Once upon a time there was a little girl named Sarah Lyn who loved everything pink and sparkly.  Her closet was full of pink dresses with sparkly stars and sparkly dresses with pink polka dots.  Her room had pink walls and a pink rug and a pink bed and sparkly pillows and a sparkly chair and sparkly stars hanging everywhere.  Every day she put on her pink sparkly coat and picked up her pink sparkly backpack and headed off to school.  She did NOT like school.  It wasn’t the teacher or the other kids or the studying that she didn’t like; those things were actually pretty fun.  What she hated about school was that there was nothing pink and sparkly there.  She hated riding the dull yellow school bus in the morning and she hated going inside the drab beige building.   She hated sitting at the boring brown desk and writing on plain white paper with ordinary gray pencil.  And she hated recess because all the other girls would swing on the black swing set (ugh!) or play with the orange ball (ew!).  Most of the time during recess, Sarah Lyn just went to the corner of the yard where some pretty flowers grew and lay down on her back and stared up into the sky, which wasn’t pink but did have a sort of sparkly glow to it.

One day, as Sarah lay and looked into the sky during recess, she heard a buzzing in her ear.   Thinking it was a mosquito, she swatted it away.  It came back.  She swatted it away again.  It came back again.  Extremely annoyed, Sarah Lyn sat up.  She saw something like a little bee buzzing from flower to flower.  At first Sarah didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but after a minute she stopped to rub her eyes.  Was she imagining it or was each flower changing color after the bee landed on it?  It was true.  The little yellow flowers turned red and the little purple flowers turned pink and the little pink flowers turned yellow.  Even better, each flower was a little more sparkly than it had been before.  In a flash, Sarah Lyn jumped up and started trying to catch that little bee.  It was hard to do.  The bee was quick and darted from flower to flower before Sarah Lyn could get close.  She didn’t give up, though.  She had a new idea.  She picked one of the little purple flowers and held very still with it in her hand.  Before long, the little bee buzzed right up to the flower and landed.  Quick as a wink, Sarah Lyn closed her hands around the buzzing creature.

“Hey!” came a muffled voice from inside her hands.  Sarah Lyn was so surprised she almost let go.  “Hey!” it said again.  “Let me go!”

Very carefully, Sarah Lyn opened her fingers just a crack and put her eye up to the hole.  “What are you?” she said.

“I’m a glitterfly, thank you very much, and I was just minding my own business when you so rudely snatched me up.  Now let. me. go.”

“But you were making those flowers colorful and sparkly.”

“Yes, of course I was.  I told you I’m a glitterfly.  Now please let me get back to it.”

“Can you make anything sparkly?”

“Of course.”

“Could you make anything pink?”

“Of course, I can change the color of anything.  Really, you’re wasting my time here.  Please let me go.”

But Sarah Lyn had a much better idea.  “I will make you a deal,” she said to the glitterfly.  “I will let you go tonight before I go to bed if you will turn everything I tell you to pink and sparkly.”

The glitterfly was indignant.  “I can’t make everything just pink.  My job is to make things colorful.”

“Pink and sparkly or I’m putting you in a jar,” said Sarah Lyn.

“All right then,” the glitterfly said sulkily.

So Sarah Lyn went happily back into the school, carrying the glitterfly in her hands.  The first thing she did was to touch her desk, and it turned all pink and sparkly.  Sarah Lyn smiled a very big smile.  Then she touched her pencil and paper and turned them both pink and sparkly.  She carefully zipped the glitterfly into her pocket and wrote all her schoolwork in glittery pink.  When it was time for music class, Sarah Lyn took the glitterfly out of her pocket and quickly skipped around the room touching all the desks and turning them pink and sparkly.  She touched the blackboard and turned it into a pinkboard.  All the other kids stared.  Sarah Lyn touched the fish tank and suddenly there was a sparkle fish swimming in pink water.  The other kids shouted.

“Sarah Lyn, what are you doing?” asked the teacher, taking her arm.  Suddenly the teacher turned bright pink and sparkly.  Now Sarah Lyn stared, too.  She slowly backed away from her teacher and accidentally bumped into a boy in her class.  He turned pink and sparkly.

“Stop it!” shouted Sarah Lyn to the glitterfly.  She looked down at her hand.  It was all pink and sparkly.  With a gasp, Sarah Lyn let go of the glitterfly.  Faster than you could say, “That poor pink boy!” the glitterfly darted out the window and flew away.  Sarah Lyn burst into tears.  She wasn’t the only one.  The little boy had tears in eyes, too, and the teacher was quietly sobbing.  Even the fish looked as if he wanted to cry.

No one knew what to do.  The principal came and all the kids parents were called.  The parents were quite upset.  No amount of washing or scrubbing or rubbing would make that pink come off.  They called in the school nurse and she called a doctor, but he had no medicine for unpinking people.  Just when everyone had given up hope, one of the little girls gave a gasp.  She was pointing at the chalkboard.  It was black.  Everyone began to talk at once.  The pink was seeping out of the desks.  The fish was beginning to look quite dull.  The teacher’s hair was getting browner by the minute.  In no time at all everyone and everything was back to normal.  The glitterfly’s changes were only meant to last for a little while.  Laughing and cheering, all of the students and teachers and parents and friends went home to celebrate.  Sarah Lyn was left in the classroom all alone, staring at her pink and sparkly hand.  She had held the glitterfly the longest, and her pink was never going to fade.   Sarah Lyn sat and thought for a long, long time.

Then she stood up and walked home and used her sparkly pink hand to paint all the walls of her room a nice cheerful yellow.