Lila Blue Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoes. I picked it up and turned it over.
It was some kind of shell that weighed almost nothing.
    "Sneaker wave," Lila
said. "Ah. A perfect sand dollar. One of Grandmother Dragon's most mysterious,
fragile jewels."
    I held the pale disk on the palm of
my hand, and she pointed out a five-petal flower pattern.
    "The pattern corresponds to
little chambers inside the creature, the internal structure that gives it
shape." She took the shell and turned it over, pointing out the round hole
in the flat bottom. "Here's where it ingests and eliminates. When it's
alive, it's covered with fine green spikes that help it move along the bottom
of the ocean."
    She turned it back over and rested
it gently in my upturned palm again.
    "Are you a teacher?" I
asked her.
    "What?" she asked, and
then she shook her head. "No, sweetie. We're all teachers and all
students, all learning together."
    While I stared at the shell, Lila
cupped her hands around my cool face and kissed me on the forehead. I looked in
her eyes and saw for the first time they were exactly the same green as mine.
"My Jewel," she said. Then she turned me around and pointed me toward
the stairs. "Home."
    As we approached the stairs, the
two white cats I'd seen in the night emerged from the tall beach grass that
grew along the stone sea wall at the base of the cliff. They brushed against
Lila's ankles, and one even stood on its back legs and stretched its front paws
to her waist like a dog to get its ears scratched.
    The cats ignored me, which was
fine, because I had no idea what to do with them. Mom and I had always lived in
apartments that didn't allow pets, so while I had seen cats at my friends'
houses, I'd never gotten friendly with one. Besides, these weren't regular
cats. Something was weird about them. Their voices for one thing. They were
yowly and loud and had about a dozen distinct meows, a vivid vocabulary of
demanding sounds. Lila carried on a conversation with them like old friends,
which I guess they were. After she told them how beautiful and brave and smart
they were and petted them everywhere they demanded to be petted, they raced up
the stairs ahead of us.
    "Chloe and Zoe," Lila
said. "Twin sisters. They came to me in a dream, and we've been together
six years."
    "Are they normal?" I
asked. "They seem different."
    Lila laughed. "They’re
different all right. They're lilac point Siamese, which is why their eyes are
such a pale shade of blue and their points are so light."
    "I never had a pet," I
said, to let her know I wasn't going to be any good at bathing them or playing
catch with them or whatever people did to take care of animals.
    "Siamese are more like people
than some other pets," Lila said. "They'll warm up to you."
    I thought, right, but I might never
warm up to them.
     "Siamese are cautious."
Lila grinned at me. "Smart, like you."
    Before we went indoors, Lila rinsed
the sand off her feet from a faucet near the porch. Beach houses are different
from normal houses. The front yard is the ocean. The back yard, if there is
one, borders the street. Lila's entrances were on the sides of her house, the
south side being the kitchen door from the garage and the north side being the
main door into the living room. The big wooden porch outside the main door
served as part of the walkway from the street to the ocean. Three broad stairs
led up to the street level and three more led down to the stepping stone path
toward the beach stairs. The porch itself was big enough for a party. It had
sturdy railing everywhere so you couldn't step off into the scrubby vegetation
surrounding it.
    On the porch sat a large flat woven
basket full of pretty rocks, shells, and driftwood. There were no shells in it
like the one I had carefully slipped into my coat pocket though. Mine was
special.
    "Those are hereby your beach
shoes," Lila said, pointing to my sopping feet. "Let's rinse them
off. We'll get new ones for nonbeach."
    After I'd rinsed the sand off my
shoes and socks and