The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell Read Online Free Page B

grinning from ear to ear.
    “Look,” Alex said, and pointed to a For Sale sign next to the oak tree. A bright red stripe with the word
Sold
had recently been added to it.
    “It sold,” Alex said, slowly shaking her head from side to side in disbelief. “It sold,” she repeated, not wanting it to be true.
    The little color in Conner’s round face drained, too. The twins stared at the house for a moment in silence, each not knowing what to say to the other.
    “We both knew it would happen
eventually
,” Conner said.
    “Then why do I feel so surprised?” Alex asked softly. “I guess it had been for sale for so long, I figured it was just… you know…
waiting for us
.”
    Conner saw tears begin to form in his sister’s eyes through the tears forming in his own.
    “Come on, Alex,” Conner said and kept walking. “Let’s go home.”
    She looked at the house for a second more and then followed him. This house was only one thing the Bailey family had recently lost….

    A year ago, just a few days before their eleventh birthday, Alex and Conner’s father died in a car accident on his way home from work. Mr. Bailey had owned a bookstore afew streets away named Bailey’s Books, but all it had taken was a few small streets for a big accident to happen.
    The twins and their mother had been anxiously waiting for him at the dinner table when they got the phone call telling them their father wouldn’t be joining them that night, or any night after that. He had never been late to dinner before, so as soon as the telephone rang, they all had known something was wrong.
    Alex and Conner could never forget the look on their mother’s face when she answered the phone—a look that told them, without saying a word, that their lives would never be the same. They had never seen their mother cry like she did that night.
    Everything had happened so fast after that. It was hard for the twins to remember what order it all had happened in.
    They remembered their mother making tons of phone calls and having to deal with a lot of paperwork. They remembered that their grandmother came to take care of them while their mother made all the funeral arrangements.
    They remembered holding their mother’s hands as they walked down the church aisle at the funeral. They remembered the white flowers and candles and all the sad expressions on everyone’s faces as they passed. They remembered all the food people sent. They remembered how sorry people told them they were.
    They didn’t remember their eleventh birthday, because no one did.
    The twins remembered how strong Grandma and Mom had stayed for them in the following months. They remembered their mother explaining to them why they had to sell the bookstore. They remembered that, eventually, their mother couldn’t afford their beautiful blue house anymore, and they’d had to move into a rental house a little way down the street.
    They remembered Grandma leaving them once they were settled into their new, smaller house. They remembered returning to school and how falsely normal everything appeared to be. But most of all, the twins remembered not understanding why any of it had to happen.
    A full year had passed, and the twins still didn’t understand it. People had told them it would get easier with time, but how much time were they talking about? The loss seemed to grow deeper each day without their dad. They missed him so much sometimes that they expected their sadness to swell out of their bodies.
    They missed his smile, they missed his laugh, and they missed his stories….
    Whenever Alex had had a particularly bad day at school, the first thing she would do when she got home was jump on her bike and pedal to her dad’s store. She would run through the front doors, find her dad, and say, “Daddy, I need to talk to you.”
    It didn’t matter if he was helping a customer or putting brand-new books on the shelves, Mr. Bailey would always stop what he was doing, take his daughter to