Beautiful Redemption by Kami García, Margaret Stohl

best one. They’re renaming the Gatlin Cotillion to—wait for it—the Wiggle & Giggle.”
    We went through the rest of the paper, having about as good a time as two Sheers stuck in a small-town newspaper office could ask for. It was like a scrapbook of our life together,all glued onto a whole bunch of newsprint. The Kiwanis Club was getting ready for its annual pancake breakfast, where the pancakes were raw and liquid in the middle, the way my dad liked them best. Gardens of Eden had won Main Street Window of the Month, which it did pretty much every month, since there weren’t all that many windows on Main anymore.
    It only got better as we read on. A wild hen was roosting in the Santa’s sled that Mr. Asher had put up as part of his light-up lawn display, which was awesome, because the Ashers’ holiday displays were infamous. One year Mrs. Asher even put lipstick on Emily’s Baby Cuddles Jesus because she didn’t think his mouth showed up well enough in the dark. When my mom tried to ask her about it with a straight face, Mrs. Asher said, “You can’t just expect to shout hosannas and have everyone get the message, Lila. Lord have mercy, half the folks around here don’t even know what hosanna means.” When my mom pressed her further, it was obvious Mrs. Asher didn’t either. After that, she never invited us to her house again.
    The rest of it was the news you’d expect around here, the kind that never changed even when it always changed. Animal Control had picked up a lost cat; Bud Clayton had won the Carolina Duck-Calling Contest. The Summerville Pawnshop was running a special, Big B’s Vinyl Siding and Windows was shutting down, and the
Quik-Chik
Leadership Scholarship competition was heating up.
    Life goes on, I guess.
    Then I saw the page for the crossword puzzle and slid it toward me as quickly as I could. “There.”
    “You want to do the crossword puzzle?”
    “I don’t want to do it. I want to write one for Amma. If she saw it, she’d tell Lena.”
    My mom shook her head. “Even if you could manage to get the letters the way you want them on the page, Amma won’t see it. She doesn’t take the paper anymore. Not since you—left. She hasn’t touched one of her puzzles in months.”
    I winced. How could I have forgotten? Amma had said it herself while I was standing in the kitchen at Wate’s Landing.
    “What about a letter, then?”
    “I’ve tried it a hundred times, but it’s nearly impossible. You can only use what’s already on the page.” She studied the paper in front of us. “Actually, it might work because you can drag the letters around on the draft. See, how they’re laying it out on the table?”
    She was right. The way the puzzle worked, the letters were cut into a thousand tiles, like a Scrabble board. All I had to do was move the paper around.
    If I was even strong enough to do that.
    I looked at my mom, more determined than ever. “Then we’ll use the crossword, and I’ll make Lena see it.”
    Moving the letters into place was like digging up a rock from the Sisters’ garden, but my mom helped me. She shook her head as we stared at the page. “A crossword puzzle. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”
    I shrugged. “I’m just not very good at writing songs.”
    In its current state, the crossword was barely half-finished, but the staff around here probably wouldn’t mind too much if I helped them along. After all, it looked like the Sunday edition, the biggest day for
The Stars and Stripes
—at least for the crossword. Between the three of them, they’d probably be relieved that someone else had taken it on this week. I was surprised they didn’t have Amma in here writing the puzzles for them already.
    The only hard part would be getting Lena to take an interest in this puzzle at all.
    Eleven across.
    P. O. L. T. E. R. G. E. I. S. T.
    As in, apparition or phantasm. A spectral being. A spirit from another world. A ghost. The vaguest shadow of a person,