Free The Rosemary Spell by Virginia Zimmerman Page A

decide what to do.”
    I push the pizza box to the floor and set the diary in its place. Unfold the page Constance’s hands remembered. There are the six lines of old-fashioned writing.
    â€œI can’t read it at all.” I squint at the loops and curls, faded to a thin gray shadow.
    â€œMe either. Is it the same handwriting as the list of herbs?” Adam asks.
    With the page unfolded, we can look at the poem and the list side by side. “Does the poem have those
f/s
things? I mean the
s
’s that look like
f
’s.”
    â€œYes!” Adam exclaims. “Look at the second line. There are a bunch of those
f
’s.
S
’s. Whatever.”
    â€œAnd look at the third line. That’s a capital
S,
I’m pretty sure, and it has that same loopiness as those ones. Look at
Sage.
”
    Adam pulls his graph paper from his pocket. “The person who wrote the list also wrote the poem.”
    â€œAnd that person might be Shakespeare,” I whimper.
    â€œMight be.” He stresses
might,
but he writes
Shakespeare
on his grid.
    I reach across him and add a question mark:
Shakespeare?
    â€œAnd Constance also wrote in the book, but she didn’t write the poem,” I say. “So it might have said
Diary of a Poet
before it was hers.”
    â€œOr before she was even a poet,” Adam adds.
    We shift around so that we’re lying on our stomachs with the book in front of us.
    It takes almost an hour to figure out just the first two lines of the poem, and then Adam has to go because it’s late and we have school tomorrow.
    We stand in the foyer, and I hold the graph paper while he bundles into his coat. I read what we’ve figured out so far, printed neatly on the right side of the paper, each letter poised precisely on the line.
    Â 
Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;
    For ears of fam’ly, friend, or willful foe.
    Â 
    Fam’ly
took us forever, and we had to look up
treble,
which means anything multiplied three times. Adam thought it had to do with music, which it does, but that’s a different meaning. Or maybe both meanings matter. If we’ve learned nothing else from Mr. Cates, it’s that words in poems often mean a bunch of things all at one time.
    With his coat zipped up and his hat pulled down over his forehead, Adam looks like a little kid. “Rosie, could you wait till tomorrow to figure out the rest of the poem?”
    â€œOf course!” I promise, in a gush of warmth for the little-kid Adam who’s part of thirteen-year-old Adam. Both of them, all the Adams I remember, are my best friends. “Maybe Shelby will be able to come too,” I suggest.
    â€œI’ll ask her,” he promises as he heads out into the night.

    Shelby doesn’t have rehearsal, and she doesn’t have plans with her friends, but we don’t get to work on the poem. Mom needs some super-special old book from the big used bookstore in Lionville, and Shelby and Adam and I always love going there, so we’re off on an unexpected excursion. In the car, we sing along to
Matilda
like we always used to, and I don’t mind that the poem has to wait. Mom and Shelby try to outsoprano each other, while Adam experiments with his new baritone, and I hang out happily in the middle.
    Eliot Books is the best kind of used bookstore. They always have what I’m looking for, as well as books I didn’t even know to look for but that seem to have been looking for me. The irregular piles of books leaning in unsteady towers all over the place promise surprises. One time Shelby found an old novel called
To the Island,
and it seemed like it had been written just for us.
    Mom heads to the back office to pick up the book she’s come to get, and Adam and Shelby and I stand just inside the front door, breathing in the musty, sweet smell of the old books. The same smell as the diary.
    The tall shelves form nooks. In some, the owners have put random