‘I do! She’d take out all the filling and I ended up eating the rest.’

‘So I started making the skins from scratch. I thought if she doesn’t eat the filling, at least I could make some delicious wrappers for her.’

Kokoro picked at her bowl of rice.

‘Do you remember that, Kokoro?’ her father asked.

Of course not. All she knew was the story they had made out of it, which they repeated every time they had gyoza.

‘I don’t remember,’ Kokoro said. She’d told her mother so many times that she couldn’t eat such a huge portion, but she still insisted on loading her rice bowl to the brim.

Did her parents always want her to be the kid who only ate the skins of the gyoza?

They want me to be how I was before I became the girl who won’t go to school.

KOKORO WONDERED WHAT SHE SHOULD do if the mirror began to glow again, but no light seemed to come from it now that it was turned towards the wall.

She felt a surge of relief. And yet, with the mirror lurking in the corner of her eye, its presence still weighed on her. Even after she’d gone to bed and closed her eyes, she turned over a few times to snatch a look.

I must be hoping for something, she thought vaguely as she drifted off.

You could be on the brink of an adventure, and you’re telling me you really don’t care? the little wolf girl had said, and truthfully Kokoro was hoping for something – at least a little. Hoping that this would be the beginning of something special.

The Chronicles of Narnia, which sat in the bookcase downstairs, crept into her mind. How could a portal into a different world not be appealing?

Maybe she shouldn’t have run away. She may have wasted an opportunity. Of course, she would have preferred it if a rabbit had shown her around, like in Alice in Wonderland, not some shrill girl in a wolf mask.

She was beginning to feel expectant. So what did she want to happen, anyway? Now that the mirror wasn’t glowing any more, she suddenly began to regret what she’d done.

What if …

What if the mirror started to shine again?

Then she might decide to enter it one last time.

With these thoughts in mind, she melted into sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING, THE MIRROR still wasn’t shining.

Feeling a bit bolder, she gently turned it around to face her, but all she could see was her own reflection – in her PJs, with her messy bed-head hair.

As usual, Kokoro had breakfast with her mum before she left for work; she then washed up, before heading back upstairs. She would often spend the entire day in her PJs, but today she decided to change and even made an attempt to tidy her hair.

At nine o’clock the mirror began to shine.