Write Before Your Eyes Read Free Page B

practically worn away a strip of the page and what she’d just written was gone. She blew away the bits of eraser, curled like pigs’ tails. “Dylan, you are such a dork. We possibly hold the future in our hands and all you can think about is Lindsay Jacobs.”
    “Come on, what can it hurt?”
    “Fine.” Gracie sighed, clicked her pen, and wrote:
    Dylan McWilliams kissed Lindsay Jacobs after school on Thursday on the love seat backstage in the auditorium.
    “Happy?” she said. Darkness was closing in, and she stood to head back.
    “Extremely.” Dylan became increasingly eloquent as they wandered down the path toward home. “You know, Gracie, this is an incredible opportunity. I mean, not just an opportunity for me to kiss a girl who’s way out of my league, but an opportunity for you, one of Shakespearean proportions. Will you be like Caesar, and carpe diem? Will you be like Hamlet, and allow tragedy to befall us all while you remain in an agonizing limbo of indecision? Will you be like Henry the Fourth, and hang around with miscreants like me and shirk your responsibilities to the future of the world until it’s almost too late?”
    Gracie pretended she knew all of those characters from Shakespeare, even though she didn’t. “You’re not a
miscreant.
What does that mean, anyway?”
    “Misfit. I’ll say misfit. I actually think I was born into the wrong century or the wrong universe or something.”
    “I know exactly what you mean!” she said. “Me too!”
    “Anyway, Gracie, you like to stay in the background. It won’t be easy for you to do this.” He stopped, put his finger on his chin, and did a quick spin to the left. It was one of his signature moves as Puck. “Hey, I could take the journal. My brain overflows with so many stories and ideas for world improvement on any given day that I don’t know whether I could get them all on paper.”
    In the gathering darkness, Gracie saw a gleam in Dylan’s eyes. She hugged the journal more tightly to her chest. “Um, maybe. I’ll let you know. But I want to keep it for a while.”
    Dylan nodded. “Actually, you know, in the Bible it says the meek shall inherit the earth.” He smiled and raised his arms up to the darkening heavens. “So, there you go.”
             
    Later, in bed, Gracie sat with the covers pulled high and her pen poised above the brittle page. So Dylan thought she was meek. That stung. Just to show him, she’d write something that would change the world.
    But not right away. She’d build up to that. She had thought and thought about what she wanted most to happen, and while it would be cool if an enormous chocolate bar fell from the sky, and while she really did want world peace, those things could wait.
    She’d start with something personal but still important. She clicked the pen and wrote:
Gracie’s dad got a job as a sports announcer, the job he wanted more than anything else in the world.

CHAPTER THREE
    Before she was fully awake, Gracie reached under her pillow and touched the blue journal to make sure it was still there. When her fingertips grazed the suede, she smiled in relief.
    She lay on her back and gazed around her room. Mom and Dad had helped her paint it the same sky blue as her room in their old house. This room was much smaller, but the sky blue helped it feel familiar. She’d rehung the famous art posters on one wall—
Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Vermeer, and
The Birth of Venus
by Botticelli—and the movie and rock ’n’ roll posters on two other walls. Finally, she’d re-created her Grace Slick wall.
    A couple of years ago she’d looked up her namesake, Grace Slick, on the Internet. In the 1960s, Slick had been the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane. She’d had a mane of jet-black hair, funky clothes, mesmerizing eyes, and a ringing, forceful voice. In an interview, Slick said when she was young she wanted to be a housewife and just happened to try out one weekend for a rock ’n’ roll band