Free Nightbird by Alice Hoffman Page B

were done in Brooklyn because it was Julia’s idea): Meet the culprit.
    In the meantime, we would help Agate and James and act as go-betweens. They had begun to write to eachother, like star-crossed lovers in an old book. Sometimes Julia gave me a letter from her sister to bring to James. Agate used old-fashioned notepaper, the kind I didn’t even think they made anymore, a creamy-white parchment. There was a gold bee imprinted on the back of the envelope. Other times I had a note from James for Julia to bring home to Agate. He used the lined paper and thin blue envelopes that I’d found in my mother’s desk. It turned out my mother had quite a lot of stationery and stamps, as if she was having a long correspondence with someone, not that I’d ever seen her writing to anyone, nor had she ever received any personal mail. It was all flyers and bills, and now the
Sidwell Herald
arrived every day.
    When I carried my brother’s messages for Agate, I could almost read what he wrote through the sealed envelopes, but not quite.
    Julia and I grinned at each other when we exchanged these love letters, but we also shivered, and not from dipping our toes in the ice-cold lake. We both had the feeling something could go terribly wrong. Wasn’t that what had happened to Agnes Early and my four-times-great-grandfather Lowell? First love that had been cursed?
    We planned to find out more about Agnes and Lowelland to catch the graffiti artist, but it was summer and we had so many other things to do, the kind of things you can only do when school is over and time stretches out before you. We rode our bikes everywhere and visited every ice cream stand in Sidwell—there were four—and decided on our favorite flavors. Julia’s was peppermint stick, and mine, of course, was apple cinnamon. On rainy afternoons, we sprawled out on the window seat in Julia’s room to read. I was in the middle of Andrew Lang’s
Red Book of Fairy Tales
and Julia had chosen the
Violet Book.
We found an old cookbook from 1900 in the pantry and on some days we took over the kitchen of Mourning Dove Cottage, making desserts that probably hadn’t been made in Sidwell in a hundred years: graham cracker muffins, banana trifle, orange meringue. We collected wildflowers and pressed them between sheets of waxed paper, and thought of the poet Emily Dickinson as we did so. We painted our nails in shades we chose because of their names: First Light (silvery pearl), Saturday Night (bright red), Picnic (minty green), Summer (a delicate blue that was the color of the sky in July was my personal favorite, even though anything blue made me think of the graffiti).
    One day when we were walking through town we found ourselves right in front of Hoverman’s HardwareStore. Julia and I looked at each other and we both said, “Spray paint” at the very same time. We were ready to take the first step on our list.
    When we went inside a little bell over the door jingled. Usually I thought it was a pretty sound, like a fairy flitting over our heads, but now I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Julia looked a little nervous as well. When you set out to find the answers to your questions, you have to be prepared to be surprised by what you discover.
    We went over to the paint section and looked around. I loved the names of the colors. Some of them were as good as our nail polish shades. Julia and I argued over which ones were the best: There was Ice Cream (I pictured vanilla, Julia said it might easily be strawberry) and Bananarama (pale yellow, of course—we both agreed on that) and Have a Heart (Red for love? Green for jealousy? We settled on pink for true love) and Butterfly (I voted for orange, like a monarch butterfly. Julia suggested pale green, like the wings of a cabbage moth). For a while I wandered off and got stuck in the blues: Aquamania, Seascape, Blue Moon, Blue Heron, Bluebell.
    Julia came to guide me away. “The spray paints aren’t here. I’ve looked everywhere.