Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody

interesting green color shot through with rose streaks, and I wondered if it was her aura I was seeing and if other artists would have one like that, too. Then Luke woke up wanting to be fed, and I suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired.
    My last thought in bed before I dropped off was of the
Coastal Telegraph
journalist, the way he had suddenly looked over at me. I would once have dismissed it as coincidence, but it seemed to me that Gary Soloman might have felt my attention, like two fingers pushing lightly against the side of his head.
    * * *
    “Ah well, I guess that was my five minutes of fame,” Da said cheerfully over breakfast on Monday. He was still radiating a few sparks. He had said enough about the second gig for me to guess it had been even better than the first.
    As for the rest of us, we had jittered and reveled in his success all weekend, but Monday morning was Monday morning, and so we were pretty much back to normal.
    I looked out at the rain-washed pavement as we trundled out for school and thought how empty streets looked in the rain. We could have been the only people in the world. I suddenly felt melancholy. I thought it was probably because no matter how exciting the weekend had been, that was basically that.

As if we had made some sort of agreement, none of us mentioned Da’s gig at school. The funny thing was that I heard a couple of kids at the lockers talking about Urban Dingo being upstaged by a local band. That drove away the glum feeling that had come over me in the morning, and I started wondering how it would be for our family if Da’s band actually started getting regular work. Maybe even a recording contract.
    It was hard to imagine Da being famous, though, because like Jesse had said, Da didn’t care about fame. He thought it was stupid to care if a lot of people knew your name and face. But maybe I was wrong about Da not wanting that kind of success, because over the past few weeks my abilities had shown me something about him I hadn’t known before: Da worried a lot about money, no matter what he said about it being good for us to live on the edge. Whenever he got a bill in the mail, he gave off the ammonia smell, and sometimes he smelled of it when he was talking about not having a gig for a few days.
    Gilly hadn’t arrived by roll call, and I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to telling her about Da’s triumph. But she turned up halfway through third period and explained to Mr. Rackett that she had been to the dentist. He grunted in disbelief and told her to sit.
    “How come teachers always act like everything you tell them is a lie?” she whispered as she slid into the chair next to me.
    “They think everyone is trying to put something over on them,” I said, opening myself to her gentle sea smell.
    Mr. Rackett shot us a look, so we fell silent. After a while he turned to fiddle with the computer so he could show us more historical documents, and Gilly said softly, “I’ve heard a rumor about you.”
    “What did you hear?” I whispered, stepping up my number screen slightly.
    She leaned closer. “I heard that you can read people’s minds.”
    “OK, I confess. Who told you?”
    “Can’t you read my mind to find out?” she asked. Then she burst into soft laughter. I laughed, too, mostly out of relief that she had been joking. “But seriously,” she said, “Sylvia told me you’re possessed by a witch and that you’re trying to find other people for your witch friends to take over.”
    “Great,” I said dryly. “What comes next? Witch burnings?”
    Gilly shrugged. “It’s just that everyone’s noticed how you’ve changed since … well, you know.”
    I sighed and tried to look as though my heart was not doing a war dance. “Being asleep for a month kind of alters your perspective.”
    “I can imagine,” Gilly murmured. Mr. Rackett was cursing, which meant that any minute he would lose his temper and go stomping off to shout at someone in the