And just like that, our comic was born. For weeks in class we worked, passing the notebook back and forth when the teacher’s back was turned, continuing the story. It was our secret delight, our shared escape from reality into the farthest reaches of space, where dragon and man chased each other across galaxies, sometimes enemies, sometimes banding together to defeat even greater foes.

When the first notebook ran out, Maja traded part of her lunch to a fat kid for a spare one he had in his desk, and we resumed our story. And this we did at least half a dozen times, keeping the old notebooks at Baba’s house where Maja’s little siblings wouldn’t get into them, slowly accumulating quite the impressive comic series.

That winter, a week before Maja’s birthday, the newsman said there’d be a meteor shower right over our town. Maja got permission to spend the night with Baba and me, and the three of us stood on the balcony to watch the falling stars. The pair of us listened with secret restrained laughter as Baba recited to us her old story of the dragons and the way they fought with mankind before fleeing to space. In our minds, it was Pavle and Monet again, going round and round as Monet tried and failed for the hundredth time to steal one of Pavle’s scales.

“Mark where the dragon scales fall, children,” Baba said, eyes shining as she watched the meteors. “If you’re lucky enough to find one, whatever you wish will come true.”

“What is Monet’s wish?” Maja asked me later that night as we lay side by side on the floor, listening to Baba snore. “He’s always fighting Pavle for a scale, so he must have a wish.”

“I think his only wish must be for their battle to go on forever. Since fighting Pavle is when he has the most fun.”

“He doesn’t need a dragon scale for that,” she observed with a giggle.

“What’s your wish?” I asked her, lying on my side, studying her face in the dark. She’s pretty, I remember thinking that night. Her hair and her dimples, her big black eyes. Her tiny pink lips...

I swallowed. What was I looking at her lips for?

“To live here, with you and Baba,” she answered my question at last. “To get out of that house, away from all my screaming siblings. But thats impossible. Mama needs my help, especially now that she’s pregnant again...” She sighed, frustrated. “When I grow up, I swear I’m never having kids.”

I couldn’t blame her for that. From her earliest memories, I knew Maja had been taking care of her younger siblings. She deserved a break.

“What about your wish, Žarko? You still want to move to America?”

I recall I had said something like that before. But if she’s asking me now, my wish...

“Žarko?”

I shook myself, realizing I’d been staring at her lips again.

“I don’t know,” I answered, rolling on my back to look up at the ceiling, ears hot. “It’s late. We should sleep...”

That night, the Albanian bakery on the next street burned to the ground. When I asked Baba how it happened later, she told me Mr. Marković had paid Mr. Shala to roast a whole pig in the bakery for his family’s slava celebration.

“But, Mr. Shala is Muslim.”

“Yes. Mr. Shala roasted it for him, and he and his sons basted the pig with their urine. So Mr. Marković and his sons threw molotov cocktails through the windows of Mr. Shala’s bakery. Now his family has lost everything, they’re moving back to Berat.”

This I was saddened to hear, because I thought Mr. Shala made the best burek in town, but Baba said it was for the best.

“For Mr. Shala’s safety, and for the peace of our town, this is the way it should be.”

The following week Baba set up a miniature Christmas tree. She didn’t have money for presents so she wrapped empty pill boxes in newspaper and put them beneath it, so it ‘wouldn’t look lonely.’

In my country, neither Catholic nor Orthodox Christmas featured a Santa Claus; these days were sacred to Jesus and the Church. For us, Santa came on New Year’s Eve. So it was when January first rolled around and the rest of the planet was ushering in the much anticipated millennium, I was preoccupied with our little Christmas tree, delighted to see ‘Santa’ had left me a real present beneath it, tucked in beside the pill boxes: a ninja turtle pencil and eraser. I got Rafael, though I would have preferred Michaelangelo. But I never told Baba that. Instead I hugged her tightly. Then, to my dismay, I began to cry.

I missed Mama. It was New Year and I missed Mama. Soon it would be Christmas, and my birthday, and she wouldn’t be here. She’d never hug me again, or give me another gift. All this, Baba understood without words. I remember she just held me atop her bed that morning, and rocked my oversized child’s body as I clutched my ninja turtle pencil, and cried and cried…

That afternoon Baba’s Kuma stopped by to visit from out of town, a lively old woman named Vera who wore an enormous starburst rhinestone pin on her bright purple coat. Baba was thrilled to entertain her old friend, and gave me the last dinars from her purse with instructions to run down to the corner store and buy a bottle of wine for them to share. Later that night, after Vera left, Baba gave me the last of the wine in a plastic cup, so I spent the evening of the first day of the millennium laughing and singing songs with Baba before passing out on the cot and sleeping soundly till morning…

Life went on. My birthday came and went. Winter slowly dissolved into spring.

It was around this time that my body started changing. My legs ached with growth spurts, and acne started appearing on my face and back. Hair was growing in strange places, and certain other things were growing as well. I felt uncomfortable with these changes, understanding a little of what they meant. It was especially painful because as my body continued to grow and change, Maja stayed very much the same.

Perhaps it was only natural that I distanced myself from her a little in that time, though she did not understand it. It hurt her, she confided later, to feel suddenly shunned by the boy she considered her best friend. But the problem for me at that time was simply this: that I’d fallen in love with her. Not in a way I fully understood, nor in a way I could articulate even now. We were children, practically siblings, and yet I knew she was the most important person in my entire world. I knew, even at the age of eleven, that I never wanted to be apart from her. Not for one single day for the rest of my life.

This is where I found myself on May 1st, more than a year from the day Mama dropped me off at Branislava’s, when Baba got a call from the family welfare office.

They’d found my aunt and uncle in Belgrade, and they were willing to take me in. Someone would be by the next morning to take me to them.

Like a bird in flight that crashes suddenly into a clean window, I was slammed by the news. I couldn’t believe it. That my life could be changed so suddenly, without my input or permission, that I could be taken from Baba and Maja and this small, peaceful town and shipped back to noisy, crowded Belgrade without so much as 24 hours warning—it was almost more than I could take.

But there was nothing that could be done. Nothing but to pack my meager belongings, the few pieces of clothing Baba had bought for me at the second hand store, and Maja’s space dragon painting. I left the comics stacked neatly on the floor.

“She’ll want them,” I said to Baba, throat strained with unshed tears. “She’s going to write her own books one day. Illustrate them, too. She’ll need them for her notes.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go see them?”

“I couldn’t… I can’t say goodbye…”

“Maja will be heartbroken.”

To that, I had nothing to say.

That night I lay awake on my cot, just staring across the dark room. Sleep was impossible. Tears streamed from my eyes, but I didn’t make a sound, lest I should wake Baba. Instead I bit my fist, clenched my gut till it ached.

When the light outside the balcony window began to brighten, I sat up determinedly. I tip-toed downstairs to find my bicycle, thinking I would ride to Branislava’s house one last time. I pushed the pedals slowly, painfully, every muscle in my body aching.

All around me, the city was slowly coming to life. The lights were on in the bakery they’d built in place of Mr. Shala’s old bakery; the door was propped open, letting delicious smells waft into the street. A kid my age zoomed past me on his bicycle, carrying bags stuffed with newspapers.

When I finally reached Branislava’s house, the sun had just crested the horizon. Leaving my bike in the street, I slipped through their gate and walked up to the front door. I considered knocking, then decided against it. Instead I turned, and took a stone of a particular size and shape from the ground, and stuffed it in my pocket. Walking over to the window of the girls’ room, I put my hands around my mouth and hollered for Maja at the top of my lungs.

“MAJA!”

Noise began in the house. Lights started coming on. Then, the window opened, and a sleepy Maja looked down at me.

“Žarko, are you nuts?! It’s 5:30 in the morning!”

“I found a dragon scale!” I said, pulling the rock from my pocket and waving it at her. “I wanted to tell you my wish!”

By this time her sisters had also poked their heads out the window, and I could hear Stanko on the front porch, cursing in bewilderment.

Maja laughed a little in disbelief, though she was definitely uncomfortable as all around us, the neighbors too were roused by my spectacle.

“What’s your wish?” she asked me, her long black hair trailing out the window.

“I’m going to marry you!” I shouted, and as Maja’s mouth fell open, I heard Stanko swear from the porch.

“Oh, this mother f*cker—”

“I’m going to marry you, and we’ll move to America together, and we’ll never have any kids! So don’t forget me!” I cried, grinning up at her as tears streamed from my eyes.

Just then, Stanko came around the side of the house in his socks and boxer shorts, wielding a baseball bat.

“The f*ck you think you’re gonna do with my daughter?!”

I was already running for my bike.

“Goodbye, Maja! Volim te! Goodbye!”