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A barrage of thunder rattled the school's old, murky windows just as Mrs. Soto wrote on the blackboard, "fiction stretches the boundaries of reality." Tony glanced from Mrs. Soto's precise block letters to the plump raindrops that were now pelting the window nearest Tony's desk in the back row of the musty, high-ceilinged classroom.
Tony blinked. No longer interested in anything Mrs. Soto was doing, he put all his attention on the storm. For just an instant, Tony could've sworn he'd seen something moving in the downpour. An elongated, human-size shape seemed to have slithered through the torrents of water just as the thunder's rumble had faded away.But that, of course, wasn't possible because Mrs. Soto's creative writing class was on the third floor of the 120-year-old limestone building. The only thing Tony could have seen out in the rain, forty-five feet above the ground, was something falling or flying.
Tony wished he could get up and go look out the window to see if anything had hit the ground. But getting out of his seat would have earned him one of Mrs. Soto's dirty looks. He hated those.
Letting Mrs Soto's voice merge with the rain's thrumming rhythm, Tony resigned himself to simply wondering about what he'd seen. And that was okay. Tony liked life's little mysteries. Poking around to find answers to why things happened fascinated him.
Tony continued to watch the rain as he pondered what he might have seen. It hadn't been a person, obviously. If a person had fallen through the rain, Tony would have heard the splat even over the sound of the storm. And surely someone would have screamed. Or maybe not. Sometimes bad things happened right under people's noses. Danger lurked everywhere, even in the places you thought were safe. Many of Tony's investigations had taught him that.
Thunder boomed again. The whole building shook this time. Two seconds later, Tony saw piercing white tendrils of light streak down in front of the hills beyond the school's grounds. That was close, he thought.3-4
On the heels of the lightning, a tree branch speared through the rain. It shot downward, then disappeared out of view. That must have been what he'd seen, Tony realized. Some of the trees on the school grounds had pale grey bark. He wasn't sure on what kind of trees they were. One minute, the hundred-foot trees that guarded the school grounds like a stolid line of stern principals had been still, their branches limp and relaxed. The next minute, the trees' branches had begun to whip around, tossed by the wind gusts that arrived with no warning.
Life was like that, Tony thought. He'd learned that from his investigations, too. One second, all was well. The next second could bring surprises of the worst kind.
Something prodded Tony's shoulder. He gasped as he spun to his right.
"Space out much?" Tony's best friend asked as he leaned across the space between his desk and Tony's. He handed Tony stack of pale blue papers.
Tony grinned nonchalantly, as if he hadn't nearly jumped out of his skin. He took one of the pieces of paper. They were assignment sheets, he realized; Mrs. Soto color-coded her handouts. Blue was for writing homework.
Tony leaned across the aisle and handed the rest of the assignment sheets to Zoey, the pretty blonde girl who sat in the desk next to his. Zoey didn't even look at him as she took the stack. She was one of the popular girls in the seventh-grade class, several rungs above Tony and his friends on the social ladder.
Tony glanced down and read the assignment. He sighed. Another fiction story.
In preparation for his goal of becoming an investigative reporter someday (he was only twelve, but he believed in planning ahead), Tony had been eager to hone his writing skills in Mrs Soto's class... his nonfiction writing skills.The class syllabus had said that it would be about all aspects of good composition, but so far, Mrs. Soto was focusing only on fiction.
Outside, the rain had stopped as suddenly as it started. A shaft of sunlight shot through the wet window, throwing prisms of refracted light across Tony's desk. He put his finger in the pink-and-yellow streaks that played cross the scarred, dark-stained oak. See, he thought. Reality was so much more interesting than fiction.
Now that the rain had stopped, Tony could hear the assignment sheets rustling as everyone in the class read over what they were supposed to do. Several kids started murmuring to one another. Tony could hear his friends whispering next to him.
