Write Before Your Eyes (2 page)

CHAPTER
TWO

Gracie followed the path to the ancient weeping willow on the creek bank beside the golf course where she and Dylan always met. The sun lay low in the golden sky and birds chattered in the softening light. This was Gracie’s favorite time of day. She sat at the foot of the tree to wait for Dylan, behind the swaying screen of willow fronds, and pulled the journal from her pocket.

She’d bought the journal at a yard sale a few blocks away last week. Mo, her black cat, had gotten out, and he’d been way too fast for Gracie, skulking under shrubs, flashing through flower beds, darting behind trees. Gracie had chased him across the golf course to the fancy neighborhood on the other side and lost him when he ran behind the old Tudor-style house with the brown peaked roof. Gracie had stood in the cul-de-sac. Mo was nowhere to be seen.

“Did you see a black cat?” she asked a thin, pointy-faced man by the curb.

“I’m afraid not, miss.” The man had an English accent. He was stacking ancient leather-bound books, a collection of pipes, and a beautiful old chess set on a card table at the end of the driveway. He propped a sign saying 50¢ in front of the books.

Gracie’s eye was caught by flashes of gold along the spines of the books. She took a step closer, touched one of the thin gold stripes. “Did they used to make books with real gold?” she asked.

And then she saw the blue journal. It looked hundreds of years old, with worn blue suede on the cover and crackly, yellowed pages with oddly shaped water stains. Gracie opened it, half expecting it to be already full of entries. But there was faint spidery writing in pale blue ink on just the first page:

Remember what the dormouse said.

Gracie knew immediately where those words came from. They were from “White Rabbit,” the famous Jefferson Airplane song about
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In fact, Gracie was named after Grace Slick, the band’s lead singer.

Her heart thudded wildly. She had to have it.

At that moment, a tiny woman in a blue nightgown, with flyaway white hair, toddled down the driveway and saw Gracie. She pointed at the journal and said, in a childlike voice, “Not that one! She mustn’t take that one!” But the man smiled and assured Gracie it was all right, that Miss Alice would never use it in the nursing home. Gracie had only a quarter in her pocket, and the man had said, “Close enough, luv,” and placed the journal in her waiting hands. At that moment Gracie had glimpsed Mo weaving through the woods behind a house two doors down, and she had waved thank-you to the man and run after the cat.

Now, Gracie stroked the cover reverently, feeling the nap of the suede change direction under her fingertips. For the first time, she let her thoughts give words to what seemed to have happened:
Everything I write in this journal comes true.
A prickling sensation spread up the back of her neck into her scalp. How could that be? Surely she was imagining it.

Swiftly, Gracie clicked her pen and wrote:

Dylan rounded the bend beside the weeping willow, his hands in the pockets of his baggy khaki shorts.

She took a breath and looked up. And there was Dylan’s gangly frame coming up the path, wearing his usual wrinkled khaki shorts. And smiling, with his hands in his pockets.

She swallowed, and reminded herself:
But I’ve been waiting for him. We’d planned to meet.

“Hi!” Dylan’s eyes were like almonds, light brown and set in his face at a mischievous slant. They were eyes an elf might have. He’d played Puck in the community theater production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
last summer, and everyone said he’d been perfectly cast.

“Guess what,” they both said at once.

“You first,” said Gracie.

“That’s okay. You go,” said Dylan.

“No, you.”

“Well, okay. You’ll never believe who called me,” Dylan said.

Dylan and Gracie had become friends two years ago at a neighborhood Fourth of July party. Just a few weeks earlier, after his parents’ divorce, Dylan and his dad had moved into what everybody called “the mansion” at the end of the road. That day Dylan and Gracie had figured out that, embarrassingly, they had both been named for sixties musicians—Bob Dylan and Grace Slick.

“I give. Who called you?” Gracie got up, dusting bits of moss from her shorts, and they headed down the path toward Reynolda Gardens.

“Lindsay Jacobs.”

“Lindsay Jacobs? Who’s she?”

“She’s a ravishing girl in my social studies class. She looks like my idea of Scheherazade. Fantastic cheekbones, dark silky curls. I could easily be smitten.” Dylan nearly danced down the path. Everyone at school said that Dylan was a genius. When he and Gracie passed under a low-hanging oak branch, he leaped up and tried to smack a leaf with the tips of his fingers. “
And
she’s one of six people in the entire school who are shorter than me.”

“What did she want?” Gracie thought about the fact that she herself was shorter than Dylan but didn’t mention it.

“My notes.”

Gracie started laughing. “Oh. So she’s using you for your brains.”

“Yes, this is true. Use me, use me, I say. Things could change in a heartbeat. In the twinkling of an eye.”

Gracie laughed again, thinking how true that was. And the moment was there. She was exploding to tell him. Somehow it didn’t even seem as though something was totally true until she’d told Dylan. Dylan bent and picked up an acorn, and as he walked he tossed it from one hand to the other. He absolutely could not stay still.

“Okay, my turn. Dylan, something amazing happened.” Gracie hesitated. Would he think she was a total nutcase? “I got this journal from a yard sale at one of the houses across the golf course.” She held it up, smoothing the suede on the front so that the nap lay in the same direction. “You’re going to think this is crazy, but I am absolutely not making this up. When I write something in this journal, what I write comes true.”

Dylan stopped, tore a leaf in half, and stared at her. “What?”

“Everything I’ve written in here so far has come true.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, look.” Gracie opened the journal and showed him what she’d written. “The minute I wrote that sentence about the squirrel, one came and sat on the branch next to me. And the same with the acorn. And I wrote that sentence about my Mom’s BlackBerry, and it rang, even though it was turned off! Then I wrote about you, and a second later, you showed up.”

They’d reached Reynolda Village, a barn and stables on an old estate that had been turned into exclusive shops. The quaint green-roofed stores were all closed now, and the shadows lengthened as the mid-September sun sank lower in the darkening sky. Dylan and Gracie sat on a bench, and Dylan examined the journal, scratching his head. The thin pages crackled faintly in the deepening dusk.

Dylan looked unconvinced. “Don’t get me wrong, Gracie, this could have world-shattering potential. And nobody is more willing to suspend disbelief than me. But any of these things could have happened anyway.”

“I know,” she said. “But what about your khaki shorts?”

“I wear khaki shorts every day. You have to write something really out there, like ‘An enormous chocolate bar fell out of the sky and landed in Gracie’s lap,’ or ‘And then there was world peace.’”

Gracie thought that over. “That would be cool, if I wrote about world peace, and all over the world every battle came to a screeching halt. People just dropped their guns and grenades and started, you know, asking each other what kind of music they liked.” She and Dylan watched the sun drop behind indigo clouds on the horizon, rimming them in orange, pink, purple, and gold. They seemed to be suspended in a glowing moment when everything was possible. Gracie was afraid to write down the world peace thing, though. What were the chances it would happen? And then the magic would be over. Little things were safer.

“Hey, I know. You could try writing that Lindsay Jacobs kissed Dylan McWilliams after school on Thursday.” Dylan smiled, raised his eyebrows wickedly, and checked his watch. “That’s tomorrow, right?”

Gracie took out her pen as if she were going to take notes. “Any particular location you’d prefer?”

“Hmmm. The old love seat they keep backstage in the auditorium would be nice. But I’m not picky.”

“Well, that’s generous of you. That gives fate plenty of leeway.” Gracie held the pen over the page, but didn’t write.

“Seriously, write something now,” Dylan said, pulling his knees to his chin. “I want to see it work.”

“Okay. I started this sentence right here. I was going to write about a fuchsia elephant. That’s weird enough, huh?” She showed Dylan the place.

“Okay. Go ahead.” He nodded.

Then, carefully forming the letters, she finished the sentence:

A fuschia elephant appeared on the horizon.

“It’s
f-u-c-h-s-i-a
.” Dylan pointed to her cursive.

“It’s so boring hanging out with a genius.” She made the correction and shut the journal. They sat looking at each other, not breathing. What if nothing happened?

Pounding footsteps approached.

But not elephant footsteps. Those of a person.

They turned as one to watch a guy run by. An ordinary college student, out for a run. Wearing a yellow T-shirt featuring a wildlife preserve. With a fuchsia elephant on the front.

Gracie grabbed Dylan’s shoulder. “His T-shirt!”

“I saw it!”

Gracie stared after the runner, then back at Dylan. The hairs stood up on her arms and the back of her neck. It hadn’t been a real elephant, but still, what she’d written in the journal had come true.

“Dylan! What do I do?”

“Try another one.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, let me think.” Dylan jumped up from the bench and paced the walkway, waving his arms in his excitement, as if he were throwing confetti. “Okay…see if you can make something from a fantasy real. Like…Frodo Baggins came to Chesterville. Oh, man, we can’t do that to Frodo after all he’s already been through. How about ‘The Cheshire cat came to Chesterville’?” He laughed. “It sounds like a bad movie sequel.”

“Okay, fine.” Gracie wrote a bit more quickly this time:

The Cheshire cat came to Chesterville.

She and Dylan remained stock-still, barely breathing, waiting for it to happen. Gracie scanned the darkening trees for glowing eyes.

“No!” Dylan said suddenly. “Erase that!”

“Why?”

“Because I changed my mind. I mean it, Gracie, please humor me and write the thing about me and Lindsay Jacobs. I feel as though I should strike while the iron is hot.”

“Lucky for you I have a pen eraser.” Gracie went over and over the line with the crumbly white eraser until she’d practically worn away a strip of the page and what she’d just written was gone. She blew away the bits of eraser, curled like pigs’ tails. “Dylan, you are such a dork. We possibly hold the future in our hands and all you can think about is Lindsay Jacobs.”

“Come on, what can it hurt?”

“Fine.” Gracie sighed, clicked her pen, and wrote:

Dylan McWilliams kissed Lindsay Jacobs after school on Thursday on the love seat backstage in the auditorium.

“Happy?” she said. Darkness was closing in, and she stood to head back.

“Extremely.” Dylan became increasingly eloquent as they wandered down the path toward home. “You know, Gracie, this is an incredible opportunity. I mean, not just an opportunity for me to kiss a girl who’s way out of my league, but an opportunity for you, one of Shakespearean proportions. Will you be like Caesar, and carpe diem? Will you be like Hamlet, and allow tragedy to befall us all while you remain in an agonizing limbo of indecision? Will you be like Henry the Fourth, and hang around with miscreants like me and shirk your responsibilities to the future of the world until it’s almost too late?”

Gracie pretended she knew all of those characters from Shakespeare, even though she didn’t. “You’re not a
miscreant.
What does that mean, anyway?”

“Misfit. I’ll say misfit. I actually think I was born into the wrong century or the wrong universe or something.”

“I know exactly what you mean!” she said. “Me too!”

“Anyway, Gracie, you like to stay in the background. It won’t be easy for you to do this.” He stopped, put his finger on his chin, and did a quick spin to the left. It was one of his signature moves as Puck. “Hey, I could take the journal. My brain overflows with so many stories and ideas for world improvement on any given day that I don’t know whether I could get them all on paper.”

In the gathering darkness, Gracie saw a gleam in Dylan’s eyes. She hugged the journal more tightly to her chest. “Um, maybe. I’ll let you know. But I want to keep it for a while.”

Dylan nodded. “Actually, you know, in the Bible it says the meek shall inherit the earth.” He smiled and raised his arms up to the darkening heavens. “So, there you go.”

Later, in bed, Gracie sat with the covers pulled high and her pen poised above the brittle page. So Dylan thought she was meek. That stung. Just to show him, she’d write something that would change the world.

But not right away. She’d build up to that. She had thought and thought about what she wanted most to happen, and while it would be cool if an enormous chocolate bar fell from the sky, and while she really did want world peace, those things could wait.

She’d start with something personal but still important. She clicked the pen and wrote:
Gracie’s dad got a job as a sports announcer, the job he wanted more than anything else in the world.

CHAPTER
THREE

Before she was fully awake, Gracie reached under her pillow and touched the blue journal to make sure it was still there. When her fingertips grazed the suede, she smiled in relief.

She lay on her back and gazed around her room. Mom and Dad had helped her paint it the same sky blue as her room in their old house. This room was much smaller, but the sky blue helped it feel familiar. She’d rehung the famous art posters on one wall—
Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Vermeer, and
The Birth of Venus
by Botticelli—and the movie and rock ’n’ roll posters on two other walls. Finally, she’d re-created her Grace Slick wall.

A couple of years ago she’d looked up her namesake, Grace Slick, on the Internet. In the 1960s, Slick had been the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane. She’d had a mane of jet-black hair, funky clothes, mesmerizing eyes, and a ringing, forceful voice. In an interview, Slick said when she was young she wanted to be a housewife and just happened to try out one weekend for a rock ’n’ roll band because she thought it would be fun. And so she became hugely but accidentally famous. Her signature song was “White Rabbit,” which Mom said had been listed in
Rolling Stone
’s issue on the five hundred greatest songs of all time. Gracie had taped up one poster of Slick performing, and another of the portly white rabbit wearing sunglasses that Slick had painted after retiring from rock ’n’ roll. Art critics hadn’t liked the painting, but Gracie did.

Gracie loved the layered meaning of the spidery words on the journal’s first page.
Remember what the dormouse said.
At first Gracie had thought the next words in the song were “Keep your head,” like in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
which was clearly a reference to not letting the Queen of Hearts chop off your head. But she had looked up the lyrics to “White Rabbit” online and she was wrong. The next line was “Feed your head.” Mom, when Gracie asked, said that meant to keep educating yourself, keep your brain occupied. Dylan said that Gracie’s mom was full of parental BS and that “feed your head” was a well-known sixties reference to hallucinogenic drugs.

“Not that I’d ever do them,” he’d added. “I can’t imagine compromising my one strong point.”

“I like the Alice in Wonderland version, ‘Keep your head,’” Gracie told him. “I like to think about it meaning ‘Don’t get flustered and lose your sense of who you are.’”

“‘Keep your head’ doesn’t actually appear in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
” said Dylan. “In truth, during Alice’s trial, a member of the jury asks what the dormouse said and, sadly, no one can remember.”

Gracie had sighed. It was so annoying, being best friends with a genius.

She felt a little like that dormouse. No one in her family ever listened to her or seemed to remember what
she
said, either. All her life, Gracie had hovered below the radar while Mom and Dad’s fights, Jen’s dramas, and Alex’s comedies had occupied center stage. She’d liked it that way. Mostly. She could live her life in the wings, practically unnoticed. Spies probably were like that. They lived lives of incredible danger and risk, and their actions affected the unfolding of the history of the world, yet they wore nondescript trench coats and faded into the crowd and never got any credit for what they did. That was Grace, so far. The middle kid flying under the radar in a plain tan trench coat.

But now she had the journal. Since she was Grace Slick’s namesake, it seemed that she was meant to have it. And if she used it, she could fix everything that was wrong. With her family. With school. With the world. And maybe that was secretly what she’d wanted all along.

“Gracie!” Jen shouted. “Five minutes!”

Gracie threw back the covers. Mo, who had been curled at her feet, let out a disgruntled snarl as he slid to the floor. Gracie had been trying to be intellectual and cool when she’d named her cat Mozart, but in typical Rawley fashion it had been shortened to Mo, and in one fell swoop the cat had been changed from a genius to a Stooge.

She riffled through her clean clothes to find a shirt and pants that met dress code. She hated the dress code. You had to wear khaki pants and a polo shirt in school colors, which were black, white, and red. Who looked good in those colors, other than Santa Claus? Plus, your shirt had to be tucked in. The teachers spent more time sending kids to the office for having loose shirttails than teaching. And now teachers and students hated each other, which hadn’t been the case before the dress code started.

Aha! She yanked a black polo shirt over her head, and with her shirt only half on, she grabbed the journal and wrote:

One of Clueless Chet’s first acts as principal at Chesterville Middle was to cancel the dress code, giving students back their freedom of self-expression.

There! That should make the world a much better place.

Outside in the car, Jen blew the horn.

Gracie stuffed the journal into her backpack with the rest of her books, slid her feet into her flip-flops—which, blessedly, were permitted by the dress code—and raced downstairs. She nearly collided with Alex in the kitchen as she grabbed one of the Pop-Tarts Mom had stacked on the counter when she left for work an hour ago.

“Get me one too,” he said.

She tossed it, and he snagged it in the air. Jen blew the horn again, this time longer, and at the same time, the phone started ringing. Gracie grabbed it.

“May I speak with Steven Rawley, please?” a professional-sounding male voice asked.

“Just a minute.” She covered the mouthpiece. “Alex, is Dad up?”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

Jen blew the horn again.

“Alex, go tell Jen to stop blowing the horn. I have to take the phone to Dad.”

Alex jogged out through the garage, shouting, “Okay, okay, we’re coming!”

Gracie ran upstairs with the phone and knocked on Mom and Dad’s bedroom door. Inside, Dad groaned. She pushed the door open and peered at the tangle of sheets in the darkness.

“Dad? Phone.”

“Hunh?” Dad propped himself on one elbow and ran his palm over his face. Gracie handed him the phone.

“Hello?” Dad’s voice sounded rusty. “Garrett Lockwood! Midnight Man! You son of a gun! What have you been doing for the last twenty years?” Dad started laughing and sat up in bed, crossing his legs campfire-style. He looked at Gracie, pointed to the receiver, and mouthed, “College buddy.”

Gracie stepped outside the bedroom. Jen blew the horn again, but Gracie couldn’t leave, not just yet. She pulled the door almost shut and listened.

“You bought a what?” Dad said. “A radio station? You’re kidding me.”

Gracie waited. Could it be…?

“What? Garrett, you’ve got to be kidding. Hey, I was just fooling around, that was just the FM college station.”

Gracie covered her mouth. Could this be the answer to what she wrote last night?

“Well, yeah, I announce the games at my kids’ school. Nothing professional.” Dad listened. Then, “Well, let me see if I can juggle a few things.” Dad was pretending he still had a job. “Um, when? Tomorrow? Hey, I’ll see what I can do. Garrett, this is incredible, man. Thanks for the opportunity.”

Gracie headed to the garage, tossed her backpack onto the backseat of the car, and climbed in. She felt a little numb. Was the journal working? Or was it coincidence? What were the chances that her dad, who didn’t have any professional sports-announcing experience, would be offered his dream job?

“About time!” Jen shouted over the blare of the radio. The tires squealed as she careered down the driveway. Jen and Alex immediately started to argue, alternately punching radio stations. Gracie found a My Chemical Romance CD on the floor in the back. She handed it to Alex, who, without a word, slid it into the player.

“Oh, man, I have a science test today.” Alex smacked his forehead with his hand. “I forgot.”

“Ouch,” said Jen.

“Quick, I’ll quiz you,” Gracie said. “Give me your book and I’ll ask you the questions at the end of the chapter.”

“I forgot to bring my book home.”

“Alex! What planet are you on, anyway?”

“Uranus. Haaa!”

“No time, anyway,” said Jen, zipping the car into the elementary school turnaround and squealing to a stop. “We’re here.”

“Mom’s gonna kill me. Oh, man.” Alex jumped out and slammed the door.

Quietly, Gracie slid the blue journal from her backpack. She opened it and wrote:
Alex got an A on his science test.

She closed the journal, feeling ever so philanthropic. He was a pain in the you-know-what, but, hey, he
was
her brother.

Jen squealed back out onto the road, changed lanes without looking, and slammed on the brakes at the last minute to avoid hitting a Honda.

“Hey, that’s Brian Greentree in the car in front of us,” said Jen. “Didn’t you have a crush on him last year?”

“No,” Gracie lied, sliding down in her seat. Brian Greentree, who played center-mid on the eighth-grade soccer team, had the most amazing legs, curly dark hair, and eyelashes girls would die for. But he was way out of Gracie’s league. She’d confessed to Jen last year in a moment of weakness that she liked him, and the next day one of his friends poked him in the side when she walked by in the hall. Jen had told! Gracie had been colossally embarrassed. That wasn’t going to happen again.

“That was someone else,” she said now. “I don’t like anyone.” She reiterated. “Really,
anyone.
”

“Are you sure? I thought it was him.” Jen banged her palm on the steering wheel as she lurched into a parking space and cut the engine. “There’s Sean. Omigod, he’s so cute. Gracie, this is no lie, when I see him in the hall I stop breathing.”

“For how long? That could be dangerous.”

“This always happens. Crap, today I look terrible, and there he is. Watch this: Tomorrow I’ll spend an hour on my hair and I won’t see him all day.”

“You don’t look terrible,” Gracie said. She didn’t. Jen was “the pretty one,” just as Gracie was “the smart one.” Jen’s body was curvy, Gracie’s was beanpole straight. Jen’s hair was blond, Gracie’s was light brown, nondescript. Jen’s eyes were green, Gracie’s were a muddy brown. Jen tanned, Gracie freckled. Et cetera.

Jen turned off the engine just as My Chemical Romance sang about a young boy whose father asked him to save the broken and the beaten and to defeat the demons of the world. Gracie loved those lyrics. They always gave her goose bumps.

Jen climbed out of the car, holding one thin notebook. “You coming?”

The words of the song echoed in Gracie’s head. “Sure.” She dragged her forty-pound backpack across the backseat. “How do you get through school with just one notebook?”

“Priorities,” Jen said. “Hey, Sean! Hang on, I’ll walk in with you.” She turned to Gracie. “Lock it, okay?” She tossed her hair over her shoulder as she caught up with Sean Romanowsky. He was a football player, and built like a refrigerator. Hence his nickname, the Fridge. Jen had liked him forever, and he’d never so much as called her.

Gracie locked the car and put her backpack on top of the trunk. Quickly, before anyone saw her, she pulled out the journal and wrote:

Sean “the Fridge” Romanowsky asked Jen out for Friday night.

Jen was mean to Gracie ninety percent of the time, but still, she
was
her sister. Feeling ever so caring, Gracie watched Jen and Sean walk across the parking lot together, headed for the high school wing. Sean slapped Jen on the butt, like she was just another football player or something, and Gracie winced.

She gazed across the parking lot at all the kids slouching toward school, the clumps of kids joking around on the defeated grass in the front yard and reluctantly filing up the worn marble steps. The ROTC, after raising the flag, marched between the chipped white columns and through the scarred double doors. In the yard, a big black crow landed on the Rock. The Rock, a legendary Chesterville landmark, was Volkswagen-sized and covered with layers of graffiti built up like tree rings by nearly fifty years of middle school and high school students. The crow pecked at some crumbs someone had left there.

Gracie rubbed her fingers across the blue suede cover of the journal and felt reassured. All of a sudden she knew what it must be like for superheroes—Spider-Man or Batman, for instance—to feel the pressure of power. It was a weight, a responsibility. Dylan was right. This was a test for flying-under-the-radar Gracie. Could she pass the test? Did she have what it took? Could she keep her head?

She shouldered her backpack, staggering slightly under its ridiculous weight, and headed slowly across the parking lot toward the middle school wing. The words of that song about the broken and the beaten still rang in her head. Her head buzzed with the possibilities, all the things she could do, all she could make happen with a stroke of her pen. Last night on the news they’d said that the local chapter of the Red Cross was out of type AB blood. The Chesterville Soup Kitchen was low on all canned vegetables except pumpkin. And what about all those cats and dogs at the Chesterville Animal Shelter, desperately needing a home? She sat down in the parking lot and began to scribble.

People from all over Chesterville generously gave enough blood to the Red Cross to help everyone who needed it.

People donated enough canned goods to the Chesterville Soup Kitchen to last for the rest of the year.

People came from far and wide to adopt every homeless animal at the Chesterville Animal Shelter.

Gracie thought her writing style was getting better. Feeling satisfied and extremely hopeful, she stuffed the journal into her backpack. So many good deeds, so little time.