Write Before Your Eyes Read Free

the back of her neck into her scalp. How could that be? Surely she was imagining it.
    Swiftly, Gracie clicked her pen and wrote:
    Dylan rounded the bend beside the weeping willow, his hands in the pockets of his baggy khaki shorts.
    She took a breath and looked up. And there was Dylan’s gangly frame coming up the path, wearing his usual wrinkled khaki shorts. And smiling, with his hands in his pockets.
    She swallowed, and reminded herself:
But I’ve been waiting for him. We’d planned to meet.
    “Hi!” Dylan’s eyes were like almonds, light brown and set in his face at a mischievous slant. They were eyes an elf might have. He’d played Puck in the community theater production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
last summer, and everyone said he’d been perfectly cast.
    “Guess what,” they both said at once.
    “You first,” said Gracie.
    “That’s okay. You go,” said Dylan.
    “No, you.”
    “Well, okay. You’ll never believe who called me,” Dylan said.
    Dylan and Gracie had become friends two years ago at a neighborhood Fourth of July party. Just a few weeks earlier, after his parents’ divorce, Dylan and his dad had moved into what everybody called “the mansion” at the end of the road. That day Dylan and Gracie had figured out that, embarrassingly, they had both been named for sixties musicians—Bob Dylan and Grace Slick.
    “I give. Who called you?” Gracie got up, dusting bits of moss from her shorts, and they headed down the path toward Reynolda Gardens.
    “Lindsay Jacobs.”
    “Lindsay Jacobs? Who’s she?”
    “She’s a ravishing girl in my social studies class. She looks like my idea of Scheherazade. Fantastic cheekbones, dark silky curls. I could easily be smitten.” Dylan nearly danced down the path. Everyone at school said that Dylan was a genius. When he and Gracie passed under a low-hanging oak branch, he leaped up and tried to smack a leaf with the tips of his fingers. “
And
she’s one of six people in the entire school who are shorter than me.”
    “What did she want?” Gracie thought about the fact that she herself was shorter than Dylan but didn’t mention it.
    “My notes.”
    Gracie started laughing. “Oh. So she’s using you for your brains.”
    “Yes, this is true. Use me, use me, I say. Things could change in a heartbeat. In the twinkling of an eye.”
    Gracie laughed again, thinking how true that was. And the moment was there. She was exploding to tell him. Somehow it didn’t even seem as though something was totally true until she’d told Dylan. Dylan bent and picked up an acorn, and as he walked he tossed it from one hand to the other. He absolutely could not stay still.
    “Okay, my turn. Dylan, something amazing happened.” Gracie hesitated. Would he think she was a total nutcase? “I got this journal from a yard sale at one of the houses across the golf course.” She held it up, smoothing the suede on the front so that the nap lay in the same direction. “You’re going to think this is crazy, but I am absolutely not making this up. When I write something in this journal, what I write comes true.”
    Dylan stopped, tore a leaf in half, and stared at her. “What?”
    “Everything I’ve written in here so far has come true.”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “No, look.” Gracie opened the journal and showed him what she’d written. “The minute I wrote that sentence about the squirrel, one came and sat on the branch next to me. And the same with the acorn. And I wrote that sentence about my Mom’s BlackBerry, and it rang, even though it was turned off! Then I wrote about you, and a second later, you showed up.”
    They’d reached Reynolda Village, a barn and stables on an old estate that had been turned into exclusive shops. The quaint green-roofed stores were all closed now, and the shadows lengthened as the mid-September sun sank lower in the darkening sky. Dylan and Gracie sat on a bench, and Dylan examined the journal, scratching his head. The thin pages