Time Travel Tuesday
May. 12th, 2020 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is moving toward completion! And you know what that means: it's time for me to post some excerpts!
I'm planning to do two chapters a week (they're pretty short chapters) for three weeks, culminating in the release of the book on June 2. Let the Time Travel Tuesdays commence!
Chapter 1
I almost didn’t notice the first time that time slipped. Until then, that Sunday afternoon was just like every Sunday afternoon since we moved to Ketaugan. Angela and I sat on the thin strip of battered carpet between our twin beds, and played cards or Parcheesi or put together our thousand-piece puzzle of Times Square.
I was sick to death of that puzzle, but it was the only one we packed when we came to Ketaugan. I had just put together the upper right corner when Dad yelled. “Angela! Piper! Angela!”
Angela and I looked up at each other. Angela rolled her eyes and bent back over the puzzle.
“Angela! Piper! My room! Now!”
I tossed aside my puzzle piece and got to my feet. “Don’t bother,” Angela muttered, but I went. I hated to hear Dad and Angela shouting at each other, and maybe if I went instead I could keep it from happening.
Dad stood in the doorway of his room. “Where’s Angela?” he barked.
“She’s reading,” I said. It wasn’t true just at that moment, but she did read a lot. “You know she wouldn’t even hear a fire alarm if she was reading a really good book. But I’m here, so you can talk to…”
“Angela!” Dad roared. He stormed past me. I twisted the hem of my t-shirt in my hands. Why was he mad? He got mad easily these days, but usually he didn’t get mad just out of the blue.
But when I peered into his room, I could see why right away. Dad’s baseball wasn’t on its stand on top of the rickety old dresser that came with the house. There was a caramel popcorn ball in its place.
I drifted across the room, staring. The popcorn ball was dented at the side, as if someone had dropped it, and there was a little pink pebble sticking to the caramel. Rose quartz.
Down the hall, Angela yelled, “I never touched your baseball!”
“Oh, yeah?” Their voices got louder as they came down the hall. “Piper couldn’t have done it! She’s too little!”
“It’s not that high up!” Angela shouted as they came into Dad’s room. She was a foot shorter than Dad, but right then, standing with her fists on her hips, she took up almost as much space.
“Oh, as if Piper could have made popcorn balls on her own,” Dad said. “When did you do it? Are you trying to punish me for having to work Saturday? I would have taken you apple-picking if – ”
“You would not, you would not and you know it. And we don’t even care. Hannah’s mom took us and we had more fun than we would have with you!” Angela shouted. “And even if I did want to punish you, I don’t even know how to make popcorn balls! Mom hadn’t taught me…”
She stopped all of a sudden, and for once Dad didn’t start shouting right away when she stopped. Instead he said, “If you didn’t – then who – just look, look – ”
He slammed his fist against the top of the dresser, next to the baseball stand. The dresser wobbled.
But the popcorn ball was gone. The baseball was back, right where it ought to be.
“Piper, did you…” Dad said, but his voice trailed off as he picked up the baseball. I stood on my tiptoes. No traces of caramel on the stand. No sign of the popcorn ball at all.
Dad sat down slowly on his sagging mattress, lifting his hand to his face. He pressed it over his eyes and dug around in his pocket with his other hand till he came up with a crumpled five-dollar bill. “Go get yourself some candy,” he said, thrusting it out. We didn’t move. “Go on!”
Angela crossed her arms. I took the money instead: I wasn’t going to turn down five dollars of candy just because Dad hadn’t said I’m sorry. “Thank you, Daddy,” I said.
Angela still wasn’t moving, so I took her hand as if she were my little sister and tugged her through our apartment. We lived on the upper floor of an old house, and the hardwood floor creaked under our feet.
I didn’t dare let go of Angela’s hand to put on my jacket, just in case she decided she didn’t want to go. I wasn’t supposed to go to the Marathon alone, even though it was just a couple of blocks away and there weren’t any busy streets to cross.
Probably Dad wouldn’t notice if I did, though. He didn’t notice much.
Angela kicked a fallen walnut down the sidewalk. It jumped over a crack in the pavement.
It was cold outside without my jacket. I swung Angela’s hand. “Five dollars will buy a lot of candy,” I said, and tried to will her to smile. “Reeses cups, Mounds bars, peppermint patties…”
Angela tried to grin for me. For a second I thought maybe things were all right, but then she scowled down at the sidewalk again.
I looked down too. Right in front of us, another popcorn ball lay on the sidewalk.
Angela made a weird sound, sort of a cross between a growl and a shriek, and gave it a kick.
It wasn’t a very good kick. She caught it at a bad angle, mushing in one side and only kicking it forward a few feet.
But – and I saw this specifically – there was a little rose quartz pebble lying on the busted up sidewalk. The popcorn ball rolled over it, and it picked the pebble right up.
“Angela!” I yelled. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” she asked. And then I remembered she hadn’t seen the popcorn ball in Dad’s room at all. She didn’t know that it already had the pebble on it then – before it picked up the pebble now.
And the popcorn ball was gone again.
So instead I pointed at a porch we were passing. “They’ve already got their jack-o-lanterns up,” I said. “They’ll be rotten by Halloween, don’t you think?”
“Creepier that way,” said Angela. Her chin sunk into her chest again: probably thinking about how we weren’t likely to have jack-o-lanterns or even Halloween costumes. We didn’t even have old sheets to cut up to be ghosts. We had left Indianapolis barely a week after Mom died, just us and whatever we could fit in the hatchback, and settled into this cold, creaky old apartment in Ketaugan.
A cold, creaky old apartment with a time-traveling popcorn ball. It was the first good thing that had happened in months, and it made me so happy that despite everything, I skipped. Then I tried to jog, still tugging on Angela’s hand; and finally I let go, and began to run. “Race you to the Marathon!” I shouted over my shoulder.
Angela began to laugh. Then she ran after me, and she shot past me almost at once. But I didn’t even care. All I could think about was the popcorn ball.
Chapter 2
The popcorn ball didn’t show up again that night. But I did find a note, folded up flower-like underneath my pillow.
I thought it must be from Angela, but as soon as I unfolded it I saw that it couldn’t be. It looked almost like something out of a medieval book, those giant capital letters with little illustrations inside.
Dear Piper, it began. A tiny deer with enormous antlers grazed in the D, while a bird nested in the upper loop of the P.
I wanted to say I am so so so sorry about ruining your Thanksgiving,even if it wasn’t very nice of you to But I’m writing an apology note instead of apologizing out loud, because you seemed busy when I got here, and I didn’t want to interrupt. It wouldn’t be a very good apology if I did the exact thing I was apologizing for, while trying to apologize!
So you’re from the future! It feels more real now that I’ve seen it. Have you met the older me yet? You should ask her if I become a ballet dancer. Or maybe an astronaut? On second thought, maybe it’s better if I don’t know. Surprises! Serendipity!
Each S had tiny, tiny scenes drawn into its curves. The first had a spider on a string talking to a girl with a hairbow as big as her head; the second, a girl lounging in the lower loop as if it were a hammock, one leg hanging over the side as she read a book.
I just learned that word, serendipity. Dad taught it to me because I was moping so thoroughly. Don’t you find big words awfully cheering? It means a happy accident – something good that happens as a surprise, when things don’t go as you planned. It’s the perfect word, don’t you think? It describes all the best things.
Serendipitously yours,
Rosie
All the hair on my arms rose up. Nothing in the note was creepy, exactly, but… it was under my pillow! And the writer knew my name! Maybe one of my classmates in sixth grade… but I barely talked to any of them, and it was under my pillow!
And then, as I watched, the girl in the hammock began to swing her leg, back and forth, like a clock pendulum. “Hello?” I whispered.
The tiny sketch-girl looked up at me.
I shrieked, or tried to, but I couldn’t get any air through my throat. I crumpled up the note and tossed it away from me, and then I managed, “Angela!”
Angela came in, still drying her hair with a towel. The shower had flattened her dark curls against her head, so she looked a little like a drowned French poodle. “You’d better not have moved any of the Parcheesi pieces,” she said, joking.
“No… no…”
She looked at me more closely. “Are you okay?”
“I…”
I couldn’t tell her about the note, not when I didn’t have it to show her. It was too weird, the message from the future and the moving drawings – it would sound like I was making it up.
“It’s just the window,” I said. “It’s so dark out there. It feels like it’s trying to get in here to snuff out the light. Can’t we switch sides? So you’re the one looking at the window, and you can keep an eye on it to make sure nothing gets in?”
Angela groaned. But she switched sides. And later that night, she let me keep the light on late while I was looking for the note, although I never did find it. Angela always looked out for me. I could always count on that.
***
Or at least, I could count on Angela when she was there. But that fall, she had joined Ketaugan’s junior high cross-country team with her new friend Hannah, and that left me all alone after school. I should have gone to the afterschool program, because there wasn’t anyone at home to watch me, but I couldn’t stand it there. I still hadn’t made any friends at my new school, even though Angela kept pestering me to make nice with my seatmate Shelby, ever since I showed her the little unicorn eraser Shelby gave me.
So I told the school people that Mrs. Schroeder, the lady who lived downstairs, would be looking after me. Never mind Mrs. Schroeder had left on a trip to Europe not long after we moved in, and still wasn’t back, and wouldn’t have watched me even if she were there. She’d scowled like an ogre at Angela and me the one time she’d met us.
I sat on Mrs. Schroeder’s back stoop, pulling Angela’s old jacket tight. It wasn’t a heavy jacket, just denim with a bunch of decorative patches that Angela had sewn on, and the wind cut right through it.
But I didn’t want to go inside. The house was full of creaks and shadows when it was empty: too scary.
Especially now that someone had snuck in and put a note under my pillow.
The half-windows to the cellar looked like blank black eyes. On nicer days I’d crouched right down by the windows and cupped my hands to the glass to try to look into the cellar, but it was just blackness. Horrible things might crawl out of a cellar like that. A slithering dragon; a ghost. Or maybe the blackness itself would come out, a mist of blackness rising around my feet to swallow me up.
I shivered and huddled deeper into the jacket. There had been a garden in this backyard once: the old rose brambles grew up in a tangle against the fence at the bottom of the yard. They climbed the fence like a wall of thorns. I liked to imagine the garden, and the old trees too, which were now only rotting stumps. I’d built a whole imaginary tree house in one of those lost trees.
And that was when I saw the popcorn ball, lying on the dry grass a few yards away from the stoop.
I jumped up. Just when I got close enough to grab it, the popcorn ball rolled away from me. “Hey!” I protested. “Stop!”
The popcorn ball stopped rolling. I stared at it, then crept cautiously forward. I didn’t even put my hand out this time: as soon as I got close enough to pounce, the popcorn ball rolled away again.
I hadn’t touched it. I hadn’t been anywhere close to touching it. And there wasn’t any breeze to give it a push, either.
Then it started to roll again, even though I hadn’t moved at all, and this time it didn’t stop. It rolled down the slope of the yard, jumping over hummocks in the grass, speeding up with every bounce.
I scurried after it, but I couldn’t get close enough to catch it. It bounced over an old tree root, and I saw that it was bouncing higher every time. It might bounce right over the fence, and then where would I be?
I stretched out my hands and dived.
The ground knocked the breath out of me. But I’d gotten it! My hands cupped triumphantly over the popcorn ball. I lurched to my feet and thrust the popcorn ball to the sky, like a baseball player who’s just made a really tough catch. “Caught – !”
But I didn’t finish the sentence. Because everything was gone.
No. Not gone – but different. No tangle of roses. Just a few neat rosebushes, covered with big fragrant flowers. No fence, either. The backyard just seemed to go on for miles, melting into rolling hills dotted with cows. Only a line of trees marked the boundary, great big oaks and maples covered with leaves, as if it were summer.
It was summer. I was burning up in Angela’s thin old jacket, and my hair stuck to the sweaty back of my neck.
I’d always wanted to walk into a different world, like Narnia, but now that it had happened – it was so disorienting! At least Lucy met Mr. Tumnus to show her around.
I looked around, turning slowly. I let out a gasp when I looked behind me. The house was still there!
Except it wasn’t the same house, exactly. It all looked clean and fresh and cared for: no peeling paint, no moss on the shingles, no duct tape fixing the rip on the screen door. The yellow paint looked so new it almost shone, and someone had painted the fancy carvings up under the roof white, like lace.
The one time we met Mrs. Schroeder, she had called those carvings “gingerbread.” “Does that make us Hansel and Gretel?” I had whispered to Angela.
“Don’t give Dad any ideas,” she whispered back.
But the house didn’t look at all like a witch’s now. Bright red flowers hid the cellar windows. A pair of roller skates lay next to the stoop. Maybe I could give them a try? I’d always wanted to learn how to rollerskate.
The screen door flew open, slamming against the side of the house. A girl with springy dark hair came flying out.
She was all dressed up in a green dress with a big puffy skirt, like a party dress. Only she didn’t treat it like a party dress at all: she leaped right off the stoop, and her dress flew up just enough to show healing skinned knees.
She landed in the grass in a froglike crouch, putting out both hands to catch herself. When she stood up, she had grass stains on the heels of her hands. She dusted them off on her pretty dress.
And then she saw me. Her face split into a great big grin, as if we were best friends, and she shouted, “Piper! I’ve still got some birthday cake!”
I'm planning to do two chapters a week (they're pretty short chapters) for three weeks, culminating in the release of the book on June 2. Let the Time Travel Tuesdays commence!
Chapter 1
I almost didn’t notice the first time that time slipped. Until then, that Sunday afternoon was just like every Sunday afternoon since we moved to Ketaugan. Angela and I sat on the thin strip of battered carpet between our twin beds, and played cards or Parcheesi or put together our thousand-piece puzzle of Times Square.
I was sick to death of that puzzle, but it was the only one we packed when we came to Ketaugan. I had just put together the upper right corner when Dad yelled. “Angela! Piper! Angela!”
Angela and I looked up at each other. Angela rolled her eyes and bent back over the puzzle.
“Angela! Piper! My room! Now!”
I tossed aside my puzzle piece and got to my feet. “Don’t bother,” Angela muttered, but I went. I hated to hear Dad and Angela shouting at each other, and maybe if I went instead I could keep it from happening.
Dad stood in the doorway of his room. “Where’s Angela?” he barked.
“She’s reading,” I said. It wasn’t true just at that moment, but she did read a lot. “You know she wouldn’t even hear a fire alarm if she was reading a really good book. But I’m here, so you can talk to…”
“Angela!” Dad roared. He stormed past me. I twisted the hem of my t-shirt in my hands. Why was he mad? He got mad easily these days, but usually he didn’t get mad just out of the blue.
But when I peered into his room, I could see why right away. Dad’s baseball wasn’t on its stand on top of the rickety old dresser that came with the house. There was a caramel popcorn ball in its place.
I drifted across the room, staring. The popcorn ball was dented at the side, as if someone had dropped it, and there was a little pink pebble sticking to the caramel. Rose quartz.
Down the hall, Angela yelled, “I never touched your baseball!”
“Oh, yeah?” Their voices got louder as they came down the hall. “Piper couldn’t have done it! She’s too little!”
“It’s not that high up!” Angela shouted as they came into Dad’s room. She was a foot shorter than Dad, but right then, standing with her fists on her hips, she took up almost as much space.
“Oh, as if Piper could have made popcorn balls on her own,” Dad said. “When did you do it? Are you trying to punish me for having to work Saturday? I would have taken you apple-picking if – ”
“You would not, you would not and you know it. And we don’t even care. Hannah’s mom took us and we had more fun than we would have with you!” Angela shouted. “And even if I did want to punish you, I don’t even know how to make popcorn balls! Mom hadn’t taught me…”
She stopped all of a sudden, and for once Dad didn’t start shouting right away when she stopped. Instead he said, “If you didn’t – then who – just look, look – ”
He slammed his fist against the top of the dresser, next to the baseball stand. The dresser wobbled.
But the popcorn ball was gone. The baseball was back, right where it ought to be.
“Piper, did you…” Dad said, but his voice trailed off as he picked up the baseball. I stood on my tiptoes. No traces of caramel on the stand. No sign of the popcorn ball at all.
Dad sat down slowly on his sagging mattress, lifting his hand to his face. He pressed it over his eyes and dug around in his pocket with his other hand till he came up with a crumpled five-dollar bill. “Go get yourself some candy,” he said, thrusting it out. We didn’t move. “Go on!”
Angela crossed her arms. I took the money instead: I wasn’t going to turn down five dollars of candy just because Dad hadn’t said I’m sorry. “Thank you, Daddy,” I said.
Angela still wasn’t moving, so I took her hand as if she were my little sister and tugged her through our apartment. We lived on the upper floor of an old house, and the hardwood floor creaked under our feet.
I didn’t dare let go of Angela’s hand to put on my jacket, just in case she decided she didn’t want to go. I wasn’t supposed to go to the Marathon alone, even though it was just a couple of blocks away and there weren’t any busy streets to cross.
Probably Dad wouldn’t notice if I did, though. He didn’t notice much.
Angela kicked a fallen walnut down the sidewalk. It jumped over a crack in the pavement.
It was cold outside without my jacket. I swung Angela’s hand. “Five dollars will buy a lot of candy,” I said, and tried to will her to smile. “Reeses cups, Mounds bars, peppermint patties…”
Angela tried to grin for me. For a second I thought maybe things were all right, but then she scowled down at the sidewalk again.
I looked down too. Right in front of us, another popcorn ball lay on the sidewalk.
Angela made a weird sound, sort of a cross between a growl and a shriek, and gave it a kick.
It wasn’t a very good kick. She caught it at a bad angle, mushing in one side and only kicking it forward a few feet.
But – and I saw this specifically – there was a little rose quartz pebble lying on the busted up sidewalk. The popcorn ball rolled over it, and it picked the pebble right up.
“Angela!” I yelled. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” she asked. And then I remembered she hadn’t seen the popcorn ball in Dad’s room at all. She didn’t know that it already had the pebble on it then – before it picked up the pebble now.
And the popcorn ball was gone again.
So instead I pointed at a porch we were passing. “They’ve already got their jack-o-lanterns up,” I said. “They’ll be rotten by Halloween, don’t you think?”
“Creepier that way,” said Angela. Her chin sunk into her chest again: probably thinking about how we weren’t likely to have jack-o-lanterns or even Halloween costumes. We didn’t even have old sheets to cut up to be ghosts. We had left Indianapolis barely a week after Mom died, just us and whatever we could fit in the hatchback, and settled into this cold, creaky old apartment in Ketaugan.
A cold, creaky old apartment with a time-traveling popcorn ball. It was the first good thing that had happened in months, and it made me so happy that despite everything, I skipped. Then I tried to jog, still tugging on Angela’s hand; and finally I let go, and began to run. “Race you to the Marathon!” I shouted over my shoulder.
Angela began to laugh. Then she ran after me, and she shot past me almost at once. But I didn’t even care. All I could think about was the popcorn ball.
Chapter 2
The popcorn ball didn’t show up again that night. But I did find a note, folded up flower-like underneath my pillow.
I thought it must be from Angela, but as soon as I unfolded it I saw that it couldn’t be. It looked almost like something out of a medieval book, those giant capital letters with little illustrations inside.
Dear Piper, it began. A tiny deer with enormous antlers grazed in the D, while a bird nested in the upper loop of the P.
I wanted to say I am so so so sorry about ruining your Thanksgiving,
So you’re from the future! It feels more real now that I’ve seen it.
Each S had tiny, tiny scenes drawn into its curves. The first had a spider on a string talking to a girl with a hairbow as big as her head; the second, a girl lounging in the lower loop as if it were a hammock, one leg hanging over the side as she read a book.
I just learned that word, serendipity. Dad taught it to me because I was moping so thoroughly. Don’t you find big words awfully cheering? It means a happy accident – something good that happens as a surprise, when things don’t go as you planned. It’s the perfect word, don’t you think? It describes all the best things.
Serendipitously yours,
Rosie
All the hair on my arms rose up. Nothing in the note was creepy, exactly, but… it was under my pillow! And the writer knew my name! Maybe one of my classmates in sixth grade… but I barely talked to any of them, and it was under my pillow!
And then, as I watched, the girl in the hammock began to swing her leg, back and forth, like a clock pendulum. “Hello?” I whispered.
The tiny sketch-girl looked up at me.
I shrieked, or tried to, but I couldn’t get any air through my throat. I crumpled up the note and tossed it away from me, and then I managed, “Angela!”
Angela came in, still drying her hair with a towel. The shower had flattened her dark curls against her head, so she looked a little like a drowned French poodle. “You’d better not have moved any of the Parcheesi pieces,” she said, joking.
“No… no…”
She looked at me more closely. “Are you okay?”
“I…”
I couldn’t tell her about the note, not when I didn’t have it to show her. It was too weird, the message from the future and the moving drawings – it would sound like I was making it up.
“It’s just the window,” I said. “It’s so dark out there. It feels like it’s trying to get in here to snuff out the light. Can’t we switch sides? So you’re the one looking at the window, and you can keep an eye on it to make sure nothing gets in?”
Angela groaned. But she switched sides. And later that night, she let me keep the light on late while I was looking for the note, although I never did find it. Angela always looked out for me. I could always count on that.
***
Or at least, I could count on Angela when she was there. But that fall, she had joined Ketaugan’s junior high cross-country team with her new friend Hannah, and that left me all alone after school. I should have gone to the afterschool program, because there wasn’t anyone at home to watch me, but I couldn’t stand it there. I still hadn’t made any friends at my new school, even though Angela kept pestering me to make nice with my seatmate Shelby, ever since I showed her the little unicorn eraser Shelby gave me.
So I told the school people that Mrs. Schroeder, the lady who lived downstairs, would be looking after me. Never mind Mrs. Schroeder had left on a trip to Europe not long after we moved in, and still wasn’t back, and wouldn’t have watched me even if she were there. She’d scowled like an ogre at Angela and me the one time she’d met us.
I sat on Mrs. Schroeder’s back stoop, pulling Angela’s old jacket tight. It wasn’t a heavy jacket, just denim with a bunch of decorative patches that Angela had sewn on, and the wind cut right through it.
But I didn’t want to go inside. The house was full of creaks and shadows when it was empty: too scary.
Especially now that someone had snuck in and put a note under my pillow.
The half-windows to the cellar looked like blank black eyes. On nicer days I’d crouched right down by the windows and cupped my hands to the glass to try to look into the cellar, but it was just blackness. Horrible things might crawl out of a cellar like that. A slithering dragon; a ghost. Or maybe the blackness itself would come out, a mist of blackness rising around my feet to swallow me up.
I shivered and huddled deeper into the jacket. There had been a garden in this backyard once: the old rose brambles grew up in a tangle against the fence at the bottom of the yard. They climbed the fence like a wall of thorns. I liked to imagine the garden, and the old trees too, which were now only rotting stumps. I’d built a whole imaginary tree house in one of those lost trees.
And that was when I saw the popcorn ball, lying on the dry grass a few yards away from the stoop.
I jumped up. Just when I got close enough to grab it, the popcorn ball rolled away from me. “Hey!” I protested. “Stop!”
The popcorn ball stopped rolling. I stared at it, then crept cautiously forward. I didn’t even put my hand out this time: as soon as I got close enough to pounce, the popcorn ball rolled away again.
I hadn’t touched it. I hadn’t been anywhere close to touching it. And there wasn’t any breeze to give it a push, either.
Then it started to roll again, even though I hadn’t moved at all, and this time it didn’t stop. It rolled down the slope of the yard, jumping over hummocks in the grass, speeding up with every bounce.
I scurried after it, but I couldn’t get close enough to catch it. It bounced over an old tree root, and I saw that it was bouncing higher every time. It might bounce right over the fence, and then where would I be?
I stretched out my hands and dived.
The ground knocked the breath out of me. But I’d gotten it! My hands cupped triumphantly over the popcorn ball. I lurched to my feet and thrust the popcorn ball to the sky, like a baseball player who’s just made a really tough catch. “Caught – !”
But I didn’t finish the sentence. Because everything was gone.
No. Not gone – but different. No tangle of roses. Just a few neat rosebushes, covered with big fragrant flowers. No fence, either. The backyard just seemed to go on for miles, melting into rolling hills dotted with cows. Only a line of trees marked the boundary, great big oaks and maples covered with leaves, as if it were summer.
It was summer. I was burning up in Angela’s thin old jacket, and my hair stuck to the sweaty back of my neck.
I’d always wanted to walk into a different world, like Narnia, but now that it had happened – it was so disorienting! At least Lucy met Mr. Tumnus to show her around.
I looked around, turning slowly. I let out a gasp when I looked behind me. The house was still there!
Except it wasn’t the same house, exactly. It all looked clean and fresh and cared for: no peeling paint, no moss on the shingles, no duct tape fixing the rip on the screen door. The yellow paint looked so new it almost shone, and someone had painted the fancy carvings up under the roof white, like lace.
The one time we met Mrs. Schroeder, she had called those carvings “gingerbread.” “Does that make us Hansel and Gretel?” I had whispered to Angela.
“Don’t give Dad any ideas,” she whispered back.
But the house didn’t look at all like a witch’s now. Bright red flowers hid the cellar windows. A pair of roller skates lay next to the stoop. Maybe I could give them a try? I’d always wanted to learn how to rollerskate.
The screen door flew open, slamming against the side of the house. A girl with springy dark hair came flying out.
She was all dressed up in a green dress with a big puffy skirt, like a party dress. Only she didn’t treat it like a party dress at all: she leaped right off the stoop, and her dress flew up just enough to show healing skinned knees.
She landed in the grass in a froglike crouch, putting out both hands to catch herself. When she stood up, she had grass stains on the heels of her hands. She dusted them off on her pretty dress.
And then she saw me. Her face split into a great big grin, as if we were best friends, and she shouted, “Piper! I’ve still got some birthday cake!”
no subject
Date: 2020-05-13 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-13 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-14 01:49 pm (UTC)Love this fast-moving and confident stride into a delightful conceit.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-14 02:08 pm (UTC)