Teaser Tuesday

Snippet from THE BOY WHO STOLE MY HEART CAR.

Rachel was back, and she looked peeved. Presumably Samuel hadn’t been visible through any of the windows she could get at. But instead of giving up and heading back to the car, she was gearing up for round two, which seemed to involve climbing Samuel’s tree to scope out the upper story.

As we watched, she leaped for one of the lower branches, caught hold, and started scrabbling up the trunk so she could hook her legs over the branch as well. A minute later, she was hidden from sight by the foliage. All we could see were shaking leaves as she clambered from one branch to the next. Finally, near the top where the leaves and branches thinned, we saw her. She hung onto the trunk and perched on a branch that was as good a vantage point as she was going to get.

“Can she even see inside?” Jay asked.

The answer, apparently, was no, because he had no sooner voiced the question than she started edging away from the trunk and towards the house. It was slow going, and a good thing she and I had not traded clothes again because scooting along a branch like that would likely have been very unpleasant in a skirt. As she made her way outwards, the branch started to droop under her weight, and wiggle, and wobble. When she had to lie down and cling with both her arms and legs I started to worry that the tree was better suited for kindling than climbing.

“Does that look safe to you?” I asked.

Before he could answer, there was a resounding snap and Rachel’s branch parted company with the rest of the tree.

Rachel screamed, Jay and I launched ourselves out of the car, and when I tried to go bounding across the road, I discovered I had shut my skirt in the car door. And, better yet, the door was locked, the keys were still in the ignition, and Jay was already on Samuel’s front lawn and really too busy trying to prevent Rachel from breaking her neck to be bothered with something as trivial as detaching me from a car.

Dangling from another lower, but thinner branch, Rachel got her senses back and started screaming, “Help! Help! Curse you, Isaac Newton! Why couldn’t we live on the moon? He-e-e-elp!”

Speaking of this book, I should really be sending out more queries...