Water Steps by A. LaFaye Read Free Book Online Page A

scrambling about in a nutty little scavenger hunt.
    I love how photographs are like windows into a piece of nature. And no matter how the seasons change
in the place you captured in that window, you can look inside that picture and see just what you saw when you first snapped the shot. It’s like you’ve stopped time. A bit of magic.
    But real magic, not foolish leprechauns and fairies and silkies and all those other made-up things Mem and Pep talked about. Little kid stories I outgrew in kindergarten. Now I made magic of my own with a little glass, a little paper, and a good flash.
    Whistling pulled me up short. I wanted to keep my tree fort private. A place just for me. The song being whistled didn’t have the hop and the jump of one of Pep’s tunes, and Mem’s not one for woods—too many snakes and bats about for her. What if it was one of Tylo’s rowdy brothers? They’d probably try to claim my fort. I had a serious need for some acorns myself, something I could pitch fast and hard to keep them away.
    Then I caught sight of the whistler through the trees. From the clam-combed hair, I realized it was Tylo. Eh, he could see my fort. Just as long as he didn’t tell his brothers about it. But to play it safe, I got down and headed out to the clearing to meet up with him.
    â€œHi there,” I said as he came closer.
    â€œHello.” He dragged his feet, a canvas bag snagging along behind him.

    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    â€œMy brother Trevor caught me stuffing my green beans in my pocket. Now I have to help him collect leaves for his science project. He has to get a gazillion of them before he goes back to school. Scratch that. I have to find them all. He’ll be at the beach all day.”
    Sibling blackmail. Now there’s one thing I’d never miss about not having a brother—
    That lie hit me like a bolt of lightning charging right down into my feet. I’d had a brother. An older brother who would’ve caught me planting my brussels sprouts in the fern by the back door.
    To let my brother Kenny know I would’ve done his science projects, carried his books, and even cleaned his nuclear disaster of a room—if it meant I could have him back—I decided to give Tylo a hand. After all, I knew my leaves.
    Pulling off a pine needle, I said, “Here’s a white pine to start things off.”
    â€œCool.” He rushed forward to grab the needles, popped them in a book in his bag, then rushed for a struggling maple. “Thanks for your help.”
    Felt good to help him, a faint hint of the kind of things I could’ve done with my own brother. And Tylo turned out to be a cool kid. Even if he did have a
fairy tale obsession with threes. He fancied himself a spelunker and promised to take me to see his favorite caves—all three of them. He had a comic book collection big enough to fill three bookcases. He even had three brothers and three loose teeth (thanks to his youngest brother, Ben, who tripped him into a rock).
    â€œIt’s okay, they’re all baby teeth.” He pushed them with his tongue. “Do you think I could get enough from the tooth fairy to buy that special night film you were talking about?”
    â€œYou mean your mom and dad? The tooth fairy isn’t real.”
    I knew the score on fairies. All the fairy stories of my childhood had sent me in search of those little critters. I’d found a book about them at school. Told me everything from the myths about the hill-living baby-stealers to those famous doctored-up photographs that had people in England believing those little woodland pixie types might actually be real. Yeah, right. About as real as Gaylen Parker’s sunset. Not only did that book show me how people could fix photographs, but it also taught me that all those magical, fantastic stories Mem and Pep had told me didn’t have a word of truth in them.
    Reading that book made me feel like