The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor
SPELL BOOK
of
LISTEN TAYLOR
(And the Secrets of the Family Zing)
Extracts from the Zing Garden Shed
PART 4 The First Few Weeks of Term
PART 5 Cassie's Birthday Party
PART 6 The Story of the Watercolor Painter
PART 7 The Last Few Weeks of the School Term
PART 8 Extracts from the Zing Garden Shed (Burnt Fragments)
PART 10 The Story of Professor Charles
PART 11 The First Six Weeks of the New Term
PART 12 The Story of Madame Blanchard
PART 13 The Story of the Trip to Ireland
PART 17 The Thursday aftter Next
PART 18 The Story of the First Trip to the Seaside
PART 19 The Story of Nikolai Valerio
PART 22 Lunchtime on a Saturday Two Weeks Later
PART 23 The Story of the Spell Book
PART 24 That Evening, in Cath Murphy's Apartment
PART 25 The Story of Monsieur Blanchard
PART 26 The Redwood Sports Carnival
PART 27 The Story of the Confectioner
Extracts from the Zing Garden Shed (Burnt Fragments)
I
MAGINE IF YOU DID NOT HAVE KNEES
!
W
HEN YOU WALK DOWNHILL, YOUR BODY'S NATURAL TENDENCY IS TO FALL FORWARD.
U
NCONSCIOUSLY, YOU BEND YOUR KNEES, CONTRACTING THE QUADRICEPS MUSCLES AS YOU DO.
T
HE KNEES PREVENT YOU FROM FALLING
.
N
OW, IMAGINE IF YOUR QUADRICEPS MUSCLES ARE SO WEAK THAT THEY CANNOT STOP YOUR KNEES FROM BENDING ONCE THEY START!
I
F THE KNEES DID NOT STOP BENDING, YOU WOULD FALL FLAT ON YOUR FACE
.
F
ALLS
C
REEK
I
NSTITUTE FOR
A
RTHROSCOPIC
S
URGERY
After midnight, the apartment waited, still in the moonlight and the heat. A moth touched its wing to the front porch light, and the apartment cleared its throat sharply.
Inside was a sleepy confusion of boxes, paint cans, sandpaper, buckets, and bananas. A wooden ladder, flat on its stomach, stretched the length of the hallway.
A young woman, perhaps twenty-eight years old, emerged from a bedroom at the end of the hall. She stepped over the rungs of the ladder, one careful rung at a time, and paused at the entrance to the living room. There was a crocus-shaped scar on her forehead.
The moonlight followed, intrigued, as the young woman drifted to the kitchen.
Next, a man stepped into the hallway. He wore boxer shorts and sleepy eyes. He too paused at the living room, but this was to yawn and stretch. The muscles in his arms and his chest seemed perfectly placed for this stretch. He disappeared into the kitchen.
When he emerged his arm was through the elbow of the woman, and he was speaking to her gently. “No, Marbie, there's no green turtle in the kitchen.”
The woman eyed him suspiciously.
“Okay?” he said. “Ready to go back to bed?” But she was looking past his face to the wall on the far side of the room.
“I can
not
believe it,” she murmured. “Again! How many nights is this?”
“What?” The man looked around uneasily. “Are you awake?”
“Watch your eyes, Nathaniel. I'll take care of this.” She marched across the room, muttering, “Little alien starships! Putting your elevator shafts on
our
â” She stopped as she reached the wall, and stared at its smooth surface.
“It was just hereâ” She turned back to Nathaniel, who was waiting patiently.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“Huh.”
“Are you awake now?”
“I was sleepwalking.”
“I know.”
They both stood still in the moonlight.
“It's hot, isn't it?” said the woman, after a moment. “I wonder if we shouldâ”
“It depends on whether Listen is awake,” agreed the man, peering into the hallway.
“Yes.” The woman raised her voice slightly. “I wonder if she
is
awake?”
“COULD SHE BE AWAKE?” boomed the man.
“I HOPE WE HAVEN'T WOKEN HER!” shouted the woman.
They both paused hopefully.
A twelve-year-old girl appeared in the hallway, blinking into the darkness.
“Oh no!” cried the woman. “We didn't wake you, did we, Listen?”
“Hot, isn't it?” said the girl.
“Exactly,” said the man.
A few moments later, all three walked out of the apartment, down
the driveway, and onto the street. They walked beneath the streetlights and the starry charcoal sky, their bare feet silent on the asphalt. The man slapped a mosquito on the woman's shoulder. The girl kicked her toe, hopped for a few steps, and then recovered completely.
Eventually, they passed a row of suburban houses, each with a small front lawn. One particular, inoffensive blond-brick house caused all three to crouch and scurry past.
Alongside this house was a hedge, a wrought-iron gate, and a sign:
BELLBIRD JUNIOR HIGH
To strive itself is to succeed.
Please Close the Gate.
The woman looked up and down the street, then nodded to the others. All three climbed over the gate.
On the dark front lawn of the school, they began to run. They ran through a courtyard and a parking lot. They ran across a basketball court and along the stone walls of the school buildings. Occasional security lights flickered.
At the back of the school was a sloping lawn, which fell into patches of long grass and tangled bush. A narrow dirt path wound through this bush and ended at a gate that, once again, they climbed.
They stood at the edge of a swimming pool. Across the pool was a bank of wooden benches; alongside the benches, several piles of yellow boards, each stamped in fluorescent white:
TRAINING DEVICE. DO NOT REMOVE
.
On an easel beside them:
BELLBIRD JUNIOR HIGH SWIMMING POOL RULES
- NO RUNNING
- NO JUMPING
- NO BOMBING
- NO SPLASHING
- NO SWIMMING WITHOUT TEACHER SUPERVISION (MEMBERS OF SENIOR SWIM TEAM EXCEPTED)
Without a word, all three dived in.
The woman in the pool was Marbie Zing. The man was her boyfriend, Nathaniel. The twelve-year-old girl, floating on her back and gazing at the stars, was Nathaniel's daughter, Listen. The three of them had just moved in together.
Listen Taylor sat on the floorboards by her bed. Her nightie had dried in the breeze on the walk home, but her hair spilled occasional water drops down her neck.
It was 3
A.M.
, but she was wide awake, and she was thinking about her name. “Listen Taylor,” she said, and then in its place she tried: “
Listen Zing.
” Only that was a question:
Listen Zing?
Because she was considering:
Am I now a Zing?
If you and your father move in with a Zing, go shopping with a Zing, paint the walls with a Zing, go swimming in the middle of the night with a Zing, go along with a Zing to Zing Family Secret Meetings each weekâdo you, eventually, become a Zing yourself?
Maybe.
To be fair, only her dad knew the Zing Family SecretâMarbie had told him a few months ago when they bought the apartment together. So only he went into the garden shed for the Zing Family Secret Meetings. Listen stayed in Grandma Zing's house and watched movies with little Cassie.
Also, and more importantly, the name
Listen
worked better with
Taylor.
The
Taylor
part relaxed the
Listen,
or gave it an approving tick. “What's your name?” “Listen Taylor.” “Oh. Okay. Well, hi.”
“What's your name?” “Listen Zing.” The stranger, already skating on
Listen,
would whack her head hard against the
Zing.
“It's
what
?”
You had to think about these things when you were about to begin Grade Seven.
Elementary school would start the year today, Mondayâthe Zings were excited about Cassie going into second gradeâbut Listen would go to an exclusive, private school, and it began the year on an exclusive, private day: Wednesday.
In just three days,
Listen thought,
it will all be different.
Of course, it was already different: She and her dad had moved out of the campervan and into an apartment with a Zing.
She sat up to look around at the boxes. It was not possible to open the boxes because they were so well taped you needed scissors or a knife to get through. Meanwhile, the scissors and knives were packaged up inside the boxes.
Listen wondered which box had her new school uniform inside. If they hadn't figured out how to unpack by Wednesday, her dad would have to write a note:
To whom it may concern:
We are very sorry but Listen Taylor will not be able to attend Grade 7 this year. Her uniform is stuck in a box.
Fondly,
Nathaniel Taylor
XXX
She was smiling sleepily at this idea when she noticed the book. It was sitting on top of a box.
It was a flimsy book, lime green with huge white letters on the cover:
SPELL BOOK.
It looked like one of those early school workbooks, in
which you have to do things like draw diagonal lines between
COLD
and
HOT
, or
BUSY
and
CALM
. But when she opened the first page of the book, that's not what it was at all.
Congratulations! You have found this Spell Book! Hooray for you!
Listen gave the book a skeptical look and noticed, when she did, way down at the bottom of the page, a disclaimer:
Disclaimer
This Spell Book will only work if you follow the instructions VERY CAREFULLY. For example, you may only turn a page when I say you can. If you skip ahead, it WILL NOT WORK. Right now, you have to put the book under your pillow. You can only turn the page on Wednesday, at 5
P.M.
At that moment, Listen jumped because Marbie Zing was knocking on her window. “Listen?” she called. “I think I'm asleep. Can you let me in?”