On These Magic Shores Read online

  “Yamile Méndez has woven a magical story about love and determination and the power we all have within. Her beautiful words and Minerva’s mighty character, even in the face of unimaginable loss and pain, grasped my heart from the first page. On These Magic Shores is equally gorgeous and powerful.

  — Kacen Callender, author of Hurricane Child

  “A powerful story about family love, resilience, and blazing new pathways. The magic Minerva finds is the kind that will linger long after you close the book.”

  — Cindy Baldwin, author of Where the Watermelon Grows

  “A beautifully-written story about hard times, friendship, and the transcendent magic of family. Readers will love Minerva’s strength, ambition, and quirky humor, and will cheer for her as she bears huge responsibilities at home, faces challenges at school, and learns how to allow herself to be a kid.”

  — Rajani LaRocca, author of Midsummer Mayhem

  “On These Magic Shores soars! A rarely seen Argentine American immigrant tale that will swoop in and claim every reader’s heart. When her mother goes missing, we fly into the tender tale of one girl’s resilience and determination to keep her family together with the help from a friend and the flutter of fairies. A beauty of a book!”

  — Aida Salazar, author of International Latino Book Award winner The Moon Within

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Yamile Saied Méndez

  Cover illustration © 2020 by Sarah Coleman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  TU BOOKS, an imprint of LEE & LOW BOOKS Inc.,

  95 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  leeandlow.com

  Book design and interior illustrations by Sheila Smallwood

  Edited by Stacy Whitman

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Méndez, Yamile Saied, author.

  Title: On these magic shores / Yamile Saied Méndez.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low

  Books, [2020] | Audience: Ages 8-12. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary:

  A friend and some very real fairy magic help twelve-year-old Minnie who is caring for her younger sisters, hiding that their mother is missing, and preparing for her school’s production of Peter Pan.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019044471 | ISBN 9781643790312 (hardcover) | ISBN

  9781643790336 (mobi) | ISBN 9781643790329 (epub)

  Subjects: CYAC: Missing persons — Fiction. | Responsibility — Fiction. |

  Sisters — Fiction. | Friendship — Fiction. | Theater — Fiction. |

  Fairies — Fiction. | Magic — Fiction. | Argentine Americans — Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M4713 On 2020 | DDC [Fic] — dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044471

  Para mis hermanos, Damián, María Belén, y Gonzalo Saied, mis primeros amigos y compañeros de aventuras. ¡Los quiero!

  And to all older siblings who know what a blessing and burden the littles can be.

  “On these magic shores children at play

  are for ever beaching their coracles.

  We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf,

  though we shall land no more.”

  — J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chasing Shadows

  Chapter 2

  Lessons from the Middle

  Chapter 3

  The Queen of the Lost Girls

  Chapter 4

  The Truth About Magic

  Chapter 5

  The Shadowless Boy

  Chapter 6

  Literally

  Chapter 7

  Friendly Spirits

  Chapter 8

  The Case Against the Mouse

  Chapter 9

  The Fairies’ Favorite

  Chapter 10

  The Grand Escape

  Chapter 11

  Neverland

  Chapter 12

  Fun and Games

  Chapter 13

  Caught and Returned

  Chapter 14

  The Quest Home

  Chapter 15

  The Twice-Over Mother

  Chapter 16

  Leading the Lost Girls — Enter the Amazons

  Chapter 17

  Not Even Magic Can Fix This

  Chapter 18

  Miracles

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Peter Pan was an idiot. Only an idiot would wish to be a child forever. The play Peter Pan was for idiots. Practicing for it was for idiots. But if I was going to be Wendy, the only important girl character in the play, I had to practice, even if I sounded like the greatest idiot of all. Twelve years old, and here I was, embarrassing myself in front of my baby sisters.

  They both sat quietly watching as I pretended my sister Kota’s teddy bear was Peter Pan. But, the bear’s beady eyes. The simple smile. The binky with the yellowing silicone. It was too much for me.

  “Let’s pretend Peter’s invisible,” I said, tossing the bear aside. “Or let’s just talk to his shadow. There’s plenty of shadows in this horrible place.”

  Our moldy basement apartment smelled like a dungeon, and I was the prisoner.

  Kota’s outraged gasp almost stopped me. Almost. I threw a blanket over the bear to keep it out of sight.

  “Minerva Soledad Miranda,” she said, her loose top-front tooth flapping in and out, in and out with every breath she took. “Why are you so rude? Our home is not horrible.” It was Mamá speaking through my six-year-old sister. “And don’t be mean to Mister Browny! He can’t breathe!”

  I grabbed my hair and silent-shouted, “Don’t call me Minerva! It’s Minnie. Minnie. Understood?” I hissed and my throat hurt like I had shouted for real. I was frustrated, but not dumb. If we made a lot of noise and the neighbor, Mr. Chang, complained, Mamá would be furious.

  I stood in front of Kota, relishing the feeling of being two heads taller than someone for once in my life.

  She pretended to be unfazed, but her cheeks turned bright red like Mr. Chang’s unpicked apples in the backyard. At the first chance she had, Kota skipped away from me. “Don’t stare at my tooth,” she said. “It doesn’t want to fall because the Tooth Fairy’s scared of you.”

  “The Tooth Fairy? Fairies don’t exist!” I laughed. No. I mocked her, and to make her suffer even more, I added, “Besides, we don’t get a Tooth Fairy. Remember, for us it’s the Mouse. El Ratón Pérez.”

  Mamá insisted on us keeping the tradition from Argentina, where she’d grown up. I’d gone along because I hadn’t known any better. Once I’d started school though, and the other kids told me a fairy took their teeth and not a mouse, switching to the fairy had been a no-brainer for me. For Kota, who loved fairies with an irrational fervor, choosing a mouse over a fairy was inconceivable.

  Kota pressed her hands over her ears
, even if it went against Mamá’s wishes. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

  “That is, if you get anything! You’re being ter­rible,” I yelled above her chant.

  She heard me after all. Her eyes went all misty and shiny. She snatched the bear from underneath the blanket and hugged it so tight, it would have been strangled if it were a real thing.

  Kota was terrified of mice, but her greatest fear was hurting a fairy. Even by accident. Because of Tinker Bell, and the tales about the Peques — the Argentine fairies — our mom told us, my sisters believed that when I said fairies weren’t real, one fell dead in Fairyland. Now, they looked away from me, as if I were worse than a dirty rodent. My cheeks burned. I didn’t really want Kota and Avi to think I was a fairy killer.

  Hands floppy, I clapped and rolled my eyes while I chanted, “I do believe in fairies. I do. I do. Happy now?”

  Avi nodded, but Kota remained stubbornly un­impressed. “Anyway, why do you want to be named after a mouse?” she whispered, setting Mister Browny on the bed she and I shared.

  Our baby sister Avalon — Avi — watched us like she was waiting for one more clue to tell her if she should cry or not. Had a fairy died after my words or come back to life after my chant?

  Stupid fairies.

  I stuck out my tongue and tickled Avi. At three years old, she wasn’t a baby anymore, but she was still plumpy and soft. Her beautiful lips! Famous women paid money for those lips, and she got them because she won the genetic lottery with her dark skin and her curly blonde hair. She could be a baby model. So unlike me, who as a baby had been so ugly, I’d been almost cute. But not Avi. She was a real beauty.

  To run away from me, she hid behind her blanket. A brown eye peeked through a hole in the flannel, right where Winnie the Pooh’s head was supposed to be. Our eyes met, and although she smiled when I tickled and tickled, she didn’t make a sound. She never did. She squirmed out of my fingers’ reach.

  I’d give anything to hear her voice.

  Kota put down Mister Browny and held her arms out for Avi. I sat on the bed in front of them, ready to pour out the secrets of my soul to the only people I knew wouldn’t go out and spread them everywhere.

  “Minerva’s a stupid name,” I said. “Why couldn’t I get a name like yours, Dakota? Or like Avalon?”

  “Avalon is the best name of all,” Kota said, patting Avi’s golden curls. I heard the happiness in her voice because I’d said her name was better than mine.

  I nodded. Avalon was lovely. It was the name of the queen of the fairies. The name of an angel, and my baby sister was an angel. The only one I’d ever met.

  “McGonagall in Harry Potter is Minerva, you know?”

  “Do you think people at school don’t say that to me at least a million times a day?” My voice was prickly and harsh. I hated the way it sounded, but I couldn’t stop being so mean.

  Kota was quiet for a second or two. Then she said, “If you always get in such a bad mood when you practice, why do you even want to be Wendy?”

  I glanced away from her dark brown eyes, so dark they looked black. She understood a lot more than a six-year-old should.

  “Every single year for the last fifty years or so, the school does the Peter Pan play.”

  “Every year?” Kota asked.

  “Every. Year.”

  She shrugged. “It’s about fairies. It’s the best story ever, that’s why.”

  She didn’t understand anything. “It’s not the best! If you listened to Mamá, you’d know it’s more than about fairies. Now let me talk, will you?”

  Kota and Avi watched me with huge eyes, and I continued, “The kids who get the lead roles in the play get elected as student body president and vice president for the next school year, eighth grade, when school really matters,” I said in a singsongy voice. “If one day I’m going to be —”

  “The first Latina president of the United States. I know, you say that every day.”

  I sent her my specialty smile: the shut-your-face. “Will you let me explain?”

  Kota did her one-shoulder shrug. Avi nuzzled closer to her.

  “As I was saying,” I continued, “I have it all ­figured out. If I get elected student body president in middle school, it will be easier to get elected student body president in high school. And then college. When I’m a lawyer, I’ll run for president. Of the country. And when I’m in the White House, I’ll be the most powerful woman in the world.”

  And no one, no one, would tell me what to do.

  To Kota’s credit, she didn’t even bat an eyelash. “Okay then,” she said after a couple of heartbeats. “Let’s practice a little more. But remember, if you’re going to be Wendy, try to sound soft and sweet. That other girl —”

  “Bailey Cooper,” I said, hating my name even more when I compared it to Bailey’s. I’d heard Bailey Cooper telling her friends she’d audition for Wendy, and no one else would dare compete against her. They wouldn’t risk losing her friendship. But Wendy’s role was mine. Mine.

  “Yes, Bailey Cooper, the girl on the billboard!” Kota’s eyes sparkled in adoration. She clasped her hands under her chin. “Bailey’s voice in the farm commercial is so sweet! It must be all that honey she eats. Think about it when you talk to your little brothers. Or eat more honey.”

  I hated honey, but then, I knew good advice when I heard it. Kota was right. I stood up in front of the girls and struck a pose, with my hand softly waving in the air.

  “Johnny and Michael,” I said in my best British accent. “Let’s help Peter the Dummy find his shadow.”

  Kota belly-laughed. Avi imitated her, clutching her belly too.

  “Peter the stupid,” I said, trying to make them laugh again. “Peter the poop-head.”

  Kota roared in laughter. Not loud enough to cover the sound of the door creaking behind me. It needed oiling again. But that wasn’t what made me want to shrivel like a dry leaf though. It was the presence I felt behind me, like a cold breeze on the back of my neck.

  I should have noticed the time.

  “Why do you use that kind of language in front of your sisters?” Mamá asked. “Why do you use it at all?”

  I turned around and saw her as she leaned on the door frame. She looked like she couldn’t take one more step, like she was tired of everything. Her jobs, her life, me. Not my sisters. They made her smile. I and everything I ever did or said, on the other hand, always brought the flashing eyes and the downward corners of her mouth.

  “Disculpa, Mamá,” I said, switching to the family language because I didn’t want to deprive the girls of their cultural heritage like she always said.

  She didn’t hear me, though. She was busy listening to Kota tell about her day (in perfect Spanish, of course), and looking at Avi like she wanted to make sure my baby sister was all right.

  When Kota moved out of the way, Mamá stepped into the room and looked around. I suddenly saw things from her perspective.

  The beds were rumpled. The floor was covered with toys, pillows, and the Cheerios Avi had spilled. Mamá put down a huge plastic bag I hadn’t noticed she was holding, picked up Avalon in one arm, and started putting things away.

  She didn’t need to say anything for us to know she was disappointed. The disappointment pulsed from her.

  Kota joined her and I stayed rooted in place, not knowing what to do. If I did nothing, she and Kota would have to do all the work. If I helped, Mamá would say I was only helping so she wouldn’t get mad at me, which in a way was true, but mostly not.

  Instead of picking up toys, I made the beds and arranged the cushions on top. Avi wiggled out of Mamá’s arms, got on the bed I had just made, and started jumping.

  “Are you having fun, Avalon?” Mamá didn’t use Avi, like Kota and I did. She never used diminutives. Avi and Mamá smiled at each other with so much love. M
aybe one day she would smile at me like that. Maybe when I became the president, she’d be proud in the White House with me. “Say yes, Avalon. Say yes for me, please,” Mamá pleaded.

  Avi kept jumping. Quietly. Silent like a shadow.

  A toilet flushing rumbled from upstairs. Avi stared at the ceiling, and with an angelic smile, she twirled in place as if the sound were some kind of music only she could hear, and not Mr. Chang doing his business.

  Kota caught my eye, and I had to swallow a chuckle. Mamá wasn’t in the mood for laughing. I knew from experience.

  After we picked up the room, Mamá plopped on the floor, like she hadn’t sat in hours and days and years. “I brought you something, hijas. Do you want to see?”

  We gathered around her like little chicks surrounding our mama hen. She pulled clothes out of the plastic bag, everything in perfect condition, though they had obviously been used before. A hint of laundry softener tickled my nose.

  Kota squealed at the sight of a flannel dress, white like fat-free milk, with a delicate print of snowflakes. She put it on on top of her jeans and T-shirt and twirled. Avi found a pair of boots, the expensive kind with lamb’s wool inside. I watched, trying to push down the longing. I wanted something beautiful too, but I didn’t dare dream.

  Mamá pulled out white long-sleeved shirts for Kota to wear to school, and pajamas for Avi. She then handed me a pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, and a red jacket. They were brand-name stuff. I bit my lip not to show my smile. Finally, something that would fit me for school. Classes had started ages ago. We were now in the second week of October, but I wasn’t going to complain. Better late than never.

  “I have something especially for you, Minerva,” Mamá said at the end, handing me a light-blue silk dress. The fabric felt like cool water on my fingers.

  Emotion filled me like the sun being born inside my heart. “What’s this for?” I asked, avoiding her eyes. If I looked at her for more than three seconds, I’d cry. She hated crying.

  Mamá smiled. “This is a special dress for auditions, right? I saw it and thought it would be perfect.”