I didn’t always live here.

I came here when she died.

She was a very old lady and nobody was surprised, but everyone was sad. All the family members used to talk loudly and jump and play when they visited her, but now they looked sadly through all the things she left behind. They started to take things away, and one day a family member found me alone on my bed.

At first I was afraid. I had never left that house before. I loved that house.

But then I was brought to the little girl.

I’ll rephrase. I was brought to the Little Girl Who Isn’t So Little Anymore.

She smiled when she saw me, and I think we both made each other happier. And that is all it took for me to start my new life.

The bed I live in is more crowded now. My Not So Little Girl sleeps in it every night, and so do many other animal friends. They tell me their stories, and I have always loved listening to stories. Every single one of them has a story, our girl made sure of that.

There is a poodle with pink matted fur. Long ago she used to be a superhero, and she shows me her paw to prove it. There is a colorful “W” with a gold ring around it, and she says it helped her travel into a computer and back out again. Everyone believes her and some of the older animals swear they saw it themselves.

The three raccoons all have different stories. One came from a place called The Mall and one came at Christmas, hiding in a stocking until morning. The third has the most exciting tale— he went on a real stage with real colored lights and put on a performance with our girl. She likes to act, he explained, and he is a puppet, so he sat on her arm and the two of them acted away. The audience cheered and clapped and everything.

The oldest story of all is from a brown dog like me, but he is smaller than me and he is not very soft. He has a big hole in his back, but that is just because he is a combination of old and very loved. He came when our Little Girl was a Little Baby, and even now he still sleeps against her face sometimes.

Our Girl Who Has Grown Up Considerably sometimes holds me while she sleeps. Sometimes it’s because she wants to, but sometimes she needs to. She holds me tight and my fur is still soft, so she can bury her hands and face in it whenever she needs to and no one else will see it in the dark.

One spring, the spring when people started getting sick, we all went to school with our girl. I guess she has superpowers too, because she traveled through a computer to get to her school, and we got to listen to the lessons.

We all learned so many things. A man named Raskolnikov did something bad but then he felt guilty about it. A tibia is a leg bone that humans have, but stuffed animals don’t (we all checked). And precalculus is when you make lots of curvy lines on a graph and then get frustrated and scribble them out. There are probably no other stuffed animals with all this knowledge.

One day, our Wishes She Were Littler Girl groans at the graphs on her paper and then thinks for a moment. She places my paw over her calculator and takes a picture with her phone. The teacher who lives inside the computer doesn’t even notice.

She sends the picture to someone in her phone and says “Darby’s doing my work for me.” I think this is hilarious, because I can’t even press the keys, and the friend in her phone also thinks this is funny.

A few days later, she gets a story-writing app on her phone, because in her words, “I need to keep from going insane somehow.” She says writing stories helps her, and we all agree with this because we love stories.

There is a thing called a profile photo, and at first she doesn’t know which photo to use. Then she remembers the one she took of me and the calculator and she smiles.