The Wishing Game(18)

Lucy looked at him, her heart breaking for the second time that day. It was true, though. Christopher wasn’t lying. He was used to being sad. Well, so was she.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the story. It is sad. But don’t worry. It has a happy ending.”



* * *



—

Christopher listened intently while Lucy told him the story she’d never told him before—the story of Angie, her sister.

Angie was sick all the time. They called her a PIDD kid, which basically meant Angie didn’t have much of an immune system. Lucy’s parents threw themselves into doing everything they could do for Angie. Lucy, their younger daughter, was healthy and didn’t need their attention, so she didn’t get any of it. And she didn’t get much of their love either.

“That’s sad,” Christopher interjected.

“I told you so.” Lucy kissed his forehead. He let her. She kept talking.

Young Lucy might have been destroyed by the lack of caring and tenderness she experienced in her family if it hadn’t been for Jack Masterson and his Clock Island books.

“I won’t tell you the whole long story about how I found the books,” Lucy said. “But let’s just say, they found me at the right time. Eight was a tough year for me. When I started reading those books, it got a lot better.”

Lucy had been in the waiting room at the children’s hospital, stuck there while her parents spent hours with her sister. She’d wanted to go back and see Angie, but she was too young. A sign on the ward said, No children under the age of 12 are allowed to visit the pediatrics ward. Lucy wasn’t even looking for a book to read. She’d been digging through a basket of used-up coloring books when she’d found it.

A thin paperback. On the back it listed the age range as nine to twelve. This wasn’t a book for babies. There weren’t pictures on every single page, just on some of them. And it didn’t look like a book just for boys either. No fire-breathing robots or pirates with swords. This book cover had a boy, but he was standing next to a girl. The boy and the girl looked about her age or a little older, maybe nine, maybe ten, and they both carried flashlights. They appeared to be creeping down a long shadowy hallway in a strange, spooky old house. The title of the book was The House on Clock Island. Lucy liked it immediately because the girl on the cover was leading with determination, and the boy was behind her, looking terrified. In other books, it was usually the opposite.

Curious, Lucy opened the book to a random page and read:

    Astrid didn’t like the rules. When her parents told her she had to wait an hour after eating to swim, she always jumped in after twenty minutes. And when she saw a sign that said No kids allowed! That means you, kid!, she walked right past it.



Lucy was hooked. A girl who broke the rules? A girl with a cool name like Astrid instead of a dumb old lady name like Lucy? If Astrid had been at the hospital, she would have found a way to sneak in and see her sister.

She wished Astrid was her real sister…

In Lucy’s mind, she erased little Max from the cover of the book and replaced him with herself. Now it was Lucy and Astrid on Clock Island together.

Hours after her parents left her alone, Lucy’s grandparents came and picked her up. She took the book with her.

“You stole it?” Christopher sounded more impressed than horrified.

“It seemed like something Astrid would do,” Lucy said. Christopher accepted that.

After that, nothing could get in the way of Lucy and her Clock Island books. She checked out everything the school library had. When her birthday came, she asked for nothing but money. When her grandmother took her to their local bookstore, Lucy bought every book there was in stock, even the ones she’d already read from the library. She even dressed up like Astrid for Halloween, wearing white clamdiggers, a nautical blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a white sailor hat. Nobody knew who she was, but she didn’t care. And when her fifth-grade teacher assigned them all the task of writing a letter to their favorite author, Lucy already had her writer picked out.

Jack Masterson. Easy enough. If you wanted to write him—or Master Mastermind—then all you had to do was write— “I know,” Christopher said. “You write ‘Clock Island,’ and the letter will go right there.”

“How did you know that?” Lucy asked.

He looked at her as if she were possibly the stupidest person alive.

“It’s in the back of the books,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Forgot.”

Lucy spent a whole week working on her letter to Mr. Masterson before working up the courage to give it to her teacher to put in the mail. The assignment said they were to tell the authors why they first read their books, why they liked the books so much, and then ask the authors one question. They were graded on their letter-writing abilities and not on the author’s response, thank goodness.

Mr. Masterson never wrote her back.

When she didn’t receive a reply after several months, Mrs. Lee told her not to be discouraged. Mr. Masterson was one of the biggest-selling authors in the world. His kids’ books sold more copies than those of many famous adult writers.

Lucy had been hurt but not heartbroken. She was used to love being a one-sided sort of thing. And really, at that age, she couldn’t quite conceive of Jack Masterson as a real person. He was a name on the cover of the books, and that was it. The thought of him living in a house and sleeping in a bed and eating cake or going to the bathroom seemed as crazy as Jesus doing all those things. Or Britney Spears.