Bronze Pen (9781439156650) by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

say yes. He would say yes, and she would go to hear the Sons of Champlin. And while he was alone all afternoon, her father might…
    So that day, like every other, she was home by one o’clock to play chess with her father, and do some homework while he read the papers. Then there was feeding Sputnik and cleaning his cage and a brief backyard trip with Beowulf before her mother came home. And, like always, it was almost eight by the time dinner was over and the kitchen cleaned up and Audrey was free to do—whatever she wanted. Whatever she wanted, that is, as long as it wasn’t something that started before eight o’clock. So that pretty much narrowed down her free-time activities to going to her room to read. Or most likely to write, but not in her journal. Not tonight.
    Audrey had found that journal writing could be useful. Not the deadly everyday kind where you wound up writing what you had for breakfast, but the kind where you only wrote about special times or feelings, good ones as well as bad. That kind of writing sometimes made good feelings last longer and bad ones seem less important. But for Audrey, the kind of writing that simply shoved everything else out of your mind—everything from a bad grade in math to not getting to go to the Sons of Champlin concert—was writing novels.
    Digging down under a lot of old essays and mathpapers in the bottom drawer of her desk, she pulled out the secret notebook where she kept all of the things she was still working on. One of the first manuscripts in the notebook was part of a fantasy she had started more than a year ago. A fantasy in which a strange, lily-shaped flower could turn anyone who touched it into an animal. Not any animal, but one who had some kind of relationship to the personality of the person who touched the flower. In some earlier chapters, she’d written about one character being changed into an elegant white swan. And most recently she’d gotten to where another character in the story, a really mean seventh-grade boy, had been transformed into a wild boar with a long, ugly snout and a curly tail.
    For a while it had been a fun story to work on, but when she couldn’t get it to head toward some more or less sensible ending, she had started a different one. Another mystery, but this time a more realistic one. But that had sputtered out too a few weeks ago, and she had gone on to the one about the girl detective who could solve mysteries by talking to animals.
    That story had been going pretty well lately, and it had been during algebra that same morning that she’d just happened to come up with a new idea about how to get Heather out of the dangerous mess she had just gotten herself into.
    Reaching into her pencil tray in her top drawer Audrey pulled out…the bronze pen.
    CHAPTER 9
    F OR A MOMENT AUDREY TURNED THE PEN this way and that, admiring its odd shape and color. She liked the look and feel of it, but what she’d really been looking for was a pencil. She never wrote her novels in ink because she’d found that being really original and creative meant doing a lot of erasing. She looked through the top drawer again, but all her pencils seemed to have disappeared. She sighed impatiently as she pawed through another drawer, and when Beowulf appeared in the doorway, she blamed it on him, even though he’d pretty much quit chewing on pencils when he’d lost his puppy teeth.
    â€œHey, monster dog,” she said. “Did you take my pencils?” But Beowulf only nudged her with his nose, inviting her to wrestle. When she went back to looking through her desk drawers, he flopped down on the floor and went to sleep.
    But Audrey was in a hurry. Right then—just when shewas going through her desk—she’d begun to come up with an even better way to solve the treacherous cat episode. The one in which the cat had talked Heather, the girl detective, into going down the alley where the