Why is the fairy world always so pretty and slender-light, yet my fairy godmother is plump, with a crooked smile that speaks with a leathery lisp? What does your fairy godmother look like? Is she milky white with a waist the size of a string, her legs like two cats leaping for it in glee, her arms like strands of airwax? Did she take you out of sympathy for your parents? Do you think she would choose you if she met you now if she knew you cheated at math? I might tell her.

Do you think you are good at ballet because of her? I'm good at picking out costumes for other girls. Lately, I've been finding ones that make girls look fat. Everyone should be fat but me and Jerry. Then, he would understand how we are made to go dancing on top of strangers, leaping from head to head into snow storms of delight.

We should live in a top-hat dollhouse that the president of April pudding wears. Jerry and I should shake like wet dogs inside snow cones, and come out shining. Drive boxes through tangled streets until we're tired, and then turn them over and over and inside out until we disappear.

I don't think Jerry is right for you. I think you need to wear this bicycle helmet monster and go for a ride down a street of nightmare kittens and dog eyed dreams. Create anti-matter from my poison apple until it's dying and flattened, the pips covering the insides of glass steam, and then eat it.

Jerry is all that is pure like a saucer of milk left out for the fairies and he's all that is pristine like a swan pond glazed with laughter. He's not for you to dally with before you kiss his friends and take them behind the school and chase them through the trees and catch them and roll over together in tall grasses and stand up covered in chocolate so everyone knows boys love you.

I've had it before. My mother gives me chocolate, but I don't go bragging. She doesn't give it to me lately, so I'll be thin like you, but I know where to find it. It's in the cobblestone alley by the hut of the woman from Romania. I don't know if she puts it out for us to find, or if it grows like mushrooms. She laughs at me for running away when I pick it, of course: butterflies always make fun of moths.

The teacher called me out today for doing math so well she thought I must be cheating from you. I've spent the day crying in the bathroom, critters running around the floor like noodles stirred in soup. They run all over my face, because I'm lying in the stall, and I don't care. You'd cheat at the three legged sack race if you could. You ran it with Jerry when he had said he'd do it with me. And he was going to kiss me when we won, I know it, and the kiss would have woken up the birds on the other side of the earth and their hemi-songs would have drowned out all my dreams about him hugging me then saying I make him nauseous, but I can't ask him why, because people are talking and I don't want to interrupt and so I leave home and never see anyone again.

Wear your dress upside down and chirp like a feather. Grind your smile like pepper and scatter it over Switzerland. Be the inside of my heart for the day. See what it's like. Then, try to laugh when you play.

But that's alright, because at home I can climb the rock walls, and talk to the toads. One day I brought a crawfish from the creek and took it up onto the treehouse to let it see the world. I could do that with you. Want to see what my life is like, with a hump on my back, and two rows of teeth, and legs the size of butter? If you'd let me, I'd pet you when I took you up to the tree house. No one ever pets me. No boy probably will. But friends, they say, don't always care about whether we look like oatmeal and smell like animal cracker barnyards. We could hunker down up there in the morning and hear the crickets playing their piccolos and we could drink cherry milk, and watch the sky turn into a circus, and the clouds dance for us, and we could forget about Jerry, and our godmothers would take tea with the best china together, and we'd hear it tinkling in the distance when they clicked their cups together, and they probably wouldn't even break.