I want to ask her about Something Magic, but instead I say, “How much does it cost a pirate to get her ears pierced?”

She lets her pencil drop to her lap and looks at me. “Huh?”

“A buccaneer,” I say, and my straight face collapses into a grin.

She gives me a little shove with her foot and now she’s the one trying not to smile. “Weirdo.”

Ruth puts the pencil tip between her lips again and goes back to glaring at her notebook.

“What’s your song?” I ask. I’m risking overstaying my welcome, and I’ll leave her alone soon, but I want to take every chance I can get. Her eyes are wide and there are odd blotches of color on her cheeks. I’d be more worried, but she’s sitting up and talking. I don’t know what to think.

“I need a word,” she says.

“Starboard.”

Roll of the eyes, but more friendly this time. “No, I mean like … um, I don’t know. Something about like, how unpredictable life is? Or not quite that. Like, that it’s bigger or different than we think it is? And love is like that too? I don’t know, that doesn’t make sense.”

I think of my favorite vocabulary word from English class. It’d make a good Treasure Hunt word one day. “Chimerical.”

She looks up at me. She’s biting her pencil now. She pauses for a moment, and I can practically see the word making its way across her forehead.

“That means, like, whimsical, right? Or like, unreal?”

“Yeah. ‘Unrealistic and wildly fanciful.’”

She hovers her eraser over the page. “Then if I changed you to all…” She erases a few words, writes in something new, adds another sentence at the end. Her lips mouth the words as she reads through it.

She looks up at me, and the smile on her face is wild, searching, sad.

“Thanks,” she says.

The Christmas I was six, Ruth and I each got a stuffed animal in our stocking. I got Murphy. His black-and-white face and beady eyes peeked out over the white fur trim of my stocking. I scooped him up first thing. That year I hardly noticed any of my other presents.

Ruth got a stuffed penguin with a slightly crooked left wing. She named it Yoko. (She was going through a Beatles phase. At age nine.) She also got a DVD with all the Beatles TV specials and Mom made popcorn and we watched them all. Ruth focused on the DVD and tried to act like she was a little too old for stuffed animals, but she brought the penguin to watch the movie with us and slept with it that night. I remember hearing her talk to someone and when I opened the door, she looked embarrassed and tossed Yoko to the foot of her bed. “Knock!” she yelled.