Rivals and Retribution by Shannon Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

she whispered, her eyes flashing. “Most of us don’t get what we really want.” Her head hung a moment, and when she looked at us next, her jaw was set and firm even in that soft-looking face of hers. “You can take some time away after Auntie comes and sees that you’ve learned your lessons. That you’re fit.”
    We nodded.
    “Now focus on her .”
    I gasped, seeing a woman in a jogging suit slumped in a nearby chair. A woman with blond hair hanging loose around her shoulders, and strong features that I’d come to recognize too well now. I knew her even without her signature ponytail.
    Wanda .
    About ten years ago.
    “Be gentle, but be firm. We don’t want to reduce every visitor to a drooling idiot like we accidentally did that Bible thumper. All you need to do is slip into her brain and find what she most wants to do in life.…”
    Our gaze focused on Wanda, and the skin of her forehead seemed to peel back and her skull unfolded and we were absorbed into her gray matter. In a moment we stood in the foyer of a dimly lit house.
    “Hurry, baby,” a voice oozed out of the woodwork of the hallway and spurred us forward.
    “Hurry, hurry—find the door.…”
    “It’s not here,” we hissed, spinning to again view all the doors lining an impossibly long hallway. A hallway that, the more we tried to look to see its end, to see where we had entered, the longer it stretched and the more doors popped into existence to fill the walls.
    “It is there. It has to be,” Mommy urged us. “You don’t have much time. She must have some defenses.”
    “Does she know it’s me?” we asked. “That I’m the one setting the trap?”
    “No—not at all. She just knows someone is. But it doesn’t matter what she knows or how she can adapt. You are better. Stronger. More able. Find the door. Open every one of them, if you must.”
    And we did. We raced down the hall, throwing doors open wide—doors to Wanda’s memories: her first kiss, her prom, her entrance exam for the academy …
    “Stop, stop!” Mommy shouted. “Too much too fast … She’s struggling. Look at the doors. Focus on your goal. You’ll see a sign. There’s always a sign.”
    We stood stock-still, spread our feet shoulder-width apart, and balled our hands into fists. Down the hall about halfway to forever the wall had distorted into a door that wobbled and glowed.
    “Got it!” we shouted as we rushed toward it and flung it open.
    We paused inside a tidy office space. Only as wide as we were with our arms stretched straight out at our sides, it was still a happy place with potted plants on the desk and a huge assortment of colorful books and pictures filling a few tall bookshelves.
    “Do you see her life’s desire?”
    We examined the area, running our fingers across the spines of books and watching their titles rearrange themselves, letters rippling and falling into unreadable jumbles at our touch and then straightening again, shaking themselves and climbing back into their proper order and place.
    “Is it temporary? What I’m doing?” Derek asked.
    “Only if you let it be,” Mommy answered. “But you can change a life forever if you just try.”
    “Forever,” we whispered, making our way beyond the bookshelf.
    On a wall hung a whiteboard.
    Words were carefully written in a dozen different colors of marker, each in friendly, bubbly handwriting. Kindness, Sharing, Love, Gentleness, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Friendship, Self-Esteem, Good Manners, Self-Worth, Science, Art, Social Studies, and Phys Ed were each in a circle with a line extending from it back to the largest bubble of them all, with two words written in neat, large script in the board’s center.
    TEACH KINDERGARTEN
    Our heart raced. “We’ve found it. There’s a whiteboard with her goal,” Derek said. “She wants to be a teacher.”
    Mommy laughed, and deep inside Derek, who was deep inside me, I shivered at the sound. “Well, that will never do,” she said.