Rain pounded outside.
It was a Saturday afternoon, in the middle of April, and I was bored. I had finished all my homework and didn’t have anything to read. There was nothing to do.
“Serena!” my mom called, seeing me sitting on the couch. “If you’ve got nothing to do, go fold the laundry!”
I groaned, but I got up and started the long and boring task of folding a humongous pile of clothes. This was gonna take forever. . . . Well, at least I had something to do now.
When I finally finished, it looked like the rain was gone. I grabbed a coat and ran outside into the wet grass of my front yard. I saw the tree that my brother and I always loved to climb. I ran over and saw our cat, Nabi, in the tree. I climbed up and petted her, but she jumped down. That scaredy cat, I thought, as she ran away. I watched her run downhill, toward the bushes at the edge of our yard, and then—she disappeared.
I gasped. What had just happened? I replayed what I had seen through my head. She had been running toward the bushes at the edge of our yard, then, a second later, she was gone! No, she couldn’t have hidden behind the bushes. She had dropped out of sight in an open area. This couldn’t be possible. But I had just seen it.
Maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me, I thought. But it sure didn’t look like that.
I caught sight of a glimmer of purple light at the bottom of the tree. I glanced down, and what I saw just about convinced me that my eyes were playing tricks on me. Standing down below me was a girl with brown hair and a green and purple dress. Apart from the dress, she wouldn’t have looked so strange if I had seen her on the street, but she was standing in my front yard. I had no idea who she was or why she was there, and it was unusual that she appeared right after my cat had just vanished, of all times. Then she turned slightly away from me, and I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. She had wings.
A million thoughts were racing through my head, but I could only think of one thing to say.
“Who are you? What happened to my cat?!”