The Lost Story

by Meg Shaffer

He opened a folded sheet of poster board covered with pictures Shannon had cut out of magazines. A page of fairies and elves. A page of tigers and wildcats. Doors without walls, freestanding in strange deserts. Giants. Goblins. Queens and princesses and knights and archers and girls with swords. Valkyries. Lost boys. Smoke-colored foxes. Dragon boats on rainbow rivers. On the top of the page, it read in a girl’s looping print, WHERE I WILL BE IN TEN YEARS. “Guidance counselor project, I think. He wrote on the back that she was supposed to do a collage of what she wanted to be doing for a job in ten years,” Emilie said. “Not make up a fairy world to live in. He gave her a B− for not understanding the assignment. Jerk.” It appeared she’d tried to do it the “right” way and had quickly given up on that. In the bottom corner of the page was a pencil drawing of a teeny tiny girl sitting at a desk. Wouldn’t anyone rather be a queen than have a desk job? “She understood the assignment,” Jeremy said, more to himself than her. He ran his fingers across the magazine pictures—the strange mossy forests, the fairy circles, the mythic animals—almost tenderly, like they were family photos and not some kid’s old homework.