Free Nightbird by Alice Hoffman Page A

for who he was. He seemed like he’d walked out of the pages of a fairy tale, a mythical creature who might carry her sister into the skies and never return.
    Julia rushed at him.
    “Leave my sister alone!”
    “We’re just sitting here,” James assured her. “Or we were.”
    Agate came between them. She looped her arms around Julia. “Please be on our side.” There were bright tears in her eyes. “We’ll have enough people who will be against us.”
    “So of course I am,” Julia told me as we sat whispering in the woods. “On their side, I mean.”
    And of course I was, too.
    Since we were now officially soul sisters, we vowed to keep their secret. Julia and I made a pact that we would do whatever we could to help James and Agate this summer. And that was how we sealed our friendship.
    With trust.

    After that, whenever I had free time and had finished my chores I sneaked away from the orchard. There was a heat wave, and the air was crackling as the temperature hovered around ninety-five. I usually met Julia at the shore of the bottomless lake she had blundered upon in the dark on the night she first saw James. The lake sat right between our properties. People called it Last Lake because it really was the last lake in Sidwell. All the others had dried up years ago during a heat wave that lasted all summer long, when there wasn’t a drop of rain. It was said that the fish in all those other lakes grew feet and walked across the meadows and ended up in Last Lake. There certainly were a lot of fish here. We lingered by the shore so we could see their silver and blue shadows flashing below the surface of the water. There were nearly as many frogs in the shallows, where lily pads floated. Some water lily flowers were white and some were yellow and some were the palest pink. Dragonflies darted above the water, their iridescent wings catching the glint of the sunlight.
    I couldn’t swim because of my cast, but I could still call out “Polo” every time Julia called out “Marco” as she splashed around in the water. Afterward we would lieout on the wooden dock that my grandfather had used for fishing. We read our books out there, and wore water lilies in our hair, and we talked about the future, when we would share an apartment in New York City.
    And then on one perfectly perfect day I saw it again. On a rock beside Last Lake.
    The blue graffiti.
    Julia hadn’t shown up yet, so I turned and did a headstand and there it was again. The face of an owl.

    Julia and I were meeting at the dock so early in the morning there wasn’t another soul around. It was the best time of the day. Even the frogs were still asleep. A few sparrows rustled in the bushes and doves were cooing nearby when Julia arrived. She spied the blue paint right away.
    “What is that?”
    We sat on the dock and I told Julia everything, how the blue monster was an owl turned upside down, how a very smart old gentleman had said it might not be what it appeared to be, how upset people were that someonewas stealing from houses and stores, leaving the mark of a monster all over town.
    “We have graffiti in Brooklyn and it’s no big deal. It’s part of New York. A lot of people think it’s art.”
    “Well, we don’t have it in Sidwell,” I said. “And this graffiti seems like it’s definitely a message, except I have no idea what it means.”
    “I’d guess someone’s playing a joke. Someone who’s seen too many scary movies and believes all that nonsense about the Sidwell Monster.”
    “If the thefts and graffiti don’t stop they’ll hunt down the monster. And if they find James, it’s all over. They’ll blame him for everything.”
    “We could protect him if we found the real culprit,” Julia suggested.
    It was a perfect idea. We immediately made a list of steps we should take:
    One: Check out the spray-paint section of the hardware store.
    Two: Talk to Dr. Shelton.
    Three (and this was a little scary, but maybe it was how things