Graceful Read online

  The corners of her mouth quiver and I can tell she’s trying not to smile. “It was YOUR great-great-great-grandfather who dammed up the river!”

  “Oh. You sure?”

  “Um, guys?” Rory says. “Can we focus, please?”

  “Sorry,” Amanda says.

  “Sorry,” Leo mutters.

  I take a deep breath and close my eyes. “Vortex of power,” I whisper to the rods. “Guide me to the vortex of power.”

  I open my eyes and in slow, measured steps begin to move forward. The rods sway gently back and forth along with my movements but don’t straighten out. I turn west and try again. They don’t begin to straighten out until I turn north.

  Leo begins to laugh. All the girls shush him.

  “Sorry!” he says. “It’s just that you’re facing the mall now. What if the vortex is inside the Gap! Or, wait, I bet it’s in the food court! The vortex could be inside Panda Pavilion!”

  “A panda would make a fine spirit animal,” Ray says cheerfully.

  “Hush!” Rory says. “The vortex isn’t in the food court!”

  “You’re probably right,” Leo says, turning serious. Then he blurts out, “I bet it’s in the underwear department at Macy’s!”

  This time, when Tara kicks, she doesn’t miss. Leo yelps.

  I’m sure the vortex is not in the mall, but still I’m relieved when I walk a few steps north and the rods swing to the right. I quickly turn east and walk forward. The rods immediately straighten out. I look like Frankenstein’s monster, with the rods sticking straight out in front of me like really skinny arms. The others shout and gather around.

  I take another deep breath, focus my thoughts again, and begin to walk. It only takes a minute before we enter the woods. There’s no path, but the trees, a mix of evergreen, birch, and elm, are wide enough apart that it’s easy to pass through them. The ground slopes gently upward, and we follow it.

  “Hey,” Leo says. “This is near where Amanda’s and my ancestors lived. When we went back in time and saw them as little kids, this was the direction they came from.”

  “And I think the road that leads to Angelina’s house is on the other side of these woods, too,” Tara says. “We’ve just never approached it from this side before.”

  “Sounds like a good place for a vortex to me!” Rory says.

  It’s beginning to feel like the dowsing rods are pulling me now instead of leading me. The tug gets stronger and stronger until I’m stumbling after them.

  “Anyone else notice the smell?” Amanda asks.

  The second she mentions it, the smell hits me and everyone else at the same time. Apples! This isn’t the usual the-air-smells-like-apples-when-magic-is-around kind of thing, this is for real. We look around as we continue hurling ourselves forward. There haven’t been apple trees here in decades. Where is the smell coming from?

  A minute later, we burst through the trees and stumble into a small clearing that I’d never have guessed was up here. The dowsing rods spread wide open, like they’re opening their arms to embrace a welcome guest. We have arrived.

  The six of us stand in a row and stare at the lone tree in the center of the clearing. The surprising part isn’t that it’s an apple tree, but rather that it’s got to be the strangest apple tree that ever existed anywhere on the planet. Ever.

  For one thing, its branches, which start about ten feet above the ground, don’t extend outward in all directions like you’d expect. Instead, they curl around the trunk, like the tree knows some big secret and is hugging itself to contain it.

  As twisted as the branches are, they are still dripping with apples. Ripe, red, full, juicy apples. The source of the smell, for sure. The power here thumps through the ground. I can actually feel it pulsing through me. I look at the others and know they feel it, too. Not as strongly as I do, but they feel it.

  “What do you do now?” Rory asks, resting her hand on my arm.

  The rods swing back to their neutral position. I kneel and rest them on a flat rock at my feet. “I’m not sure,” I admit. I hadn’t planned that far ahead.

  As I stand back up, I notice there are a lot of rocks around the size of my foot, most of them covered over with grass. I also spot an old stone bench on the outskirts of the clearing, mostly hidden by overgrown brush. I point at the ground. “What do you think the story is with these rocks? They don’t look like they were placed here randomly.”

  We begin kicking aside grass and dirt with our shoes, following different paths of rock. “It’s like a big circle,” Leo says.

  “Circles inside circles,” Tara adds. “But some of the stones are missing. There are big gaps.”

  I stop short. The pattern reminds me of something. I pull the pouch out of my back pocket and find Angelina’s first postcard. Greetings from … Stonehenge! shouts up at me.

  Stonehenge. It literally means stone circle.

  I flip the card over. The symbols of my friends swim before my eyes. One circle inside another, inside another. “It’s a labyrinth,” I announce. “And we’re supposed to rebuild it.”

  Standing here, in the shadow of the vortex, everyone can clearly see the writing on the card now. No one questions my conclusion.

  We fan out and run back into the woods to find more stones to match the others. Ray gets busy clearing off the stones that are already there. We start out very focused on our task, but then start getting silly. We dart in and out of one another’s paths, hiding behind trees and scaring one another when we pass. Tara has so many rocks in her arms I don’t know how she moves!

  Eventually we have enough and start filling in the gaps. Now that we can clearly see the old ones, it’s pretty easy to follow the circular lines. Whether on purpose or not, everyone leaves the innermost circle for me to fill in. I’m not sure they’re comfortable being so close to the vortex. Even I don’t want to get too close to the tree. What if it sucks me in and spins me around for all eternity? I shudder. From a few feet away I can see markings on the surprisingly smooth trunk. I can’t tell if they’re natural or man-made, but a closer inspection will have to wait.

  When we’re done, we step back to admire our handiwork.

  “We’ve got some serious labyrinth-building skills,” Leo says, wiping his hands together to dislodge the dirt. I’ve already wiped mine all over my clothes. Mom will be thrilled.

  “Totally!” Rory says. “We could make this our career! People would hire us from all over the —”

  But she doesn’t get to finish. At that moment, a wave of energy, stronger than the one I felt in the store last week, bursts out of the tree and knocks us all off our feet.

  “Is everyone all right?” Ray asks, crawling over. We groan and sit up. “Everyone say aye if you’re okay.”

  “Aye,” we each say in turn.

  “Aye aye, matey,” Leo says, doing his best pirate imitation.

  “That was crazy,” Tara says, rubbing her elbows. “What happened?”

  “I felt it once before,” I tell them. “Last Friday night in the store. It almost knocked me over then, too. But Tara and Ray didn’t feel anything.”

  “I felt it last Friday night, too,” Amanda says quietly. We all turn to look at her. “It was near the end of the gymnastics meet. So maybe around eight fifteen-ish?”

  “That’s when I felt the one in the store,” I tell her.

  “I figured I’d just imagined it,” Amanda says, “but then I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was different. And then on the way home is when I saw the watch store had gone. I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner, about either of those things. It’s almost like I forgot it, like I dreamed it.”

  “I totally get it,” I assure her. “It’s like that for me sometimes, too.”

  She smiles at me gratefully.

  “But what was it?” Tara asks. “If the last wave can be connected with the things changing in the alley — which it definitely sounds like it was — then what happened this time? Is the entire alley g