She was always there when Ganady looked, and never there when anyone else did. At least, Nick hadn’t said anything about a giant cockroach, and neither Mama nor Baba Irina had kvitched about a giant cockroach while cleaning his room, and Da didn’t much come into the boys’ room at all. So there she sat on The Baseball, next to the Virgin Mother for over a week, and waited for God knew what. Ganady considered asking Mr. Ouspensky about it, he having more experience with magic than most people. At the very least, Ganady knew he wouldn’t laugh. How could a man who watched ghost baseball games laugh at a boy who had followed a magic baseball to a Cockroach Princess and then dreamed of a girl so beautiful that she had to be a princess herself? At most he might observe that between Baba Irina’s folktales and Nikolai’s romantic notions, Ganady had princesses on the brain. He would be right. “Oy!” Ganady lifted his head from the funnies.
