Glenda and her entire family had moved away very soon after. Still to this day we can’t find out where they went or where they are. We don’t know how they changed their name or how they relocated so completely, but even the school has no record now of Glenda ever attending there and the people who live at their house refuse to talk to me. At first my wife and I tried to get Brixie to talk to us about what had happened, but she couldn’t seem to remember. She says that she remembers coming home from school and then waking up the next day, but nothing in between. We tried everything that we could think of. Counselors and doctors told us that nothing was wrong with her and that everything would be alright if we just established a “normal life” for her. Whatever that meant.

In the meanwhile, we received the news that she had been accepted into a “Magnet School” for Chemical Volcanology and that we needed to act on the offer quickly. The school was out in the countryside and it was top rated. So top rated that I had never even heard of it. Heppler Winkley was a school of only two hundred. “Training and educating the brightest and most talented children in the land” was their credo and they meant business.

She was gone almost every day of the year at school. She got to come home four days a year, and these were at her disposal. We could not visit her at school, as parents were not allowed on school grounds, so we waited for her to come to us. She chose only to use one of those days each year. Her birthday.

And every birthday was the same. We sat around waiting for the box to sing to her. We gather around the cabinet to see if anything will happen. Every birthday nothing happened and she asks to be driven back to school.

She accepted the teacher’s aide position at school and stayed past graduation until she was twenty. The day of her birthday, around five in the morning our doorbell rang, and it was her with all of her belongings.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and went to the fridge.

Just then a most majestic tone of trumpet and organ sounds filled the room. The box had begun to play music, and then a voice followed directly after.

“Be it known that the most honorable Brixallyn Maeve Charlington has hereby today received from The Supreme Nibbler Conservatory of Wellston Park Limited, the most coveted of all gifts that a young woman may receive, her second Nibbler.” The voice was still and the music stopped. Then there was a little hiss and the second panel from the left end of the box slid upward and was silent.

We all waited for what would happen next.