A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic by Papademetriou Lisa

Author:Papademetriou, Lisa [Papademetriou, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-22T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Kai

KAI STOOD IN FRONT of the closed door, unsure how to proceed. She had pressed the doorbell, but the way it dangled treacherously from a wire made her suspect that it wasn’t working. She had knocked, but perhaps not loudly enough. And she didn’t want to bang on the door, in case the doorbell was working and Doodle had heard the knocks, and maybe just hadn’t had time to answer the door yet.

There are a great many details that go into planning even the smallest thing, as Kai’s mother had taught her.

She had just decided to try knocking again, when she heard something—a rustling, scraping sound. It was coming from the side of the house.

Kai walked down the two concrete steps (one corner had fallen from the top step and lay, like a shark’s tooth, beneath the unevenly hung mailbox). Waist-high cornflowers, awkward on their leafy stems, clustered thickly against the edge of the house. Clumps of tall red-crowned bee balm punctuated a few clouds of black-eyed Susans. The grass was high and patchy, and the flowers seemed to have the run of the yard. They were wild, untamed things, planted without a plan. The result was colorful anarchy, a beautiful disaster.

When Kai rounded the corner, she found Doodle digging up a section of dirt beneath a bedroom window.

“What’s up?” Kai asked.

Doodle looked up, her eyes taking a moment to focus on Kai, as if they had been looking down into the hole at the bottom of her shovel, seeing a new world down there. (They had.) “Hey. Just digging.”

“What’s that?” Kai nodded at a flower that lay on its side in an exhausted heap near Doodle’s feet. The tiny flowers formed a purple cone, such a deep color that they looked like velvet.

“Butterfly bush,” Doodle replied, waving at a tall shrub farther along the vinyl siding. “We’ve got a white one.”

“That isn’t white,” Kai said. The bush was only partially white. More orange.

Doodle just lifted her eyebrows and walked over to the six-foot-tall bush. She gave it a shake, and the orange flowers lifted up, fluttering into a cloud and then dispersing. The bush was left with white blooms.

Kai cried out a single, incomprehensible syllable at the sight of all of those butterflies.

Doodle hushed her. “My dad’s asleep in there,” she said, motioning to the window.

“That’s your dad’s bedroom?” Kai asked.

“Yeah. He likes butterflies, too. I thought I’d plant this for him.”

A harsh, rasping cough rattled the window, and Doodle froze. She watched the window with large eyes as the coughing went on for twenty-three seconds. Finally, it stopped. When it had been silent for more than a minute, her eyes lost their frightened look. “He’s sick a lot,” she said finally, not looking at Kai. “Sometimes, it gets really bad. Then he can’t work. And when he can’t work, he doesn’t get paid.”

“What does he do?” Kai asked.

Doodle nudged the dirt with the edge of her sneaker. “He makes coffins.”

“Oh, right,” Kai said, and Doodle looked at her sharply.

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