“Oh—uh—carpooling. We carpool to school.”
“Pay attention from now on, Miss Rawley.”
Gracie nodded.
After class she hurried up to Mr. Diaz’s desk. “I was just wondering about those concerned scientists. Do you have a list of their names?”
Mr. Diaz had a large head and tiny glasses. He looked at Gracie and blinked. “Yes, you can go to the Web site.” He wrote down the name on a sticky note. “It’s gratifying to see you’ve decided to show some interest in global issues, Miss Rawley.”
Gracie headed for the library at lunchtime. If a billion people worldwide were going hungry, as that actress had said in the ad the night before, Gracie could certainly skip lunch. She could use the computers for research on hunger and global warming, and, almost as important, she could avoid having to eat lunch by herself. She glanced into the cafeteria as she walked by. Jen was approaching one of the juniors’ tables with her tray, getting ready to sit down, when some girl with bleached hair rushed over and shoved Jen’s tray right up into her face.
“What are you doing?” Jen yelled. Goopy pink yogurt clung to her LE PETIT GARAGE T-shirt, and spilled milk covered the thighs of her jeans. Chicken nuggets and fries slid across the floor.
What was happening? Gracie took two hesitant steps into the cafeteria.
“Stay away from Sean!” Bleached Hair screamed.
“What, are you crazy?” Jen shrank back.
“I’ve been going out with Sean for three weeks.” Bleached Hair stepped closer and shoved Jen. “Me and my friends will make your life a living hell, I promise you.”
Gracie was only halfway across the cafeteria, but she still saw something in Jen snap and an electric fury cross her face. “Hey, it’s a free country, and if you didn’t notice, he asked me out!”
“If you go out with him tonight, you will pay!”
“Get away from me!” Jen shoved the girl.
But the girl rammed Jen with a lowered head, slapping and hitting her.
Jen started screaming “Omigod!” and staggering backward, covering her face with her arms. Gracie ran down the aisle between the tables, but Clueless Chet and Lieutenant Ellis, the resource officer, raced by her and pinned both girls’ arms behind them.
“She attacked me!” Jen was yelling. She’d started crying; she had red scratches on her neck and under one eye, and mascara had run down her cheeks. “I was minding my own business and she just attacked me.”
“She’s a lying skank!” Bleached Hair screamed.
“Jen, are you okay?” Gracie reached out to touch her sister’s arm, but Lieutenant Ellis held up his hand and said, his voice very clipped, “Stay back.”
Both girls struggled as they were dragged from the cafeteria. Gracie’s heart was in her throat when she met Jen’s eyes and saw how humiliated her sister was. Gracie felt utterly helpless.
But she wasn’t.
She had the journal.
Leaving the rising level of noise and hysteria behind, Gracie left the cafeteria and ran to the girls’ room. She slammed herself into a stall and opened the blue journal. She was still breathing hard, and her hands were shaking. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t write anything else in the journal until she really had it figured out, but how could she not help Jen? School policy was that anyone over sixteen caught fighting in school would be immediately expelled. She couldn’t let that happen to Jen.
Gracie squeezed her fingers tightly around the pen, her mind racing. Then she wrote:
Jen explained what happened in the lunchroom to Clueless Chet and Lieutenant Ellis. They were convinced she was telling the truth and was only defending herself and did not expel her.
Gracie looked at what she had written, thought for a moment, and added:
None of Bleached Hair’s friends sought revenge against Jen. Jen did not retaliate against them either.
The door to the girls’ room swung open and Gracie instinctively pulled up her feet so they couldn’t be seen. She crouched on the toilet, cradling the journal between her raised knees. Two girls came in, and Gracie heard them talking. Through the slit in the stall door she could see only a strip of a face and she didn’t recognize the voices.
“I heard that Jen has been trying to snake Sean from Candy for, like, ever.”
“Hey, can you believe that? I wonder if Jen and Candy will get thrown in jail.”
“Ha, can you imagine the two of them locked in a cell together?” Giggling.
“‘Omigod, you skank, omigod, get away from me.’” More giggling.
“Hey, they should televise it. Survivor: Twenty-four Hours with Jen and Candy in Cell Block One. Haa!”
Gracie’s face grew hot and her fingers tightened around her pen. How dare they gossip and make up lies like that? And without hesitating she scribbled:
Bleached Hair and the two girls gossiping in the girls’ room about Jen got major-league acne and had bad-hair days for two straight weeks.
CHAPTER NINE
“I asked you at the end of the day yesterday to think about whether what happens in the world makes sense.” Ms. Campanella turned toward the window to compose her next thought, and the afternoon sun illuminated her porcelain face like a halo. She turned again to face the class, and Gracie knew she was remembering their e-mail exchange, and she knew Ms. Campanella was going to call on her. “Gracie? What are your thoughts? What do you think Irving is trying to say about this in A Prayer for Owen Meany?”
She leveled her deep-set eyes on Gracie.
Gracie drew a shaky breath. Her mind was a white blank wall, since she’d spent the entire class period reliving Bleached Hair attacking Jen in the lunchroom.
“I…I’m not sure.”
Ms. Campanella tilted her head, and disappointment etched her face. “Anyone else?”
Usually Dylan would have the answer, but of course, he was still suspended. He hadn’t tried to contact Gracie at all, but she told herself that maybe his dad had taken his cell phone. A guy behind her answered.
“At first it seems like nothing makes sense, like when Owen accidentally kills his best friend’s mother with the baseball.” The boy had a nice voice, but it shook a little and Gracie could tell he was nervous. “But at the end when he saves all the kids, it seems like there is good in the world, and you see that there is a big picture, that things happen for a reason, but people don’t always understand what those reasons are.” The boy cleared his throat self-consciously.
“Very good,” said Ms. Campanella. “Sometimes in our lives events seem very random. Sometimes tragic things happen to the best people, and sometimes it’s even our fault, and that’s very difficult for us to understand. One of the reasons we write fiction is to help us make sense of what seems senseless. Nicely put, Brian.”
Oh! That had been Brian Greentree talking. Normally he didn’t talk in class. Of course, when Dylan was there, hardly anybody did.
Gracie thought of Dylan, at home. Was he also thinking of her?
The bell rang. “If anyone would like to stay after to discuss this further, or if you just want to talk about anything at all, please feel free.” Ms. Campanella again looked directly at Gracie.
Gracie looked down. No, she didn’t want to discuss this further. Right now she just wanted to go home. Right now she was pretty exhausted by trying to make things make sense. She was going to have to ride the bus home from school. Jen had sent her a text message on her cell saying she’d been suspended for the rest of the school day. Bleached Hair, on the other hand, had been expelled. So the journal had worked. Gracie had just barely saved Jen. But the truth was that what Gracie had written about Sean asking Jen out had probably caused everything in the first place.
She ducked out of class without meeting Ms. Campanella’s eyes.
Riding the bus was humiliating. Gracie walked all the way to the back and slid onto a torn leather seat with the stuffing coming out. She tried to remind herself that taking the bus was reducing greenhouse gases,
though it was hard to imagine how, since oily black clouds constantly billowed from the exhaust and the nauseating fumes seeped through the windows.
So far, Gracie’s efforts to change the world had gotten her best friend and her sister suspended, her brother sent to detention, and her father sent to Atlanta. Not to mention the fact that some eerie Cheshire cat seemed to be stalking her. Gracie didn’t trust that cat for one minute. Maybe she could just leave the journal on the bus and forget all about it. But then the bus driver would turn the journal in to the office and it would end up in the hands of Clueless Chet, who wasn’t eerie but was totally clueless, and that was almost as bad. All of this was enough to turn a person’s hair white.
Then it hit her: Why didn’t she just throw the journal out the bus window? Its scribbled pages would slowly bleach and disintegrate under the pounding of the sun and rain. If she threw it into the woods somewhere, nobody would ever find it. The world could go back to being the way it had always been, with Gracie flying below the radar and nothing she did ever making a difference. All her life she’d thought it was a burden not to matter, but now she realized what a blessing it was. Her pounding headache and all her angst would be gone.
Gracie’s stop was the last; the bus normally did a U-turn in the parking lot of the apartment complex. She waited until everyone had gotten off except for about three people, all still sitting up front. Then she tried with all her might to push her window up, but two wads of filthy chewed gum stuck into the window well made it impossible to open. She stood, went to another seat, and tried to open that window. It was jammed. The third one she pushed on slid up haltingly and unevenly with a piglike squeal.
Gracie took the journal out of her pocket, held it in her lap, and stroked the blue cover. She looked out the window, her heart pounding, and waited until a shadowy wooded area loomed by the road, with no houses visible on either side.
Perfect.
Adrenaline surged through her as she began to think about giving up her power to save the world from global warming and hunger, her power to fix her parents’ marriage, and her power to make Jen and Alex and Dylan happy. She’d never had any power in her life, and having it for only two days had been too much for her. All she’d done was screw things up.
She thought about Dad in Atlanta and her throat began to ache.
She stood up, drew back her arm, and hurled.
The journal flew into the woods, its pages flapping like the wings of a dove.
CHAPTER TEN
The journal landed on a carpet of shiny orange and yellow leaves. Slanting through the web of tree branches, a shaft of sunlight illuminated the blue cover, turning it an azure so brilliant it barely seemed real. Gracie’s heart hammered in her throat. She ran to the back window of the bus and watched the copse of trees where she’d thrown the journal grow smaller as it receded into the distance. She had a sudden feeling of panic. Her headache, instead of going away, throbbed above her eyebrows with doubled force.
How could she have given up so easily? She realized she’d just thrown out the window what she’d always wanted most in her life: the ability to make some kind of difference.
She jumped to her feet.
“I missed my stop!” she said, throwing her backpack over her shoulder and lurching unsteadily down the aisle of the moving bus.
“There’s no stop here,” said the driver, glaring at Gracie in the rearview mirror, her large, fleshy arms bracketing the steering wheel.
“Please, I have to get off,” Gracie said, swaying and hanging on to the pole by the front door.
“School regulations. I can’t stop in the middle of nowhere.”
Was there a school regulation about everything? Gracie looked back at the wooded area that was now disappearing over the horizon.
“Sit down. I’ll let you off at the next stop.”
Gracie heaved a sigh, purposely not looking at the kids staring at her, and sat down in one of the empty front seats, gazing at her flip-flops, wishing she’d worn running shoes.
The driver turned into a subdivision and Gracie closed her eyes, memorizing the route she’d take to get back to the journal. Finally, with a wheezing pneumatic blast, the driver stopped the bus at the corner of a cul-de-sac.
“Be careful.” The driver threw the bar to open the door.
“Thank you.” Gracie bounded down the steps and headed back toward the wooded area. It was at least a mile’s walk back to get the journal, and another mile home.
What had she been thinking?
Gracie tried running, but her flip-flops were too floppy and her backpack was too heavy, so she settled for a brisk head-down walk. It took nearly half an hour to get back to the thick grove where she’d thrown the journal, and by then the sun had slid behind a tower of dark clouds. She thought she’d memorized the exact spot where she’d seen the journal land, but when she waded into the trees, crashing through fallen leaves, weaving between tree trunks, she couldn’t find it. She wandered around and around, sliding her feet through the leaves. Her underarms grew damp, she was out of breath, and fear lodged tight in her throat. Then her toes jammed up against a tree root and she fell sprawling, scratching her face and arms on branches and underbrush. Her backpack slammed into the back of her neck.
Leaves poked at her face as she lay on the ground, her hands and neck throbbing. A damp metallic-smelling breeze whistled through the leaves and a cold drop of rain plopped onto Gracie’s scalp. Bare branches rattled in the wind, a threatening tribal sound, and more drops landed on her face and shoulders. Gracie dragged herself to her feet. Her left this-little-piggy-had-none toe had a loose, bleeding flap of skin. She stuck the skin back in place and began searching with more urgency. The journal would be getting wet too.
She went back out and stood beside the road as the storm came with more intensity, letting rain drip down her face, trying to visualize the exact arc the journal had taken when she threw it and the exact pattern of trees where it had landed. She trudged back into the woods, following her imaginary trajectory.
Around that time, one strange shaft of sunlight in the midst of the storm found its way between the tree trunks and Gracie saw a flash of blue.
“Ah!” She ran through the trees and took the journal into her arms, holding it close to her chest. She was dizzy with relief.
She tried to wipe the cover with the wet bottom of her shirt. She peeked inside. A few words that she’d written with a fine-tip marker had run on the outside edges of the pages, but otherwise the journal seemed intact. She shoved it under her arm and began the long walk home in the rain.
Now she wished she’d stayed after and told Ms. Campanella about everything that had happened. What had she been afraid of? Maybe that Ms. Campanella’s admiration and sympathy would transform into pity, or horror, or a kind of sappy curiosity. She couldn’t take that. She wanted Ms. Campanella to take her seriously, but how could she, with a story like this? Ms. Campanella might even think she was nuts and send her to the school counselor. A fate worse than death.
When she was nearly home, the rain thinned out and then stopped. She called Dylan on her cell phone, thankful that it hadn’t been cut off yet. “Dylan, please meet me by the weeping willow. This is urgent. You have to help me. There is no way I can do this by myself.”
“You forget. I’m grounded.” His voice sounded exactly the same, not like he had a crush on her.
“Can’t you sneak out? I’m desperate. Please? You really have no idea how big this is getting.”
“Gracie, I hate to burst your bubble, but this magic journal of predestination is a figment of your imagination.”
“Dylan, it’s not. What about the fuchsia elephant?” On the other hand, it looked like the thing she’d written about him liking her hadn’t worked. He didn’t sound like he liked her at all. If anything, he sounded depressed.
“I don’t know. It was nothing. It didn’t matter.”
“And what about you and Lindsay meeting? It came true.”
<
br /> “At Lindsay’s request.”
“Because I wrote it in the journal.”
“That’s where you and I disagree. It was coincidence. Luck. Extremely bad luck, as it turns out. But it doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m over Lindsay.”
She started to blurt out, “So, who do you like now?” but was afraid of the answer. Instead she said, “Dylan. Just meet me for a few minutes.”
“I better not. I’d really get in trouble.”
“Please?”
“Gracie…”
“Pleeeease?”
“Well…Dad did say he’d be working late. But I can only come for a few minutes.”
“Thank you, thank you. See you there.”
Without even going home, Gracie cut across some backyards and along the edge of the golf course. The shower had completely passed and now water drops on tree leaves turned to prisms in the afternoon sun, gently sprinkling Gracie as she crashed into the dim sun-striped room under the willow fronds. She shoved her backpack behind the tree trunk, sat on one of the willow’s humped roots, pulled her wet hair off her neck, and examined her toe again. She was squeezing the excess water out of her sweatshirt when Dylan wandered in, rubbing his hands over his face. “Talk fast. If I’m caught I’m extremely dead.”
“Okay.” Gracie searched his eyes. Did they appear slightly dreamier than usual when he looked at her? She told Dylan everything, about Clueless Chet reinstituting the dress code, about her dad’s interview, about Jen’s date, about the fight in the cafeteria, about the Cheshire cat.
“I still harbor suspicions that you’re hallucinating all this, but I have divined a simple solution to this entire scenario.” Dylan reached in his pocket and pulled out a pack of matches. “I vote we burn it.”
Gracie stared at him, wide-eyed. “Are you serious?”
“We can end this sickening spiral of events right here, right now.”
“But I was going to stop global warming and world hunger. I was going to save the children!”
Dylan cocked his head and patted her knee. “You’re insane, right?”
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