“No chance,” I replied. I argued the move wouldn’t be good for Shira. That I couldn’t see myself living outside Tel Aviv. I was afraid of telling Nelly the truth because I had the feeling she might be testing me. That she was thinking of leaving me and checking where I stood. So I said there was nothing to talk about, and only after two weeks, when I realized she was serious, did I say I’d do it, just for her.

Shira was psyched about the idea, said living in the desert sounded like a dream. She thought and talked about the world in Disney terms, and meeting her expectations wasn’t always easy. She once declared hysterically that she had to find the star closest to the sun otherwise she’d die, forcing Nelly to take her to the observatory in Givatayim that very same evening. When she was eight, she reached the conclusion that she was a secret princess and we were her adoptive parents, thinking the word “adoptive” meant evil. Her first attempt to run away from home soon followed. We found her seven minutes after she walked out the front door, fifty meters from our building. She told us she hadn’t dared go any farther because she knew she wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone.

We didn’t always know how to handle that distant dreaminess of hers, and she certainly didn’t know how to handle our sarcasm. She kept saying she’d never be like us when she grew up. On her most recent birthday, when she turned eleven, she even tried hiding the Encyclopedia of Fairies she got from her friend, fearing we’d tell her fairies weren’t real.

Nelly worried Shira wouldn’t fit in at the school in Mitzpe. She claimed that if Shira couldn’t even handle us, she wouldn’t stand a chance with the children there. They’d eat her alive. I was also afraid the hooligans of Mitzpe would crush her delicate soul, but I thought it was a good opportunity to force her out of her little bubble. Luckily, she landed a good teacher, who even assigned her a “big brother,” a year ahead of her. When Shira got home from her first day at her new school, we were on the edge of our seats as if she was returning from the front lines and had lived to tell the tale. Straight off the bat she said we had lied to her, that the kids in Mitzpe listened to exactly the same music as the kids in Tel Aviv, and we both laughed with relief.