The Amazing Adventures of Samiya Henderson

The purple door hadn't been there yesterday. Samiya Henderson pressed her nose against the bark of the old oak tree in her backyard and blinked. She'd climbed this tree a hundred times. She knew every knot, every twisted branch, every place where the bark smelled like rain. And there had never — not once, not ever — been a door carved right into its trunk. But there it was. Small enough that she'd have to duck to get through. Painted the exact color of a grape popsicle. With a tiny gold handle shaped like a star. "Sam!" Her little brother Marcus called from the porch. "Mom says come eat!" Samiya didn't move. The handle seemed to glow — just barely, like the last second of a firefly's blink. She reached out and touched it. Warm. Warmer than the summer air around her. She knew she should go inside. She knew dinner was getting cold. She knew all the things a sensible eight-year-old should know. She turned the handle. The door swung inward, and the smell hit her first — like a library mixed with honeysuckle mixed with something she couldn't name. A light poured out that was every color and no color at the same time. Samiya Henderson had a choice to make. She stepped through. The door clicked shut behind her, and suddenly she was standing in a meadow that shouldn't exist — not in her backyard, not anywhere in the normal world she knew. The grass was silver. The sky held three moons. A river ran uphill through the valley below, its water glittering like crushed diamonds. "You came back." Samiya spun around. A creature the size of a golden retriever sat on a mushroom the size of a kitchen table. It had the body of a lion cub, the wings of a hummingbird, and eyes that were somehow the same warm brown as her grandmother's. "Back?" Samiya said. "I've never been here before." The creature tilted its head. "That's what they all say. The first time." "What is this place?" "You know the answer," it said. "You've always known." And the strangest part — the part that made Samiya's heart do something between a gallop and a flutter — was that she almost did. Like a word on the tip of her tongue. Like a dream she'd had a hundred times but could never quite remember in the morning. "I have to go back," she said. "My mom—" "The door only opens when it needs to." The creature stood and stretched its tiny wings. "And it needed to open for you today, Samiya Henderson. Because today, something has gone wrong in the Wonderlands, and there is only one person with the heart to fix it." Samiya looked down at her hands. Regular hands. Eight-year-old hands with a friendship bracelet on one wrist and a bandage on her thumb from when she'd fallen off her bike last Tuesday. "Why me?" The creature smiled — and it had a lot of teeth, but somehow that smile was the kindest thing she'd ever seen. "Because you are braver than you know." Somewhere in the silver-grass distance, something roared. Samiya took a deep breath. She ran toward it.