I recall that the story in question was in a collection called “What If?” which I think was geared toward YA audiences. I read it in my fourth-grade classroom.
The story is about a young girl with a stutter, who befriends a writer. She wakes up one day to find that her writer friend is dead at the typewriter, having left only this message: “[main character’s name] has enough imagination to power a starship” (or something similar). She takes the paper away and doesn’t tell anyone that the writer had left a note.
The next day she wakes up again and her friend is alive as normal; she continues not to discuss what happened.
The town where she lives has a strange character known as ‘Beautiful Day’ because he says this to everyone he sees.
It turns out that Beautiful Day is an extraterrestrial and the main character, when the time comes, literally uses her imagination to power the ship that takes him back to his home planet.
Does anyone else remember this or have any more information? I tried Google and Amazon and couldn’t turn it up, but it’s possible my google-fu is weak.
It’s relevant to know the year that you read a story (and not just the grade in school) because there’s a spread of about sixty years in the ages of the posters here. When a poster says that they read a story in fourth grade, that doesn’t tell us much. We need to know if that was in the early 1940’s or the early 2000’s. Sorry to get picky about this, but posters are always doing this. They seem to think that we are all about the same age here. We’re not.
So… Did she call the cops? If the coroner came and took the body away, did the friend come back to life in a refrigerated drawer? Or, did she not call anyone, went to bed with the body in the room, and then the body was alive again in the morning?
