Andrea White: Radiant Girl

I stepped off the trail into a small clearing and began hunting for the fluffy dandelions that I liked to blow into the wind. Just as I had suspected, late April was too early. After a fruitless search, I returned to the path. A few hundred yards away, I spotted my magic boulder, a perfect gray egg, waiting for me.

I had discovered my boulder on a day much like this. I was probably no more than four or five. My neighbor, Boris Boiko, who was nine years older than me, was taking me fishing in the woods. I was riding on his shoulders. Even though I was too heavy for him, he was trotting like a pony. When Boris tripped, we had landed on the rough path.

“Are you all right?” Boris cried. His lashes quivered over dark eyes full of concern.

“Yes,” I said. But I wasn’t. My shin had hit a rock, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying.

“Let’s rest here.” Boris picked me up and plopped me down next to the boulder. For a few minutes, we listened to the stream and watched the dragonflies. “Are you feeling better yet?”

I nodded. To keep from crying, I forced myself not to look at my leg. The bruise must already be turning purple.

Boris twisted around. “Look.” He pointed underneath the boulder. “A hiding place.”

Forgetting about my hurt leg, I crawled over to him. I stuck my hand inside the moist, dark space. “What would you put there?” I asked.

“Secret things,” Boris whispered.

With these words, I forgot all about my hurt leg. “I don’t have any secrets,” I admitted.

“Sure you do. Everybody has secrets,” Boris said.

“What’s yours?” I asked.

“I can’t tell. It wouldn’t be a secret,” Boris said.

When I got old enough to take trips into the woods by myself, I began hiding special things underneath this same rock. At first, I kept all I needed for a picnic with my forest creatures: an old worn-out green blanket that my mother had knitted, a bowl to make mud cakes and a blunt knife to cut the slices. As I got older, the contents of the hiding space grew more varied. Not only did I keep my fishing pole, lines, hooks and handmade bait, but just a few days ago, I had hidden a note from Sergei, the boy in my class.

As I walked towards the boulder, I thought about Sergei. He had handed me the note during recess. A few days earlier, we both had been the high scorers in the physical fitness competition and had received certificates from the principal. Since my best friend, Angelika, had a crush on Sergei, I expected the note to refer to her, to her bright smile and her brown eyes. I was speechless when I read, “Katya, let’s go out together.” Hoping that the boulder would somehow help me solve the problem of Sergei, I had hidden the note in my secret space.

Motorcycle World , a magazine, was another prized possession I kept underneath the boulder. Like most things slick and glossy, it was foreign. Maybe French. The motorcycles were all shiny and much too big for a ten-year-old to drive. My parents called me the only girl in the whole Ukraine who liked fairies and motorcycles . Despite their teasing, I had spent many peaceful hours leaning against the rock and studying the pages of Motorcycle World . When I was older, I hoped to own a bright red Yava with silver spokes and a curled handlebar.

This day, I set my basket for wildflowers next to the boulder and began searching the streambed for rocks to skip. I was examining a flat one, oddly shaped like a heart, when I heard a muffled sneeze.

The noise sounded as if it were coming from the far side of the boulder where the ocheret with its slim reeds and thick brown cattails grew tall and thick. At my side, Noisy was strangely silent.

I took a few cautious steps around the boulder.

At first, I saw nothing, only the ocheret . But then I spotted a boy—a small boy, with his body pressed close to the rock. His pants were dark, and his off-white shirt was embroidered with an old-fashioned geometric pattern of red squares and black triangles. His bright blond hair, nearly as long as a girl’s, was neatly combed and glowed almost white in the sunlight.

Most startling of all were his eyes. His eyes were blue, bluer than the pisanki eggs that Auntie Maria decorated. They were even bluer than the cornflowers that would soon bloom in droves in the fields around my cottage.

For a moment, as I looked into his eyes, I forgot about everything except a small memory of Granny Vera. Unlike most storytellers who started with, Once upon a time , she began her stories with, “ Now at the beginning… ” It was as if I could hear her saying this phrase, and I sensed that I was at the beginning of something new. Yet at the same time the feeling was familiar. For hadn’t I felt this way when I had played with my forest creatures? Nothing obvious happened, maybe only a shift in the light. But suddenly, the air shone like glass, and my skin prickled with the awareness of another world just beyond my reach.

Noisy raced to the boy and sniffed his hand.

The boy ruffled the dog’s hair with his long pale fingers. “You’ve come,” he said simply to me. He looked to be about a foot shorter than me and so skinny that his features were all angles.

“Who are you?” I asked. I searched my memory for my Granny Vera’s stories but found they had grown hazy in my mind. Granny Vera knew everything. She must have told me about a creature who looked like a human but who lived in the woods. How could I have forgotten?

A red squirrel dropped from a branch overhead onto the forest floor. In a flash, Noisy was chasing after the animal.

“Who do you think I am?” the boy said.

I sat down across from him and took a good look. His face appeared translucent, as if I could strain my eyes and see through him. That blond, shaggy hair curling over his ears also covered the back of his hands. It shone in the yellow light of the afternoon. And his eyes were so blue that they kept me from noticing anything else about them. “Are you a wood sprite?” I blurted out and immediately felt ridiculous. Since Granny Vera had died, even though I pretended otherwise, I had begun to suspect that my forest creatures weren’t real.

The boy frowned as if insulted.

“No.” “What’s your name?”

“Vasyl,” he said. “I know your name.”

I was puzzled, though not yet afraid. “How could you know my name?” I asked.

Vasyl smiled brightly. “You are Katya.”

I stared at him in wonder. Even though he denied being a wood sprite, he certainly seemed magical. “Can you tell fortunes, too?”

He laughed, but as young as I was, I understood that his laugh was hollow like the wind rushing past my cottage on a cold night.

Ignoring the haunting sound, I asked, “How do you know my name?”

“Today is your birthday, isn’t it?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“You look radiant,” Vasyl said, smiling. “Like a birthday girl should.”

I blushed, pleased at the compliment. Then, I noticed that the sun had almost disappeared. The crickets were making a racket. The boulder had turned a deep gray. I was going to be late for my own party. As I stood up, I called, “Noisy!” I explained to Vasyl, “I have to go.”

Vasyl held up his hand, saying, “Don’t tell anyone that you’ve talked to me. Promise me—for your own good.”

“I promise,” I called over my shoulder in my haste to get home. “Noisy, let’s go.”

From out of the ferny depths beyond the boulder, the dog appeared at my side, his sides heaving.