Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

powers. He was having a lot of fun with it. Who wouldn’t?
    He was untroubled, which made him even more appealing.
    It was a time-sensitive spell, with a catch. He didn’t know that yet. Here was the deal: He had to somehow learn certain lessons, involving humility, compassion, respect, and independent thinking. Math and verbal skills would also be useful. Actually, these are the same lessons everyone has to learn, but part of the spell was a blinder effect that made it a lot more difficult.
    It could take five minutes or five years or forever. It wasn’t clear how it was supposed to happen. Probably through encountering certain significant persons, like maybe a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and a monk in a yellow robe. A white rabbit, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, and a walking deck of cards. Or it could be a lonely misfit, a shy girl and … a wrinkled crone bearing magic pieces of fruit? It could be almost any combination of people or events. The key was, something had to penetrate his golden aura and touch his soul.
    If he learned these lessons, he would get to keep some of the special powers, though they would matter less because he would have some new ones.
    If he didn’t learn them, he would remain a large, furry, willfully stupid animal.
    If he learned just some of them, he would be somewhere in between, but any would be better than none.
    The likelihood of any one result was completely unpredictable.
    In the meantime, he had to maintain a “C” average to stay on the team. It wasn’t that difficult. He wrote his name and the date at the top of the paper, all in capitals, with a sharp, slashing slant.
    The house was empty when Hector took out his guitar, and he left his bedroom door wide open. He opened the notebook on his desk to the back and flipped forward a few pages until he found his newest song. The new idea he was trying with this song was that, since he wasn’t good enough at finger picking to do it and sing at the same time, he was going to strum while he sang, and in between verses he would do the finger picking. Besides the fact that it was the only way he could do it so far, it seemed like that’s when people would notice it more, anyway.
    He thought the refrain of the song was really a good one. Basically, he just wanted to sing the refrain over and over, but he knew you had to break it up with some verses, so he was working on that.
    Here’s how the refrain went:

     
    It sounded so good he hoped someone hadn’t already written it—that could happen. How would you know?
    What was brilliant, Hector felt, was that the words said “fine, totally fine” and so on, but it had this minor-key sound so you were left thinking, well, is it fine, or maybe it isn’t?
    He didn’t have the verses, or a tune for the verses, yet, but he had a feeling about them. A bittersweet feeling. The verses should be about things that weren’t really fine at all, but—or maybe there should be a verse or two about things that really were fine.
    He couldn’t decide if it should be about social injustice or about the human condition or about love. Maybe all of them. Maybe one verse each. You could have the same reaction to each one. You could say the same words with different feelings:
    and it’s fine, totally fine, totally fine, all of the time.
    It could be dark, bitter, ironic.
    Or it could be light, joyful, carefree.
    Pick a feeling, you could feel it when you sang these words. It could be a song about …
    Something Hector had heard a day or so ago came back to him, unexpectedly. He had been in the grocery store, N.J.'s, the neighborhood one with wood floors where you could sign a charge sheet and they would send your parents a bill at the end of the month. A mother and her little girl were at the checkout in front of him. The little girl wanted to whisper something. Her mother leaned over and listened, then said to the cashier, “She’s excited because she has a new toy cash register at home.