Cicada Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

from under her pillow and began to draw the summerhouse.
    As the lines curled from the tip of her pencil, Eloise’s thoughts looped and snarled and slowly grew clearer. What had happened to her? She’d seen something. She’d gone somewhere. She must have gone back in time. She’d seen the house and the garden, the pool and the summerhouse as they used to be in the olden days, when they were new and lived in and cared for; when a family lived there, a little girl, someone who played the cello by an open window, a mother and a father who gave their daughter the summerhouse to play in.
    Somehow time had jumped backward, and dragged her back with it like a wave sucking at a beach. Then it had rushed forward and dumped her back in her own time again. She had walked through some kind of invisible wall into the past.
    Eloise flipped to a clear page and smoothed it with her hand. Then she began to draw the face of the summerhouse girl: her big fierce eyes, her pointed chin, the small beaked nose. When the drawing was almost done, Eloise faltered; she stared at the picture. Then she scrambled off the bed and up the hall to the bathroom. She craned to see her own face in the mirrored cabinet.
    It was true: the summerhouse girl’s face looked like her own reflection. The same big eyes, the same beaky nose.
    Mum used to call Eloise my little owl . And it was a little owl’s face that Eloise had drawn in her sketchbook.
    Eloise stood there for a long time, watching her own face in the mirror, as if the reflected girl might tell her something important. But she didn’t say a word.
    Next morning, before it got too hot, Eloise slipped from the house and pedalled the old bike toward the church on the hill. Today she was prepared. She’d found the helmet in the garage, and a pump to harden the tyres. She wore bathers under her dress. A dress was more old-fashioned than shorts, more suitable. As well as her sketchpad and pencils, she’d packed apples and biscuits and a bottle of water. Luckily Mo seemed to live mostly on biscuits; the cupboard was full of them.
    She’d run into Mo in the kitchen and half-expected to be questioned about where she was going, but Mo had just looked her up and down, observing Eloise’s hat, the water bottle, the backpack. ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘You look ready for anything.’ Then she’d shuffled off to her study and closed the door.
    The house lay becalmed among the trees, mute and still. Eloise propped her bicycle (already she thought of it as her own) in the shade by the front steps and stood for a moment, listening. Her pulse raced.
    She couldn’t expect it to happen every time. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it to happen or not. And what was ‘it’ anyway? Time travel, magic, ghosts?
    Eloise walked slowly through the long grass. When she caught sight of the diving board, she closed her eyes and pictured the house as she’d seen it yesterday. She took one tentative step forward, then another. The dry grass crunched under her runners, and the sun was hot on the back of her neck.
    If she really wanted it, so badly it hurt in her chest, it wouldn’t happen. Things you wanted as badly as that never did. She had to pretend she didn’t care; she had to trick it into happening.
    One cicada began to shrill, then another and another. Eloise halted, her eyes still squeezed shut. It wasn’t going to work. She’d hoped too hard . . .
    Then the cicadas stopped.
    Every sound switched off. Eloise’s eyes flew open.
    The garden was crowded with green and splashed with flowers, the lawn cropped roughly underfoot, the pool brimming with liquid light. Music floated down the slope from the house; this time someone was playing a piano.
    And the girl was leaning out of the summerhouse, beckoning frantically to Eloise. ‘Quick, quick, they’ll see you!’
    Eloise ran, and the summerhouse girl pulled her inside. ‘They mustn’t see you,’ she said earnestly. ‘You’re my comfidential friend.’