THE BELL AND THE BALLERINA

“Where is Emma?” Jenny said again, and then again.

“Stop crying,” Tommy said. “Look, look. There she is!”

And it was Emma. And Jenny took her hand and held it as tightly as she could.

“Now you two stay here,” Tommy ordered.

“Don’t follow us,” Jenny’s sister Taylor warned them.

“It’s too dangerous,” said Derek from down the street, as if he and all the rest were setting off into the bone-chilling wilderness.

Of course, it wasn’t really scary at all. They just didn’t want two little girls tagging along. And so Jenny and Emma held hands and watched the old ones, all of them, go sliding down the hill, ducking under the sassafras limbs and laughing until they were gone from sight. But even when they were left behind, Jenny and Emma knew something no one else did: Their souls were connected and always would be.

Everyone knows that the very best friends can sometimes do different things, but even when Jenny and Emma were apart, they were together. Emma was the fastest girl in school, and when she ran a race no one cheered louder for her than Jenny. And Jenny loved ballet — oh, how she could pirouette — and no one applauded louder when she danced in her recitals than Emma.

Families have Christmas traditions all their own, too. In Jenny’s house everyone had an ornament that was theirs and theirs alone and only they could hang it on the tree. Jenny’s father had a copper teapot, and Mother a miniature oaken bucket. Every year Father would tell the story of the teapot and the bucket, survivors from their first Christmas tree, in an apartment Mother and Father lived in before any of the children were born. Tommy’s ornament was a dinosaur. Taylor’s was a pair of tiny blue beach sandals. Jenny’s, of course, was a crystal ballerina. How that dancer would twirl!

Emma and Jenny had a tradition of their very own. On Christmas Eve they left their shoes on the porch by the front door — even their houses looked exactly alike — and in the night their shoes filled up heel-to-toe with packages of chewy red and green and yellow and orange gummy bears, each to each, because they both loved them so.

This year, though, Jenny didn’t feel much like leaving her shoes by the door. Emma was moving away. And not just to a different house a few streets across town but to a whole different state hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away. The day before Christmas it was cold outside and as they sat in the living room by Emma’s Christmas tree, Jenny asked her friend if she had a special ornament just like Jenny did.

Emma got up from the floor, reached high up, almost to the star, and took her own special decoration down. It was a silver bell with her name on it in the most elegant writing Jenny had ever seen. Emma gave it a shake and a delicate, beautiful note came out of it.

“Why do you have to move?” Jenny asked her.

Emma sighed. “My mother got a new job.”

“Where?”

“Out West,” Emma said, trying to say it with a hint of adventure but it sounded like the dark side of the moon.

“West,” Jenny said. That was where the sun went down.

That night was Christmas Eve, the best night of the year in Jenny’s house. It was the night they put up their tree. After everyone found the perfect spot for their special ornament, they had one last tradition before disappearing upstairs to wait for morning to come. They were all allowed to open one present. Just one. Father opened his first. Then Mother opened hers. Then Tommy, then Taylor. Jenny was the youngest and had to wait the longest.

Father passed a long, thin present to Tommy. “I wonder what this is,” her brother said as he shook it and put it up to his ear, pretending he couldn’t figure out what was inside the wrapping when it couldn’t have been anything else in the whole world but a hockey stick. Everyone laughed, even Jenny. And they oohed and aahed at the sweater, as downy as kitten fur, when Taylor pulled it over her head. “It’s so soft,” she said.

“This is for you, Jenny,” her father finally said and gave her a small, rectangular box. Jenny pulled the ribbon apart on the top, then pried the tape off one end. She knew what it was, too, but was afraid to hope too hard. It was a plain old shoebox but inside it she found the most wondrous thing — her very first pair of point shoes. Jenny gasped, and she looked at her mother and father and her sister and brother. She pulled her slippers off in a rush, put her feet in her new ballet shoes and tied the pink ribbons around her ankles to hold them in place. She stood up in the middle of the living room, beside their tree with all the lights and ornaments, kicked aside the wads of wrapping paper and empty boxes and twirled and danced and leaped with joy.

Jenny danced around the living room and through the dining room and back through the living room and out the front door onto the porch where her new shoes made a musical sound, scraping and clicking against the wooden deck as if she was keeping time with her heartbeat. As she held her arms out, posed exactly so, and turned and turned, her head flipped around one last time and she saw Emma watching from her living room window. Her best friend in the whole world waved to her and Jenny waved back and they smiled at each other as though their smiles might never vanish.