Zayan's hand felt numb and his body was shaking from the cold of the afternoon, but he didn't care. He couldn't stop drawing. Only when the tip of the pencil broke did he sigh and start walking back to his house.
   He had never drawn so much! He felt full of a mysterious and inexplicable energy.
But one week later, that burst of energy seemed very far away.    Zayan searched the bedroom he shared with four of his brothers three times, inch by inch, but the notebook was nowhere to be found. And then, he feared the worst. Maybe he had accidentally lost his sketchbook at school... or it had been stolen.
   The next day, the start of Real Madrid's season, Zayan ran to the blackboard side of the school, arrived at the corner of the bar, almost out of breath, and sat on the wax as he always did. Even without the notebook, he held on to a minimal hope that the magic would continue to happen. But the hours passed and the smiling face of his idol did not appear on the screen all morning.
   Then Zayan sighed in disappointment.
   Apparently nothing he had drawn had come true: neither the toys for the children in his neighborhood nor the shoes his little sister needed to go to school nor the expensive medicines his grandmother needed, nor the new job for his father - who seemed more depressed every day - and lately preferred to go to bed without dinner.
   Zayan arrived at the door of his house, head down and took a moment to wipe the tears of frustration from his face. He did not want his mother to see him cry. Once again he would think that his classmates at school were mistreating him because of the color of his skin or his imperfect French. But before he could dry his face completely, he heard a commotion approaching him.
   His mother's face would never be erased from his memory, smiling in a way he had never seen her smile before; He would never forget the happiness that came from his father's voice shouting to whoever would listen that he had gotten the job of his dreams. He also couldn't hold back the tears when he saw his grandmother's face walking upright across the yard without help and without complaining of any pain or when he saw his little sister dancing in her new pink and blue sneakers, just as she had always dreamed of them and as he had imagined them while he drew them in his notebook.
   His notebook...
   Each one of the more than a dozen drawings he had made in the last week before that notebook was lost was now materializing before his astonished eyes. There was so much happiness surrounding him that he even managed to forget the sadness he felt days before when he realized that he had no more pages left to continue drawing. After all, what more could he wish for than to see the world being a little better, he thought, moved.
   Zayan sat on the curb and enjoyed the laughter of the children running around the wet street, delighting in their new toys, which, as far as he could see, were still being unloaded from a giant truck parked a few meters away.
   And seeing so much joy in those barefoot children who shared their toys and laughed and joked with other children who joined in the hubbub, mixing their different colors and forgetting their different dialects as if they were all part of the same family, Zayan gave a big, loud sigh. He couldn't help but think that if he had only had one more blank sheet of paper to draw on, his idol Kylian Mbappé would now be sitting there next to him. Because that was what he dreamed about every night.
   "I think this belongs to you..." a voice said, surprising him. Zayan saw before his eyes an outstretched hand holding... his notebook!
   The child looked up in dismay. And he stared in disbelief at the tall, strong, smiling young man who now sat next to him on the wax. Zayan could recognize that smile even though he had never seen it except through a screen.
   With a trembling hand he tried to take the notebook but then Kylian, in a quick movement, took it from him, and gave him another one in its place.
   A new and enormous notebook shone before his eyes. Zayan began to cry again.
   “Remember...,” Kylian Mbappé's sweet voice told him, “the sky is the limit...
   And without saying anything else, he gave him the warmest hug Zayan had ever received in his entire life...