Alphabet Allie's Arc

Chapter 17 of 20

Allie followed the roadrunner's trail until the grass turned to sand. The path opened onto a shoreline. Waves slapped a wooden dock. A small patched building leaned near the water, its boards nailed in mismatched colors. Allie stopped and stared. Her notebook was fat now, pages loose at the edges. She had been flipping through it as she walked, and two slips had already fallen out. She had picked them up. But she knew she would not always notice. She sat on the sand and opened the notebook flat. R words on one page. O words three pages back. P words somewhere in the middle. She turned pages faster. Where was M? She could not find M. Her chest tightened. All those letters. All those friends. If she lost the pages, she lost them. A low growl rolled behind her. Allie turned slow. A sabre-toothed tiger stood on the ridge, striped and huge, two long fangs curved past its jaw. Allie's hands went cold. Then she looked at the letter on her page. S. Sabre. She wrote it down before she remembered to be afraid again. "Sabre-tooth," she whispered. "S." The tiger sniffed the air, turned, and padded off along the ridge, uninterested. Allie let out her breath. Then she laughed. She looked at the shanty. S. She picked up a shell by her foot, smooth and curved, with the words SEA SHELL printed right across it. S and S. She giggled. The giggle grew. "Sabre. Shanty. Shell. Sand. Shore." She wrote them in a fast column. Her hand shook with laughter. Every S thing she saw was another friend, and they were all in one place. A small voice piped up beside her. "Don't forget seahorse." Allie looked down. A seahorse floated in the shallows, tail curled, bright fins fanning. His scales were blue and yellow, his crest a wild orange spike. He grinned at her. "Silly Seahorse," he said. "That's me. Silly and Seahorse. Two S's for the price of one." Allie laughed so hard she snorted. Then she stopped. She looked at her messy notebook. She looked at the shanty. She stood up. "They all start the same," she said. "That's the answer." She ran to the shanty door and pushed it open. Inside, empty shelves lined the walls, each nailed with a small wooden tab. She dug in her pocket and found the blue crayon. She climbed on a crate and wrote a letter on each tab. A. B. C. All the way to Z. Then she sat on the floor and tore her notebook apart at the seams. She sorted every page under its letter. R with R. O with O. M turned up between two P pages. She slid it home. When she finished, the shelves held her whole journey. Nothing could slip away now. Silly Seahorse peeked through the porthole. "Room for more?" "Twenty-five more shelves," Allie said. "One's already full."