I wish I could tell you that she said these things in a calm, reasonable tone, but she didn’t. She yelled them as loudly as she could.

Then she said that this was the worst birthday ever, and her mother told her to go to her room, and she said Fine, I will, and she slammed the door, even though at that exact same moment her mom was yelling at her not to slam the door. Kate stayed in her room for the rest of the afternoon.

None of the things Kate had said were strictly true, except maybe the one about it being her worst birthday ever, although when she was two she’d had a fever and spent her whole birthday throwing up, so it was a close call.

Deep in her heart Kate knew that. She knew that her problems weren’t real problems, at least not compared with the kinds of problems kids had in stories. She wasn’t being beaten, or starved, or forbidden to go to a royal ball, or sent into the woods by an evil stepparent to get eaten by wolves. She wasn’t even an orphan! Weirdly, Kate sometimes caught herself actually wishing she had a problem like that—a zombie apocalypse, or an ancient curse, or an alien invasion, anything really—so that she could be a hero and survive and triumph against all the odds and save everybody.

Which of course she knew was wrong. She just wanted to feel special. Like somebody needed her. And obviously, having a steam engine wasn’t going to make her special. Obviously. But she’d felt special for a bit. And now her mom was going to send it back to wherever steam engines came from.

And the worst part of it all, Kate thought—as she lay on her bed, her eyes feeling sticky from crying, and stared glumly out the window, and the afternoon stretched on and on toward evening—was that she kind of saw her mom’s point. Kate hated to admit it, even to herself, but even though the train was real and awesome, it was also insanely big and kind of ridiculous, and, bottom line, it didn’t really do much of anything. Given the untold skrillions of dollars Uncle Herbert must’ve spent on it, he probably could’ve bought, I don’t know, a mini-submarine, or a rocket, or a supercomputer.

Or a robotic exoskeleton maybe. Anything but a stupid steam engine. Maybe he could return it and they could keep the cash instead.

Someone knocked on the door—she could tell from the knock that it was Tom. She didn’t answer. He went away, tried again, went away again, then finally he just came in without knocking and flopped down on the lower bunk. They had their own rooms, but they used to share, and there were still bunk beds in Kate’s room.