Chapter One

1

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

—Old children’s song When I was ten years old, my friends and I would sneak out at night and meet in our building’s service courtyard to play spy games and exchange secrets. The courtyard was forbidden: it was dangerous; it was ominous. Purple shadows draped its brick walls like pieces of cast-off clothing. It was where the building sorted its trash and where God only knew what dangers lurked. It scared me into a hollow, cold silence, but I went anyway because I was in love with Michael Farber. He lived two floors below me, and I would have eagerly followed him into the heartless depths of a raging fire.

One night, near the dumpster, Michael found a blue plastic gem, a dime-sized circle with facets, like the kind that came in the gum-ball machines at the front of Woolworth’s and Lamston’s.

“A sapphire!” whispered Julian Becker, who lived three floors above me and was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“No, it’s fake. It’s only plastic,” I told him.

“What?”

“You’re such a dweeb,” Michael said, with a certainty that Julian made no effort to contradict.

Julian was the extra boy, and Michael was the one I adored, the one who made me willing to brave my fears and the purple shadows.

“What are you going to do with it?” Michael asked me, putting it in my hand.

“Me?” I asked, flustered.

“You,” he said.

“You’re giving it to me?” I said.

“You could make it into a necklace.”

Tende