How to Ditch Your Fairy Read Free Page B

be gone already. But I can’t be sure and there’ve been no signs of a new one.
    I’ve read everything in the library about fairies, especialy anything that touches on the question of how to get rid of one, which hardly any of them do! Talking to Stupid- Pants Fiorenze’s parents was tempting. But al they’d have would be theories. That’s al anyone’s got— even the Fairy Studies experts—but there aren’t any that fit al the facts, and make sense, and can be proved.
    No one has ever seen a fairy. There are lots of fake photo sites, No one has ever seen a fairy. There are lots of fake photo sites, but, wel, they’re clearly fake. Or they’re so indistinct and smudgy it could be anything. Like Steffi said, some people don’t think it’s a fairy that makes sure that every car I’m in gets a parking spot.
    Some say they’re ghosts or some kind of spirit, and some people, like my dad and Steffi, don’t believe it’s anything but luck.
    My mom has many theories. She’s the one who figured out what my fairy was. I was stil a baby. She’d had to go into town every day for a week because she was giving evidence in a court case (she’s a microbiologist) and Brianna, who used to look after me back then, was sick, so Mom had to bring me in and hand me to the lawyer’s associate to mind while she was on the stand. Anyway, every single day I was with her she got a parking spot in front of the courthouse in the only spot without a parking meter. It didn’t matter how late she was running or whether it was raining or anything. The only time it didn’t work was when Dad took a day off work to mind me. Mom ended up having to park practicaly where we lived and catch a bus in.
    “Bingo!” she thought. “My daughter has a parking fairy.” After that she put it to the test and found parking spots outside the Opera House, in the ranges, and right near the NACG on the first day of the Milennium Test. Incontrovertible proof that her first child had a parking fairy.
    And the beginning of my life in cars. I’m always being borrowed by Mom, or one of her sisters, or her best friend, Jan, or Nana and Papa, or just about everyone in our neighborhood, whenever they’re going to the doctor’s, or grocery shopping, or anywhere that parking might be a problem. Every single day of my life someone asks me to get in their doxhead car.
    I hate cars. I hate drivers. I hate their little squeals of joy when they find a parking spot.
    But mostly I hate my benighted parking fairy.

CHAPTER 4
New Avalon the Brave
    Days walking: 60
    Demerits: 4
    Conversations with Steffi: 5
    Doos clothing acquired: 0
    I t was such a long walk home that I almost wished I’d accepted the lift from Rochele. Then a bus got caught at the lights. There was hardly any traffic. I could cross against the lights, and if I ran flat out I’d make it to the next stop in time to catch it.
    Two months of walking … I considered whether I was tired enough to give my fairy a sniff of parking possibilities.
    Nope. I was not going to give in.
    The lights changed and the bus zoomed away. I crossed the street at my own pace, walking by the basebal diamond, where littlies in uniform were doing catching drils and their coach was yeling encouragement. I walked past the bus stop and someone said Charlie in my ear. I dropped my lucky cricket bal.
    “Gotcha!” It was Steffi, grinning. Black curls bouncing around his face.
    I grinned back, wondering if it would be totaly weird if I reached out and touched one of his curls.
    He retrieved my bal, rubbed it on his shorts, though it was a long time since that bal had any shine, and then tossed it back to me.
    “Thanks,” I said, wishing I could think of something else to say, but al I could think of was his pulchiness.
    “Saw you from the bus, so I thought I’d surprise you. How’s it going?”
    “Not too horrendous,” I said, smiling. Especialy not now that Steffi was here walking beside me.
    “That sounds grim.”
    I