I must have been so excited. In just a few hours I would be going to my very first concert, and it was a HILARY DUFF concert! As any eight year old would be, I couldn’t sit still all afternoon, and wouldn’t even read my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book. At lunchtime I wolfed down my creamy-peanut-butter-and-jelly- sandwich-with-apple-slices-because-my-mom-wanted-me-to-be-healthy lunch, and I ran upstairs to pick up my coolest outfit for the concert.

But soon enough I was bored. I had hours to go and nothing to do, so I decided to play with my two-week-old sister in my parent’s room. However, when I got in the room I found baby Sophie asleep with my dad. I certainly couldn’t sleep with such a major event of my life coming up so soon, so I decided to look through the shelves of my parents’ room. My dad woke up and left to go downstairs, he only stopped to tell me not to be too loud and wake up Sophie.

A few minutes later when I was about to leave the room, a wooden box caught my eye. It was really pretty with engravings on it, and I decided to look inside. When I opened the box I felt a tinge of guilt. After all this was my parents’ and I wasn’t supposed to look at other people’s things without permission. But I convinced myself that it would be okay as long as I was quiet and didn’t wake up Sophie. So I opened up the box.

As I rummaged through the box, I found a few interesting things, like photos and ticket stubs, but nothing that held my interest. There was one last little box, an earring box to look at, and then I’d be done. I shook it, and it sounded like there was a bunch of little beads jumbling around. I naively thought that maybe there were beads and I could make a bracelet, so I opened it up. Inside the box were eight, tiny, little pearly white teeth. The same number of teeth I’d lost.

It took a minute for this to register in my mind, but I soon figured out that my dad kept my teeth, which meant that the tooth fairy wasn’t real? This was impossible! Sure Santa wasn’t real, and nobody believed in the Easter Bunny, but the Tooth Fairy was a fairy and she was real! Wasn’t she? In a matter of seconds fume was steaming out of my ears, tears were sliding down my cherry red cheeks and I was storming off to my room. There was only one way to determine if my dad was the tooth fairy or not, and that was to find one of my old letters from the tooth fairy.

I slammed the door to my room and pulled open the second drawer to my nightstand with all of my upper body strength. I whipped journals, books and pens out of the drawer until I found the letter. I snatched it and burst into tears; my dad’s handwriting had penned eight of these letters from the “tooth fairy”, and I hadn’t considered her not being real for even a second.

At this point I couldn’t talk the tears were rushing down so quickly, and I stomped my way down the stairs. “DADDY!”, I bellowed with all that was left in me, “WHY DID YOU LIE TO ME?”.

My dad was on the computer, and swiveled around in his chair with a completely innocent face. “What are you talking about?”, he looked at me and smiled. Then he saw the note and the smile was wiped off his face.

“Oh sweetie,” he tried to comfort me, but I just hit him away, still in shock. The rest of his explanation was a blur. Sophie woke up from my screaming, and we had to go back upstairs to rub her back to sleep.

After about half an hour of drying tears and explanations, my dad finally got the message through to me; he wasn’t trying to deceive me or lie, it was just a nice thing to believe in. And even though I knew it meant I had left some of my childhood behind; I also knew that this meant I was growing up a bit too. But I was okay with that, because growing up meant getting some new things to do. New things like going to Hilary Duff concerts.