’ll begin with the kitchen. You need to find a room as much like my kitchen as possible, as I have not managed to see the faeries anywhere else: not in other rooms in my house, not in rooms in Mrs. Delavecchio’s house, not in the public library, not at my school, and not at my mother’s work. If you cannot find a room like my kitchen, coming to my house may be easier since we know my kitchen works for seeing the faeries.

So, try to find a galley kitchen so thin that two people passing through in opposite directions will touch both each other and the cupboards even if they’re walking sideways. A fridge needs to be on one long side of the kitchen (a white fridge, not steel and not 1970s mustard or lime) along with eight cupboards, four above and four below the counter. The cupboards, of course, must also be white with small handles of polished chrome. If a few handles dangle a bit, maybe wobble roundly when you pull on them, excellent; it’ll better scatter the light.

The other long side of the kitchen needs to have cupboards, a sink, and a stove. Again, the cupboards must be white with the same chrome pulls. The stove and the fridge cannot sit directly across from each other; rather, the fridge must face the sink. Above the sink, there needs to be a curtainless window. Make sure your window doesn’t face a dark alley or look out directly onto a brick wall. (In my case, the window looks into Mrs. Delavecchio’s fruit and vegetable plot. She grows cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, grapes, and other such edible plants older Italian ladies grow in their gardens. I often wonder how vital this garden is to seeing the faeries. For example, would a scrubby, empty lot yield the same results? Or a field overgrown with wildflowers? In comparison with those, Mrs. Delavecchio’s garden is as rigid as can be, her rows parallel and perpendicular, plants cut uniformly and tended to fussily. I would have thought that faeries would be unimpressed by the symmetry of Mrs. Delavecchio’s garden, but I have been proven, time and time again, wrong in this regard. Perhaps faeries like plants, no matter their layout.)

As for the short sides of this rectangular kitchen, one must open to a front hall and stairwell, while the other needs a door to the backyard. This door to the backyard can be made of glass panels like mine (more light, it is important!), but any sort of see-through door (frosted glass, patterned glass, stained glass) should work.

Now the floor: tile, obviously. Faeries do not like the feel of carpet on their feet. (Plus, you just can’t keep carpet in a kitchen clean. Imagine yourself tripping while holding spaghetti sauce in a carpeted kitchen — unless, of course, your carpet was a tomato orange red color, in which case please feel free to imagine tripping holding some other staining liquid, like black ink. In my case, my mother pulled up the carpet in the kitchen the day we moved in. She put the roll in the basement so we can put it back down if the landlord, whom I have never met, demands we do so.)

As for the walls: pale colors, like white, cream, or an anemic shade of yellow. This helps to see the shadows better. For shadows you need light, and for light you need sun, since the buzz of an incandescent bulb annoys the faeries, while low-energy fluorescents aren’t strong enough to cast a shadow. (I am still looking to test energy-saving LED light bulbs. I have one such bulb screwed into the reading light in my bedroom. I intend to begin experiments with it at my earliest possible convenience. Please refer to later editions of this book for results. Until then, sunshine ahoy!)

Now, to see the faeries. While you’d think you’d be able to see the faeries in the same way (or at least in a similar way) as seeing your left hand or your reflection in a mirror or a neighborhood cat, this is not the case. Seeing faeries is like seeing the wind or, if you are someone like Mrs. Delavecchio, seeing God or the Devil. (My mother says that even though we don’t believe in God or the Devil, we must be respectful of Mrs. Delavecchio’s beliefs, although I find it presumptuous that my mother has decided what I believe. However, she is adamant on this point, so perhaps she is right. Also, consequences of wind are easier to describe than those of deities’ machinations, so I’ll stick with that.) You see the wind move the leaves or make waves in the puddles on the sidewalk or blow away homework held loosely in your hand. No one says the wind doesn’t exist, hence, if you follow these instructions, you will be unable to say that faeries don’t exist either.

Find a sunny day and sit on the floor. There will be a square of light coming in from the window and hitting the tiles just so. It may not be a perfect square, perhaps more of a diamond or even a rhombus, depending on the angle of the sun outside and how you’ve positioned yourself relative to the sunbeams from the window.

Twist about until the tetra-shape of light falls into your right peripheral vision. Right and not left, as faeries have learned the sinister connotations associated with the left side. Don’t look at the light straight on. I have never found faeries to appear while looking for them. Faeries work through non-anticipation. Since you are not expecting their existence, faeries have a way of being invisible, but even when appearing invisible to us, faeries cast shadows, and that is what you see: the shadows of the faeries in your right periphery in the four-sided patch of sunlight on the tile floor of the skinny room in which you are sitting while not waiting for the faeries to not appear.