Aunt Marge drove Rose to a private school called the Country Lane Academy. The school was a wonderland of games to play and projects to do, and computers on which to write words, and bright-faced eager teachers. There were only fifty students in the whole school and Rose was reading Dr. Seuss in no time. On Tuesdays, the whole school spoke Spanish and only Spanish. And they went on trips to museums and zoos and Rose loved all this.

At home Aunt Marge and Aunt Julie helped Rose with her homework, and they baked cakes and cookies, and when the weather was cool, they cooked barbecue outdoors and drank lemonade mixed with iced tea with lots of sugar. Rose loved swimming in the gulf. For her sixth birthday, Aunt Marge and Aunt Julie gave a party and invited the whole school to come, even the older kids, and it was the best picnic ever.

By the time Rose was ten, she understood that Aunt Julie and Aunt Marge were paid to take care of her. Uncle Lestan was her legal guardian. But she never doubted that her aunts loved her, and she loved them. They were retired schoolteachers, Aunt Julie and Aunt Marge, and they talked all the time about how good Uncle Lestan was to all of them. And they were all happy together when Uncle Lestan came to visit.

It was always late in the evening when he arrived, and he brought presents for everyone—books, clothes, laptop computers, and wonderful gadgets. Sometimes he came in a big black car. Other times he just appeared, and Rose laughed to herself when she saw how mussed his hair was, because she knew he’d been flying, flying like that first time, when the little island had sunk into the sea and he had carried her up into the Heavens.

But Rose never told anyone about that, and as she got older she came to think that it just couldn’t have happened.

She’d gone from the Country Lane Academy to the Willmont School some fifty miles farther away, and there she was really getting into the most fascinating subjects. She loved literature and history best of all, and after that music, and art appreciation and French. But she did all right in science and math because she felt she had to. Everybody would be so disappointed if she did not do well. But what she really wanted was to read all the time, and her happiest times at school were in the library.

When Uncle Lestan called, she told him all about it, and they talked of books he loved and that she loved, and he reminded her: “Rose, when you grow up, remember, you can be anything you want. You can be a writer, a poet, a singer, a dancer, a teacher, anything.”