Change

What if I could just wish myself into becoming a new person?  she wondered.  Leave this old self behind entirely and start over as someone else.

It was a bleakly cold end to New Years Day.  The setting sun cast a dim rainbow of color into the dusky sky, silhouetting the western mountains.  A faint glimmer caught her eye - the evening star.

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight...

She smirked.  Wishes and stars.  How many times had she pleaded on those cold distant pinpricks and they had come through?

Just that once...  No.  She shook the thought from her head, running numbed hands through her tangled brown hair.  The bite of the air pricked her skin and her breath was beginning to materialize in thin white wisps - it was time to head in.  But she felt suspended in the growing twilight as the memories rushed back.

In their eighth summer, her next door neighbor Laney had insisted that three friends were better than two, so they created Jenna.  With curly blonde hair and sky blue eyes, Jenna was the prettiest, most popular, and nicest girl anyone ever met, even if no one else knew it.

No, it was a coincidence, pure and simple.  Imaginary friends don't appear out of thin air and real friends don't vanish without a trace.

Jenna was their favorite secret - the third fairy, the third witch, the third New World explorer, the third musketeer.  That was, until one day when Laney announced that Jenna told her that she only wanted to speak to her.  Suddenly Jenna always seemed to agree with Laney about everything, especially on the fact that two friends were better than three.  Remembering running home in tears that August afternoon still smarted.

That night she had looked out of her bedroom window at the stars and wished with all her might on the brightest one she could see.  I wish Jenna was my best friend and Laney was imaginary and then we could leave her out and she would be sad and alone for ever and ever.

The next day, Laney was gone.