My mom doesn’t give hugs. She’s never excited to see me after school or sad to see me leave for the bus. She doesn’t ask me where I’ve been, help me shop, tell me when to go to bed. I’ve never in my life heard her laugh. She has a degree in art history, but she doesn’t ever talk about her professors or what she learned. She never says how she fell in love with my dad or if she loved him at all.

Sometimes when she’s talking to me, it’s as if my name is on the tip of her tongue for a while before she can retrieve it. Before meetings with my teachers or my pediatrician, she asks me how I’m doing in school and how I’m feeling, as if to catch up before a test. It’s all she can do to keep track of the facts of me.

I’ve known for a long time that my mom doesn’t look at me the way most moms look at their kids—like a piece of light they don’t want to look away from. She barely looks at me at all.

Still, I love her more than anyone else on earth, and I guess it’s because she’s the only mom I have. My paintings on her wall are one of my many ways of trying to love her into loving me back. And I guess my stories are my way of pretending I can change things: a pretend spell and a pretend beast and a pretend escape to somewhere safe together. And I guess Germ is right that they’re never going to work.

And the thing that bothers me is, I’ve been thinking that too.

I head out into the hall. I flick my Lumos flashlight on because one of the chandelier bulbs has burned out, and go down the creaky old stairs to the basement. I throw a load of laundry in, then run up the stairs two at a time because the basement gives me the willies.

On my way through the kitchen, I pick up my story from where it’s wedged by the counter.

I have a plan.

And, though I don’t mean it to, it’s my plan that makes it all begin.

CHAPTER 2

My bedroom is something special, decorated for me by a mom I feel like I’ve never met. Long ago—before I was born—she painted it in bright beautiful colors, creating rainbows and guardian angels on the ceiling. There’s a window around which she painted the words “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness,” which—I found out later—is a quote from Anne Frank’s diary. I love the person who painted that on my wall. I dream of that person, but I certainly don’t know her.