Free Believe: The Complete Channie Series by Charlotte Abel

him.
    “It’s getting late. I gotta go. I’ll see you at school, tomorrow.” She kicked off and headed for the house with Josh’s gaze boring into her back, right between her shoulder blades.

    Channie opened the front door and dropped her backpack on the linoleum floor in the entryway. Momma and Daddy must have hit the flea-market—or the local junkyard—while she was at school. The ratty old sofa they’d brought from home was the nicest thing in the room. Momma’s homemade incense, smoldering in every corner of the parlor could not mask the foreign smell of other people’s lives.
    Channie gripped the wall and leaned around the corner to get a peek at the dining room and cringed. Centered under the crystal chandelier that came with the house was a picnic table, just like the ones at Heritage Park next door. She’d been so distracted by Josh that she wouldn’t have noticed whether or not one was missing.
    Momma fanned smoke out the window while Daddy sat behind a stained formica table on a decrepit old chair with bent chrome legs. Tufts of off-white batting peeked out along the edges of the cracked vinyl. He was busy fiddling with some sort of electronic gadgetry and didn’t even look up when Channie pulled out a chair and sat down beside him.
    “Hey baby girl, how was school?”
    “Fine. Where’d the new dining room table come from?”
    Daddy didn’t answer, but Channie hadn’t really expected him to admit he’d stolen it. He held the gadget up and lifted his gaze to Channie’s face. “You didn’t happen to learn anything about these little thing-a-m’bobs at that fancy-pants school of yours, did you?”
    Channie sighed. Daddy had never gone to a regular school. Everything he knew, he'd either learned on his own, or picked up from other mages. He didn’t have much use for schools. She said, “If you want, I can take it with me tomorrow and ask one of my teachers. I’m sure at least one of them will know what it is and how to fix it.”
    “Nah, that’s okay. I’ll get ‘er figured out—one way or another.”
    Momma snorted and quit fanning the smoke long enough to turn around and yell at Daddy. “Next time maybe you’ll stop and think before you go and yank something plum out of the ceiling before you even know what it is.”
    “Well, if you’d pay attention to what you’re doing, maybe you wouldn’t set the kitchen on fire every blamed time you turn on the stove.”
    Abby leaned over the railing and shouted, “Can y’all keep it down? We’re trying to sleep up here!”
    Momma and Daddy kept arguing, but they dropped their voices to a whisper. Channie decided to leave before Momma and Daddy started throwing curses at each other. She slipped out of the kitchen, grabbed her backpack off the entryway floor and crept upstairs.
    As soon as she opened the door to her room, Channie’s heart sank. Her bedroom furniture all matched—which was a miracle—but it was hideous. She might have liked the ornately carved white furniture with its metallic gold trim five years ago. But even then, she would have hated the frilly pink canopy over the bed. She’d never been a lace and ruffles sort of girl.
    Momma and Daddy were still whisper-yelling at each other when Channie snuck back downstairs to get a screwdriver out of Daddy’s tool chest in the garage.
    It took her less than fifteen minutes to remove and disassemble the wire frame that held the canopy. She piled everything in the back of her closet and shut the door. The whole room looked better. Maybe she could talk Momma into buying a small can of blue paint with some of her grocery money. If Channie could paint over the gold trim with a nice dark blue, she’d actually like her new furniture. Her favorite color was red, why did she want blue paint? Channie tried, and failed, to convince herself it had nothing to do with the color of Joshua Abrim's eyes.

    A little past midnight, the sound of weeping woke Channie from a deep sleep.
    She crept