“Oh, Danny,” Mrs. Contreras said. That’s all she said. He recognized how tired her voice sounded, and suddenly he felt terrible. He didn’t like the sadness in her big brown eyes, but he hated that no one believed him about Pili even more. “How could you possibly find her this way?”
“That’s the way fairy dust works,” Danny explained. He tried not to move or his arm felt like there were needles inside. “In the book, the kids really believe. Something must have gone wrong.”
“And where would this fairy dust have taken you?” Mrs. Contreras asked.
“Rio Luna. That’s where Pili promised we would go together.”
“Sweetie, I know you miss your sister,” Mrs. Contreras said. When she sighed, she deflated like a party balloon. “But you can’t keep doing things like this or you’re going to get seriously hurt. You promised me you’d be good.”
He’d also made a promise to his sister that he wouldn’t forget. How could he do both?
“I know, but—you don’t understand,” Danny said.
Why couldn’t they see that Danny was trying to find Pili? She was out there. People didn’t just vanish into thin air. Not unless they had the help of the magic from the stories.
“I’m sorry, Danny, but this is just glitter. It is great that you love these books so much, but they only live on the page. There are no gateways inside closets, and you can’t break another mirror trying to find a portal. I want to find you a good family, but I need your help.”
Danny didn’t want to listen. He tried to turn over on his hospital bed, but he couldn’t because his arm hurt too much. He was forced to keep looking into Mrs. Contreras’s face. He was used to this routine. He and Pili had been in more foster homes than he could count. Each time, they had tried to hope to become part of a family, but somehow it never worked out.
How could he be part of a family without his sister? Why did everyone want him to forget?
Mrs. Contreras kept talking. She had tears in her eyes. He wasn’t used to seeing grown-ups cry, but Mrs. Contreras sometimes did when she talked about Pili. “We’ve done everything we can, Danny. But she’s gone. It’s been months now. The police say she must’ve run away with the older foster kids.”
“She wouldn’t leave without me,” Danny said. There was a heavy sensation on his chest, like he couldn’t breathe easily. “We were supposed to go there together!”
“Is there anywhere else she might have gone?” Mrs. Contreras asked him. “If you tell us a real place, maybe we can search again.”
Rio Luna is a real place, Danny thought. But he didn’t say it out loud again because he’d already told them. He told the social workers and he told the detective and he told everyone who asked. That was the only place Pili could have gone. Each time, they wrote things down about him. They asked him question after question. They called it an assessment. But Danny knew they were treating him like a broken toy they didn’t know how to fix.
Danny shook his head. “There’s nowhere else I can think of.”
“Try and get some sleep,” Mrs. Contreras told him, resigned to his silence. “I’ll take this with me.” She took his copy of Peter Pan, which they’d been assigned at school that week, and Danny knew he wouldn’t be getting it back.
He also knew he wasn’t going back to the Finnegans’. He’d go with Mrs. Contreras to the group home. But this time, there’d be no Pili to stop the big kids from stealing his socks or to talk to after he woke up from a nightmare.
Sometimes Danny wondered if he’d ever find a family to belong to. What if the parents who had died and the sister who vanished, what if that was the only chance he was going to get? He was a boy who came from nowhere and belonged to no one.
No, Danny thought. I belong somewhere. I belong with Pili.
So he let that thought fill his heart, like a tiny, secret star only he could see.
DANNY STILL BELIEVED. BUT for the next couple of years, he kept his feet planted on the ground.
After the Finnegans, he’d moved back into the group home. There were so many kids there that he found it easy to hide and do what he did best: dream up his favorite fairy tales.
But he was tired of being passed around group homes. Of not having a family. His record came with a long list of hospital visits and wild stories, and no one seemed to want a little boy who didn’t follow the rules. It was time to stop talking about fairy dust and other realms.
As luck would have it, Mrs. Contreras found a family for him a few days after his tenth birthday. The Haydenson family was very kind. The father was tall, with dark hair and brown skin. The mother had hair the color of red apples and was so short, she and Danny almost stood eye to eye. At first, Danny thought he looked like he could belong to them.
He promised Mrs. Contreras. This time there would be no jumping off roofs or digging holes in the backyard, trying to find a secret passage to a magic world. This time, Danny would be good.
He said please and thank you. He washed his hands after using the bathroom. He helped with laundry and raking the leaves and shoveling snow. Instead of going into the fairy-tale section of the library hoping to find a copy of his book, he wandered to the science section. The Haydensons loved visiting museums and going to plays. Maybe if he was smarter, if he knew facts and art and history, he could be just like them.
Yet no matter how hard he tried to deny it, the world around him tried to insist that magic was real. Shadows played tricks on him. They moved at the corners of his eyes. One time, he thought he saw one float right in front of him on the way to school, but Mrs. Haydenson told him it must have been a cloud. Danny didn’t think a cloud’s shadow could look like a person, but he kept this to himself. Some nights, he had fitful dreams about Pili. She was in a dark forest and called out to him, but he always woke up before he understood what she was saying.
One afternoon during spring break, Mrs. Haydenson asked Danny to accompany her to the library. She went straight for books about babies. Danny picked up a book on space with color photos of planets and found a couch where he could read. He read about how stars were big balls of gas that had exploded. In fairy tales, stars could come down to Earth and help you travel across worlds. How could a ball of gas a billion miles away in space be able to do that? Were stars not magical at all? He thought of his favorite Ella St. Clay story, about a guinea pig who catches the tail of a star and uses it to get to a place called the Cliffs of Nowhere. Danny had never met a talking guinea pig, so that must mean that the traveling stars weren’t real, either.
Suddenly, it dawned on him. What about the other stories by Ella St. Clay? The one about a young witch who discovered a crack in the air and found herself in the Red Woods, where she lived with the royal family of jackalopes. Danny searched through a stack of books for proof that there was such a creature as a jackalope—a hare or rabbit with great big antlers. But he couldn’t find any evidence that jackalopes existed. It was one thing to leave the stories in the past. It was another to know that they were never true.
He closed his eyes and watched the stories unravel in his mind like bright bursts of color. If these stories weren’t real, then what did that mean for Pili?
Danny shut his science books. Heat pricked at his eyes and his mind felt like Mrs. Haydenson’s ribbon drawer. Everything was so tangled up. He wished he could talk to someone. Pili. He needed her to make sense of the world around him. He knew he’d made a promise to believe. But now, he was forgetting exactly what he was believing in.