I waited there like that for a minute, feeling the muggy poststorm air heat up around me, feeling the steam rising from the sidewalk and the street. I looked at the dead mouse at my feet, and I tried to take it all in. The open door to Sam’s room, the insane pajamas I was still wearing, which were way too hot for today, Jasper, and Mr. Face. It felt like a story I was reading or a movie I was watching. There were too many pieces to the story, and I couldn’t quite take it all in or make sense of it.

Then Mr. Face turned and darted away, back into the azaleas, and so I reached down to gather up the mat at my feet, with its sad limp mouse. But a strange thing happened.

The mouse woke up.

It gave a little shake, a shudder. Its nose twitched, and a moment later it sat up on its haunches and looked around. I swear that half-dead mouse stared at me.

“Hi,” I said, startled.

The mouse blinked.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s a miracle! I thought you were a goner for sure, little guy.”

The mouse didn’t answer. It turned and ran off, raced across the porch and jumped between the spindles, then down into the piles of dead leaves that nobody had bothered to rake for a year.

Of course, I knew it wasn’t magic that had woken up the mouse. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation. The mouse hadn’t been dead in the first place, only stunned. But it felt like magic. Anyway, it felt like something. And maybe just being alive, and a little brown mouse—able to sit up, twitch your nose, dash into the old dry leaves—maybe that was magic enough.

The Actual World

I didn’t go back to the farm for a few days after that. I wanted to, badly, in hopes of seeing Jasper there. But when I woke up each morning, I felt too nervous, almost sick to my stomach. I’d said so much to Jasper, after not saying anything to anyone for so long. It felt like I’d emptied myself, like I was an eggshell without the egg in it. On top of that, I’d cried, in my too-small ugly yellow footie pajamas, and I felt . . . ridiculous. As badly as I wanted to see Jasper again, I was a little afraid of what would happen when I did. I was so full of feelings. I didn’t think I could bear it if she laughed at me.