Amelie flew to the window and watched the entrance to her building. Once she saw Adrien exit and walk across the street, towards the train she closed the curtains and went into her bedroom. She reached under her bed and pulled out the box of childhood memories she kept there. She sifted through old drawings she had done of her family, a note from her mother, a picture of she and her father that was too blurry to display out in her apartment, but showcased one of his trademark I-told-you-so looks and she looked up at him covered in mud. Finally she found the folder of notes she had kept on Adrien's visits.

Ever the scientist, she had started keeping detailed notes about their encounters and comparing the years to look for any patterns about the mysterious boy. She flipped through them until she found the page she was looking for. The one from age fourteen. She scooted over until she was leaning against the frame of her bed and began reading.

The curling youthful handwriting made her remember writing this note so clearly. She was at Washington Square park and had written huddled up on the corner of the bench so she could shield her written words from curious eyes. She was re-immersed into the simultaneous fear and elation that came from sneaking out of school for the first time.

"I wanted to ask you....Would you mind meeting me downtown next year? We're going to Lancaster City but I can probably finish my task by eleven and I'll take the train out to Philly so we can meet at noon. That way we can spend more time together."

I remember him saying that. I wrote it down after last year's meeting. Just like I wrote down everything that happened after he came when I was twelve.

I still have the perfect map he drew for me of Old City, Philadelphia so I should trust that he's going to come. Yet, it's 12:30 and he still hasn't shown up yet. I shouldn't be worried, he's taken the train out to see me before, I should trust him. I should be excited to be out on my own in the city. Am I a wimp that I'm sort of terrified?

I'm also pretty excited, but I need Adrien to get here already so we can do something. I want to walk around and go down to see the river, but I should stay here until he gets here. I'm just so bored. And worried he won't come. I should have brought a book.

After that, there was a page just filled with doodles, and Amelie's poor attempts at drawing the dogs that were walking around the park. Amelie chuckled to herself.

The next page was filled with shaking handwriting. It was difficult to read and Amelie remembered she had written this on the train, not wanting to waste a second of time forgetting her day before she wrote it down. Such a good mini-scientist.

Adrien showed up at one pm! His train got delayed an hour.

I told him I wanted to walk by the water and he knew exactly how to get there. I'm not sure how he could know that, seeing as he's only been to Philadelphia a handful of times before. I asked him and he said cartography was a heavily emphasized subject in his weird school.

We walked along the water for a while and then found a stand that sold soft-pretzels. We took some pictures on my phone with the pretzels since they were the size of each of our heads. Then, because the pretzels were head sized, we made up a dialog for them. My pretzel was Urgen Von-Pretzelscieger, the owner of a fancy-pants art gallery that only sold art depicting other personified pretzels. He was Pretzelton Herbert III, a fancy-pants rich guy who was looking to buy art for his wife for the tenth anniversary of them 'tie-ing the knot.'

We spent so long exploring the world of pretzel related humor that by the time we finally began eating Urgen Von-Pretzelscieger and Pretzelton Herbert III, they were cold. He asked me what else I wanted to do and I said I wasn't sure so he said we should walk the Ben Franklin Parkway. I had never done that so I agreed.

The BFP is actually this long diagonal road that runs away from Center City and ends up at the Art Museum. It's decorated with the flags of a bunch of countries I knew nothing about. But Adrien, he knew something about every country. He could even speak a little bit of their languages. I wouldn't have believed him but he ended up speaking to some tourists in perfect Chinese and directed them towards City Hall to prove it.

At this point I was really confused and couldn't stop hypothesizing what kind of school this kid went to. Was he maybe in school to be a spy? Was that why he was so independent he could navigate a foreign city at fourteen and speak seven languages? I knew at least he wasn't Amish.

When we reached the Art Museum and had planted ourselves at the top of the steps I gathered my courage and asked him.

"Adrien, are you training to be a spy?"

He literally threw back his head his laughter was so strong. I smiled even though I was a little embarrassed.

"No! I am not that cool at all. Why would you think that?" he asked.

"Well, you speak so many languages and you have hardly ever been here yet you know your way around. And you're kind of mysterious. I don't know. The best explanation I have is international spy-in-training." I said the last part jokingly and nudged his shoulder.

"No....I'm not a spy." He got all quiet and distant after that and started tapping his leg up and down the way people do in exams or in class.

"You can tell me. I can keep a secret, Adrien. I haven't told anyone else about meeting you. Not in four years." I reached out and grabbed his gloved hand with my own, "You can trust me."

I can't believe this really happened, but he did trust me. But I need to wait until I get home to write this because I don't want anyone reading over my shoulder on this train...

There was a gap and then the writing resumed again, this time in much neater handwriting.

After I took his hand he looked at me and god he looked so sad I didn't know what to do. I leaned my head against his shoulder to try to communicate to him that I understood and was going to be supportive. I'm not sure if that's what that actually communicated but that was my intention.

He whispered in my ear after that. It tickled my face and made me get a tingling feeling in my stomach to feel his breath on my face life that. I have never kissed a boy, but him whispering in my ear like that made me wonder what it might be like.

I was so distracted by the whispering that I almost missed what he said, "I go to a school that trains people with magic."

I pulled away from his face and looked straight in his eyes. I widened mine questioningly and raised my eyebrows asking a silent question for him to confirm what he just said. He nodded.

"Can you show me?" I asked.

He nodded again and stood up. He reached his hand down and pulled me up with him.

"Let's go back to the river," he said.

He led the way back to the river and I followed silently. I'm not ever so quiet but he was clearly afraid of someone overhearing anything so I let myself follow for once.

When we got to the river he walked along it until we were underneath the Ben Franklin Bridge and out of view from passerby.

"Okay. I'm going to show you something small. They can only trace it when I use a good bit so I think just a little trick will be okay." He looked at me and I nodded excitedly. "You can't scream. This needs to be a secret."

"Okay. Okay. I understand. I've seen Harry Potter. We muggle can't know." I said jokingly. He just looked confused at the reference. "I won't tell." I repeated. Unbelievable. He doesn't know Harry Potter.

He leaned over the edge of the sidewalk until his hands were over the water, then he looked around us to make sure no one was watching. He curled his fingers a tiny bit and a droplet of water the size of a softball rose from the water. It didn't stay in a perfect circle like I had expected though, it flowed around and moved like an amoeba suspended in air. I gasped.

He turned to me and let out a small smile then I watched as the water droplet moved up over the edge of the fence at the sidewalk's edge and came in front of me. Suddenly it burst apart into twenty or so smaller droplets of various sizes. My insides warmed. The shimmering droplets began to dance around me, sweeping up and down and swirling around each other. I gazed around in wonder.

It was the strangest feeling, watching the magic. It wasn't just that I saw them dancing, but I could feel the life of them. The waves of threads of buzzing energy they seemed to follow.

It was addictive. I had never felt so alive in my life. Like I was finally Awake and Alert. There was this energy inside me like I should go run a marathon or do a backflip.

I started dancing.

I threw my arms above my head and swirled like the droplets of water. Adrien started laughing.

I reached out between the droplets and grabbed his hands. I leaned back and started spinning around, pulling him along with me. We spun like that until I finally started to feel dizzy. I let go and looked around at the droplets dancing their concerto again.

"This is amazing," I finally said.

It really was.

Amelie put down the paper and leaned her head back against the bed. She looked up at the ceiling and let the fluttering in her heart and ball in her throat grow into a blush on her cheeks. She moved her arms around herself and squeezed them tightly into a hug. It made her think about the last time she had felt such girlish joy. It certainly hadn't happened with Jake. She reached down and grabbed the next piece of paper in her stack.

After that, Adrien put the water back in the river and we walked up to grab an early dinner. It was close to six pm, which I knew was his time to go Cinderella on me.

On the way, I asked him some about his wizarding school and the world he comes from, but it was hard. He kept looking around like he was afraid of being watched.

We ended up getting Gyros from a street vendor and sitting in Washington Square Park. The joviality we had felt earlier while we were eating pretzels was gone as we felt the impending goodbye.

"Will you be able to come back next year?" I asked the question I had been fearing all day.

The look on his face told me the answer. "No. We're going to DC and will be together as a group the entire time. I'm so sorry." I nodded sadly.

"But in two years we'll be in New York City. I can take the train down here or you could come meet me up there?" He asked cautiously.

I had never been to New York before. "Can you draw me a map of New York? If you tell me where to meet you I can do it."

"Are you sure? I know it's a lot to ask."

No, but I was going to try. Not that much will change in two years, right? "Yes. I'll come. I promise."

He drew me a map of where to meet him. DO NOT LOSE IT AMELIE OR YOU ARE SCREWED.

So he got on a train and left. My heart hurts. Two years until I see him again. Two years until I can feel magic again.

Magic. God it felt like a building crescendo of a symphony inside me. I'm not musical but it was the kind of feeling that made me want to go to the orchestra and feel the music. Maybe I'll ask Dad if I can start piano lessons.

Amelie set down the paper and started to cry. The echo of the loss she felt after he left her that day still reverberated inside of her. The wondrous feeling of magic had just been opened up to her and then was locked away. She now knew that the loss she felt wasn't simply over missing her friend, but was also strongly related to missing magic.

How could he hide this from her? He must know the staggering loss she had felt after magic was ripped away like that. Would all Elves feel this powerful connection to their magic? She could still remember the feeling of the sparkling threads of herself that reached out to weave into the magical water beads floating around her.

Now it was like those sparkling threads were buried beneath her wherever she stepped. Like all she could access was living inside of her and she no longer could communicate with the world through through any means but her corporeal hands and body.

Why couldn't she access them? She felt how locked away they were and had often wondered if she had just felt the reaction to Adrien's magic or if some of that had come from within herself. No she hadn't wondered...she had hoped and dreamed. But she had not believed enough in her own ability to possess magic to do more than hope.

And Adrien had done that to her.

She tried to reach inside and pull up the threads she had felt before, desperately searching for any remnant or clue of how to access them. But she came up empty handed each time. It was as if she was reaching her bucket into an empty well. Maybe the bucket wasn't empty? Maybe it just had a false bottom? Like a lock that need a code?

She wiped her now frustrated tears on her sheet that was hanging down from the bed and stood up to look for her phone.

The clock said 2:00 AM.

Was it too late to call? She sent a text:

Call me when you can.

Not a minute later her phone was ringing.

"Hello" Amelie answered

"Hey. I'm glad you called. Can I come back over?"

"No you may not come over," she replied.

Silence.

"I want you to teach me," she said. "About what you did with the water. How to do that." She was trying to be discrete. After re-reading her old notes, she remembered how cautious he had been about magic.

"I don't know if that's a good idea, Am. You don't know how it works. And these are really dangerous times, it's not a good time to be blundering around learning about it."

"Adrien if I'm in danger I need to learn to defend myself. You owe me this much. You kept this from me for ten years."

"I don't know... It could be dangerous for you," he replied.

She grit her teeth at his chauvinism. "Please," she said softly, "Adrien, I have felt this missing from my life for a long time. This is important. Please."

He stayed silent, then, "Okay. Yes okay. Meet me here tomorrow," he gave an address.

"I'm working until 5. Can I come after that? It's not too far from my office."

"Yea that fine. See you tomorrow."

"See you tomorrow!" she responded. She was about to hang up when she remembered how happy she had felt reading her old notes and said, "Hey! Adrien, you still there?"

"Yea I'm here."

"I just wanted to say... I missed you. I never said it earlier. It's good to see you."

She heard an intake of breath on the other end of the line. "I missed you too. So much." She smiled. "Goodnight Amelie."

"Gnight."