PART I

It was a summer day perfect for doing nothing at all. For once, thick clouds hid the punishing rays of the sun and the air was quite cool. Any other kid would have been thrilled at the prospect of sleeping in or maybe watching copious amounts of Youtube. But Elsa wasn’t like any other kid. She woke up at exactly 6 am every day and was never very interested in watching any sort of tube. She sighed loudly and reluctantly got out bed.

“Mom?” Elsa called out as she headed to the kitchen.

“Cereal and milk are on the table,” Mom said, barely looking up from her computer. As usual, she was doing three things at once —drinking coffee, typing on her laptop, and chatting on the phone.

“I guess we’re not walking around the block today,” Elsa said, even though she already knew the answer.

Mom didn’t even blink to acknowledge her statement.

Zombie mode. She knew that when her mom was like this, she’d be rooted to her “office” for hours on end. Elsa ate in silence as she tried to remember the last time they went out. It was months ago, with her dad a week away from ending his vacation and going back to work in Dubai. He reserved a room for them at a resort and they spent a whole day at the beach with no phones and no computers to compete with. But now, Dad was back to his work and Mom was as busy as ever.

Elsa cleared the table and washed her bowl just to have something to do. Now what? Elsa counted the wooden boards she stepped on as she went up the second floor of what she jokingly calls their new-old house, a house that her grandmother recently passed on to Elsa’s mom.

She checked the shelves and scanned through Lola Isabel’s worn-out volumes of Reader’s Digest magazines. I need light. Elsa searched the ceiling for a light bulb. But instead, she saw a chain hanging from the ceiling. I’ve never seen that before, Elsa thought to herself. She quickly ran to her room and got an umbrella. She hooked the umbrella to the chain and pulled on it. Stairs slowly came down to the ground.

An attic! Elsa’s heartbeat quickened as she began to climb the staircase. Faint light was shining through a small window, but it wasn’t enough for Elsa to see what was inside the room. She groped around for a light switch and found one. Warm yellow light filled the room and Elsa was amazed at what she saw—dusty albums, hard-bound books, framed photographs, wooden trunks—she couldn’t believe her luck! A treasure trove of things to explore! She picked up a book and dusted its cover. It was an encyclopedia dating back to the 1970’s. Elsa poured over its contents, laughing at some outdated information and carefully looking at each picture being described. She was so absorbed that she failed to notice a ball of dust rolling across her feet. Soon, the ball was on her shoulder.

“Hi!” A tiny voice came from nowhere. She looked around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. She spotted the black ball of dust on her shoulder and was about to sweep it off when she heard it squeak.

“Who are you? What are you?” Elsa said, her voice filled with wonder.

“We’re dust sprites and we live in this attic,” the ball spoke.

Then, another gray ball emerged from between her feet. “We are the guardians of the things people have forgotten. Can we help you look for anything?”

Elsa grew silent for a while, thinking of the situation she was in. The sprites looked harmless enough, and quite cute with their big round eyes and furry bodies. Between the prospect of dying from boredom downstairs to talking to these eager balls of dust, she thought the latter was the obvious choice.

“Hmmm…,” Elsa tapped her chin. “Do you have something actually owned by Lola Isabel? I was just a toddler when she passed away.”

“Oh, we have a lot of those,” a particularly furry sprite rolled away and came back with an album.

Elsa flipped over the pages and saw beautiful black and white photos of a woman who looked like a more dressed up version of her mom. She was glamorous, with her beaded gowns and her hair pinned up. Elsa got so absorbed with looking at pictures that she almost forgot the time.

“Elsa!” She heard the distant voice of her mom. “Oh, gotta run!” Elsa said a quick goodbye to her new friends.

“Come back soon!” The dust sprites gathered at the attic’s opening to say their goodbyes.

Going to the attic quickly became Elsa’s favorite pastime whenever her mom was working, which was practically all the time. She was always careful to pull the stairs back up whenever she climbed. She didn’t want her mom to find her special place and ban her from it. She’d spend hours playing with her cute friends, soon giving them equally cute nicknames. She’d try on the old gowns that had been stored away and do a fashion show with the sprites. She’d open trunks and read through beautifully penned love letters. The sprites always tried their best to find what she wanted.

One particularly long stay, Elsa’s stomach grumbled. “Oops, I’ll just go down and grab some food.”

“No need,” Shorty (the stumpy one) said. “Let us show you some of our magic.” It took an old magazine and opened it to a page with a spread of food—cubed cheese on a wooden tray, blueberry bagels, sugared donuts and a steaming mug of hot chocolate. “Point to what you like.”

Elsa pointed to a cube of cheese and somehow, the sprite was able to lift actual cheese from the page.

“Cheddar!” Elsa exclaimed as she popped the cheese in her mouth. “Can you get me a doughnut?” The sprite called for some help to lift the doughnut from the page, and just like the cheese, a fluffy doughnut appeared.

“I could get used to this,” Elsa said, eating to her stomach’s content.

“Anything for you,” the sprites smiled, throwing approving looks at each other.