by Nikki Loftin
I had everything except Annie.
I’d tried to find her. Dad had even helped. We’d called MD Anderson, but they wouldn’t give us any information, except that she had been a patient there. I sent a letter with photos of the art I had finished in the valley the month before school started. I’d tried to make real art, as Annie would say, but it wasn’t the same. It was like the valley was asleep, after that last night when I had shown my family. That night Annie had gone away.
Maybe she had taken the magic with her. Maybe it had been her all along, bringing the magic to the place.
Maybe she had been a real wish girl after all.
I tried, though. I made forms out of cut grapevines, then waited until dark for the fireflies to come out. I took pictures of the few lightning bugs I could coax along the vines. My favorite photo was the one where the shape looked exactly like a rain lily.
I wouldn’t have called my art transformational, but I thought Annie might have liked it. She’d probably call it evocative, or phenomenological, or some other word I’d never heard.
If she remembered words like those.
I wondered about that for a long time. Wondered if she’d recovered. If she’d had to do the treatment. If there was still any Annie left in the world, or if all that was left was what was in my heart.
There was a lot of Annie there, of course. My heart was so full of her, of memories of that week, sometimes it felt like she was there for real. When I was in the valley or sitting by Pretty Pool. Even when I saw Doug and Jake—from far away, since the police had had a talk with them and their parents about charges that might need pressing or something—I thought about Annie and how she had turned out to be the friend I hadn’t known I’d needed.
The one who thought I was enough. Unique. Phenomenal.
I wished every day that she would come back. But my wishes never came true now. Annie had vanished, and she’d taken the magic with her.
And then, one day in early fall, a letter came.
There wasn’t any writing, exactly. It was a picture drawn on paper that said “St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital” across the top.
It was hard to tell, but I thought . . . I thought it was a picture of damselflies covering a person—a girl who had little patches of bright red hair peeking through the insects’ wings.
And at the bottom, like a title for the drawing, there were three words. The letters were all squished together and hard to read. But I was pretty sure it said: Wish Girl, Transformed.
My heart jumped, and I had to stop myself from shouting out loud. I grabbed the letter to my chest and ran as fast as I could to the rim of the valley. I held the page out in front of me, smiling as wide as I could. “Look,” I told the valley, “look! She’s alive.”
Annie was alive. And making art.
And she remembered me.
Then I knew. Someday, she would come back. I knew it, like I knew how to be quiet, how to be still, how to listen. She would return to the valley and run with me through the soft thorn bushes, past the sleeping snakes, across meadows of fossils and flowers, through streams that flowed with water cleaner and purer than rain, followed by clouds of dragonflies and sparrows, butterflies and lightning bugs playing games in the sky. She would come back to us, and we would all be transformed, again and again.
I knew it. But, just to be sure, I spoke the words out loud: “I wish Annie would come back.”
The breeze rushed across the branches far below, moving the brush and trees on the floor of the valley, then up the sides in strange, living green waves as it raced to me, to my ears, to answer.
Yes.
Acknowledgments
When I was a girl, I spent my summers in a Texas hill country valley that I knew was a magical place. Many moments in this book were pulled from those memories, and I thank my sister, Lari Rogge, and my mother, Rae Dollard, for their help collecting the fossils from which I built this story.
A special thanks goes to Tara Adams, oncology nurse, leukemia survivor, and friend. Thank you for reading, encouraging, and answering endless questions about your work and experience. Any medical facts I got right are thanks to you! And any factual errors, of course, are all mine. Thanks also to my brother, Dr. Ryan Loftin, for help brainstorming in the early and late stages—you’re the best Bubba ever.
April Coldsmith graciously helped me understand some of the ways childhood leukemia can affect parent behavior and a child survivor’s personality. Although I wish you hadn’t had the expertise to share, April, I am so grateful you offered it.
My writer friends fill my life with magic. Thank you especially to Shelli Cornelison, Shana Burg, Shellie Faught, and Diane Collier for your critique and encouragement, and to Suzie Townsend, Danielle Barthel, and everyone at New Leaf Literary for all that and more.
Gillian Levinson has the ability to read and truly hear what I mean to say—even if it isn’t on the page yet. Thank you, Gillian, for your editorial skill and friendship, and to all the amazing people at Razorbill who made my wish a reality.
And, as always, my love and gratitude belong to my very own wishes come true: Dave, Cameron, and Drew.
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