Nem continued her schooling. Her clothes were nicer, and the kids began to accept her after Lacy left.

That’s what bothered her. Lacy.

She was the little catch behind their great fortune. Before this, she’d puzzled a lot on how the diary worked. She now thought of the book and its power as a game. Good for bad. Bad for good.

The person losing the luck suffered a misfortune, which transferred good luck to another, where things worked out just great. This trading wasn’t always equal and the timing not immediate either. Lacy gave her clues to the rules.

The girl had apologized to her on the last day of school. So she’d worried through summer about what she would discover when school started, especially considering their good fortune. Would she learn her classmate or someone in her family had died, or their house had burned to the ground or another terrible fate?

First day back after school break, she discovered Lacy was absent. Something had happened; Nem knew it in her bones. The diary always had an effect. As much as she’d tried to erase Lacy’s name, scribbling over the entry (it returned later the same), nothing worked. She couldn’t even tear out the page because magically the words returned on the next. Once you were in the book, what was to come became inescapable.

How could she be so sure it was the book taking control of people’s lives?

The ticktock feeling of cogs in her head as though she had connected to the diary’s magic. Each time she sensed them move like a clicking, pieces slipping into place as she traveled along a guided path. A foggy impression of who was wrong and right invaded her mind. Doctor Shepherd, the therapist, was one chosen by the book to punish. Shaded, terrible images came to her when they’d first met, making her skin crawl. His name appearing in the book, written in bold, determined strokes was no surprise.

So she expected Lacy to be absent from school and felt terrible at the thought her classmate had been punished for a simple argument. Whatever the effect might be, she prepared herself, ashamed she’d sent the luck thing after her friend.

“Where’s Lacy?” she said to Amy who was in one of the popular gangs.

“Sick. Bad.” The girl shook her head as if the idea was crazy.

Waves of panic traveled through Nem.

“What happened?”

“Some weird brain stuff, I think. She could be a veggie. Kind of freaky, right?”

* * *

For two days Nem tried to put Lacy’s fate out of her mind but she couldn’t sleep. She awoke from nightmares, her body wet with sweat. When this happened she’d check the diary, hoping the sick girl’s entry had changed. She even wrote her name again, with a plus sign and the words Lacy recovers from illness. But the sentence had disappeared by the next time.

Apparently, she wasn’t in complete control of who was chosen and what happened to them. What would help was if the power came with a rule book or lessons from somebody with experience. Like that would ever happen. For all she knew she was the only person in the world to possess such a power.