I so wanted to live in this place. To wake up to this cacophony, this noise and action that looked almost choreographed. To not know what the day would hold, to be free to choose where to go, what to eat, who to play with. To do different things every single day. To be pressed into the madness of all these people.

We hit Midtown. This was where all the non-natives were. That's what Mother called them. Tourists were easy to spot, easier than a red maple in the late fall, she'd say. They were all looking up, they all had cameras out and ready to go, and they all looked like they had just stumbled into Disney World. Confused but generally cheerful.

"So what are we doing, anyway?" asked Georgie.

"Hmm. I thought it might be good to get away from the hive here, spend some quality time in the Village?" Dad switched her Q station off, right in the middle of Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins," which I was secretly trying to memorize up in my room when I was supposed to be doing homework. I grunted in frustration when he switched my song over to some whiney woman singing about how is she supposed to live without him, blah, blah, blah. Drama queen.

Despite the music switch, my heart ticked up a beat at the mention of where Dad was taking us. I loved Greenwich Village. It was where The Fossil Store was. At the Fossil Store, you could actually buy an ancient shark's tooth or the fossilized etching of a snake or the dead body of a tarantula. They had crystals and freeze-dried bats and molded replicas of saber-toothed tigers' teeth from back when there weren't even people living in the world yet.

Besides The Fossil Store, Greenwich Village was also home to Miss Minnie Pinnister herself, the lady who came to our school to teach us about what she called natural magic. She was also, of course, teaching me how to speak up for myself, since I tended to stew in silence with my feelings.
Minnie Pinnister used to live up where we did, in Scarsdale, but she told us she had "escaped" to the city as soon as she was legally allowed. She still came back to our school once in a while, though, when she visited her parents, which I thought was just about the craziest thing I'd ever heard since Minnie seemed so old herself. I couldn't even imagine how ancient her parents had to be.

These days, Minnie owned a shop in Greenwich Village where she mixed potions and made ointments and blended teas that would help people live their best lives. Minnie told me once that every one of us holds magic inside that's just busting to get out.


Ours was not, unfortunately, a magical school like that Harry Potter kid went to, but when Minnie came to visit us for assembly, she brought her brand of magic to us every time.

I was almost positive most of my school's grownups didn't like it when Minnie came to talk. Even Mrs. Dumars, my third-grade science teacher who always got yelled at for setting things on fire for us, seemed a little ill-at-ease when Minnie would come in dragging her big old carpetbag behind her. But word had it Minnie was related to somebody who was on the "board," whatever that was, so they had to let her show up now and then.

Minnie would come into our classroom hauling her carpetbag full of strange concoctions, then ask if anybody had problems on their bodies, which always made us laugh. She doled out treatments to the kids who spoke up, though, and they always came away happy customers.

Once, she gave Michael Bester a mixture of lavender tea and local honey, and his cough went away. She gave Annie Gilchrest some tea tree oil mixed with grape seeds and cucumber seeds to rub onto her psoriasis, and the white blotches that once covered her arms and the back of her neck were erased by the next week. Minnie put that same tea tree oil, mixed in with some cloves and lemon and the root of a calendula plant on Shane Cobbin's planter wart and let him take home the whole bottle. By the following week, goodbye wart.

But when the principal, Miss Felmin, sat in on one of Minnie Pinnister's presentations, she told Minnie she had to stop giving kids anything we could taste, which was a bummer. That's when she started bringing her plants into our class, teaching us how each plant, just like each of us, has magic inside it.

Principal Felmin didn't like that so much either. She made Minnie promise to always advise against us trying plant concoctions at home without some grown up watching.

Every time she came to my school, Minnie Pinnister awarded a prize to the kid who guessed the right plants to use for whatever our ailment was. We all chimed in and she never even yelled at us for not raising our hands.

One day, she asked us what we could do about a common cold. I was the winner, because I knew that you could boil the roots of purple coneflowers in tea for any kind of breathing problem or for the beginnings of a cold. I also knew that purple coneflowers were known in the science world as Echinacea. Minnie leaned back on her heels with her mouth in a big "O", and then asked me to come to the front of the room to get my prize.

"Have you ever seen a magician who pulls quarters out of children's ears?" she asked me.
I solemnly shook my head, but thought about my Uncle Archie, who tried that trick with me, only with silver dollars. He did a bad job of it, but I mean, who's going to call attention to bad magic when there's a silver dollar in front of you?

"Well," Minnie was saying, "I don't use quarters."

She reached behind me with one hand, snapped the fingers on the other hand, and the next thing I knew there was a Tamagotchi hanging right in front of my eyeballs.

Tamagotchis were the newest fad that just about every kid was obsessed with, even older kids like Georgie. They were these little electronic devices, the size of my palm, that housed the virtual egg of an alien creature, and you, the owner, were responsible for this alien's growth and happiness. When you pushed the right buttons, you could watch your Tomagotchi hatch from its egg. Then you had to feed it, or play with it, or clean up its poop, or sometimes even discipline it. The creature lived only as long as you took the right kind of care of it.

I could not believe my fortune.

"Are you a witch?" I asked her, breathless as I stared at my alien's egg, and I think my eyes were probably the size of Uncle Archie's silver dollars.

She kind of pursed her lips and her forehead got crinkled up.

"Some people don't like that word," she said, squatting down so she could look me in the eye. "But yes, I suppose that's what I am, and here's how I define that word, witch: A witch is someone who is always searching for the best solutions, always puzzling over what might heal an ache or a sadness, not only for themselves but for everyone they know. The witches I know believe in helping people see the beauty in life, to find joy and healing from the Earth's bounty. I believe we should explore this extraordinary world every day, learning and growing until the day we die. These Tomawhatchamaycallits," she pointed at my new treasure, "they aren't really alive, are they?"
I shook my head.

"But it's fun to pretend they are, right? And by taking care of something outside of your own self, you're learning. And all learning is good."

"What if I kill it?" I asked, afraid to even touch one of my Tomagotchi's buttons. "If you forget to take care of your Tomagotchi, it dies!"

"Everything does that, you know," said Minnie Pinnister, grunting with the strain as she stood up. "Plants, people, you name it, we all die sooner or later. But we all serve a purpose, and that's to learn and to help others learn and enjoy this life, the one we have right now."

I stared at my new treasure. "I think if I kill it, I can reset it." I'd heard other kids talking about putting new batteries into their Tomagotchis or pushing the reset button to start their aliens over as eggs if they got their angel wings because they hadn't been fed for a while.

"It's a toy, Madeline, not a living being. Yes, you can reset a Tomagotchi. Not so much a person or plant who dies. Just as your toy's 'death' will teach you a lesson, our humans and plants who pass over also have something to teach us and can comfort us during our bad times. When they go away, we can still find ways to reach them, and they can still find ways to reach us. But only," she pointed to my chest, "if we believe."

"I believe," I whispered. "Can I be a witch, too?"

"With hard work and a whole lotta faith, my little friend," she said.


Now I looked out my backseat window and I realized I had once again left my Tomagotchi at home, where it would certainly die. Again. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for taking care of things.
I sighed, but my attention was back on the streets. They were getting narrower as we wove through the Village traffic, and their names were words now instead of numbers. Hudson. Greenwich. Bleeker. Perry.

"Can we visit Minnie Pinnister?" I asked, but my voice was drowned out by some guy on the radio who was screaming about Jungleland. Dad's favorite hobby was making mixtapes. This tape was all about his college days, and every song pretty much sounded like the last one if you asked me.
"We'll see, my Sweet," Dad said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror. "But first, but first, a special treat!" His eyes did that thing I loved, like a little dance of excitement.

"What is it?" Sometimes Georgie and I said things at exactly the same time, at which point we would scream "Jinx!" and then start counting, to see who had to buy the other one a Coke. As usual, I lost this time. I think I owed her about twenty Cokes.

Dad wouldn't tell us where he was taking us, but his eyes kept dancing.

We parked in one of those spooky garages that have the ceilings coming at you and you're absolutely sure the roof of your car is going to get sawed clean off. The walls were the color of bandaids. When we got out of the car, the sounds of the place, the cars' engines, the slamming doors, our voices, were like echos inside a cave.

Outside, we squinted against the sudden brightness and wandered through flurries of snow, catching flakes on our tongues, and laughing up into the sky, until we got to a weird corner building that was shaped like a triangle. Dad ushered us in.

The room was dark and smelled like mashed potatoes. There were candles everywhere, and long strands of beads hanging over the windows and in the back entryway. A lady sat behind a table with what I'm pretty sure was a crystal ball.

Georgie stopped dead and put her hands on her hips. She turned to face Dad and glared up at him. "Are you kidding me?"