While Mr. Pagliacci busied himself assigning instruments, Kallie gathered her wits and approached Anna. “May I see that?”
Anna stopped playing. She smiled and handed Kallie the ocarina.
“This is a bone?” Kallie turned the piece over in her hands. “You’re sure?”
Anna nodded. “My great-great-grandfather was an archaeologist. He excavated it from a dig in southern China. It’s a real artifact.”
Tsars. Magicians. Archaeologists. Anna certainly had an interestingly eclectic family.
Kallie felt the weight of the ocarina. She ran her fingers along the rutted surface. It felt like the same material as the circular inlays on the box. The same material as the pieces she’d tossed. The pieces that had landed on the same pictures three times. They must be made of bone.
Kallie handed the instrument back to Anna, who took it gently and began to play softly once again. In her mind’s eye, Kallie drew three squares and in them she recalled each of the images.
An animal. A broken cup. And something strikingly similar to Anna’s ocarina …
A prickling sense of dread settled into Kallie’s stomach. Something strange was happening. Something that connected her to the box. And to the bones.
Kallie had less patience for Ms. Beausoleil’s class than the previous day. First, because the teacher wore a potato-sack-shaped dress made of gold lamé. Second, because it was last period on Friday and she desperately needed to get home to the box. She had to open it again. She had to stop whatever was happening and take back control.
To make matters worse, it was a double period, so she grudgingly cleared a space beside Pole at the rear of the class and sat cross-legged, trying not to make contact with any unhygienic pillows, while the other students took turns reading chapter after chapter of the ridiculous story. Talking beavers. People turned to stone. Utter nonsense.
To distract herself, Kallie continued to think about the pieces that had tumbled out of the box. She had an excellent memory for detail. She could visualize each one.
The first piece had a foxlike image. And then a strange white animal had appeared outside her bedroom. The second piece had a broken cup, and then Anna’s cup was smashed. The third piece—the one that looked like an egg with holes—was most decidedly an ocarina. It had to be. And then there was the music. The hollow melody that had come from the box … What could it all mean?
“Now,” said Ms. Beausoleil, taking the novel from Queenie. Together, they had managed several more chapters, passing the halfway point. “I have an assignment for you.”
The class groaned in unison.
“But it’s a long weekend,” whined Taylor.
“All the more time to spend on the assignment,” said Ms. Beausoleil.
Taylor flopped back into her pile of pillows and continued grumbling.
“But…” said Mathusha. “It’s Labor Day. Aren’t you supposed to get time off from work?”
“To earn time off from work you have to spend time on it. Good thing you have Saturday and Sunday to warrant that holiday Monday,” said Ms. Beausoleil.
Kallie wondered what sort of assignment the woman had come up with. She hoped it would not be some ridiculous imaginative adventure. Perhaps she’d be lucky, and it would be something she could handle, like a timeline of the events. Or a graph of the various creatures and how often they appeared in the story. With a little luck, a report on the improbability of the entire thing.
“You will be writing a letter,” said Ms. Beausoleil.
Kallie, who only realized in that moment she’d been holding her breath, exhaled. A letter. That might be okay. She could write a letter to the author explaining her disdain for his narrative. She could write a letter to the publisher complaining of the nonsense they’d published. She could write a letter to the principal, the school board, the parent council …
“You will be writing the letter from the viewpoint of one of the characters,” Ms. Beausoleil continued. “You may choose Lucy or Edmund.”
Another person’s viewpoint? Kallie could have guessed there’d be a catch to this letter-writing exercise.
“You will be writing to your mother, who is in London during World War II and who has sent you to live with your uncle and…”
Kallie raised her hand so sharply that had there been a balloon above her, it would have popped.
Ms. Beausoleil stopped midsentence. “Yes, Kaliope?”
“Kallie. Just Kallie.”
“Yes, Kallie.” The teacher corrected herself.
“Why?”
Ms. Beausoleil paused and smiled, waiting for Kallie to finish. When nothing more was added, she responded, “Why what?”
“Why do we have to write a letter as though we are one of the characters? I don’t understand the purpose.”
“Well…” said Ms. Beausoleil. “So you can learn to see things from another perspective … So you can demonstrate understanding of a character’s feelings, viewpoint, voice…”
“But I have my own voice and my own viewpoint, and that’s good enough for me.”
Pole nodded vigorously. “Me too.”
“Try the activity,” said Ms. Beausoleil, her words stretching out like gentle, encouraging arms. “Perhaps you’ll both discover something about yourselves you didn’t know.”
“I’m going to pick Edmund,” said Anna when the bell sounded. She tried to poke her way between Kallie and Pole, who formed a solid wall as they left the class.
“Edmund?” said Pole. “Wouldn’t it be easier for you to write as Lucy?”
Anna looked confused and annoyed. “Why would it?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Pole, blushing.
Kallie rolled her eyes.
“Because I’m a girl?” snapped Anna. “That’s pretty narrow-minded. Besides, a writer can become whomever they wish. I can be a boy. Or a girl. Or a moth. Or an alien trapped in a human body I’d invaded and then somehow gotten stuck in and left behind by my interstellar exploration mission—”
“Have a good weekend, Pole,” interrupted Kallie. She took several paces and then stopped. Without looking back, she added, with more feeling than she’d intended, “You too, Anna.” She marched straight to her locker and out the building.
“I don’t want to go to the lake today.”
Grandpa Jess appeared startled. “Why? Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said, not being entirely truthful.
“Are you sure? It’s a disruption to your schedule.”
Kallie hadn’t thought about her schedule all day. She became all the more convinced there was something wrong, something very wrong, but she tried to rationalize her feelings. “I have a lot of math and science homework. Plus an English assignment.”
Grandpa Jess eyed her for a judgmental moment and then shrugged. “You know best. Schoolwork comes first.”
As they walked, Grandpa Jess asked his usual questions, and Kallie responded absentmindedly, her thoughts drifting from the conversation to the box. She couldn’t tell Grandpa about the strange coincidences between the images and the happenings. After all, they were just coincidences, and he might think she was becoming imaginative. She shuddered at the idea.
Once home, Kallie ignored her snack and went straight to her room. The box was on her shelf where she’d left it. The side facing her had two stars atop the last quarter of the moon. This time, it looked like a large, toothy smile.
She sat at her desk, frowning at the box for the longest time before she reached for it. If she could open it and see the pieces again … If she could just hear the melody one more time, to be absolutely sure …
Getting out her notepad, Kallie looked up the moves she’d recorded. But when she tried to manipulate the circles, they wouldn’t budge, as though the mechanism had been broken. Or as though the box no longer wanted to be opened.
Kallie thought about the pictures on the bones once again. The jackal. The broken cup. The ocarina. She set the box down and pressed her memory. Next came a castle, a flaming cylinder, and then a coffin …
She looked up at the box. It continued to smile.