Beatie was small for her age and wore thick glasses. Her dark hair was naturally untidy, and her clothes didn’t fit. Instead they hung from her small frame and seemed to shout “charity shop” to the cruel hordes of eleven-year-olds that comprised her class at school. No one wanted to be her friend, so she stuck to her books, stories about dragons and fairies and goblin treasure. One day in June, right before the end of the school term, she was walking home with her nose in the pages of a book about magical rings, when she hooked her toe on a jagged piece of paving stone. She braced herself for a hard fall on the coarse surface but instead fell atop a soft, velvet cushion, purple with gold trim, where none had been before. She squeaked with surprise and jumped to her feet just in time to lock eyes with a boy at the end of the street. She recognized him from school. He also kept to himself and had a scar on his forehead that you could see if you caught him at the right angle. Beatie looked back at her feet to see that the pillow had vanished. And so had the boy. When she got home, her mother feebly asked her about her day. She mumbled that it was fine and retreated to her small room, little more than a closet, at the back of the house. The following day, the year six students were dismissed at midday. It was the start of summer holiday, and Beatie looked around the crowd of children kicking footballs and listening to music from portable cassette players for the boy with the green eyes and the scar. Suddenly the crowd parted and she saw him, standing alone by the corner of the school library. He looked at her and smiled sadly. The two began to move deliberately towards one another when a shout rang out, causing the boy to start. “Oy, you! You’re dead!” A pudgy, pink-faced brute with a prominent cowlick lumbered towards the pale boy who took off running around the library.

That was the last time Beatie ever saw him. Once, a few weeks into the start of year seven, she had seen the pink-faced bully at the local drugstore and had asked him about his skinny cousin, “the boy with the scar.” The fat boy’s mother seemed to condense out of the air in the candy aisle, snatched her son by the back of his shirt, and gave her a cruel, stinging look. Beatie spent the remainder of her school years reading in the small bedroom at the back of her parents’ rental. She was offered a scholarship to a small university nearby, but by then, her father had taken ill, so she went to work in a dress shop. When he died a few years later, Beatie and her mother moved in with an aunt who lived up north. In her thirties, Beatie tried online dating. Her profile read, “Seeking a life of magic and adventure, a partner who is kind, considerate, and brave; not averse to scars; I’ve got my share.” Nothing ever came of it.