One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street Read Free

sweetest oranges grew. She sat cross-legged on the yoga mat in front of the perfect orange.
    And then she chanted, over and over:
    NOW, NOW
MAGIC
NOW
,
SHOW ME HOW,
MAGIC
NOW
. . .
    Ms. Snoops figured if she could just keep noticing the oranginess of the orange and its sharp perfume and its pockmarks and its almost perfect roundness, then she could hold on to her disappearing memory. Remembering the distant past was a cinch—and something she loved to do! Worrying about the future was pretty easy, too. Remembering the recent past was much trickier, and lately she just couldn’t seem to wrap her brain around lots of things happening right now.
    But her stomach began to growl, and, oh, that orange smelled good! So Ms. Snoops stopped what she was doing to eat it for breakfast, with a nice hunk of Gouda cheese.

ust around the time that car with the mysterious stranger pulled up under Ms. Snoops’s window, Ali discovered her name spelled out in nasturtium seeds in the empty lot. Sitting cross-legged in a sunny spot near the fence, she just happened to glance down near her left foot, and there it was. ALI .
    â€œManny, look!” she called out to Edgar’s nanny.
    Ali examined the seeds again. OK, maybe the “A” was a bit of a stretch, but the “L” and the “I” did seem to be perfectly formed.
    Manny was strapping Edgar into the orange tree’s swing. “What’s up?” he asked.
    â€œOh, nothing,” said Ali. She sighed. She was being silly. What’s the big deal about a bunch of straight lines? Any tidy squirrel or a particularly intelligent rat could have laid out the seeds like that. It was so hard to be a scientist when she kept hoping for miraculous things to happen.
    Then again, strange and interesting things did seem to happen in the empty lot. For instance, the amazing ideas. Of course, you could get ideas anywhere, but Ali’s best ones seemed to come to her in the empty lot. She had just had an amazing idea that morning, as a matter of fact, just before she discovered the nasturtium seeds. Ali couldn’t wait to announce it to her fellow members of the Girls With Long Hair Club. She hoped they would agree that it was a kind and generous idea, the sort of idea that made you feel like a kinder and more generous person just for coming up with it.
    But sometimes in the lot, someone would get an amazing idea, and soon after that, there would be an argument. Ali had some theories about why those two things would occur together. At that moment, she was considering two of them:
    (1) There was a surplus of invisible, buzzing orangey electrons that inspired ideas and created friction, especially in warmer weather.
    (2) Los Angeles was known as the City of Angels, and thelot was a hangout for a group of bored, invisible angels, who liked to inspire ideas
and
stir up trouble.
    The first theory sounded more scientific, but the second theory was more fun.
    â€œDid you ever have a great idea that arrived out of nowhere, as if, say, a little angel whispered something in your ear? Something you’d known all along, but didn’t know you knew?” she asked Manny.
    â€œLucky you,” he said, gently pushing Edgar in his swing. “I have to work hard for my ideas, and they’re not always so great.”
    Ali smiled at this, because in her opinion, Manny, as well as being politely modest, had very good ideas. His real name was Manuel but it had been so wonderful, so
fitting
when he’d said, “Hey, everybody, call me Manny the
Manny
!” Ali loved words, and she especially loved that words and names, like shoes, could
fit
.
    Manny could juggle and do magic tricks. He entertained children in hospitals where he called himself Magic Manny. His torn jeans came from Planet One, the coolest store ever. He knew umpteen unusual things to do with an orange, such as piercing it with his penknife, inserting a straw in the hole, then drinking the