Hand-Me-Down Magic #1
Page 4
Alma got up and looked around their little backyard. There were all of Abuelita’s beautiful flowers and all of Titi Rosa’s vegetables and herbs. There was a discarded picnic blanket in one corner and a worn lounge chair in the other. Alma nudged Del. She pointed at the picnic blanket. At first Del looked confused. But then she saw what Alma had seen. A little bit of movement under the blanket.
“A raccoon?” Alma suggested.
“A unicorn?” Del said.
“A squirrel?”
“A fairy?”
They went back and forth, Alma naming animals, Del naming magical creatures, and it looked like they might start fighting again, as their suggestions got more and more spirited. It was right after Alma suggested a bunny and Del insisted it must be an elf, that the picnic blanket flew up in the air and revealed what kind of creature was actually underneath.
It was a cousin.
They should have known.
It was little Evie, hiding underneath the picnic blanket, listening to her big cousins.
“What in the world were you doing under there?” Alma asked.
Evie shrugged. It was a little like an Abuelita shrug and a little like an Alma shrug and a little bit like her very own kind of shrug.
And after the shrug, she opened her eyes wide and stuck her hand into her pocket and pulled out one pair of gold-and-pink dangly clip-on earrings.
20
No One and Everyone
-Del-
Del hadn’t thought she’d ever see those earrings again. And certainly not from Evie.
Del lunged for her magical pink-and-gold dangly earrings. Alma gasped.
Evie closed her hand tightly around them. “You can have them back,” she said. “But only if you don’t have any more fights. Not ever again.”
“Evie Maria,” Del said. It was very serious when they used each other’s full names. “You give those back right now. They’re mine.”
“Delfina Ann,” Evie said, every bit as serious, “Abuelita said magic doesn’t belong to anyone.”
Del stopped her lunging. Alma’s mouth stayed open. Evie had said something that even her big cousins had to stop and think about.
They had heard Abuelita say that before. The day of the stoop sale. Abuelita said that magic doesn’t belong to any one person. Magic belongs to everyone. And no one.
Alma and Del sat down. They had to sit down to think. Evie sat down too. She wasn’t thinking, but she liked copying what her cousins did.
“She’s right,” Del said. “The best kind of magic is hand-me-down magic.”
21
Felix Sanderson’s Lucky Day
-Alma-
Even though it had been a few days since the stoop sale that started it all, Alma couldn’t stop thinking about one thing. One person, actually.
“Evie,” she said after thinking it through, “who is Ethan Copper’s best friend?” Ethan Copper was the boy who was moving away from the neighborhood with his family. Alma knew his best friend would be the sad boy who had watched her at the stoop sale.
“Oh that’s easy,” Evie said. “Felix Sanderson.”
“Felix!” Alma exclaimed, much to her cousins’ confusion.
“Who is Felix Sanderson?” Del asked.
“A boy I know,” Alma said.
“From the lake?” Del asked, all turned around and confused.
“He’s not from a lake!” Evie said. “He lives at the bottom of the street!”
“And he’s best friends with Ethan Copper, who moved away?” Del asked. Alma watched as Del thought about it. Del’s face made a lot of movements when she was thinking. Her eyes squinted and her nose wrinkled and her mouth flipped up and down from mini-smile to mini-frown.
“I would hate if my best friend moved away,” Del said at last. “Even though she hasn’t lived here for very long at all.” Del grinned. It made Alma grin too.
“I would hate that too,” Alma said. “I like having my best friend live so close.”
They looked very hard at each other. Alma knew they were both thinking the same thing. They didn’t need any more luck. They were already the luckiest people on all of Twenty-Third Avenue. Maybe they were the luckiest people in the world. Because from now on they would always be two floors away from their best friend.
“I bet Felix Sanderson could use some luck,” Del said.
Alma didn’t give an Abuelita shrug to that. She gave a big, enthusiastic Alma nod. “He could maybe even use some magic,” she said.
Del and Alma and little Evie walked down Twenty-Third Avenue. They passed by the sobbing tree with its drooping branches. They waved to Cora and Javi playing with Oscar in the park. They saw Titi Clara and Uncle Andy on their stoops, calling to each other across the street. They passed by all the brick buildings with all their special details. Year-round Christmas lights around one building’s window. A bright green birdcage hanging from one neighbor’s tree. A polka-dotted doorknob and a knocker shaped like a giraffe. They walked by every wonderful bit of the street.
And like magic, at the very end of Twenty-Third Avenue, they found Felix Sanderson right where they thought he might be. Sitting across the street from the Coppers’ building, watching the new neighbors move in. He had striped shorts and a pink shirt and over that a brown vest, like the kind Alma’s father had worn to her cousin Flor’s wedding. Alma liked that Felix Sanderson didn’t dress like other people she knew.
Evie waved at him. Evie was good at waving at people. She loved being friendly. Felix waved back. He looked like he could use some friendliness.
“We have something for you,” Alma said. She did an Abuelita shrug.
“It’s something magical,” Del said.
Alma didn’t contradict her cousin. She just clipped an earring onto Felix’s vest. It was a pretty fancy vest, so the earrings made sense there. Del clipped the other one on.
Maybe some people would think it was strange, to have magical earrings clipped onto their clothes. But not Felix Sanderson. He smiled. He had been wishing for some friends. And it seemed he had come into a little bit of luck at last.
Acknowledgments
It has been a pure joy to work on this book, and so many people added to that joy.
Many thanks to my agent, Victoria Marini, for making it happen.
Thank you to my editor, Mabel Hsu, for heaps of creative insights, bundles of care and thought, and for loving my characters with me.
Thank you, Katherine Tegen, for years of support as I find new kinds of stories I want to tell.
A very special thank-you to incredible illustrator Luisa Uribe. You truly made Alma, Del, and their neighborhood come to life, and I’m so grateful for your big-hearted, beautiful illustrations.
Thank you so much to Alexandra Hernandez, Bianca Vargas, Kayla Ruiz, Nivia Scallon, and Frank Scallon for reading, answering questions, and helping me make Alma and Del’s world sparkle.
Thank you to the smart, thoughtful, and talented bookmakers, book lovers, book designers, and book collaborators who helped me turn this story into a book on a shelf and add a dash of magic to everything I do: Alexandra Arnold, Tanu Srivastava, Amy Ryan, Alexandra Rakaczki, Maya Myers, Allison C. Brown, David L. DeWitt, Emma Meyer, Sam Benson, and Robert Imfeld.
And a heartfelt thank-you, thank-you, thank-you to the Haydu, Scallon, Maldonado, Olavarria, Borrero, Ross, and Spokes families. This is a book about family, and mine has always been bookfilled and cozy and is also newly big and boisterous, and it all makes me smile.
Excerpt from Hand-Me-Down Magic #2: Crystal Ball Fortunes
Alma and Del’s magical mishaps and fun continue in Hand-Me-Down Magic #2: Crystal Ball Fortunes.
Read on for a sneak peek!
1
Delightful and Daring
-Del-
There were only sixteen hours to go before Del’s Delightful and Daring Dress-Up Party. She had been counting down the hours for an entire week. Everyone participated in the countdown because Del loved bi
rthdays and Abuelita loved hosting parties and the whole family loved cake and party hats and singing one round of “Happy Birthday” followed by one round of “Feliz Cumpleaños” at the top of their lungs.
“How many people are coming?” Alma asked. She was putting together goody bags for the guests. She’d helped Del pick out stickers and sparkly pens and three different kinds of chocolate. “This seems like a lot of chocolate.” She gestured to the enormous pile. Their littlest cousin, Evie, couldn’t stop eyeing it. It was so tall that Alma couldn’t see over the top of it from her seat at Abuelita’s kitchen counter. It was so tall that Evie had named it Chocolate Mountain and said they should keep it just like that forever.
“Like, a million people,” Del said. “Pretty much everyone ever. And they’re all going to be dressed up! I can’t wait to see what they’re all wearing!”
“A million?” Evie repeated. She was bouncing up and down on her toes. “Really?”
“No, not really,” Del said. She rolled her eyes at Alma. But Alma looked nervous, like she thought there really might be a million people shoved into Abuelita’s apartment tomorrow, too. “More like twenty. But still. That’s a lot. That’s more than were at my party last year. But I’m going to be another year older, so it makes sense.”
“Twenty is a lot less than a million,” Evie said, huffing. “You’re not very good at math, Del.”
“Not as good as you, I guess,” Del said, laughing.
Evie thought about this. “Do you think I’m good enough at math to count all these chocolate bars?” she asked.
“Why don’t you try?” Del said. Evie started counting pieces of chocolate very loudly. So loudly, in fact, that Abuelita and Titi Rosa came into the kitchen to see what all the fuss was about.
Abuelita made a startled noise—“Oh!”—and smiled. Del and Alma turned to see what she was looking at. She was facing the window that looked out at the backyard. And right there, perched on the birdbath, was a little black kitten. She was dipping her paws into the birdbath, then shaking them off, over and over, like she was trying to figure out something very important. “What a darling gatito!” Abuelita said. “¡Hola, mi gato!” she called out to the kitten.
The kitten jumped in surprise, and the jump made her stumble all the way into the birdbath with a cute kitten-y splash. Del thought the kitten might be scared, taking that fall. But instead she seemed interested in the water. She licked it. She pawed at it. She jumped out of it, then right back in.
Del had seen a lot of stray cats before, but never one that acted anything like this one.
“It’s time to start winding down,” Titi Rosa said, directing them away from the window and the now-very-wet kitten.
“But we have so much decorating left to do!” Del said.
“And so much chocolate to eat— I mean count!” Evie said.
“I’ve never been to a delightfully daring dress-up party,” Alma whispered to Del. She sounded nervous.
“Don’t be a fraidycat!” Del said. “This party is going to be perfect.”
“I hope so,” Alma said. “And I’m not a fraidycat. I just get scared of new things sometimes.”
“How can you be scared when you’re going to be wearing this!” Del ran to the closet where she’d been storing her big surprise: two big fluffy boas. They’d been planning their costumes for the party for a while, but this would be the perfect addition, Del was sure. She wrapped the orange boa around Alma and the blue one around herself.
“What can go wrong when you have a boa?” Del asked. She twirled her blue boa and did a little birthday dance.
Alma pulled her boa more tightly around herself.
“Trust me,” Del said. “Tomorrow will be the best day ever.”
About the Author and Illustrator
Photo credit Jessie Weinberg
COREY ANN HAYDU is the author of Eventown and other acclaimed novels for children and young adults. She grew up in the Boston area, earned her MFA at the New School, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her new daughter, who will certainly grow up loving New England lakes, her abuelita’s empanadas, and stoop sales. Find out more at www.coreyannhaydu.com.
Photo credit Manuela Uribe
LUISA URIBE is an illustrator and designer of children’s media. Her art has been selected for Iberoamérica Ilustra, a catalog showcasing the best work by Spanish-speaking illustrators. She was awarded the Society of Illustrators Dilys Evans Founder’s Award for The Vast Wonder of the World. She lives in Bogotá, Colombia, with her partner and cat.
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
HAND-ME-DOWN MAGIC #1: STOOP SALE TREASURE. Text copyright © 2020 by Corey Ann Haydu. Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Luisa Uribe. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover art © 2020 by Luisa Uribe
Cover design by David DeWitt
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951638
ISBN 978-0-06-297825-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-06-287825-0
Digital Edition JUNE 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-287826-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287825-0
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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