Zoe and the fairies

I am not sure what was more normal - the way Zoe and I became best friends, or the way we happily collected rubbish from the playground every lunch time. My love for Zoe was simple. The moment I saw her, by the swings, standing next to a girl called Tamsin, Zoe took my hand and I took hers and off we went.

I don't know whose idea it was to dress the fairies, although we both knew that it made absolute sense. Fairies liked anything shiny, a fact I knew without question. So at lunch time, as our fellow students discarded their lolly wrappers and crisp packets, Zoe and I would set to work, sweeping the concrete square for anything that glistened. It took us both by surprise as we lined up neatly in class rows at the end of lunch one day that the prinicipal should thank us for our efforts. We knew only that what we were doing was very important and would make the fairies very happy.

We would fold the wrappers we had collected into little dresses and skirts and leave them under trees at dusk so the fairies could collect them overnight. The outfits were always gone in the morning.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I started reading about fairies in a book by Doreen Virtue. I hadn't thought much about fairies since that time but the memories came flooding back as Virtue described the delight fairies take in chocolate wrappers, aluminium foil and anything sparkly.

How had we known? And what had we seen in one another that made us inseparable from the moment we met?