Chapter 1

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DEDICATION

For every child who has learned that the best wishes are the ones you make come true yourself.

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There was a wishing well in the garden behind the Sunnyvale Community Center, and seven-year-old Nadia Morales believed in it completely.

Nadia visited the well every Tuesday and Thursday, when her abuela brought her to the community center for after-school care. While other kids played tag or drew pictures inside, Nadia went straight to the garden, pulled a penny from her pocket, and dropped it into the well.

"What did you wish for today?" her best friend Caleb asked. He always followed her out, because where Nadia went, Caleb went. They'd been best friends since preschool, when Caleb had shared his goldfish crackers with her during snack time and Nadia had decided he was the finest person she'd ever met.

"I can't tell you. If you tell a wish, it doesn't come true."

"That's not a real rule."

"It is too. My abuela told me."

Caleb looked into the well. The water was clear and shallow — maybe two feet deep — and the bottom sparkled with coins. "What if wishing wells don't actually work?"

"Then how come the wish I made last month came true?"

"What wish?"

"I wished for a snow day and we got one."

"Nadia, it was January. In Minnesota. Snow days happen."

"Because people WISH for them."

Caleb shook his head, but he was smiling. He liked Nadia's certainty about things — her unwavering belief that the world was full of magic, that wishes were powerful, that a seven-year-old with a pocket full of pennies could change things.

But Nadia had a bigger wish now. One she hadn't told anyone, not even Caleb. It wasn't about snow days or birthday presents or getting a puppy (though she definitely wanted a puppy). It was about something she saw every Tuesday and Thursday at the community center — something that bothered her, that sat like a pebble in her shoe, uncomfortable and impossible to ignore.

The community center was old and tired. The paint was peeling, the playground equipment was rusted, and the garden — including the wishing well — was overgrown and neglected. The director, Mrs. Patterson, did her best with a tiny budget, but "best" wasn't enough. Kids deserved a place that felt cared for, that was bright and clean and full of possibility. Instead, they had faded walls, broken swings, and a garden that looked like it had given up.

She dropped her penny into the well and closed her eyes tight. Fix it, she thought. Make it beautiful again. Please.

The penny hit the water with a tiny plop and sank to the bottom, joining hundreds of other wishes that had been made and forgotten.

But Nadia wasn't going to forget. She was going to make this wish come true — even if she had to do it herself.

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Nadia was a planner. Her mom said she'd been organizing things since she was a toddler — lining up her stuffed animals by size, sorting her crayons by color, making lists on scrap paper before she could even write real words.

NADIA'S WISH LIST FOR THE COMMUNITY CENTER 1. Paint the walls (they're ugly gray now. They should be happy colors) 2. Fix the playground (the swings are broken and the slide has a crack) 3. Clean up the garden (everything is dead. Gardens should be alive) 4. Fix the wishing well (the bucket rope is broken and the wood is rotting) 5. Get new books for the reading corner (half the books are missing pages) 6. Make it feel like someone CARES

She showed the list to Caleb.

"Number six isn't really a task," Caleb said. "How do you make something feel like someone cares?"

"By caring. And showing it. When you take care of a place, it shows."

"This is a lot of stuff, Nadia. We're seven."

"So? Being seven means we have energy and we don't give up easily."

"Also we can't paint walls or fix swings."

"We can't do it ALONE. But we can ask for help. That's what communities are for."

Nadia went to Mrs. Patterson during snack time. Mrs. Patterson was a large, warm woman who always smelled like coffee and hand sanitizer, and whose desk was a monument to paperwork.

"Mrs. Patterson, I have a proposal."

"A proposal? Nadia, you're seven."

"I know. But I have a list of things the community center needs, and I want to help fix them."

Mrs. Patterson looked at the list. Her expression went from amused to thoughtful to something that looked almost emotional.

"Nadia, I've been trying to get funding for these things for three years. The city budget keeps getting cut."

"Then we won't wait for the city. We'll do it ourselves. We'll have a Fix-Up Day. Get volunteers. Ask people to donate paint and supplies. My abuela knows everyone in the neighborhood. She can spread the word."

Mrs. Patterson stared at Nadia — this small, fierce girl with a purple marker and a plan — and felt something she hadn't felt about the community center in years. Something that started small and grew like a flame catching kindling.

"You know what?" Mrs. Patterson said. "Let's try."

And just like that, Nadia's wish started becoming a plan.

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The first challenge was volunteers.

"SUNNYVALE FIX-UP DAY! Help us make the community center beautiful again! Saturday, May 10th, 9 AM. We need painters, gardeners, fixers, and anyone who cares. Bring yourself. Bring your friends. Bring your tools. Snacks provided!"

Then they waited.

Days passed. Nobody called. Nobody signed up on the sheet Mrs. Patterson put at the front desk. Nobody seemed to notice the flyers at all.

"Maybe nobody cares," Caleb said on Thursday, as they stood by the empty sign-up sheet.

"They care. They just don't know they care yet."

"That doesn't make sense."

"It does. Sometimes people want to help but they don't think one person can make a difference. So they don't try. But if someone shows them that it's possible — that one person CAN start something — then they join in."

"How do we show them?"

Nadia thought. And then she had an idea.

"We start without them."

On Saturday morning, two weeks before the big Fix-Up Day, Nadia arrived at the community center with Caleb, her abuela, and a bag of garden tools. They went straight to the overgrown garden around the wishing well and started weeding.

It was hard work. The weeds were thick and stubborn, with roots that went deep. Nadia's hands got dirty and her knees got sore and a thorny weed scratched her arm. But inch by inch, weed by weed, the garden started to emerge from the mess. Green shoots that had been buried under tangles of dead vines suddenly appeared. A rosebush that nobody had seen in years was still alive underneath a mountain of crabgrass.

Mrs. Patterson came outside on her coffee break and saw them. "You started already?"

"We couldn't wait," Nadia said, pulling a weed that was taller than she was.

By noon, a small section of the garden was clear. It wasn't much — maybe ten feet by ten feet — but it was different. It was visible. Anyone walking by could see that someone was taking care of this place.

And someone did walk by. Mr. Chen, who lived across the street, stopped on the sidewalk and watched them for a minute.

"Need any help?" he called.

"YES," Nadia and Caleb said in unison.

Mr. Chen went home and came back with his own garden tools. His wife came too. Then their neighbor Donna. Then Donna's teenage son, who complained the entire time but pulled more weeds than anyone.

By the end of the afternoon, the entire garden was cleared. The wishing well stood exposed and visible for the first time in years, its gray stones covered in moss but solid, its little wooden roof still intact despite decades of weather.

Seven people had shown up. Not because of flyers. Because they saw someone doing something and decided to join in.

"See?" Nadia whispered to Caleb. "You start, and people follow."

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Mr. Chen told his coworkers. Donna told her church group. Mrs. Patterson posted photos on the community center's social media page. And suddenly, the sign-up sheet at the front desk started filling up.

Five names became ten. Ten became twenty. Twenty became thirty-five. People signed up to paint, to garden, to fix the playground equipment. A local hardware store heard about Fix-Up Day and donated fifteen gallons of paint. The garden center down the road offered discount plants. A retired carpenter named Mr. Washington called and said he'd fix the playground swings for free.

Nadia's list — the one she'd written on the back of a bake sale flyer — was turning into a real project. And it was bigger than she'd imagined.

"Abuela, you're a genius," Nadia said.

"I know, mija. Where do you think you get it from?"

Caleb, meanwhile, had a surprise of his own. He'd been quiet for a few days — suspiciously quiet, Nadia thought — and on Tuesday he showed up at the community center with a box.

"What's in the box?"

"Books." He opened it. Inside were dozens of children's books — picture books, chapter books, comics, and a complete set of the Magic Treehouse series.

"Where did you get these?"

"I asked my mom to post on her neighborhood group. She got fifty responses in two hours. Everyone has books their kids outgrew. I collected three boxes total."

Three boxes. Over a hundred books. The community center's sad little reading corner with its torn, page-missing books was about to get a complete makeover.

"Caleb Okonkwo," Nadia said. "You are a superhero."

"I'm a kid who asked his mom for help. That's not a superpower."

"Asking for help IS a superpower. Most people are too proud to do it."

Other kids from the community center started helping too. Amara, who was nine, volunteered to organize the books by reading level. Six-year-old twins Mia and Max said they'd help pull weeds (their definition of "help" was enthusiastic but not particularly productive, though their enthusiasm was contagious). And a boy named DeShawn, who was eight and practically lived at the community center because his mom worked two jobs, offered to help Mr. Washington with the playground.

"I'm good with tools," DeShawn said. "My grandpa taught me."

"You're eight years old," Mr. Washington said. "I can't let you use a saw."

"I can hand you stuff. And hold things. And measure. My grandpa says the person who holds things steady is just as important as the person who hammers."

"Your grandpa sounds like a wise man."

"He's the wisest. After my mom. And probably Mrs. Patterson."

The Fix-Up Day was becoming more than a project. It was becoming a community. People who had lived on the same street for years without talking were now planning together, sharing tools, arguing about paint colors (was the main room going to be "Sunshine Yellow" or "Morning Glow"? The debate got heated), and discovering that they had more in common than they thought.

Nadia watched it all from the garden, pulling weeds and smiling so hard her face hurt.

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Fix-Up Day was a Saturday in May, and it was perfect.

Not perfect because everything went smoothly — it didn't. The first batch of paint was the wrong shade of yellow (more "mustard" than "sunshine," which caused an uproar). The hose for watering the new plants had a leak that sprayed Mr. Chen directly in the face. And DeShawn accidentally stepped on a newly planted flower, which he was so upset about that he almost cried until Nadia assured him plants were resilient.

But it was perfect because fifty-three people showed up. FIFTY-THREE. More than Nadia had dared to wish for. They came from every block in the neighborhood — families, retirees, teenagers, small children who mostly got in the way but looked adorable doing it.

The painting crew tackled the main room first. Sunshine Yellow (the correct shade, after a trip back to the hardware store) went up on the walls, transforming the space from a dingy gray box into something warm and alive. Someone painted a mural on one wall — a landscape of trees and flowers and the sun, done by a local artist named Maria who had heard about Fix-Up Day through Donna's church.

The garden crew, led by Abuela, planted flowers around the wishing well — marigolds, zinnias, petunias, and sunflowers. They added a small herb garden (basil, mint, rosemary) that Mrs. Patterson said the after-school cooking class could use. They laid down fresh mulch, trimmed the bushes, and hung birdhouses that Mr. Chen had built in his garage.

The playground crew replaced the swing chains, patched the cracked slide, oiled the merry-go-round (which hadn't spun in two years and now whirled like a helicopter), and painted the metal frame in bright colors. DeShawn handed Mr. Washington every tool he asked for, measured every cut, and held every piece steady. By noon, the playground looked brand new.

And at the center of it all, Nadia ran from group to group, checking progress, solving problems, cheering people on. She was covered in yellow paint (from hugging a freshly painted wall by accident), her shoes were muddy from the garden, and she had a streak of dirt across her forehead that made her look like a tiny warrior.

"Nadia," Mrs. Patterson said, standing in the middle of the transformed main room, turning in a slow circle. "Look what you did."

"I didn't do this. We did this."

"You started it. You saw what this place could be and you didn't accept that it had to stay the way it was. That's a rare thing, Nadia. A lot of people see problems and walk past them. You saw a problem and picked up a garden tool."

Nadia looked around the room. Yellow walls glowing in the afternoon light. Maria's mural bursting with color. Kids sitting in the new reading corner, already pulling books off the shelves. The sound of the merry-go-round spinning outside, DeShawn shouting with glee as it whipped around.

This was what a wish looked like when you worked for it. Not magic — effort. Not pennies in a well — hands in the dirt. Not hoping someone else would fix things — fixing them yourself.

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The next weekend, Mr. Washington came back with his tools to fix the wishing well itself.

The wooden roof was rotted in places, so he replaced the worst boards with new cedar that he'd sanded and stained to match the old wood. He repaired the bucket rope — not because anyone would use the bucket, but because, as he said, "A wishing well without a bucket is like a playground without swings. It needs to be complete."

Nadia and Caleb cleaned the stones with brushes and soapy water. The moss came off to reveal gray granite underneath, solid and beautiful in a way that only old things can be. The brass plaque — "THE SUNNYVALE WISHING WELL — Est. 1952" — shone like gold after they polished it.

"This well is seventy-four years old," Caleb said, reading the plaque.

"That means people have been making wishes here for seventy-four years," Nadia said.

"And has anything happened?"

"Maybe it has. Maybe all those wishes turned into people deciding to do something. Like us."

Caleb considered this. "You think the well works because it inspires people to act? Not because of magic?"

"Maybe inspiration IS magic. Think about it. A kid throws a penny in and wishes for something. The wish doesn't come from the well — it comes from the kid. The well just gives them a moment to think about what they really want. And once you know what you want, you can work toward it."

"That's surprisingly deep for a seven-year-old."

"I contain multitudes."

"Where did you learn that word?"

"The reading corner. New books are amazing."

They finished restoring the well by late afternoon. The garden around it was blooming — marigolds and zinnias nodding in the breeze, the herb garden fragrant in the warm air. The wishing well stood at the center like a monument to hope, its gray stones clean, its wooden roof restored, its bucket hanging from a new rope.

Mrs. Patterson came to see it and pressed her hand to her heart. "It's beautiful. It looks like it did in the old photographs."

"What old photographs?" Nadia asked.

"The ones in the storage room. This community center was built in 1948, and the wishing well was added in 1952 by a woman named Elizabeth Morales. She was one of the founders."

"Morales?" Nadia's eyes went wide. "That's MY last name."

"I know. I looked it up. Elizabeth Morales was your great-great-grandmother."

Nadia stared at the wishing well with completely new eyes. Her great-great-grandmother had built this. The very well where Nadia had been throwing pennies and making wishes had been created by someone in her own family, seventy-four years ago.

She ran home and told Abuela. Abuela's eyes filled with tears.

"Bisabuela Elizabeth," Abuela whispered. "My grandmother. She helped build that community center with her own hands. She believed every neighborhood deserved a gathering place — somewhere people could come together."

"She built the wishing well?"

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Nadia had one more idea.

The ceremony was held on a Saturday evening in June. Nadia helped hang string lights in the garden. Abuela made tamales — enough for the entire neighborhood, which was optimistic but turned out to be exactly right. Mr. Chen brought dumplings. Donna brought a three-layer cake. The teenager who'd complained about weeding brought chips and guacamole. DeShawn's mom, on her one day off, brought her famous sweet potato pie.

The community center glowed. Literally — the yellow walls reflected the evening light like sunshine, and the string lights in the garden created a fairy-tale shimmer over the flowers and the wishing well. Music played from a speaker someone had set up. Kids ran through the garden playing tag. Adults stood in groups, talking and laughing, holding plates of food.

Mrs. Patterson spoke first. She stood by the wishing well and looked at the crowd — easily seventy people, more than the community center had seen in years.

"Three months ago," she said, "a seven-year-old girl came to me with a list written on the back of a bake sale flyer. She said she wanted to fix this place. I'd been trying to fix it for three years with grants and budgets and meetings. She fixed it in three months with pennies and determination and a belief that if you start working, people will follow."

She looked at Nadia. "She was right."

Nadia stood up to speak. She was nervous — her hands were shaking and her voice was small — but Caleb was standing beside her, and Abuela was in the front row, and she could see the wishing well behind Mrs. Patterson, its stones clean and its bucket hanging straight.

"My great-great-grandmother helped build this place," Nadia said. "She believed every neighborhood needs somewhere to come together. Somewhere to share food and stories and help each other. I think she was right."

She looked at the crowd — Mr. Chen and his wife, Donna and her church group, Mr. Washington and DeShawn, Maria and her mural brushes, all the families and neighbors and strangers-turned-friends who had picked up paintbrushes and garden tools and made something beautiful together.

She pulled a penny from her pocket — her last one. She held it up so it caught the string lights.

"I have one more wish," she said. And she dropped the penny into the well.

"What did you wish for?" Caleb whispered.

"That we never stop taking care of each other."

The penny hit the water and sank, joining seventy-four years of wishes in the cool, clear water. And around the wishing well, the community of Sunnyvale stood together in the warm evening, eating tamales and dumplings and sweet potato pie, their faces lit by string lights and the glow of something that felt a lot like home.

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Summer arrived, and the community center was different.

Not just the building — the building was beautiful now, with its yellow walls and Maria's mural and the reading corner full of books. But the difference was bigger than paint and plants. The difference was what happened inside.

More families came. The after-school program grew from fifteen kids to thirty-two. Abuela started a cooking class on Tuesdays where she taught kids to make tamales and empanadas. Mr. Chen started a chess club on Wednesdays. Donna's church group organized a monthly potluck. Mr. Washington taught a Saturday woodworking class for kids, with DeShawn as his enthusiastic and surprisingly skilled assistant.

The wishing well became the center of the garden — and the center of a tradition. Every Saturday at the potluck, anyone who wanted to could stand by the well and share a wish. Not the private, penny-in-the-water kind — the out-loud kind. The kind where you told your neighbors what you hoped for and asked for their help.

Mrs. Patterson wished for more funding for art supplies. By the next month, three families had donated boxes of paints, markers, and clay.

Mr. Washington wished for more tools for the woodworking class. A hardware store two towns over saw his wish posted on social media and sent an entire toolkit, free of charge.

DeShawn's mom wished for more time with her son. It wasn't something you could fix with donations. But the community responded anyway — neighbors offered to watch DeShawn after school so his mom could pick up fewer shifts. It didn't solve everything, but it helped. And helping, Nadia had learned, was always worth doing.

The wishing well worked. Not through magic, not through coins in water, but through the simple, powerful act of people telling each other what they needed and then showing up to help.

On the last Tuesday of summer, Nadia sat by the well with Caleb. The garden was in full bloom — sunflowers taller than Nadia, marigolds blazing orange and gold, the herb garden fragrant in the warm air. The bucket hung from its new rope, swaying gently in the breeze.

"So," Caleb said. "Do you still believe in wishing wells?"

Nadia thought about it. She thought about the pennies, the wishes, the list on the bake sale flyer, the weeds she'd pulled and the paint she'd spilled and the fifty-three people who showed up on Fix-Up Day because one seven-year-old had started working.

"I believe in this one," she said. "Not because it's magic. Because it reminds people to hope. And hope is the beginning of everything."

"That sounds like something Abuela would say."

"Where do you think I get it from?"

They sat in the garden while the evening turned golden and the sounds of the community center drifted through the open windows — kids laughing, chess pieces clicking, the smell of something delicious from the kitchen.

Let us take care of each other.

She opened her eyes and dropped the penny. It caught the light as it fell — a tiny flash of copper — and landed in the water with the softest sound in the world.

Plop.

And somewhere, in the echo of that tiny splash, seventy-four years of wishes rippled outward, touching the stones, the water, the flowers, the garden, the community center, the neighborhood, the world — one small wish at a time.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Crimson Ark Publishing publishes fiction for readers of all ages, drawing on the spiritual principles and rich cultural heritage of the Bahá'í Faith. Our stories explore themes of unity, justice, courage, and the transformative power of love — through characters and communities that reflect the beautiful diversity of the human family. Every book is an invitation to see the world not only as it is, but as it could be.

Visit us at crimsonarkpublishing.com