I am five when my dream of dandelion fluff cracks open, and the Queen of the Fairies

pulls herself up from one of the crevices.

“You are wrong,” she tells me.

I’m scared, because her crooked smile reveals teeth sharpened down to points, and I don’t

know what wrong is, so I repeat the word. “Wrong.” She nods seriously, so I say it again.

“Wrong.”

“The child you replaced is causing problems on our side,” she says, like I’m supposed to

know how to fix it. 

I look down, and the fuzzy grey unicorn pants my mom calls pink are caked with mud on

the hems, and my feet are bare, and there is a single stem of a dandelion still remaining, but it

has no feathery down left to wish on. The Queen of the Fairies grabs me, wrapping gnarled

fingers around my arm, but I pull away.

When I wake up, there are white fingerprints pressed into the curve of my wrist. I rub at

them; they fade to a dusty grey. It looks almost like a bruise.

She’s a frequent visitor after that. Sometimes, she does nothing but watch. Sometimes,

she throws her wand of twisted thorns and breaks the dream entirely as it smashes into millions

of sharp slivers. Always, I ask for a name to call her, but she gives me nothing but a scowl.

“You are wrong,” she tells me when I am eight, and nine, and now I agree. I have always

been this way, fingers that smell like mud even after I scrub them clean again, again, again, until

my mother tells me to stop. My limbs have lengthened to willowy sticks that catch on

everything. Most people can’t look straight at me—their eyes slide to the dirt at my feet. I watch

other children from a distance. When they smile, I  mold my mouth around muscles that don’t

quite understand how to move. When they cry, I blink and blink. Sometimes, my eyes almost

feel wet.

When I’m thirteen, the Queen of the Fairies bares her fangs and growls at me. She is still

nameless so I call her Titania, because I am in eighth grade studying Shakespearean comedy, and

the tangled thorns on her head look enough like a crown that I think I’m being clever. 

“You need to come back,” she orders, stomping down a path that has suddenly unfurled

in front of us.

I follow her, because the tiny grey mushrooms that pop up in the cracks of the path

sparkle brilliantly, and I want to know how they taste.

It doesn’t take long to get to the other girl, the other child, the other thing that sits against

the rotten remains of a stump with her knees drawn towards her chest and a dead look in her

eyes.

“She won’t budge,” Titania tells me. “We feed her,” she adds as an afterthought, and I

nod—not because I understand, but because I don’t want her to growl at me again.

The other thing reaches a hand towards me and whispers, “Please,” so I step forward. She

looks just like me, but she smells like soap and honey and a little bit of vanilla. She doesn’t smell

like mud, so I hate her.

“I don’t know what to do about this,” Titania says. “I’ve tried everything.” She sniffs

haughtily, and I know that if she had any wings at all beyond the skeletal bones of her spine, she

might choose this moment to fly away from it all. 

The other thing blinks, and I step even closer, watching her pupils dilate in fear. I lean

forward until my nose brushes against hers, and she flinches back. Her breath smells like

peppermint, and I hate her for that too, because mine does not. My mother has taken me to the

dentist where I have been diagnosed with halitosis and prescribed toothpastes, and mouthwashes

and rinses, and none of them cover the smell of dirt. “Stop moving,” I command. She stops

because I am powerful here.

It is my dream.

I study her eyes like I study smiles. Her eyes are cameras, and I mimic, pupils dilating

back and forth, each a lens on autofocus. “So that’s how they see color,” I murmur. I’ve been

faking it a very long time, and when I blink, it’s a relief to see that the mushrooms at my feet are

orange. “I’ve got it now.”

“That doesn’t solve this,” Titania says, waving towards the girl.

“Human children like friends,” I say, like it's easy, like the fairies have a whole clump of

children they’ve stolen from mothers and fathers, like friendship is so powerful it can cure a

heartsick teenager sitting against a stump. “So get her one.” I bend down and pluck an orange

mushroom from the dirt and swallow it, then shake myself awake again.

When I am sixteen, the Queen of the Fairies rips the ground out from under my feet, but I

keep walking because now I’ve grown wings of moss, and even though I keep them wrapped

against my back when I’m awake, it’s my dream, and so I’m allowed to fly.

“It’s time,” she insists, like she still holds power over me.

“Cool it, Mab,” I shoot back, because Titania no longer rolls off my tongue. I’m in

high school now and we’ve progressed to tragedy. “I’m not trading back.” I reach up and twist

my long, unruly hair into a knot on top of my head like all the real girls do, snagging a

rubberband from my wrist and tying it with practiced ease. 

“I brought you into this world,” she says, crooking a spindly finger at me.

“Shoo,” I say.

Her face crumples in fear for just a moment, then she bursts apart into thousands of fluffy

dandelion seeds, and I don’t make a single wish as I puff them all out of existence.