I slip it into my backpack and take it home.
The studio apartment in a not so nice part of town is good enough, because I’m hardly ever there, between work, auditions, classes and scraping together enough to get by. Ramen noodles or pasta await my leisure, but I don’t make dinner. I leave my backpack by the front door, after taking out the tiara.
Holding it, I sit in the middle of the floor and wonder. Just a bit of strangeness, maybe even a bit of magic, like the well, like being a girl’s dying wish.
I put the tiara on. It settles comfortably above my ears.
I close my eyes and see a room, a studio apartment like this, but worse, with peeling paint, holes in the carpet, and soiled furniture. A family of six lives there, a mother and five children. Father in prison. A girl, the oldest of the kids, sits at a kitchen table doing homework, not minding her siblings screaming around her, her mother’s scolding, the noise of a television. Her pencil scratches math problems, and she works through to the end of the page. Then she digs a history book out of the stack and reads. She wants to go to college, the thought comes over me like an electric shock. But she’ll never get there without help.
So I grant her wish. Just like that, because I can, because the girl is working so hard and I want her to succeed, I want this little bit of magic to work. One day she checks the mail and finds a letter telling her about the full ride scholarship she’s won. She won’t just pull herself out of poverty, she’ll pull her whole family. I see it all, it will happen. The certainty is as wondrous as the wish come true itself.
I could float before her on fairy wings, waving my magic wand, and it would be the same.
My hands shaking, I remove the tiara. The gold holds the warmth from sitting on my head. Maybe I’ve imagined it. Maybe it’s all in my head. I’ve been working at that place too long. It’s starting to make me think I can change the world.
For a week, I put on the tiara every night. I see the wishes, I know their outcomes. I help a girl in the suburbs find her lost cat. I convince a middle-aged woman to walk out of her abusive marriage. I find a winning lottery ticket for a harried mother of three. Another girl wins a beauty pageant. I see the scenes play out as if I stand in the middle of them. I am invisible and omniscient.
Better, I move through my days like I believe. Yes, I can make a difference. Yes, dreams do come true. I believe in fairy godmothers. I think back to my own life, to the dream that made me drive to L.A. with nothing more than what I could fit in my trunk and pushed me through the door of every audition. Each step of the way there’d been a little voice whispering, You can do this.
I thought it had been ambition. Maybe there’d been something more. Something to explain why I’d taken the steps and my friends hadn’t. I wear that tiara and I hear that same voice whisper, You can do this.
A doctor marries the artist her wealthy family disapproves of.
A lawyer in Manhattan quits her job and moves to the Bahamas to be a tour guide.
And one little girl gets a pony for Christmas.
I wave my magic wand and shower the world with stars.
“Maddie, are you okay?”
I blink at her, aware suddenly that Audrey has asked the question several times. “Yeah, I’m sorry, I guess I was daydreaming.”
“I couldn’t tell,” she says with a wry grin. “A bunch of us are going out, you want to come?”
“No, thanks. Too much to do.”
“Come on, you haven’t been out with us in weeks.”
That long? I think about it and can’t remember when I’d last been out with the group. I try to imagine going out with them now, sitting at the end of the table or bar, staring into space, barely eating. Not really belonging. I have better things to do.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company tonight. Next time for sure.”
She gives me a look like she doesn’t believe me.
Forcing a smile, I wave them off, then rush home, back to my real work.
During the day, I see the faces of a thousand children, and I don’t see them anymore. I look for the stories, for the wishes hiding behind their eyes. When Paige—the small plump woman with the big eyes who wears a white wig and draws in wrinkles around her eyes so she can play the fairy godmother—waves her wand and asks the children to make a wish, what do they imagine, and is it something I can see? What will the tiara show me?
A family with children gets off the streets in time for Christmas.
An overlooked youngest daughter gets the lead in the school play.
A battered woman presses charges.
I move through my days like a ghost. No matter how many women and girls I see through the tiara, there are always more. The scenes never slow, never stop. I think if I do this enough, if I work hard enough, I’ll make all the wishes come true.
It’s bound to happen, sooner or later, that I see someone I recognize. Someone I know, at least a little.