Rules for Stealing Stars (3 page)

Four

M
om follows me upstairs. I thought she needed alone time, but sometimes Mom's moods change so fast it's hard to keep track, like she's playing some complicated kind of Ping-Pong with herself and I'm watching, trying to keep score.

She opens the hall closet, steps in for a moment like she's looking for towels or the vacuum cleaner, but comes out empty-handed.

“Mom? What's in there?” I say. I'm hovering outside the twins' room and would rather be in there, but not until Mom is tucked away in her bed for the rest of the day.

Mom runs her hands straight back through her hair. It
is fine and unwashed, so the strands stick and don't fall back into place. She sighs, a rickety sound that smells and sounds like cigarette smoke. She promised she would stop smoking.

“You think something's wrong with me!” she says. Her lips wobble. Her hands shake. She doesn't usually explode in my direction. I'm not important enough to explode at. “You think I'm a terrible mother. I don't understand why you hate the family so much.”

“I didn't mean it,” I say, but I'm stuck doing a strange math, the kind that is way too advanced for me. I don't have any idea how we got from me asking what she's doing to her being a terrible mother, but I'm squinting and counting on my fingers and speeding up my mind, trying to figure it out. “You're a great mom! I love the family. I wanted to hang out with the girls. I wanted to make sure you didn't need help with chores or anything. I didn't mean to be rude.” I'm talking fast and loud and pretty much praying that my sisters will hear me and save me.

They don't.

“I've done the best I can,” Mom says. She hangs her head and I imagine an enormous eraser, big enough to erase everything I've ever said that makes her feel this way.

“You're such a good mom,” I say. “You're the best mom.” I lean against the bedroom door and kick my heels against
it a little, wish I'd learned Morse code when the boys in my class were all super into it two years ago. I could call for help through the pounding of my feet.

“So ungrateful,” Mom says. Her mouth is turning down into its mean look, which I have seen from afar but never up close. These are the kinds of things Mom says to everyone, but never to me. This is the kind of conversation that always seems about to happen, but she'll ask Eleanor or Dad or Astrid to take me to my room before it spirals out of control. This is the first time Mom hasn't protected me from herself, and it hurts, makes me sick a little, but also reminds me of losing my first baby tooth or learning to read or getting on the bus for the first time. I'm joining my sisters. I'm growing up. They can't deny it anymore.

“I expected so much more from you,” Mom goes on. “I'm so disappointed. Why do you think I'm like this? I never got what I wanted. You never give me what I want. You don't care about anything or anyone but yourself.” She's talking to me, but also to a place on the wall next to me, her eyes shifting back and forth. I don't know if it's more terrible when she's looking right at me or when she's lost track of me and is speaking to the wall. “You're a terrible disappointment as a daughter.”

I can't think of a way to escape, but Dad saves me before
it gets more desperate. He's on his way up the stairs.

“Gretchen!” he says, surprised at her words, I think, and maybe the swaying of her body. It looks like she's on a ship, not stable ground.

I get it. We're on rough waters.

“It's fine,” Mom says with a slur, and I bet she doesn't even know what she's said, but I do and Dad does, and I have to wave my hand and shake my head and smile like it's totally okay and we're having some normal mother-daughter chat.

Mom starts yelling at Dad almost right away, and I should be relieved that he directed her away from me, but I don't want her to be yelling at anyone.

When the yelling reaches the highest volume imaginable, the door to the twins' bedroom finally cracks open, and a hand, Astrid's, pulls me inside. The yelling is only moderately quieter behind the door, but my sisters huddle around me, and when I nestle my head into their arms and shoulders and close my eyes, I can almost block it out.

“Are you okay?” Astrid whispers right into my ear, so that I can admit only to her if I'm not.

“Has that ever happened with you and Mom before?” Eleanor asks, but she knows it hasn't. She knows this is the day I have moved from special little Silly who needs protecting and turned into just another one of the girls.

It's weird, how something can feel good and bad at the same time.

“What'd you do to upset her?” Marla says.

“I hate this house,” I say, which doesn't answer any of them, exactly, but also answers all of them, I think.

Five

T
he curtains are drawn and the room is dark, except for a crack of light peeking through the bottom of Eleanor's closet. Astrid and Eleanor picked out heavy navy curtains when they decorated their new room, and they almost never leave them open, so it's night in here even when it's daytime everywhere else. Astrid says she works better with just a few night-lights on, and Eleanor is almost never inside anyway. So the way the closet light breaks through the darkness right now is unmistakable. A cut in the night.

I know instantly that's where their secrets are kept.

I guess closets are where we all keep our secrets. Dad
keeps the books that are too adult for us to read in his closet. Astrid and Eleanor have always kept pictures of boys they like in their closets. In my closet in our old house I had a story I wrote about me being LilyLee's sister and living with LilyLee's family. Of course now there's only other people's discards in my closet, which is yet another reason to hate the New Hampshire house. I don't even get a place to store my secrets.

Mom's secrets must be in closets too. Maybe she keeps extra bottles in there or something.

“I want to go in,” I say, pointing to the line of light below their closet door.

“No!” Marla says, her voice cracking and desperate. A whole complicated series of looks are exchanged between the twins, and I understand that even if Marla was invited in before me, we'll always be the younger ones and they'll always have each other.

“She needs it too,” Astrid says to Eleanor. “Don't you think?”

“I'm more than a whole year older,” Marla says. It's not the first time she's used that as an argument for something. She's a stickler for a certain kind of fairness: if she wasn't allowed to swim to the deeper part of the lake until she turned eight, I shouldn't be allowed to do it until I turn eight a whole year later. Since she got a new bike when she
turned ten, I shouldn't have one when I'm only nine. She wants her extra year on me to matter in some measurable way, whereas I'd rather pretend she and I are twins too, able to do everything together like Eleanor and Astrid.

“You can't leave me out there with Mom when you're all in here,” I say, not realizing how true that is until I've said it. If there's a tornado, you all hold hands and anchor one another so that no one gets swept up alone. We are in the middle of a tornado, and it's not okay for them to hold on to one another and sacrifice me to the spinning, violent force. “It's not about how old I am. I can't do it all by myself. Didn't you hear how she talked to me? I can't be included in that but not included in this.” I get a pang of fear that they won't listen. That I'll have Mom calling me a disappointment on the other side of their bedroom door while they all escape into secrets without me.

“I shouldn't be lonely when I have three sisters,” I say, like feelings and families are simple scientific facts. Cause and effect.

There's a certain kind of shock on Eleanor's face, and I think she's never heard me say so many words at once, and so clearly.

“We're in charge, okay?” she says.

I nod. It's not anything new. They're always in charge.

Marla makes a series of noises that must be the
beginnings of words that she doesn't know quite how to finish.

Eleanor pulls the door to her closet open, and there's nothing inside but one of Astrid's dioramas. Not even a very good one. It's a basic park scene: aluminum-foil pond, green construction-paper grass, toothpicks with green pom-poms on top for trees. Orange Play-Doh dots that are meant to look like goldfish swimming in the reflective pond. Tissue-paper roses. It's pretty vanilla for Astrid, who usually likes her diorama trees pink and her diorama ponds covered in glitter.

“Do you like it?” Astrid says. I don't know if she means the diorama or the way they've positioned it in the middle of the closet. I shrug. “Like, is it a place you'd want to visit?”

“It's a park,” I say, which isn't an answer. “It's a nice park,” I amend, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

Astrid steps into the closet. Eleanor steps in beside her. Marla's next, and it's a pretty tight squeeze. I'm not sure there's room for one more.

I step inside and Eleanor closes the door. It goes dark and I close my eyes, a funny reflex I have when a room goes black.

Marla starts to giggle. Hearing Marla giggle is so new and strange I wonder if she's choking before realizing what the sound is. My eyes open because of the smell of roses. It's strong.
Overwhelming. I wonder if Eleanor's secret boyfriend has bought her some new perfume that she's spraying like crazy.

That's not it, though.

The ground is covered in green and yellow spikes of grass. At my feet there's a glassy pool of water. A small pond. I think I even see little orange fish swimming around right beneath the surface. I rub my eyes. There are roses everywhere, growing right out of the ground and not in bushes. We are in a very pretty park, the size of a baseball field.

I don't understand the things I'm seeing.

“We're in a park,” I say. My feet won't move, and my sisters don't look confused enough, given what's happening.

“This is the best it's ever been, isn't it?” Astrid says to Marla and Eleanor. Eleanor nods and her eyes widen, but Marla shrugs, unconvinced.

“It's probably a good diorama,” Marla says, her voice tight and fast, not leaving any room for other theories.

“Maybe all four of us together make the closet stronger,” Astrid says. “We should have brought Priscilla in earlier.” The sun's bouncing off the pond and her white-blond hair and the tips of our noses.

“Cautious is good,” Eleanor says, but she's glowing in the sun too, and her jaw and elbows and shoulders look looser.

“What happened?” My voice screeches. They're all too calm. “How are we in a park? Is it . . . a time machine? Is this what you do? You go to parks? How do they— What do they—” I was so gung ho about having an adventure that I hadn't considered the way an adventure actually feels—prickly and terrifying. I want desperately to hold on to something steady, but nothing feels real or anchored here. “Help me understand.”

“We bring in the dioramas,” Marla says. I can tell she's trying to make it sound like she's done it a million times before, even though last night was the first time. “And they become real.”

I start laughing, because it is a completely insane conversation that we're having.

“So Astrid's magical?” I say, thinking of the way her hands move so gracefully when she's making the dioramas. There's some magic there.

“The closets are,” Marla says.

“
This
closet makes dioramas real,” Eleanor says, “but Astrid's closet doesn't work.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “This is the magic closet. The others aren't, okay?” She's speaking French basically. Or Japanese. Or pig Latin, which I know is supposedly really easy to understand, but I never am fast enough to keep up with.

“Enough with the talking! Look what I made for you!” Astrid says. She picks up a handful of grass and throws it at me. I'm surprised it smells real.

I finally take a step. The grass pokes the bottoms of my feet, and silky roses swipe my ankles. Immediately, I want it all. Not only the park and the smell of the outdoors and the way sunlight glints off the shiny pond. I want more. It's a funny impulse, given how much I now have at my fingertips. Like getting everything I want for Christmas but already making my Christmas list for next year.

I try to list every diorama Astrid's ever made in my head, or at least the ones I saw strewn all over their floor and furniture yesterday, but there are simply too many. Furry ones and sparkling ones and scary ones and perfect ones. She makes them, tweaks them, dismantles them for parts constantly, so it's an ever-changing collection of universes. Astrid's imagination is vast and strange and unexpected. And apparently, we now have a way to live inside it.

I'm goosebumping and blinking.

It smells like a park but also like a home. Birds, bright-blue ones, swoop in the sky and land on Eleanor's shoulders. They flap their wings against her face, and it seems to relax her.

“We let the closet take care of us,” Astrid says. “And it always does.”

We hold eye contact. In a lot of ways, Astrid's eyes are more surprising, more magical than anything in the closet. An almost neon blue, much brighter than even the birds, and never blinking.

I pick a rose. “You know these don't grow from the ground, right? Roses grow in bushes,” I say. I don't know why this is the thing astounding me the most, but it is. Astrid shrugs. She's never been concerned with things like reality or facts or the world we live in.

The rose blossom moves in my hand. The petals open farther and farther, then it grows new petals to open even more.

“You're growing it,” Astrid says.

“That. Is. Beautiful,” Eleanor says.

“This isn't what usually happens?” I say. The rose grows. It's the size of my fist, then my head. It smells sweeter and silkier every moment.

“I knew it. We were meant to be in here all together,” Astrid says. She has this serene look on her face, like everything's clicked, and Eleanor mirrors her soon enough. If one of the twins has a mood change, the other often follows. Twin domino effect.

Marla and I are in different universes, but the twins are living in the same square inch of land. I try to make eye contact with Marla, but she's staring at the center of the rose,
and I'm left searching for something else to look at. This would never happen with the twins.

Eleanor leans over and touches the petals of the rose growing in my hand, and it expands even more.

With that, even Marla looks impressed. She sticks her nose into the center, soaking in the scent with a loud inhale. She's a different person in here. She can't stop laughing at the way the petals flop over, hitting her face as they grow.

Eleanor cracks up too and reaches into the pond for a lily pad. “Let's do this one!” she says, and we all touch it. In a moment, it grows to blanket size, big enough to wrap all four of us into a kind of sister-burrito.

Astrid's crying from laughing, and Eleanor keeps hugging me. It's so much better than anything I thought they might be doing up here.

We make all kinds of things grow and become more beautiful. We stick our feet in the pool of water and it sparkles. We hug a tree and it sways.

We do all of it together, since Astrid is sure that's the key to really accessing the full extent of the closet's magic. Togetherness. Sisterly-ness.

When we can't think of anything else to touch as a group, we do the most obvious thing. We play in the park. Like little girls and like sisters and like LilyLee's family,
who always go on group adventures and spend afternoons together.

Marla settles on her back in the grass, which we made longer and greener, and Astrid spins around in circles until she gets so dizzy she falls over, then does it again. Eleanor sits by the pond and splashes the water, kicking her legs up and down so fast they're a blur, calling for us to join her.

I join Eleanor by the pond and dangle my toes in as well. Fish swim around my feet, tickling my ankles, and we are far, far away from our parents and the New Hampshire house.

“You've been keeping this from me,” I say. If we were outside the closet, I think I'd say it meanly. I think I'd pout or something. But inside the closet, the sun on my shoulders and my ankles soaking in a pond filled with bathwater and gentle goldfish, I don't mind at all, I'm only curious what she'll say.

“We don't know if it's safe,” Eleanor says. “We don't know anything.”

“So?”

“Mom says we need to look out for you.” A fish swims in between my toes.

Mom's always singling me out. “You're too smart for your own good, little one,” she said only a few weeks ago.
“We have to keep you a kid, okay? Let's keep our Silly a kid.” She was talking to all my sisters, and Eleanor and Astrid nodded and rolled their eyes, but Marla truly hated it. I think she wanted someone to care about keeping her a kid too.

Whatever that means.

“I guess she's not too concerned with protecting me anymore, huh?” I say. I can't quite grasp the image of Mom from a few minutes ago. I know I thought the look on her face would stay with me forever—stony but hazy. Unfocused but forceful. Right this moment, though, I can't pull up the image in my memory.

The goldfish slow and stroke my toes. A butterfly lands in my hair. It's an old, forgotten feeling, like when my mother used to scratch my head as I fell asleep.

Eleanor looks at me. Hard. It feels like she's trying to see if I've grown since the last time she looked at me.

She nods.

“We need this place,” she says. And for the first time, when she says “we,” it includes me.