The Books of Magic #1: The Invitation

Chapter One

What is the point of all this gross national product nonsense? What's it to me what the leading export of Chile is? There are some things I'd like to export to Chile, like Bobby Saunders for starters, but nobody's asking me, are they? No one ever does.

Does school have to be so boring? Is it a council requirement? There must be something vaguely interesting lurking inside all those books. Someone was interested enough to write them. Molly is bored too, I can tell from the way she's swirling her pencil around?she must be doodling in the margins of her notes, like she always does. Why can't we ever learn anything interesting, answers to the really important questions, like why things are so bloody random, or how is it decided who is born poor and who's born rich? And why are the wrong people always in charge? But school's no place to ask such dangerous questions.

Timothy Hunter pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and tried to pay attention. No such luck. Social studies just could not hold his interest. Not when there were much more interesting things just outside the window. Or maybe not, he thought, his gaze sliding over the empty schoolyard, the chain-link fence, the broken streetlamp at the corner.

What is Molly doing now? Tim glanced behind him as Mr. Carstairs drew a graph on the board. Molly had the strangest smile on her face, so Tim knew she wasn't writing down the facts and figures that Mr. Carstairs was droning on about. Of course, neither am I, he thought, flipping forward in his notebook to find a blank page. If Carstairs strolled up and down the rows, Tim didn't want the teacher to spot his journal entry.

Tim bent his head as if he were writing intently, and snuck another peek at Molly by peering under the crook of his elbow. Something was different about Molly this year. He had known her all his life, had spent many years trying to rid himself of her-but she didn't irritate him the way so many other people did these days. Lately, she was the only person he wanted to talk to, and one of the few he didn't mind letting into the flat when his father was home. Which was most of the time, since Dad rarely left his overstuffed recliner.

Maybe it isn't Molly who's changed, Tim mused. Maybe it's me.

Nothing seemed to fit these days-and not just because he'd outgrown his trainers and hadn't yet managed to approach Dad to arrange for new ones. Tim felt restless all the time, as if he had grown on the inside and his outside didn't have the room to accommodate his new size. But some days he felt just the opposite: that on the outside he had grown to official teenagerhood-thirteen after all!-while he felt smaller inside, and as skinless as a snail popped out of his shell. No wonder he couldn't find shoes that fit.