Table of Contents
THE AUTHOR WILL DONATE A PORTION OF THE PROCEEDS FROM THE PAPERBACK EDITION OF ...
MORE BOOKS FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS
THE MILKWEED EDITIONS EDITOR’S CIRCLE
Also by A. LaFaye
The Year of the Sawdust Man Nissa’s Place Edith Shay The Strength of Saints Dad, In Spirit Worth Up River Stella Stands Alone Strawberry Hill
To every kid who faces a fear
and finds a little magic
Thanks to everyone at Milkweed Editions for bringing this book out into the world, to my students at Plattsburgh State University who shared the magic of the lake, and to God for providing the inspiration for this novel.
AIR
Any old dummy can take a digital photograph. But how many kids can take a real old-fashioned shutter shot of a purple hairstreak butterfly in flight? Not too many. That’s how I earned a red ribbon at the Cortland County Fair last year. I could’ve taken the first place blue if it weren’t for Gaylen Parker, the girl with gigabytes for brains.
She had to enter with her digitally muckety-mucked picture of a Pocono Mountains sunset. No way does nature paint with that kind of a brush, but computers sure do. She can swear to fifty thousand judges that she didn’t fix-up that photograph, but I’m not going to buy it. Thanks to her cheating, pixel tweaking pinkies, I lost the blue.
“Too bad you can’t get her to spit in water, Kyna,” Pep told me the morning after the fair. He’s always coming up with these wacky Irish traditions no one but the leprechauns have heard of.
“What good would that do?” I asked, helping him set the table for breakfast.
He paused, cocked his eyebrows, then said, “Well, some folks say if a liar spits in water it doesn’t float.”
“Did you pick that up from one of your fairy friends?” I asked. I needed a real solution to my problem, not fairy dust.
“How many times do I have tell you? Fairies aren’t friendly.
