same meal as Jake Harrison. Am I right?

  Wrong on all counts. NOTHING HAPPENED!

  What do you mean? Like, no cows came to life?

  I mean Nothing Happened! No one even gave him a second glance!!!

  Was this market in a parallel universe where no one knew him?

  Nope! Just a regular supermarket.

  Did he have a baseball cap covering his face?

  Nope. People must have finally gotten the message that he’s more than just a pretty face!