All week, Noa had been making a kite. It had a long tail of ribbons, red and gold, and a face painted on the front that looked a little bit like a friendly dragon.
"Tomorrow's the windy day," said Dad, checking the weather on his phone. "Perfect for flying."
Noa could hardly sleep with excitement, and in the morning she carried the kite to the top of Hollow Hill, holding it high like a trophy.
But the wind had other plans. It had wandered off somewhere, and the air on the hill was still as a held breath. Noa ran back and forth, kite trailing on the grass, but it only flopped and dragged and would not lift, not even a little.
"It's not working," Noa said, and her chin wobbled. She sat down hard on the grass, arms crossed, feeling the disappointment sit heavy in her chest like a stone.
Dad sat beside her. "That's a rotten feeling," she said — wait, Dad said. "Wanting something so much and the day saying no."
Noa nodded, blinking fast. For a minute she just breathed, and let the disappointed feeling be there without trying to push it away.
Then a grasshopper landed right on her shoe, bright green and surprising, and Noa laughed before she meant to.
"Look," Noa said, pointing. The grasshopper leapt again, a tiny green rocket, and Noa chased after it through the grass, forgetting the kite for a moment.
After the grasshopper hid in a clump of clover, Noa flopped onto her back and looked up at the sky instead. The clouds were doing something interesting — one looked like a sleepy elephant, another like a bowl of soup with steam curling off it.
"That one's a turtle," Noa said.
"I see a very fat cat," said Dad, and they both laughed.
They stayed like that a while, naming clouds, until Noa noticed something on her arm — a breeze, small and shy, ruffling the little hairs there.
"Dad. Dad! The wind's coming back!"
It wasn't a big wind, not the kind that would send the kite soaring across the whole sky. But it was enough. Noa scrambled up, unwound the string, and ran a few steps downhill. The kite lifted — wobbled — climbed a little higher, ribbons streaming, dragon face grinning against the clouds.
It didn't fly high or long. After a minute the breeze faded and the kite drifted gently back down into the grass. But Noa was grinning too, chest warm instead of heavy.
"It flew," she said. "Even just a little bit, it really flew."
On the walk home, Noa carried the kite under one arm and a grass stain on her knee and a pocketful of clover from where the grasshopper had hidden. The evening was turning soft and blue, the first stars blinking on one by one.
By the time Noa was tucked into bed, the kite leaning in the corner of the room, her eyes were already drooping, full of grasshoppers and cloud-turtles and one small, wonderful moment of flying.