[i]”She came in a box.

“I’d asked Mother— Nero, Hermes— for a friend, because I was alone in a great big palace built just for me. Everybody was bigger than I was, and none of them liked me. Some were scared of me, some resented me, some condescended to me, but not one of my teachers wanted to be my friend. The stakes were too high, and I wasn’t good at learning, and I didn’t want to learn anyway. But I wanted— just someone to be with. Someone who would understand. Someone like me.

“So we made a deal. If I memorized all my material in these little handbooks that my teachers made for me, made me recite from memory, testing to see how much I could learn by rote, THEN I would get a friend. She’d see to it personally. And I did it. I worked harder than I’d ever worked. I made the words cram inside me until they were the entire world. I earned the little jewels they set into my crown badges, one by one, four to a row. And then, for my birthday, the best birthday I ever had—

“The box was covered in rose-pink waves, and trimmed with lace, and I broke it on accident. I tried to pull her out of the box, but I didn’t realize how heavy she was going to be, so I fell in and crushed all those waves beneath me. Looking back, she was scared. She hissed, her tail got all, you know, like that. But my head was full of workbooks crumbling into joy, and I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. All those jewels on all those crowns (bronze, silver, gold, in their ranks on my sash) and I would have thrown them all away if it meant I got to hold someone like me.

“So I pulled her over and insisted she have some of the cake and kept touching her hair, her hands, her tail, so happy that she was real, that I would get to keep her, that I had a friend now, and after the cake I decided to show her the entire palace, dragging her along and explaining everything to someone who— she had to listen. I get that now. But I was a child and I was just so happy that I got to share it, all of it, and she kept looking around with her eyes so big and round, and holding her tail in her hands, and slowly following everywhere I ran to.

“Except when it was time for bed and I pulled her into my bedroom for the second time, she tugged her hand out of mine and screamed and ran into the darkness of that great big house, and I stumbled after her into the dark, and the dark was so big. I think it was supposed to help me sleep. All the lights came from the walls and the ceiling, and they pretended to be a sun crawling across the ceiling, and after sunset bathed everything golden yellow and burning orange, it snuffed out and everything was dark, no moon, no stars. And I fumbled through the halls, hissing her name, because ANYTHING could have been in those shadows, snakes and dragons and things with claws, and eventually…

“The only thing that made sense was that I did something wrong, and I didn’t even know what it was. Which meant that it was my fault. I’d gotten my first ever friend and now I’d lost her because I made a mistake, and Mommy wasn’t going to give me a new one unless I crammed even more books into my head, but I didn’t want a new one, I wanted my Bella, with her soft hands and her soft hair and her jingling bell and her eyes like gold, and I sat down in the dark and just… I sobbed. It was ugly and loud and I was making a mess on my hands and face, but I was more miserable than I had ever been in my whole life. And she didn’t come back, and I fell asleep sitting next to the wall after all my strength left me.

“But when I woke up, just before dawn, she was sleeping next to me, all curled up, head on my arm, and I promised— and I don’t know if she heard— her ear twitched—

“I promised that I’d never make her run away again.”[/i]