Graceful Read online

  Tara offered to ask her mom if she knew anything about preparing potions. After all, it was a potion from Angelina that indirectly led to their family moving here. Plus, her mom knows a lot about gardens and herbs. Mrs. Brennan was happy to help, so now I have a whole list of instructions.

  “Ready?” Bailey asks, rolling up her sleeves. She’s come over to help me prepare the potion. The first step was to dry out the herbs and flowers, so they’ve been hanging upside down in small bundles in my closet for a week. I was afraid Mom would find them when she put away my clothes, but she’s been so distracted lately I don’t think she’s done laundry all week. Or maybe all month. I’m down to one clean sock.

  When I unclip the herbs from the hanger, a few stiff, white petals fall to the floor. I can’t take any chances on messing up the recipe, so I crawl around the closet and pick them out of the carpet.

  Suddenly a low, rumbly voice reaches my ears. I duck my head out of the closet. “Did you say something?” I ask Bailey.

  She shakes her head.

  I crawl back in to get the last leaf and hear it again. A man’s voice for sure. “Just give me one more chance,” he says. “I won’t let you down.”

  “Bailey!” I call out in a loud whisper. “I think someone is trying to reach out to me! I’m hearing voices!”

  “So am I,” she whispers back.

  My eyes widen. “You are? Maybe you share my powers because you’re my best friend!”

  “Pretty sure that’s not it,” she says, pointing to the back of the closet. “It’s coming from in there.”

  We push past the hanging clothes and press our ears up to the back wall. Sure enough, the voice comes through again.

  “One more day, Mr. Murphy, you’ll see. Things at home have been” — he pauses and I picture him stopping to gulp down what’s probably his tenth coffee of the day — “difficult,” he finishes.

  “Mr. Murphy is my dad’s boss,” I whisper, my heart thumping.

  “I thought your dad was still at work,” Bailey whispers back.

  “So did I.” We wait for another minute, but my dad must have gotten off the phone or moved farther away from his bedroom wall. I grab Bailey’s sleeve and tug her through the clothes again.

  “That didn’t sound good,” she says once we’ve closed the closet door behind us. “It sounds like he might get fired!”

  I don’t answer. I have a tight ball in the pit of my stomach. I stuff the crumbly herbs into the bowl I’d snagged from the kitchen earlier. “Let’s hurry up with this. Looks like we don’t have any time to waste. We have to save my dad’s job!”

  Half an hour later we’ve ground the herbs into a fine powder using a rock and a bowl, soaked them in vinegar, strained them with my last remaining sock, and are in the process of drying them in my Easy-Bake Oven. We could dry them in the microwave, but I don’t want to risk running into a parent. Plus the Easy-Bake Oven still smells like the chocolate chip cookie Bailey and I made in there when we were seven. Before the vortex, baking that cookie in my toy oven was the most magical thing that had happened to me. Well, that and meeting Jake Harrison!

  Connor’s voice floats in from the hall. “It’s me,” he says, knocking on the door. “Can I come in?”

  He never used to knock. I kind of wish he hadn’t started treating me differently, but I can’t blame him. My parents are obviously taking it the hardest, but having a sister in my situation can’t be easy on him. I open the door and yank him inside.

  He wrinkles his nose. “Why does it smell like Easter eggs in here?”

  Bailey holds up the jar of vinegar.

  “We’re making the forgetting potion,” I explain.

  He bends down to peer inside the toy oven. “You know that’s just a one-hundred-watt lightbulb in there, right? It’s not actually cooking anything?”

  “We totally baked a cookie in there once,” Bailey says, jutting out her lip.

  “No, you didn’t,” he says. “I switched it out with a store-bought one when you guys weren’t looking.”

  I put my hand over my ears. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  He picks up the list of instructions. “Why do you need to dry them twice if you’re making tea? Won’t they just get wet again?”

  I glance over at the list. There does seem to be a lot of drying and wetting and drying again going on.

  Connor whips out his phone. “I’ll call Tara and ask.” A few seconds later, he says, “Yo, New Girl! What’s with this potion recipe you gave my lil sis? Is it legit?” He pauses to listen for a minute. “Okay, roger that.” He slips the phone in his pocket and looks over to me. “Yeah, her mom may have guessed on a few steps.”

  I frown at the soggy mess inside the oven.

  “Maybe you can just put it in the tea now,” he suggests. “That should be fine, right?”

  I shake my head slowly, not taking my eyes off the oven. A vision is unfolding in front of my eyes of me using the mixture. A brief snapshot, but it’s enough. “I’m not putting it into tea after all,” I tell them confidently.

  “But, Grace,” Bailey says. “You heard your dad. He could lose his job, your mom’s a mess, and everyone’s always bugging you at school about the hospital and whispering about how you grew four inches in one summer and —”

  I look up in surprise. “I didn’t think anyone at school noticed that.”

  “Trust me,” she says. “Everyone noticed. You really need to —”

  “Wait a second,” Connor interrupts. “You heard Dad say he might lose his job?”

  I nod. “Sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “It’s not your job to protect me all the time,” Connor says. It’s the closest he’s come to snapping at me since all this started. It kind of is my job to protect him, but I’m smart enough not to point that out. Instead I say calmly, “Anyway, I didn’t mean I’m not going to do the spell, only that no one needs to drink it. Turns out it isn’t for our parents, it’s for me.”

  Connor and Bailey exchange their Grace has lost it again look. “What do you mean, for you?” Bailey asks. “Are you going to try to make yourself forget?”

  I shake my head. “I just had a vision of me asleep with the herbs under my pillow.”

  “A vision?” Connor asks. “What do you mean?”

  How can I explain? Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m never sure what to tell and what to keep. I don’t want to freak them out, or the other extreme — make them jealous — so I wind up keeping a lot from them. I still haven’t told anyone about seeing Angelina in that garden at her house. That didn’t feel like a vision, though, not in the way that this did. That felt like I was really in the garden with her.

  “A vision is when a picture pops into my head,” I explain. “Like, I’ll see a scene that hasn’t happened yet, or I’ll see some place different from where I am.”

  “Does this happen a lot?” Connor asks, his voice thick with concern.

  I shake my head. I won’t ask his definition of a lot.

  “That’s good,” he says. “I’m sure that’d be real distracting.”

  To change the subject, I ask Bailey if she has the pouch with the key in it.

  She reaches into her backpack and roots around for it. “You’re trying to get in the store again?” she asks, handing me the pouch.

  “Not yet,” I reply as I pull out the key and tuck it into my desk drawer. “I think I’ll know when it’s time to go back there.” I open the oven door and slide out the little tray. The mixture is only a little drier than when we stuck it in there. I place my hands over the tray and focus on pushing warmth out through my palms. In seconds, the mixture is dry again. I let my hands fall to my sides.

  Connor breathes in sharply. “Wow, how did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I just suddenly knew I could.” Before they can ask anything else that I won’t know the answer to, I grab the pouch and pour the dried herbs int