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Camila was thrilled when Luz learned to put her own velcro shoes and stretchy socks on, completely independently, at the age of three. She was always ahead of the learning curve — talking the ear off anyone who would listen in complete sentences with a frighteningly large vocabulary. Camila was less thrilled when Luz learned to take her shoes and socks off and proceeded to do so every single time she was placed in a stroller.
"¡Mija! Where are your shoes?" Camila said when she noticed her daughter's tiny brown feet waving in the cool fall air.
"¡No zapatos!" Luz yelled. She stretched her toes as wide apart as they could go as if to grab at the world with all four limbs.
"¡Tranquila, porfa! I cannot afford to buy you another pair of shoes this week. Another! Already!" Camila turned to look up their quiet residential street, hoping that the shoes and socks would be visible on the sidewalk.
"Good! Then I'll have no more shoes and no more socks!" Luz cheered.
"Ay, Luz, mi niña loca. How far back did you leave them?"
"¡Nunca te diré!" Luz mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key.
"Dios mio." Camila turned the stroller around and they walked back up the street. After the first three pairs of nondescript black and green shoes got lost, she had started buying shoes in bright colors so that they would be easy to find by the side of the road. A flash of red rested in the weeds between sidewalk cracks up ahead. "I think I see them."
"No, no, no shoes! I don't want to wear them! I don't need them! I'm not cold! They're scratchy! They're too tight!"
Camila rolled her eyes, glad that Luz couldn't see her face. Her daughter was anticipating all of the arguments she had made, time and time again, to try to convince her that shoes were a necessary part of leaving the house. She had started buying bigger sizes and softer socks, but even that wasn't enough to get Luz to keep them on her feet. She might need to switch to shoes that Luz couldn't untie and take off on her own, but that felt like undoing the progress she had made in gaining independence…
"Mira, ¡una lechuza!" Luz yelled.
"Oh, how beautiful," Camila whispered. A small owl with huge yellow eyes was swooping down from above the trees. "I've never seen one in the day before, and in the city, no less."
As they watched, stock-still, the owl dove for the sidewalk, grabbed Luz's red shoe in its beak, and flew away.
"¡No!"
Too late, Camila left the stroller and started running towards the spot where the shoe had been. The owl and its treasure disappeared over the tops of the trees.
"The owl is on my side! I win! No shoes forever!"
Camila sighed. Her cariño was so happy in that moment, with her bare feet dancing above the sidewalk. She was also happy while stuffing her clothes with handfuls of free lollipops from the bank, and while storing ants in her hair, and while exclusively meowing whenever kids her age tried to interact with her. Allowing her to do the things that made her happy was not going to help her fit in. It was not going to keep her safe.
"Come on, Luz. I'm buying you shoes with laces."
The weary mother and delighted daughter slowly rolled towards home.
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Kindergarten was no place for Luz. Mami said the first day would be the hardest and then it would get better. It had been two weeks. It wasn't getting better.
The other kids all liked each other more than they liked her. They all got bored after only five fun facts about mushrooms. The teacher wouldn't let her go to the school library when she finished her worksheets early, and they made her change her shirt after she poured water all over it for fun. The classroom was too small. The chairs were too hard. She had stopped taking them off constantly, but her shoes were still too tight.
Luckily, Luz had a plan to make sure she never had to go back. When she snuck out of gym class to spy on the fourth graders through their classroom door, she learned all about animal adaptations. Lots of animals use camouflage to hide from predators, like the little brown birds out the window, who blend in with trees, and like fish that have light stomachs and dark backs, so they're hard to see from above and below in the water.
Luz was going to spend all weekend practicing her camouflage, too, so that it would be ready to hide her from teachers and students alike by Monday. She wore dark brown leggings and a green shirt. She gathered sticks and leaves and spread them out over her. The fourth grade teacher said that animals use their movements or stillness to be hard to see, too. She decided to stay totally still, her whole body relaxed into the earth, so that no one would ever find her.
No one found her , exactly, but a small brown owl with large yellow eyes found her red shoelaces and decided he had to have them. Like Eda, Owlbert was attracted to shiny and brightly-colored objects. He was smart and persistent enough to pick out the knot in the shoelaces with his beak. Slowly, he tugged the laces on Luz's left foot free from the shoe.
Luz felt something happening to her foot. It was a test, she decided. She always had trouble staying still and focused when something touching her was moving. Her teachers' words echoed in her head: I will bet you ten lollipops that you can't stay in your seat until the end of this lesson . Luz was always excited to beat the challenge. She always lost the bet.
Not this time , she told herself. This time, she was going to stay still. She pressed her eyes shut and let her mind race through a list of animals, their predators, and the habitats that they camouflage with. It kept her from flinching, even when Owlbert slid the end of the lace out of the hole and flew away.
When Luz finally gave into the jitters, jumped up, and shook the forest off of her clothes, Owlbert (and the shoelace from her left shoe) were gone. The looseness of her shoe around her foot made her wince and fidget as she walked into the house. It would be fine: she could steal some tape from the kitchen and wrap it around her shoe. Mami wouldn't notice. She could bury herself in leaves on the playground and no one would try to talk to her. She could get through kindergarten. It was just so unfair that it was so hard.
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Luz grew up and as she did, she grew farther away from the other kids at school. There had to be other friends, other people, other creatures, that she would fit in with. The librarian gave her a book about how to build tiny fairy houses out of sticks, leaning up against trees and stones. The book said that if you leave gifts for fairies, like berries and flowers, they will come visit your house.
It took hours, but Luz constructed a fairy house that she was proud of in the yard. It had a basement with roots coming out of the walls and two rooms upstairs and the biggest leaves she could find, pinned down by pebbles, to cover the roof. She filled it with flowers, like the book said to, but there were no berries near her house. She took the beads out of a crafting kit she used to love but hadn't touched in a year and put those on a leaf in front of the house to welcome the fairies in.
The next day, the beads were gone.
"¡Mamimamimamimami!" Luz ran into the house shouting. "Thefairiesvisitedmyfairyhouse!"
"Lucita, love, I need your inside voice," Camila said softly. She was lying on the couch with the lights off and the blinds closed. "It was a long day at work, okay?"
Luz deflated. "Okay. Okay, I'll tell you later. Feel better, Mami."
She went to her room, frantically searching for something else to leave for the fairies. She had a glitter pen. She had a bunch of colored erasers. She had plastic jewelry and coins from Mami's purse (don't tell her) and everything she left at the fairy house disappeared, one by one. The book said to never try to see or catch a fairy, because that would break their trust. Luz never watched the little house, never tried to catch her visitor by surprise. She never saw Owlbert placing her gifts in his sack to take back to Eda.
Because the fairies obviously loved her gifts so much, Luz decided it was time to leave a note introducing herself. She filled it with details about her life and her favorite books and her fun science facts. She tried to guess what the fairies would have in common with her, how they would be different, and what books they would recommend. She pictured them following her to school (once they were good enough friends to reveal themselves, of course) and protecting her from the kids at school, whose taunts had gotten more bitter and pointed. This was the start of her life turning around, she was sure.
The note stayed unopened next to the fairy house.
Luz wrote a new one each day, and they piled up. The little flashy gifts, however, kept disappearing. What kind of friend wants your stuff but not your fun facts? What kind of friend will visit you every day, but never read a single thing you have to say to them?
She returned the fairy house book to the library. She stopped leaving gifts. The stick lean-to toppled over and the notes began to decompose.
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Luz spent more and more time with fictional characters, wishing that they were real so that they could be her friends. For her tenth birthday, Camila gave her a pink, glitter-covered notebook so that she could write stories about herself becoming friends with the warrior cats and telekinetic children and especially her heroine, Azura the Good Witch. In her stories, her jokes were always funny. She could focus and excel in school. Often, she had magical powers and could speak every language and was better than anyone who had ever lived before. Her stories gave her moments of absolute joy.
When the second Azura book was due to come out, Luz began spending more and more time in online fandom forums. She found a fanfiction site she liked and read and read and created an account. She spent weeks rewriting her favorite story about herself and Azura until she thought it was good enough to share.
At the public library (where Camila wouldn't see), Luz posted her first chapter and waited. She hit refresh over and over. Why is no one reading it? Then, why are people reading but not liking or commenting? Her stomach turned over like it was full of dairy.
Then the first comment came in: ur probly like 12 so ill say this nicely: ur character lucia is totally a mary sue and she sucks. Ive read so many fics like this and im so done with them. Plz come back when uve writen smthn good
Luz froze. She felt her face fill up with blood and her hands start to sweat. She deleted the fic and then, after a moment's thought, her account. She took her notebook home and paced frantically, thinking about putting it under the bed or in the closet or in the shredder… It was all of the stories she had ever written. It was trash that no one should ever read. It was too precious to destroy. It was too shameful for anyone, even her, to ever see again.
She ran out into the woods and threw the notebook as far as she could. It landed on the other side of a fallen tree, just out of her sight. Maybe it would still be there if she ever needed it. At least it was far enough away that her breathing could slow and she could begin to scrub that comment out of her mind. She went inside to try to find something else to do, something that would make her feel less alone again.
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The next day on the Boiling Isles, Amity had been left by her parents and then her older siblings to wander the market alone. She was on the edge of overwhelmed and ready to go home when pink glitter at a vendor's stand caught her eye.
The garbage-seller, a woman with bushy gray hair and a single fang, considered her carefully. "Are you fixing to steal that parchment-stack? If you are, you're being way too obvious."
"No," the witchling said meekly. "I won't steal it. I don't have any money, though. So I can't buy it. What is it?"
"A genius's life's work," Eda said dramatically. She flipped through the pages slowly. "Best fiction of the year, and this is the only copy in the world. Wait, why am I trying to sell this to you? You can't buy it."
Amity shrugged.
Eda narrowed her eyes. "You seem kinda down, kid. Know what, you can have it. It's on me."
Amity crossed her arms, unbelieving. She knew nothing was ever free.
"Take it. What, are your hands cursed or something? It's yours now." Eda reached out and tucked it into her folded arms. "Good. Now, scram. A kid without money doesn't belong at the market."
Amity turned and ran.
At home, Ed and Emira stole the notebook and dangled it out of her reach until she teared up and their parents yelled. She didn't get to start reading until after bedtime, with a light spell under the blankets.
The stories were written in various shades of sparkly pen, always in rushed handwriting with crossed-out sections and extra words added in the margins. Some of them were boring or confusing, but the last one… the last one was perfect. It was about a wonderful girl named Lucia who became best friends with the Good Witch Azura, the main character in a book Amity had just read. She found herself jealous of Azura, and not just for her magical abilities, like usual. She was jealous of her for having a friend like Lucia. Maybe if Amity had a Lucia, she could even make her feel better about losing Willow. Amity got out some colored ink and a quill and doodled herself, Lucia, and Azura in the margins of the notebook. In her imagination, they saved the whole world together.
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The bullying escalated.
When Luz was twelve, her teacher asked each student to bring in an object that represented their family. Luz wasn't supposed to open the big glass cabinet with the family heirlooms in it, especially because she had grown very quickly and no longer had complete control over her long limbs. But how could she pass up the opportunity to show off the painted bowl her grandparents had brought when they immigrated from the Dominican Republic, depicting fearsome shape shifting spirits? She had prepared plenty of fun facts about the goriest, most frightening parts of her people's mythology.
Luz got the beautiful bowl out of the cabinet without breaking it or anything else. She didn't even wake Camila, who was sleeping off a 12-hour shift that had ended at 6 AM. There was a moment where Luz thought she and the bowl were going to make it to school and back without incident.
Her neighbor and personal bully ended that moment before she even got on the school bus. Without a word, he pushed the bowl from her hands and its generations of history smashed on the sidewalk. He didn't even wait to watch Luz cry.
The bus came. She chose to leave the pieces there because although the broken bowl was awful, missing the bus would be worse. When it was her turn to present her object in class, she pulled her cat-eared hood over her face and put her head down on her desk.
A zero on the assignment was bad, but it was better than the look on Mami's face when Luz took her to the cabinet and showed her the empty space where the bowl was supposed to be. It was better than the silence of her being so disappointed that she couldn't speak. Luz went back looking for the pieces, thinking maybe she could fix it or at least take Camila some small part, but everything was gone.
Owlbert had taken the brightly painted shards. They were too odd to sell, so they got a second life as a windchime on Hooty's roof.
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So no, it was not that Luz was "the chosen one." She was not "fated" or "destined" to enter the Demon Realm. She got there because she was weird enough, brave enough, lonely enough, and determined enough to choose a life in another world.
Someday, Amity will think of how much Luz reminds her of her imaginary friend Lucia, whose story she got for free at the market. She won't say anything out loud because the parchment-stack was thrown out long ago, and it almost seems like a dream.
Someday, Luz will be clearing out the trash room in the Owl House to turn it into a nursery. She'll find a lump of baby socks in a corner, wash them, and put them on her son's tiny feet. She'll never know that they're her socks, or that the windchime she loves to listen to is her grandmother's bowl. She would be so happy to know that they are staying forever in her magical, chaotic family.