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family almost died out twice, you know,” said Maya’s mother. “Before the church fell on them, there was the war. They were deported, you know.”
    Only Louise’s mother had survived the war. And then she had had a church fall on top of her! Life was definitely not fair.
    â€œDo you want to keep this, Maya?” asked her mother, and she tore out the page from her sketchbook with a quick swipe of the hand.
    From the sketchbook another picture stared up at them: a fountain, sketched lightly in blue pencil and now only about half inked in. Sad cherubs hoisting a banner: Amandine, 1954; Laurent, 1955. . . .
    â€œThat’s the Fountain of Lost Children,” said Maya. “By that café.”
    â€œYes,” said her mother. “Odd things from the neighborhood; that’s my theme this year. Did you know that was all some big mistake?”
    â€œMistake?”
    â€œI went inside the café to ask about it. You know I do like to ask about things.”
    She smiled at Maya, one of her quick, dancing smiles. And Maya smiled back.
    â€œAnyway, turns out there was about a decade where children were disappearing, or so they thought, and lots of hue and cry and fuss, and some benevolent association collected money for that fountain—‘adorably hideous!’ said the man in the café; they seem quite fond of it there, in a way—and then after it was set up, it turned out the children weren’t exactly missing, after all! Can you imagine? Oh, they’d each wandered off, the way children do, for an afternoon or something, or been misplaced in a store for an hour by their aunties, and been reported as lost, but once you looked more closely into the thing, it turned out they’d all pretty much wandered home.”
    â€œHow could everyone have been so wrong?” said Maya.
    â€œMass hysteria,” suggested her father. “Very common. Happens all the time.”
    Somehow Maya did not think that eight whole children could be rumored to have been lost or abducted or misplaced for a whole decade without anybody noticing they had actually been perfectly fine all along. But her mother shrugged.
    â€œSome of them, the families had moved away. Others apparently had problems of some kind. Weren’t in regular schools anymore. Maybe the parents were ashamed. Anyway, the kids had slipped out of the records, one way or another. These things do happen.”
    â€œBut the fountain’s still there,” said Maya.
    â€œOh, yes.” And Maya’s mother laughed. “The café had moved in by then! They fought tooth and nail to keep the fountain, accurate or not. So there it still is.”
    Look at it this way: If Maya vanished for a day or ten years from her spot at the back of every class at the Collège Paul Sabatier, no one would ever have felt moved to carve a sad cherub bemoaning the loss of her .
    â€œMeh,” she said to Valko a few days later, when he asked how her French class was going. “The teacher hardly even glances at me. It’s like I’m invisible.”
    She thought of Cousin Louise then for a moment and shuddered.
    â€œTeachers never notice the ones who don’t cause trouble,” said Valko. “When I was younger, I was noticed all the time, believe me.”
    He laughed a bit, a nice laugh, and Maya felt the specter of her possible Louiseness dissipate just a bit.
    â€œStill, I’ll never ever fit in,” she said (but already more cheerful about it).
    â€œ Very possible,” said Valko. “Likely, even. But you don’t have to fit in to be okay. Believe me! I am the not-fitting-in world expert. I have not fit in in maybe five different countries so far. I am homelandless. I even make mistakes when I speak Bulgarian. But it’s no big deal, not really. It’s not the end of the world, right? It’s okay.”
    He did look pretty convincingly okay, Maya had to admit, for