Holt Mcdougal Literature Interactive Reader Grade 7 File

“Took you long enough,” she said. “You’re… real?” I stammered.

I heard a knock. Thump. Thump. Thump.

“It’s a message,” she said, stealing a fry from my tray. “Walls are like time capsules. Maybe a kid lived there before you, and they’re trying to reach across time.”

She sighed dramatically. “The chalk broke the loop. For five minutes. So hurry—ask me something important.” Holt Mcdougal Literature Interactive Reader Grade 7

I blinked. “What?”

“Of course I’m real,” she snapped. “I’ve been stuck between the walls for thirty years because of a time-rift. It happened when the building was built. Every time I try to leave, I end up back in 1994. But you—you wrote in chalk . Chalk is made of calcium carbonate. It disrupts temporal energy.”

I decided to dig. I went to the building’s creepy basement and found old mail in a rusted filing cabinet. Most of it was junk, but one envelope stopped me cold. It was addressed to an apartment —which is my apartment. The name on it: Eleanor Vance. “Took you long enough,” she said

I already had the chalk ready. 1. Summarize: Write one sentence that captures the main conflict of this story.

It wasn’t words, exactly. It was more like the memory of a voice. A soft, hurried hush, like someone on the other side was trying to tell me a secret but couldn’t find the right letters.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. But secretly, I loved that idea. “It’s a message,” she said, stealing a fry

Why does the author have Eleanor give a “scientific” explanation for the chalk? How does this mix realism with fantasy?

She stepped backward into the wall. The plaster sealed itself. The room warmed up. And the only sound left was the quiet hum of my digital clock.

That afternoon, I grabbed a piece of chalk from the sidewalk and wrote on my bedroom wall: