The day the children were asked to bring something they had made with their own hands, the girl was the first to raise her hand.

She loved assignments like that. They gave her an excuse to open her old notebooks, choose one of the stories she had invented, and see whether it still made her laugh the way it had when she first wrote it. Sometimes she changed the ending at the last minute. Other times, she added a new character simply because a beautiful name had suddenly come to mind.

This time, they were asked to prepare something to present to everyone at the end of the week. It could be a drawing, a story, something they had built, or anything else they wanted to share. There was no competition, at least not in the beginning. The teacher explained that the purpose was to discover things about one another that weren’t always visible.