Her name was Natalie, and she was dying of cancer. She was 9 years old, I think, and one of those groups that grants wishes to terminally ill children had offered to make hers come true.
Her wish was simple, she wanted a big party for her 10th birthday, but of course it was also heartbreaking because there would not be an 11th. Her doctor knew it, her family knew it and Natalie - because she was close to a boy who was at her same stage of cancer and had recently died - knew it.
I thought about Natalie and her sweet, sad party the other day, more than 25 years after I'd written a story about it for the newspaper I was working for back then. The group had gone all out for her, with pizza, cake, carnival rides, clowns and a big pile of presents.
I remember her, chemo-bald but party-pretty in a new outfit, screaming with delight after opening one gift in particular - a Michael Jackson dress-up kit, with the requisite sparkly white glove. I hope she was innocent enough to think it was from Michael himself.
Because what Natalie had actually wished for, but that her family had gently dissuaded her from asking for because it seemed so unlikely to be granted, was to meet Michael Jackson. When you have a kid with end-stage cancer, I guess you know all too well that no amount of wishing will make some wishes come true.
But I don't know. I'd like to think maybe if someone had gotten to him with the request he might have done it - although at that point, at the height of his post-Thriller mega-stardom, he no doubt was deluged with daily requests, from the sick and the healthy, the young and the old, the famous and the not, all just desperate to meet this unlikely king.
This was long before the child molestation accusations emerged, of course, and yet even knowing that, he still seemed like someone whose heart would have been touched by a child being robbed of her childhood.
From the coverage of his death these past couple of days, it seems so clear that Jackson never recovered from his own foreshortened youth - the constant touring and performing, the mean father who became his manager and forgot to be his dad, the lost just-kid pleasures that he obviously and inappropriately tried to recapture as an adult, from his amusement park home to the toy-soldier outfits to, yes, the sleepovers.
In more recent years, he had become the Wacko Jacko punch line of so many jokes. I'd almost forgotten until now, with the flood of postmortem tributes and footage, just how astonishing he was in his prime, and how vast his audience.
