We got into her green car and I thought about the last time I was there and how drastically my circumstances had changed. As if on cue, Leah reached up and twisted the crystal glass hanging from the mirror and sprinkled me with hundreds of magical twinkling lights. The rainbow-rimmed circles bounced on the dashboard as we drove and before I knew it, we were walking into the entrance of a department store.

I felt overwhelmed by the racks of clothes that stretched before us. I mostly wore Matilda’s hand-me-downs and, if not, my grandmother shopped for my clothes and brought them home for me to wear. Like she did at the museum, Leah took my hand and together we inched our way through rows of pants and shirts and prominent displays of white and pink underwear.

Leah looked through the racks and pulled out things she thought would fit. I busied myself by staring at a tag hanging from the sleeve of a dress, rearranging the letters into different words in my head. After Leah collected an armful of clothes, she handed them to me and I went inside the dressing room while she waited outside. I tried on a gray sweater so soft it felt like a kitten. It had designs around the wrists that looked like O’s. I tried on a few other things and when I came out of the dressing room, Leah slipped her arm around my shoulders.

Next, we went to the drugstore. She left me alone to browse among the notebooks and pens and pencils. I loved the smell of new notebooks and the way the scarlet line kept all the words in their proper places. I chose three with different colored covers and then started thinking about going to a new school. A sick feeling grew inside of me and spread to my arms and legs, making them feel so heavy that I was scared if I didn’t move soon, I might be stuck in the stationery aisle of that drugstore for the rest of my life.

She came from behind, warming me as though I had just come in from a snowstorm. Her hair tickled the back of my neck and I could feel her heart beating against me. She eased the notebooks into her basket and slipped her hand into mine. We walked to the magazine rack where she pulled her hand away only so she could throw something into the basket she was carrying. As we were leaving, I saw what she had chosen—a thick, soft-covered word search puzzle book. On the way back to the car, I realized that since breakfast, we had not exchanged a single word. I sat in the passenger seat with my word search book, curling the corner of the cover lovingly between my fingers.