Write Before Your Eyes (14 page)

A few hours later, Gracie sat in the fork of the oak tree in the backyard, her spine pressed against the scratchy trunk. Yellow and red leaves swirled to the ground and the late-afternoon sun angled through the trees in that wonderful eerie way it had of doing in the fall, as if there were magic in the air. Mom had given her a journal this afternoon after seeing her writing in the blue one. It had flowers embroidered on the front, in colors like the leaves that whispered around her in the tree. A friend had given it to Mom once and she’d never used it.

“You’ll make better use of it than I ever will,” Mom had said as she unpacked groceries. “Oh, some really good news. You know the woman in my book group, Sally Gomez, who was dying of cancer? She’s gone into remission. Isn’t that miraculous?”

Gracie had a fuzzy memory of passing Constance Gomez in the hall the other day, feeling how lonely and sad she was, and a small surge of joy whirled around her heart.

“By the way,” Mom went on. “I saw Laura Miller in the grocery store. Do you know her daughter? She’s Jen’s age. I don’t think she and Jen have ever been very friendly, but Laura had just gotten back from taking her daughter to the dermatologist. She’s got this terrible outbreak of acne. It’s so bad she stayed home from school. The poor girl was crying all weekend.”

Gracie gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth. Foggy memories flashed, like old fast-forward videos, of crouching in a bathroom stall, scribbling.

“The acne should go away in two weeks,” she said to Mom.

“What are you, a renowned dermatologist?”

“No. But I was just saying, it probably will,” Gracie had added. She’d felt bad. For a minute she wanted to call Brian and ask him to write something for her in the journal. But then she thought,
No, I’ve had my turn with it.

Now Gracie clicked her pen. She thought about writing a story about Dad’s new apartment, and then decided to write instead about her dream of the houseboat on the crest of the huge wave.

She wondered what Brian had written so far in the journal. She imagined what it would be like for him, the first time he realized what was happening. There was no doubt that Dylan was right about the magic. She smiled.

And she put her pen to paper.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to:

Chris Woodworth, my whip-cracking muse, for this story;

John Bonk, for the gift of the title, and for advising me to study Edward Eager’s
Half Magic
(a book whose magic seems pretty complete to me);

Ellen Howard, my advisor at Vermont College MFA Program in Writing for Children, for the loving way she nurtured Gracie (and me);

Stephanie Greene, for encouraging me to go to Vermont;

Caryn Wiseman, savvy, literate, prompt, upbeat, tough, thorough, and sensitive dream agent;

Stephanie Lane, who won my heart by writing
Ha!
in so many places in the margins, for her bold, intuitive faith in Gracie’s story, and also for that great “nugget factory” line;

Kelsey Kline, my incredibly gifted and knowledgeable music consultant;

The delightful students in my summer teen writing workshops, the Writers’ Loft, for sharing their outrageous creativity and irrepressible spirits;

Ann Campanella, Nancy Lammers, Carolyn Noell, Judy Stacy, Jean Beatty, and Ruth Ann Grissom, who introduced me to the ubiquitous
O.C.,
as well as to poet Maxine Kumin’s concept that there is a dead squirrel in every poem;

And finally, my family—beginning with my parents and brother, and now my husband and children—for putting up with a person who is always in another world.

Write Before Your Eyes is Lisa Williams Kline’s third novel for middle-grade readers. Her first novel, Eleanor Hill, won the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award, and her second, The Princesses of Atlantis, is in its fourth printing. Her stories for young people have appeared in Spider, Cicada, Odyssey, and Cricket. She has an MFA in fiction from Queens University and lives in North Carolina with her husband, who is a veterinarian. They are joined during the summers by their college-age daughters.

In addition to her writing, Lisa has been a tongue-tied disc jockey, a radio copywriter, a zoned-out waitress, and a disorganized but trustworthy veterinary hospital office manager. Now she is an associate editor for Novello Festival Press in Charlotte and reads and evaluates manuscripts for iUniverse. Lisa enjoys reading, running, watching movies, and playing golf. For a recent job she was proud to learn to drive a forklift.

ALSO BY LISA WILLIAMS KLINE:

Eleanor Hill

The Princesses of Atlantis

Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.

New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Lisa Williams Kline

All rights reserved.

Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit us on the Web!
www.randomhouse.com/kids

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89128-1

v3.0