Once Was a Time Read Online Free

wanted to bother Dad in his library. Kitty had adopted it, too, although her parents had no interest in secret knocking codes.
    I stood up, wiped the back of my wrist across my eyes, and went to open the door. There I found Kitty, looking like a drowned cat. She had her book bag but no gas mask, a forgetful habit for which Miss Dickens frequently reprimanded her. “Thanks a lot for waiting for me,” Kitty said.
    I was so surprised to see her that I just stood there.
    â€œCan I come in?” she asked. “I’m still getting rained on, you know.”
    I let her inside and went upstairs to get towels for both of us. We sat on the living room floor together, dampening the rug. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s Friday,” was her explanation. “Why wouldn’t I behere?”
    â€œWhat about the Film Stars?”
    Kitty looked puzzled. “What about them?”
    â€œThey invited you,” I said. “I saw their letter.”
    â€œOh, right.” Kitty shrugged, her towel bobbing up and down on her shoulders. “I said no thanks.”
    â€œWhy?” I gasped. No one ever said “no thanks” to Margaret , Betsy, and Jeanine.
    She wrinkled her nose. “Because I don’t want to be a Film Star. Those girls are mean. And boring. And they didn’t invite you. So it sounded like a stupid club.”
    I didn’t say anything because the love that I felt for Kitty, which was always part of me, like background music to my life, suddenly crescendoed into a symphony so loud and powerful that I would not have been able to speak over it had I tried.
    â€œDid you honestly think I was going to join a club without you?” Kitty asked, her eyes wide.
    I shrugged.
    â€œLottie, are you daft ?”
    I nodded, and we both giggled.
    â€œCome on,” I said, standing up and heading to the mantel. “It’s freezing in here.”
    So Kitty and I built a fire, together.

Chapter 4
    Much, much later that night, Kitty and I were back in the living room. We’d spent hours designing a massive treasure hunt that went through every room in the house, and then forced Thomas to solve it. He got in a sulk when he reached the end and realized that there was no actual treasure to be found, so that was the end of that.
    Then it was time for bed, but Justine kicked me and Kitty out of the bedroom for whispering and giggling too loudly, so now we were whispering and giggling too loudly downstairs, where my sister couldn’t hear us. We were drinking Ovaltine that tasted more like sludge—a little bit of hot water with an awful lot of powder—and practicing our psychic connection.
    My dad had told us about things called Zener cards that were used to test for extrasensory perception. A deck consisted of twenty-five cards: five showing a circle, five showing a plus sign, five showing three wavy lines, five showing a box, and five showing a star. If you were just guessing what the next card to come up would be, the odds were that you’d get about five of them correct. So if you got a lot more than that correct, then you weren’t just guessing: You were exhibiting genuine psychic abilities.
    Dad didn’t think there was any scientific proof behind any of it, but Kitty and I really wanted to have a telepathic connection, so we made our own deck of Zener cards out of paper and practiced mentally beaming the pictures at each other. One time when Kitty looked at the cards and thought really, really hard about the image on each of them, I got nine correct. Justine told us it was just luck, but I could swear I’d seen the symbol appear in my mind’s eye as if Kitty was broadcasting it directly to me.
    Tonight we’d run through the deck a few times, but we hadn’t done any better than eight out of twenty-five. Which was certainly better than average, but still not our personal best.
    We were halfway through the deck, this time