Free A Box of Gargoyles by Anne Nesbet

House, where people trying to, um, avoid Fourcroy’s writing desk were definitely not supposed to be, and yet here they both were: Maya (climbing to her feet a little unsteadily because the breath had just been knocked right out of her) and Valko (looking rather shocked and surprised).
    â€œHey, I thought you were doing math,” said Maya.
    â€œGrandmother called from Bulgaria, so I was able to scamper,” said Valko.
    Maya frowned, remembering all the reasons she had to hate, hate, hate Bulgaria, but Valko was still chattering at her, his hand on her arm.
    â€œMaya! You went in there without me! Are you okay?”
    She considered that question. She didn’t feel extremely wonderful, that much she knew.
    â€œYou see how stuck we are?” she said. “Every time we turn around, we’re doing what he told us to do in that letter. Even when we think we’re doing something different. It’s awful. I don’t want to be on a clockwork path.”
    â€œWhat? A what?”
    â€œA clockwork path ,” said Maya, with more bitterness. “Ticktock. Like the whole universe is dominoes falling over, or something. I hate being a domino. You said a letter couldn’t boss us around!”
    â€œOh,” said Valko, and his eyes lit up a little, as they did whenever the conversation veered into ideas he particularly liked chewing over. “But. Well. I mean, a letter can’t make you do anything, all right, but as far as dominoes go . . . The world really is sort of like that, right? Everything’s caused by something. Billions and billions and billions of little dominoes, falling all the time. Don’t you think about that, sometimes—you know, when you’re about to open your mouth and say something? Don’t you kind of wonder what it is the dominoes are going to make you say?”
    Maya looked at him. What? Wonder what the dominoes were going to make you say?
    â€œNope,” she said.
    But the word felt strange in her mouth, all of a sudden—sort of rectangular and full of extra corners and—well, to tell the truth, ever so slightly like . . . a domino.

  5  
MISCHIEF NIGHT
    L ater that day Maya sat at the dining-room table with an open notebook in front of her and a pen in her hand. Her hand had more or less stopped in its tracks, and it was all Valko’s fault. Billions of dominoes everywhere! So what did that mean? It was already fixed in stone somehow, what word she was about to write? If she paid careful, careful attention, could she catch that particular domino before it fell? Could she figure out what her brain and hand meant to write—and then do something completely different? Or would the different thing just be the domino falling, all over again? Her eyes had glued themselves to the tip of her ballpoint pen, and now they refused to budge.
    She had sat there over her notebook, completely frozen, for a few minutes already, when she noticed her parents had stopped working on their jigsaw puzzle at the other end of the table and were now both staring at her in amused concern (or possibly just plain amusement; hard to tell).
    â€œMaya, dear, are you stuck?” said her mother, who probably thought Maya was trying to do a bit of extra homework over vacation.
    â€œYes,” said Maya in relief. “I can’t figure out whether I can write anything surprising or if every time I write a word, a gazillion little dominoes have already decided what that word is going to be.”
    â€œOh!” said her parents, and (freaking Maya out a bit) they gave each other particularly warm and loving smiles, as if the topic of little dominoes were for some reason near and dear to their hearts.
    â€œDeterminism! Physics! The great machine!” said her father to her mother, the way other people’s parents might mention the national parks they visited on their honeymoon, and her mother laughed and patted him on the