Graceful Read online

  “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.”