Shadowmaker Read Free Page B

shone clear and golden, if anyone else could have seen it. But they didn’t, because I hugged my feelings to myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have.
    One day Mom sat with me, her eyes glittering with excitement, and explained that she wanted to take six months leave from her column and magazine writing andwrite a novel. She explained that while she was writing the novel there would be very little money coming in, and staying in Uncle Jim’s old beach house, on which she’d kept up the tax payments, would save our biggest expense—monthly rent.
    My words came out in a ragged croak. “But my dance lessons? The school musical?” My voice broke, and I couldn’t finish.
    “You’re talented in so many directions, Katie—dance too—and I know you enjoy your ballet lessons,” Mom said.
    The words zinged inside my head like a tennis ball gone crazy.
Enjoy my lessons? Enjoy? Couldn’t Mom understand that my love of dance was so much more than “enjoy”?
    No. Of course she couldn’t, and it was my fault, because my love of ballet was too private to share.
    I guessed that Mom was trying to read my face, because she looked sort of puzzled, then sad and vulnerable as she told me the plan for letting our apartment go and storing the furniture. “We won’t do it unless you agree, Katie,” she said. “I know it’s hard for you, or anybody else, to understand, but this story I want to write has been taking over my mind. Mentally, I’m inventing whole chunks of dialogue, and visualizing scenes, and living more with my imaginary characters than with the real people around me. The story has to come out. I
have
to write it.”
    Strangely enough, I did understand. Even though I was sure I’d never want to be a published writer, like Mom, I realized what she was trying to tell me. I keep a journal, and sometimes I just have to write down my thoughts andfeelings. It’s like an itch that starts in my brain and drives me crazy. I can’t ignore it.
    Mrs. Gantner taught us to keep journals when I was in eighth grade, and I’ll always be grateful that she did. She’d look through our journals, to make sure we were on the right track, but whatever we wrote was private, and she never talked about content, even to us. Once, I wrote my thoughts about ballet in a kind of poetry that pulled the music from my body and laid it out on the paper in the form of words. Mrs. Gantner told me my poem was good and she was glad I liked to experiment with word forms, so since then I wrote a lot of poetry in my journal. Maybe it was good, maybe not, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody had ever seen it except me.
    Mrs. Walgren, my English lit teacher at Kluney High, was also big on journals. She seemed pleased when I told her I’d been keeping one. I guess she didn’t want to have to explain all over again how to do it to the new student. She had asked us to turn in our journals over the weekend, so I brought mine Friday and added it to the stack.
    I was eager to get it back because I wanted to write about what had happened last night. It’s easy for me to sort out ideas, feelings, problems, and all that stuff by putting them into words on paper.
    I gobbled down a quick breakfast, grabbed my books, and walked along our road about three blocks to where it intersects with the main road into town. The dogs knew me pretty well by now, but they came running down the long slope from their houses, which were almost out of sight on the next road north, and leaped against their chain-linkfences, showing me, with a few halfhearted barks, that they were on constant duty.
    I took a few moments to talk to each dog, so I had to run the last few feet to catch the school bus.
    The bus was loaded with junior high boys—all loud mouths and big feet. I squirmed through them to the nearest empty seat and plopped down, out of balance as the bus took off. This was pickup truck country, and I doubted if there were more than two dozen kids in the entire high school who didn’t