Rules for Stealing Stars (2 page)

Two

I
knock on Astrid and Eleanor's door in the late afternoon when the house is lonely and quiet. No one answers. No music is playing. I don't hear their voices. I don't smell anything or sense any movement behind the wooden door with the hand-painted
ELEANOR AND ASTRID'S ROOM
sign on the front.

I am officially crazy curious.

Marla catches me with my ear against the twins' door. She sniffs, this noise she makes when she thinks she's better than me.

“They won't tell you what they're up to,” Marla says.

“They won't tell you either,” I say.

“They already did,” Marla says.

I can't tell if she's lying. Marla is the kind of person who lies, but not if she's positive she could get caught. I squint, trying to see her better, but all I see is her dark mane, knotted at the ends, and her big blue eyes and the way her skirt rides up too far on one side.

Marla reaches for the doorknob, like she's about to go in, and I seethe with jealousy. It comes all fast and unexpected, a feeling with force.

“We have to protect you, remember? That's what Mom says. You're special or whatever,” Marla says. She's always mad at me for things that aren't my fault, like the way Mom babies me even though she barely is able to even vaguely support or interact with anyone else a lot of the time.

Before I have a chance to respond, we hear a crash over by the stairway. Multiple clunks. A yelp. And a little-girl cry.

“Gretchen?” Dad, from his office, has heard the same series of noises. He doesn't call out to see if me and Marla and the twins are okay. I don't know if my sisters notice that kind of thing, but I always do. When a crash or a bang or a yelp happens in LilyLee's house, her parents call out to ask if she's okay. When it happens here, Dad rushes to Mom. He breezes past Marla and me in the hallway and peers down the stairs. We follow him and see her in a lump at the bottom.

“Oh!” Marla says, and rushes down before Dad is able to hold her back. Mom is crying the kind of tears that don't make noise, and she's hovering her hands over her ankle as if she'd like to hold it but can't bring herself to touch the tender part. We hover too, the three of us reaching toward, but never touching Mom.

“I fell,” she says, and I'm laughing because it's such an obvious statement that it must be a joke, but Dad doesn't laugh, and Marla's breathing speeds up. I look at Mom's face to see if she was being dry and funny the way she sometimes is in upsetting situations, but she's glazed over and pale.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Marla says. She's waving her hands like she's trying to shake bugs off her fingers.

“Let's lift her up,” Dad says. “Marla and Silly, can you help me get her to the couch?”

“Silly should go to her room,” Mom says. Even now, even in her state of absentness, she's doing this weird protective thing. “This is probably a little scary for you, right, Silly?”

I shrug. I don't think I'm any more or less scared than Marla.

“I don't want you to see this,” Mom says. “Go to your room.” Like it's fine for Marla to see everything bruised and bloody and blurry and out of place.

“What about me?” Marla says. I would say she asks this
exact question at least a dozen times every week.

“We need your help!” Mom says. “Silly's too little for all this.” Mom's words sound mushy and soft. They wind together, overlapping and turning a sentence or two into one mega-word.

“Right. Yeah. Of course,” Marla says. She hooks her hands around the back of Mom's knees. She's moving like a cat, like a kitten, like the most delicate creature on earth. But Mom screams out in pain from the touch, and Marla scampers away.

“Okay, okay, let's call an ambulance, right? I have my phone here, so I'll do that? And we can let the girls go upstairs?” Dad puts a huge hand on Mom's head, a reminder of how very small she is in comparison. I wish he didn't say everything like a question.

“Stop trying to be Prince Charming,” Mom says. Her voice has pins in it. Pins and knives and cactus needles and thorns. Everything sharp. She calls Dad Prince Charming a lot, and mostly with a sneer when Dad's trying to help her. It always catches him off guard.

Marla and I freeze, like sad marble statues, and I'm sure my breathing stops too, and my heart, and my mind. All of it freezes waiting for whatever's next.

“Go to your rooms,” Dad says. “Both of you. Don't come out until dinnertime.”

We don't go to our rooms. We go to Eleanor and Astrid's room.

Or Marla goes to their room, and I sneak in behind her. There's no chair under the door today, but they still don't want me to come inside. Marla tries to shove me out the door, but I hang on to the frame and stand my ground because I am a sister too, and she can't change that by being a completely impossible human.

“Oh. They're already gone,” she says. Her shoulders droop, and mine do too, even though I don't know what we're missing, exactly.

Astrid and Eleanor are nowhere to be found, which is strange since I know they came up here earlier. But all over the floor and their beds and dressers are Astrid's shoe-box dioramas. She makes them all the time, but I had no idea she had this many. One for every day of the month. Maybe for every day of two months. I've never seen them all out at once, a collection of little scenes and imaginary worlds.

Pipe cleaners and glitter and construction paper and wallpaper samples and neon shoelaces and Christmas bows litter the room—the remnants of her creations. Astrid is the only person in the world who can make a brand-new universe with a few rhinestones, a bunch of wrapping paper, and Popsicle sticks.

Usually the dioramas are hidden under the bed or displayed on bedside tables.

“What is all this?” I ask, not really expecting an answer.

“It's for Eleanor's closet,” Marla says. I have so many follow-up questions I'm worried I'll choke on them, but Marla drags me out of there and tells me to go to my room for the rest of the day or I'll never find out anything, and I either believe her or am so tired from all the commotion with Mom that I don't have the energy to argue.

They should call me Sleepy, instead of Silly, because that's mostly what I am these days. Sleepy and small, every time something else goes wrong in this terrible house.

Three

T
he next day, I'm the only one awake in the whole house, even though it's past nine. Plus, I'm starving for pancakes. It's not Sunday, though, so there won't be any pancakes from Dad, and I don't know how to make them myself. Or bacon. I guess I don't know how to do much of anything. For instance, I'm freaked out by the iron, and no one taught me about doing laundry or fixing holes in my pants or talking to my mother. I can't do the useful things Eleanor is able to do or the sort of weird things Marla knows about—like folding hospital corners when she makes the beds or showing off her expertise with Mom's fancy label maker or deciding which attachment to use on the vacuum
cleaner, based on what kind of surface you are vacuuming.

Dad comes down at ten. It's weird, since he's usually hard at work by now, either at the university preparing for classes, or working on one of his fairy-tale research projects. He made us sandwiches and brought them to our rooms last night for dinner, but he didn't let us come downstairs or see Mom when they got back from the hospital.

There are a lot of weird things about Dad, but one of them is that he doesn't really sleep. He doesn't seem to need it.

“Try not to worry,” he says, instead of explaining anything that's happening.

Marla comes downstairs next. She's still pajamaed and slippered and shuffling her feet instead of picking them up to walk. Her too-long brown hair is in a not-quite-as-long brown ponytail, and her cheeks are blotchy. She picks up a cereal box to read the back of but doesn't start yelling at me for finishing off the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.

She is different. Not a little. A lot.

“Where have you been?” I say. “What'd you guys do last night? And this morning?” After Mom's fall I sat in my room and read books and wrote LilyLee angry emails about how mean my sisters were being. I strategized ways to look and act older so they'll start treating me like I'm one of them.

Marla shrugs and smiles. She's beyond pleased that she's one of them now.

Eleanor comes downstairs next. She yawns the whole way down the stairs—from the top step to the sloping, broken one at the bottom. Her hair is a nest. It's hard to even recognize Eleanor when her hair isn't shiny and her clothes aren't pressed.

Then Astrid emerges. She is transformed too. Her blond hair is twisted and twirled on top of her head. She kisses my cheek and hugs Dad.

“Morning, family,” she says, and just like that, because she's decreed it, we are a normal family for a delicate instant.

“It's late,” I say. “We've been waiting for you.” I nod toward Dad. He's wrapped up in a book with an old green cover and a bunch of Post-it notes.

“Silly. Let's be glass-half-full girls today. It's late morning, but it's not afternoon yet!” Astrid smiles, and I swear I haven't seen her smiling with actual teeth in months and months. It's not her style.

“That's nice,” Dad says. He's smiling too, a real smile that goes to his eyes and even wrinkles his forehead a little. He heads to his favorite armchair on the porch, which is right off the kitchen, but if we are quiet enough, he won't hear us. I get a look at the spine of his book.
Sleeping Beauty.

“Where were you yesterday? Did you go somewhere?
Were you hiding? Marla and I went to your room and you weren't there and Mom fell and—” I don't leave space in between my questions for answers, but Eleanor doesn't seem concerned about that anyway. She shakes her head. That's when I notice gold in her hair. At first I think it's summery blond streaks that we all get from the sun, but when I look more closely, it looks more like tinsel.

“Your hair . . .”

Eleanor tries to run her hand through it, but this morning her hair is knotted and half wet, and I know from the dampness of it and the way it glimmers that she has been somewhere. Again. She looks rained on, by both water and strands of gold, and she smells like pine trees and clouds, if clouds have a smell.

All my sisters giggle and I want to laugh with them, but it's too close to crying, and I think if I let anything out, it will
all
come out.

“We should make a perfect kitchen,” Marla says. “Dollhouse stove. Apple pie. Red checkered curtains.” She's looking at Astrid, who nods like she knows what Marla's talking about, even though Marla is making no sense at all.

“This is a kitchen,” I say. It is the world's lamest sentence.

“Don't worry about it,” Marla says. “I wasn't talking to you.”

“But I am worried about it,” I say in such a small voice I think it is even less hearable than a whisper.

Mom hobbles into the kitchen. Her ankle's all wrapped, and she's in Dad's old robe. It doesn't fit her at all.

I'm sleepy again, on command. The sight of her makes me tired.

The opposite is true for Marla, who comes to life when Mom's around. She throws her arms around Mom's middle and heaves out a hefty “MORNING!”

“Not now,” Mom says. She sort of flicks Marla away with her hand. Marla's face goes from happy to an angry frown.

“I'm going upstairs,” Marla says to all of us and none of us. Eleanor and Astrid pop to attention and scamper after her.

“Can I come too?” I call after them. “Please?” The please is pathetic, and we all know it. Mom even winces on my behalf.

“Not right now,” Astrid says. “Maybe later, okay?”

But Eleanor shakes her head like later is totally not going to happen.

“Give me a hint about what you're doing up there,” I say. I won't follow them if they'll only tell me a tiny bit, let me in on even a small sip of the secret.

Astrid pauses on the stairs. She likes riddles and clues
and mystery. She thinks, all dreamy, her eyes rolled up to the ceiling.

“We're here, but not here,” Astrid says. “We can go almost anywhere, but not move at all.” She leaps up the rest of the stairs.

I get up and half follow her, but stop myself before I'm too pathetic. I'm stranded, standing near the bottom of the stairs.

I picture monsters and dragons. I picture black holes and haunted rooms. I picture fairies and princes and treasure chests. I picture all the things I've always been told aren't real, but must be.

Mom drags me back to reality, though. There is nothing more real and less magical than Mom's dark moods.

“Your sisters should be nicer to you. I should have included my sister more,” Mom says, shaking her head at how quickly the girls ditched me.

“You don't have a sister,” I say. Mom never talks about growing up, but I'm sure I would have heard about a sister if she'd had one.

“But I did,” she says. Her eyes are red and confused. Even as she says the words, she looks like she doesn't believe them, and I know she's not totally in her right mind at the moment. Usually in the mornings she's pretty present, but not today.

“You did?” I say, one foot pointed in the direction of Astrid and Eleanor's room, and the other foot pointed toward Mom, wanting to understand what she's telling me.

“No. No, never mind,” Mom says. “I don't want to talk about this now. I'm tired. I need some time alone, Silly.” It's not the first time she's said something strange and wrong, but it was so specific and odd, the claim that she has a sister, I have to tell Astrid and Eleanor and Marla.

We need to be in this together. They can't leave me out here with Mom and her disconnected thoughts while they have some grand adventure.

Plus, I need to know what they're doing up there. What secret thing the twins have been up to the last few summers, and that Marla is all of a sudden allowed to do too.