Talya couldn’t stop daydreaming after meeting the Chimera named Xenophon. It wasn’t so much that he’d been cute or anything—sure, he had been, but Talya was still too young to be entranced by someone else’s looks. And it wasn’t even that she’d made a new friend, although making a new friend was enough to give someone pause. Nor was it worry over what her other friends would think—when she’d told Evey and Lillian between classes, they’d agreed that he had sounded nice, that his idea for a costume was a good one, and they had both expressed interest in meeting him. That wasn’t much of a surprise, really, the three of them had pretty similar tastes in people (well, mostly—Lillian preferred them a lot quieter than either Talya or Evey did). His idea would fit in quite well with their theme, and he’d even suggested they do a little performance. Evey had agreed with his proposed plan, pointing out that it could lead to extra candy from enthusiastic adults.No, the reason Talya couldn’t stop thinking about him was because he’d made her feel so much better. The world was such an awful, terrible, rotten place—but he’d made her feel better. He’d made her re-examine her life, and all of the people in it, and made her realize—she loved so many other people, and so many other people loved her. And all of the people in her life, they each made her feel different—and each in a unique, special way. Not a single one of them was interchangeable, and the more she thought about it…no, she would never trade them away. Not even for a chance to have a real family. A “real” family—after all, now she realized, she did have a real family. Not related by magic, but by something way more important than that.
How can I thank him for that? I have to find some nice way to thank him for that. It was really awfully sweet of him to help me out, me being a stranger at the time. Of course, making him a friend was a pretty good step in that direction—he’d said he didn’t have many friends, hadn’t he?—but it wasn’t quite enough… She looked around the classroom, thinking. Her eyes strayed to the book in her bookbag, and something one of the characters had been talking about. He’d been talking about something called “paying it forward,” where someone did something for you and you paid them back by…basically, by doing something nice for someone else. Not for the person who’d done something nice for you, but for someone else who needed it a lot. It hadn’t made sense to her at the time, but after meeting Xenophon…
I’ll make other people feel better about themselves, she told herself. I’ll do like Xenophon did, and teach them how to feel good about themselves. Maybe I’ll even do it for a living when I grow up! She smiled at the idea of a job that nice and perfect, and went back to trying (in vain) to pay attention to the lesson.
