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Summary
Summary
Magic moves in next door in this hilarious and heartfelt middle grade fantasy about a resourceful girl battling a temperamental thunder wizard.
Donna's always liked her life by the river--that is, until her beloved aunt Annabelle died in a tragic kayaking accident. Now money's tight, her mom works all the time, and her best friend, Rachel, would rather hang out with her basketball teammates than with Donna. When a strange old woman moves in next door and hires Donna to clean part-time, she figures this is the perfect chance to get over her friendship troubles and help her family out--especially since the woman pays in gold. Turns out, Donna's new neighbor is an ancient, ornery thunder mage, and it doesn't take much to make her angry. Before Donna knows it, Rachel is in danger and Donna's family is about to lose their home. To save the day, Donna will need the help of a quirky new friend and the basketball team . . . plus the mysterious, powerful creature lurking in the river.
Author Notes
Ellen Booraem, born in Massachusetts, now lives in Downeast Maine. She is the author of The Unnameables (an ALA Best Book for Young Adults), Small Persons with Wings , and Texting the Underworld . All of Ellen's books have, among other awards, been picked as Best Books of the Year by Kirkus Reviews . In addition to being a writer, Ellen is also a mentor and writing coach. She lives with a cat, a dog, and an artist in a house they (the humans) built with their own hands.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5 Up--Another engaging fantasy set in the real world from Booraem. Donna's life is a wreck. Aunt Annabelle recently drowned and Donna's best friend Rachel has drifted away. To make matters worse, her single mom and high school--age sister can barely pay the bills, so it's up to Donna to do all the chores. When a voice in her head sounds like Aunt Annabelle giving her chore advice, the new neighbor pays her in gold for cleaning her house, and the weird kid at school turns out to have some common interests, things seem to be okay for a minute. Then Donna discovers the voice is a river dragon's, the gold is addictive, and the neighbor is a thunder mage who is turning everyone in the town into chickens. It takes the help of her new friend and the basketball team, along with the River Dragon to save her town, her house, and her family. Readers will root for quirky, charming Donna throughout, though they may wonder what she looks like (not described) and how old she is (her school has lockers and class periods, but also recess.) While there is a lot going on plot-wise, the story is woven together believably, though the chickens challenge suspension of disbelief more than the dragon, pixies, and thunder mage. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Katherine Applegate's Crenshaw who don't mind a bit of off-the-wall chicken magic.--Hillary Perelyubskiy, Los Angeles P.L.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Donna Landon grew up riverside near "a teeny little Maine town" with her white carpenter mother, older sister Janice, and beloved aunt Annabelle. But nine months after Annabelle drowns in a kayaking accident, Donna begins hearing Annabelle's voice in her head--or someone who sounds a lot like her ("The thing to do with anger is blow it out your nose and hope it hits somebody"). It's a comfort to the girl, whose mother is working three jobs to offset debt, and whose sister, now 16, has "nothing good to say" about Donna. Worse, Donna's best friend, Rachel, also white, has abandoned her for basketball teammates. Afraid she'll be sent to live with wealthier "Cousin Betty, plus her Evil Boy Twins," Donna jumps at the chance to clean peculiar new neighbor Vilma Bliksem's house, especially when Vilma pays in gold. But when Vilma reveals she's a thunder mage who's holding a grudge, Donna must step up to set things right. A dense emotional core, resonant voice, and themes of grief, shifting friendships, and family enliven Booraem's (Texting the Underworld) contemporary fantasy, reminding readers that "hope is everywhere." Ages 10--up. Agent: Kate Schafer Testerman, KT Literary. (Apr.)
Horn Book Review
In Booraem's (Small Persons with Wings, rev. 3/11; Texting the Underworld, rev. 7/13) latest fantasy, Donna's small family is grieving the death of her aunt, Annabelle, and struggling financially now that Annabelle is no longer there helping to support them. Donna takes an afterschool job as a housecleaner for Vilma Bliksem, an elderly new neighbor. But Vilma, it transpires, is a weather mage, and as her telepathic dragon companion reports, she has a nasty retaliatory streak. When she spitefully turns Donna's former best friend into a chicken, Donna mobilizes an eccentric classmate and half the girls' basketball team to change her back. The mix of the fantastical and the practical gives this light, quickly paced fantasy its vitality; dragon flights and magical gold coexist with tips from "Annabelle's Guide to Everyday Household Mechanics." On the serious side is a family on the verge of collapse and a girl who feels she's lost her best friend; on the whimsical, the magic of pixies and the suspenseful action of a hand-to-hand fight with a baleful thunder mage. Deirdre F. Baker March/April 2021 p.81(c) Copyright 2021. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The river near her home in Maine is central to everything real and magic in Donna's life. Donna is mourning the drowning death of her beloved aunt Annabelle, who was her mentor, guide, and inspiration. Now things are falling a there are huge bills to pay, and her mom is considering sending Donna to a hated relative for the summer. Donna's sister is nasty and hateful, and her best friend is drifting away. Dealing with all this is difficult enough, but an awful lot of strange things are happening. There is a voice in Donna's head that seems to be Annabelle's. Kids at school speak of pixies and ley lines. Vilma, an older woman who is a new neighbor, turns out to be an extremely powerful thunder ma Margily, a river dragon, carries her on thunder forays. The magic builds slowly at first, but the pace quickens with twists and turns galore. Enemies become friends, and new friends are recognized, especially previously despised classmate Hillyard. There is greed, danger, breathtaking adventure, and even humor and joy. Donna narrates her tale, voicing her feelings, reactions, and confusion. Readers will recognize her as a kindred spirit and root for her all the way to a satisfying conclusion. The book situates Whiteness as the default. A carefully constructed interweaving of reality and magic that will transport and delight. (Fantasy. 10-14) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Annabelle's Guide T he river is wide and calm in front of our house, like it never meant you any harm. But you hear the rapids all the time a quarter mile around the bend. Here's what those rapids are telling you: Do not mess with this river. Mim--that's what we call our mom--she wanted to move away from the river after what happened to Annabelle, but we never did it. Annabelle was Mim's big sister, always lived in Maine--about always lived with us--and she loved this river. We'd be leaving her behind if we ran away. The river being across the road is why Mim and my dad bought this house in the first place. When my dad left--just before I was born--Annabelle moved in to help out, and a few years later she and Mim started ripping stuff down and adding on and you should see it, it's amazing, everything built in like it's a boat. Annabelle carved fruits and vegetables and animals in the woodwork, and in surprise places like inside the bookshelf. You pull out Peterson's Field Guide to Birds and, whoa, there's a nest of sparrows . She painted the ceilings: a sunset in the living room, the constellation Ursa Major over my bed--that's the one with the Big Dipper, and it glows in the dark. Everywhere you look, there's Annabelle having a blast. On May 8, eight months after Annabelle drowned, I started hearing her voice in my head. I got a thirty-six in vocabulary that day, even though I tried real hard, and I was lying on my bed after school all miserable and sorry and listening to the rapids gurgle and sploosh , and I said right out loud, "Annabelle, where are you?" Because she used to help me study and when that didn't work we made brownies. I got this buzzy feeling and there was Annabelle's voice in my head, almost like it came out of the rapids, except it was sweet and smooth, calm like deep water. Here's what she said:Keep your tools sharp and oiled. Floss your teeth. Hello, Donna. "Annabelle," I whispered. "Is this you?" Of course it's me. Jeez'm, who else? I almost cried, except I didn't because I'd totally lose it once I got started. "I miss you. Where are you?" Never mind that. Feeling anxious? Rub lavender oil on your temples. That last thing was right out of Annabelle's Guide to Everyday Household Mechanics. It was a big blue loose-leaf notebook with 278 pages--except pages 115 to 118 were missing, which makes 274. Annabelle kept it in the kitchen, and it was full of recipes and instructions and advice, even poetry. I was into the Guide all the time now, trying to do chores Mim didn't have time for. So I was sure it was my own head talking. Man, I wanted that voice to be Annabelle. You're fine. You're smart. Not everybody's good at language arts. Which Annabelle used to tell me a lot, so those words would be in my head too. Never heard them from anybody else--Mim didn't talk about feelings too much and my big sister Janice . . . she had nothing good to say about me anymore. Everybody should have an Annabelle. She had bright blue eyes and white hair she got when she was thirty- five, and she was little and sturdy like Mim and me, and gave amazing hugs. She taught me rope knots and knitting and woodworking, also how to get calm by doing stuff with your hands, which is like Mim and now it's like me. Annabelle's voice started showing up every night to drift me asleep. "Annabelle," I whispered. "I'm going to pretend this is really you." Good plan. Losing Annabelle changed a lot of things. When she and Mim were kids, they had to move in with their rich cousin Betty's parents because their dad was let go from his job. Annabelle always said Cousin Betty made them feel small for being poor. After Annabelle died, Mim was in the same situation all over again because of the loans she and Annabelle took out so Mim could leave her desk job--she's a carpenter supervisor up to the university. They wanted to start their own carpentry business--well, Annabelle did, and she talked Mim into it. They bought tools and a shiny red truck, and I got to help them build a workshop out back. Mim was supposed to quit her job after Labor Day. But Annabelle died the end of August. Mim already remortgaged the house by then, and even with the extra work she took on there was no way to keep up with all the bills. She even dropped the insurance on the red truck, which meant we couldn't use it anymore So now Mim wanted to send me to live with Cousin Betty, plus her Evil Boy Twins. For the whole summer . At their ugly house in Southern Maine, on a pond full of leeches. Every video chat all winter, Cousin Betty kept saying I should come babysit the twins so she could concentrate on her mail-order bug spray business. Mim said sending your kids to live with relatives is what you do when times get tough. She liked to say she got strong when she was a kid because of Cousin Betty being so mean, and that's why she succeeded in a man's profession. She said Cousin Betty's grown out of her meanness, mostly. I didn't care. The one time I met Cousin Betty in person, Evil Boy Twin Andrew gave me chocolate that turned out to be Ex-Lax, plus I got a leech on me. I really needed to stay home. Okay, so I was hearing my dead aunt in my head. But then things got even weirder, because a lady named Vilma Bliksem moved into Mrs. Wittingham's house uphill from us. She was odd, we could tell from the start. Then she kept getting odder and odder until . . . Well, better start at the beginning. I found out about the new neighbor at breakfast, about a week after I started hearing Annabelle's voice. Janice was eating a thing of yogurt and Mim was packing up her briefcase and she said, "Dana at the store tells me the Wittingham kids rented their mom's house to some lady. Don't know her name." Mrs. Wittingham was old, and she died about a month after Annabelle. "Didn't even have a moving van," Janice said, because she's in high school and knows everything. "Dave Pelletier sold her a car. She didn't have one of those either." Janice had on blaze-orange lipstick to match her hair dye. She kept lapping her yogurt spoon real, real slow so Mim could see the stud in her tongue and get ooged out all over again. Janice is this amazing student but now she said she wasn't going to college because we couldn't afford it anyways and instead she was going to get a job and a whole bunch of tattoos. Janice is why we call our mother "Mim"--when she was little she said it instead of "Mom" and Annabelle thought it was awful cute, so it stuck. "Drat. Drat." Mim poked around in her briefcase, making a mess, panicking even, looking for something. "Bus pass is here." I opened the drawer where I put it after she got home Friday. "There it is. Thanks, Girlie-cue." Mim stuck the pass in her pocket, where it would probably get lost all over again. I didn't say anything even though it was only halfway through May and we couldn't afford two bus passes in one month. " Bus pass is here ," Janice said in a squeaky, Donna- mocking voice. "What a sad little person you are." I didn't understand why saving the bus pass made you a sad little person, but there was no talking to Janice when she was in that kind of a mood, which was pretty much every day since Annabelle died. Especially after Mim stopped paying our cell phone bills. Mim went to catch her bus. Janice left with her friend Michelle, who always drove her around before school and never offered me a ride even though their school is right behind mine. I took out the last pork chops to defrost so I could Shake 'n Bake them for supper. I never poisoned us even though Janice said it was only a matter of time. I went to get the new wooden knob I made for the silverware drawer. I wasn't supposed to touch the lathe without an adult standing there, but Annabelle drowned before she could finish teaching me and Mim never had time. So I was real careful. I put on short sleeves and wore the mask and tied my hair back and everything. Trustworthy--that used to be the main thing about me. But the knob was all wonky and didn't fit. I took it off and threw it in the woodstove and my eyes ached like I was a person who cried. Then, like every morning since Annabelle died, I went to her room off the kitchen to breathe in the lavender and look at her socks. Socks were Annabelle's trademark, along with saying "jeez'm," which not that many people do anymore except me and her. She wore socks with sandals when she could, and they had rainbows and ice-cream cones and stars and things. I gave her the rainbows. She had forty-seven different pairs and she organized them by color, so I knew there was one pair missing in the purple section and another in the green section. Drove me nuts wondering which was just missing and which was the one she wore the day she died. One cup olive oil, a quarter cup white vinegar, Annabelle whispered. Made me jump because she didn't usually talk to me in the daytime.Keeps wood furniture clean and shiny. Also, that sister of yours deserves to be horsewhipped. "Jeez'm, Annabelle." I never heard her say such a thing in my whole life. "I'm losing it," I muttered, slamming the sock drawer shut and booking it out of the room. All of a sudden it was late. I grabbed an elastic so my best friend Rachel could French braid my hair in homeroom, squeezed my feet into my stupid, too-tight shoes, and hustled for the hillside steps behind our house. They went up to Mrs. Wittingham's and we used them as a shortcut all the time. At the top, this little bird barreled out from under Mrs. Wittingham's pricker bushes and ran at me, cheeping like it had something important to say. When I went to step around it, it blocked my path, head cocked sideways so it could look me in the eye. Annabelle wrote about birds in the Guide, but I never saw one like this: brown and white like a sparrow, but with the beak all wrong and a brown sort of Elvis-y hairdo. "Look, little guy, I gotta go to school. I'm late." I faked to the left and ran to the right. It chased me a few steps, and I was so busy escaping I forgot the sidewalk upheaval in front of the house and fell splat and scraped my knee and got blood on my good tan shorts. Man, that stung. Somebody behind the front windows coughed out a laugh--the new lady, I thought, even though the curtains were closed, so I don't know how she saw. There was an old beater station wagon in the driveway. I sat on the sidewalk a minute, spitting on my finger and rubbing the scrape. Usually Rachel would be waiting for me but it was probably too late. Weirdly, the little bird hunkered down in the middle of the path next to me. What a bizarro bird.Always feed the birds,Annabelle whispered. And wash bloodstains in cold water. A spicy, swampy smell hung in the air like nothing I ever smelled before--sort of musty, almost pleasant, but not really. Why only almost pleasant? the Annabelle voice whispered.I think it's lovely . Except Annabelle hated weird smells. "Annabelle," I said. "You are starting to freak me out." Ah. My apologies. I'll do better. I waited a minute, rubbing my knee, but she never said another word. "You okay?" said a voice behind me. Chapter Two The Ley Line I looked up from my bloody knee and it was Hippie Hillyard, this kid from my class who wore a ponytail and a leather vest and scarves around his neck in all kinds of colors. Most everybody else wore shirts and jeans, and they were mostly scarf-free. Hillyard's mom homeschooled him up to last fall. About the third thing he said to us was TV rots your brain. In class, he was the one quiet kid in the room when everybody else was bouncing all over the place. Hillyard's mom is a biologist, and during our ecology unit he showed us how to measure the mercury and other bad stuff in our river. We can't even eat the fish anymore, at least not very often. Hillyard said everybody should care about the river. He said we're all made of water and the river's like a relative. One time I told him the river drowned Annabelle. He said no, the river doesn't drown people, it just does what it does and we do what we do and sometimes we get in each other's way. Interesting, I guess, but I didn't feel like talking to him for a while after. That was Hillyard for you. He made our ecology unit way more fun than anybody expected, but he still went around saying our brains were rotting so he didn't get any more popular. If Annabelle was alive I would've had to be nice to him because he had no friends, but after she died the kindness pretty much drained out of me. Anyways. Why Hillyard was on Upper Street Monday morning, I had no idea. I thought he lived on some farm someplace. "I'm fine," I said. My backpack was all spilled on the ground, including Florinda, the My Little Pony Annabelle gave me when I was eight. I kept her in a special pocket in my backpack because . . . I dunno. She was grimy. She had wings. I grabbed her and stuck her in her pocket before Hillyard could see. You'd think a person would keep walking and let another person get up and put her backpack on in peace, but no, he stood there waiting. When I got going, he walked with me, even though in my class girls and boys did not normally walk together, plus he was Hippie Hillyard. Usually I stop at this one place where you can see the river between the houses and, you know, say goodbye for the day, but I wasn't about to do that with somebody I hardly knew. So it was weird when he stopped instead. "You can get a last look at the river from here," he said. "You probably didn't know that." I didn't say anything. Sweet boy, Annabelle whispered.Be kind to him. If you wanted me to be kind to Hippie Hillyard, I thought, you shouldn't have died. My dear child. Is this what you've been feeling all this time? How horrible. It was pretty horrible, I had to admit. We started walking again. "You must be wondering why I wasn't in school Friday," Hillyard said. (Which I wasn't.) "We moved into the house on the corner." "The Grays' house?" I saw the moving van but I didn't know it was hippies. "Yup. My dad's going to use the shed for a workshop. He's starting his own carpentry business." Now I was the one who stopped walking. For months, I was waiting for Mim to start Annabelle's carpentry business all by herself and make a ton of money so I didn't have to go to Cousin Betty's. And now there'd be a carpenter in the neighborhood already. We might as well sell every one of those tools. I might as well start packing. Annabelle was deader than ever. Hillyard realized I wasn't moving. "What's up?" "Nothing." I hope his father hits his thumb with a hammer,Annabelle whispered. Definitely not a Guide to Everyday Household Mechanics comment--not much of an Annabelle comment at all, which was bizarre. On the other hand, someone who loved me was riding around in my head. Better than a stick in the eye, you know? All the way to Dave Pelletier's used car lot on the corner, Hillyard talked. He said his dad started other businesses in the past but this one was going to work and he was going to paint his room with leftover paint and it was going to be five colors, all swirly on the ceiling. "That'll be fine till you get the flu," I said. "Then it'll make you puke." I didn't see Mr. Pelletier anywhere and the car lot looked closed. Strange, because Mr. Pelletier was always there, with his Elvis hair and beige suit, waving his hands around so some poor person wouldn't notice what a bad car he was selling them. All the way up School Street Hillyard talked about how he didn't eat meat and how the pasta always stuck together at hot lunch. Tater Tots were his favorite. He stayed with me the whole way to my locker like we were besties. None of the other kids said anything, which was good because I never know what to say when somebody says something. As I unloaded my backpack in my locker, I realized something terrible: If Hippie Hillyard figured he could be friends with me, I was even less popular than I thought. I used to do okay as far as popularity. When Annabelle drowned right before school started, she was front-page news and everyone was real, real nice to me. But that wore off and something else changed. Stuff that used to be so interesting--the best online video, who could draw the ugliest zombie, how mean Amelda was on Witchery Girl --seemed stupid compared to real life. I wasn't up on Witchery Girl anyways because we stopped cable and didn't have Netflix or Hulu or anything. All I had to talk about was Shake 'n Bake pork chops or the many household uses for baking soda--even to Rachel. I tried to be normal, I swear, but finally I quit trying. Rachel was at her locker--last fall we made sure we were next to each other, like we've been since kindergarten. She was acting funny, not looking at me. All I could see was brown hair and a green barrette and one cheek that was blotchy red and white, like she was blushing. On the other side of her, Taylor and Mei Xing were laughing so hard they fell into their lockers. "Rachel," Taylor gasped, "remember this? Rachel. Look at me." I could tell Rachel didn't want to look for some reason, but she did and Taylor crossed her eyes and made these snorting noises and grunted something--"pig-breath," probably a line from some movie. She and Mei Xing cracked up big-time. Rachel's cheek got redder and she shot me a side glance. "What's going on?" I asked. Rachel and Mei Xing and Taylor and Sarah were forty-four percent of the girls' basketball B-team, so they hung out together a lot. "Nothing," Rachel said. "Hey, Taylor," yelled Jillie, who's not even in our class, for Pete's sake. "I slept all afternoon yesterday and I still went to bed right after supper." Then she grunted "pig-breath" like Taylor did. And I knew. I looked at Rachel. She finally looked back at me. "So . . ." I said. "There was a sleepover?" She looked like she swallowed a lump of squash. "Taylor texted last minute. I didn't know you weren't invited. Not till I got there." Of course it had to be Taylor. She showed up in our class four years ago--she's from away, meaning someplace other than Maine--and she tried to be Rachel's best friend, except that was already me. In the beginning she said I had big ears and was a math nerd, but Rachel didn't like that so she stopped. Now she said sneaky stuff like, "Donna, how come I don't have you in my contacts?" when she knew I didn't have a cell phone. She did that three times in, like, six months. Our school has quite a few people from away. Their parents work up to the university, same as Mim. Anna- belle used to say our ancestors were from away even if we were born here--except Sarah's because she and her mom are Mi'kmaq, which is pretty much the opposite of "from away." I wished Taylor wasn't so good at sports and eye makeup. She taught Rachel how to do a smoky eye, which I didn't even know there was such a thing. And now Rachel was on the B-team and I wasn't, because I can't dribble the ball without tripping over it. And I couldn't afford going to movies or anything, so sometimeswe went a whole weekend without seeing each other. If Rachel was still my best friend she would've called me up before the sleepover to find out what I was bringing for snacks. She could've used the landline. We still had that. "I'm pretty sure Taylor forgot about you," she said, like that made it better. "Because she couldn't, you know . . ." She got redder. "Text me. Right." I marched into homeroom like I didn't care, and about ran for the back row of desks so nobody would notice if I lost it a little. I didn't save a seat for Rachel so she could French braid my hair, which hung down like dead seaweed. Rachel sat with Mei Xing and did her hair instead, even though it's only shoulder- length. I was mad at Rachel, maybe. I swallowed it down. No, no, Annabelle whispered. The thing to do with anger is blow it out your nose and hope it hits somebody. Huh? As a pick-me-up, make a tea of peppermint and rosemary. This was getting way too peculiar. I couldn't remember Annabelle ever blowing anger out her nose. Backing away now, Annabelle whispered . At lunchtime, to prove nobody hurt my feelings, I made a point of sitting with Rachel and Mei Xing and even Taylor, who left an empty seat between us, which was cold if you want my opinion. She made her long, thick red hair hang down between us like a curtain. Hillyard came out of the lunch line and I absolutely did not make eye contact, but he went right for that empty seat between me and Taylor and plunked down his tray real fast, like he wanted to get it over with. Usually he ate at the hopeless table with Mr. Mansfield the custodian and some other nerdy kids. Rachel froze, a forkful of mac and cheese halfway to her mouth. "Good afternoon," Hillyard said. "Although strictly speaking it's still morning." Rachel put down her fork. "Did we invite you to sit with us?" Rachel says stuff other people only think. She and Taylor actually do have a lot in common. Hillyard concentrated real hard on opening up his milk container. "Nobody was sitting here." "This table is all girls," said Sarah, who likes to keep things orderly. She was sitting across from him, next to Rachel. He didn't look at her but his ears went red the way they always do if Sarah talks to him, I guess because she's cute. I don't know what would've happened next except Taylor blurted out something about some fantasy show with mythical beasts in it, and that got everybody arguing. Magic is this big, huge deal for Taylor, ever since second grade--she has a wand, and she knows, like, seventeen different dragon breeds. The rest of the B-team likes that stuff too except Rachel, who's more into reality. Sarah has this epic Lord of the Rings collection. Mei Xing draws merpeople all the time, probably because her mom's an ocean scientist. I had no clue what was going on in that show--no cable, remember? Hillyard and I sat there eating our mac and cheese like we were at the hopeless table. Even Rachel usually watched the show, but she wasn't up on that week's episode either--her parents were in Australia and her aunt Dana wouldn't let her watch TV on school nights. She knew the characters, though, so at least she could fake it. "No, no, NO!" Mei Xing yelled, cutting everybody else off. "It's because they call up earth energy when they get mad." Hillyard brightened up. "My uncle Patrick says there are these lines of energy all over the world, like a grid, and one line runs right through this town and it gives people mystical powers." Taylor rolled her eyes. "Duh. Everybody knows that. They're called ley lines." She looked at Hillyard anyways, like he might have something interesting to say for the second time in the whole year. "Actually, my dad says Uncle Patrick's an idiot," Hillyard said. "Dad says ley lines are made up." He thought about what to say next. "Uncle Patrick believes in ghosts. And pixies." "We all believe in pixies," Taylor said. "They flit past thecorner of your eye and when you look they're not there." "Don't you think that's sorta convenient?" Hillyard said. "That they're not there when you look?" "The house next door to me has ghosts or something," Sarah said, and of course Hillyard went all red again because she was looking at him with, like, her eyes. "It's empty again because people keep moving out. It's mystical energy from the ley line doing weird stuff, my dad says." "I bet Hillyard's dad thinks your dad's an idiot." Taylor picked up her tray. "I bet Hillyard thinks we're all idiots. I'm going outside. Coming, Rachel?" Hillyard opened up his mouth like he was going to say No, I don't think you're idiots but instead he said, "You didn't eat your green beans." Taylor blew air out her mouth and stomped off to the dish room. The others followed. Hillyard watched them go, slumped in his chair. "I promised my mom I'd try harder." I got up too. "Maybe you shouldn't bother." I swore to myself Hippie Hillyard was not dragging me down to his level. After I dropped off my tray he was still at the table, using his fork to make designs on his plate with leftover cheese . No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted, Annabelle murmured. That's from the Guide. Actually it's from Aesop, some Greek guy. What did he know. I went outside so I could hang around like a loser watching Rachel and Taylor shoot baskets. ς ς ς After school, I made it out the door without Hillyard. I had exactly fifteen dollars from Mim to spend at Johnson's Food Mart--enough to get eggs, bread, three bags of the kind of frozen corn Annabelle said they should feed to cattle, maybe peanut butter and cheese. I went by the cookie aisle and inhaled. We had dollar- store brownie mix at home but we were saving it for a special occasion. I went to cash out with Rachel's aunt Dana, who was tending the store while Rachel's parents were away. She beamed at me because I guess she didn't know about my sleepover shame. The checkout system wasn't working right--Aunt Dana swiped the guy's stuff ahead of me and the register said it cost, like, five hundred dollars. "Cussid ley line," she said, like she was joking, and the guy laughed, and she switched to the manual register. "Rachel's not here yet," she said when my turn came. Rachel bags after school. "Kid gets later every day. You're all so busy ." She yammered on, punching my stuff in, but I wasn't listening, watching the register. When she was done, it said sixteen dollars and thirty- four cents. I grabbed one bag of corn. "I'll take this back." The guy behind me in line groaned and Dana glared at him like he was a worm in some broccoli. "Don't take it back, dear," she said, but I was already elbowing past the guy and booking it for the frozen food section. I didn't look anybody in the eye when I got back and Dana just took my money because I guess she thought I was going to cry if she was nice to me. At home, I was putting the pork chops in the oven when Mim came in with a bag of groceries. "Uh, I went shopping too," I said. "I spent the fifteen dollars." She dropped her bag on the table. "I didn't have the cash with me, so I used credit." She rubbed her forehead like it hurt. "I got corn and eggs and peanut butter and bread." "Me too. Plus cheese." She nodded in a tired way, and slung a bag of corn in the freezer. "I'll go by tomorrow and see if they'll take my stuff back." The only thing Mim hates worse than having no money is somebody knowing about it. She slumped into a chair and looked out at the shop building under the maple tree. "Um," I said. "The Grays' house on the corner . . ." "Yeah. I heard, Girlie-cue. New carpentry business." She stood up and went for the living room door. "Changing my clothes." And she was gone. I was doing my math homework and I let supper cook too long, so the pork chops were tough and the frozen fries were dark and crunchy and the frozen corn was mush. I felt like a big failure in the taking-over-for- Annabelle department. Janice refused to eat the fries because they made her tongue stud hurt, so Mim erupted like Krakatoa the volcano about how stupid it was to get your tongue pierced. Janice stomped upstairs to her room without even putting her plate in the sink. Before Annabelle died, there was a glass paperweight on the table and you held it when it was your turn to talk about your day. The paperweight was over on the windowsill now, next to the easy chair where Annabelle used to knit. Why is Janice so unpleasant? "She wasn't always like this, you know," I said without thinking. Mim looked up from her mushy corn, which she was pushing around with her fork. "I do know." I was afraid I made her feel bad. "I mean, things are sort of different." Understatement of the century. Mim didn't say anything, just scraped her corn into the compost bin and put her plate in the sink. She sat down at her laptop to do data entry for an insurance company, which she started doing over the winter, which is why we still have internet. I loaded the dishwasher and went back to my homework. My room's off the kitchen, next to the downstairs bathroom, which is next to Annabelle's room, which is next to the TV room--all added on when Mim and Annabelle did the big renovation. Before the addition, Janice and I shared a room upstairs, but it's all hers now. When I was real little and she was in third or fourth grade, we'd get in her bed and she'd read to me and sometimes we fell asleep there, and in the morning I'd whisper, "Are you awake?" and she'd say, "Let's get cereal." I moved downstairs when I was six, so Annabelle wouldn't be alone down here. Janice snuck down every night for a week to crawl in bed with me till I got used to being by myself. My room, I gotta say, is amazing. The closet door has Annabelle's carving of The Wild Swans , this fairy tale she used to read to me. On the windowsill by my bed, she carved a dancing mouse with a hat and a cane. I see him first thing in the morning. His name is Herbert. That night, I sneaked ahead in my math workbook to cheer myself up, blew off language arts, and went to bed. Florinda was under my pillow, the Big Dipper glowing on my ceiling overhead. Like always, I traced Herbert's outline with my finger before I closed my eyes. Around midnight, something woke me up. Couldn't get back to sleep. Annabelle tried to relax me by talking about pouring baking soda, salt, and vinegar down a clogged sink, even though knowing that kind of information was exactly why I didn't have friends anymore. It's very satisfying unclogging a sink. I don't understand why nobody understands that. Those children at school should be fish bait, Annabelle whispered. "Jeez'm, Annabelle. That's harsh." A door slammed someplace, maybe at Mrs. Wittingham's.Ahhh, Annabelle murmured. I have to go now. There was this whump, whump noise, faint at first but pretty soon it was like a thousand eagles flying over your head. Joy, Annabelle whispered, which made no sense. I got up on my knees and threw open the window over my bed. That spicy, swampy smell wafted in at me. "Hello?" I called, though why I thought a thousand eagles would talk to me I can't tell you. Anyways, they didn't. "Okay," I whispered. "All right. Okay." As I lay down again, Annabelle said,Hearing things, Petunia. Go to sleep. Annabelle did call me Petunia sometimes. Excerpted from River Magic by Ellen Booraem All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.