Rules for Stealing Stars (6 page)

Ten

I
'm going to sneak an egg up to my room. It won't be hard to do. I'm practically invisible right now. Dad's going for a post-paper run. Eleanor is texting her secret boyfriend, and when she's doing that, she doesn't notice anything else. Marla's baking something, and Astrid's working on a diorama at the kitchen counter, filling a black shoe box with flowers made from Dad's newspaper and lining the bottom with carpet samples Mom's left on the counter for weeks. It's easy to take things like that without Mom noticing.

LilyLee was always jealous of me wearing my mother's things. I'd come to school with a necklace with a tiny
diamond hanging off it, or a yellow silk scarf that looked like it was stitched from Rumpelstiltskin's gold, and LilyLee would tell me how lucky I was that my mom didn't care about things like that.

“It's not that she doesn't care, it's that she doesn't notice,” I'd say, but even though she's my best friend, LilyLee didn't understand the difference.

Before bringing the egg upstairs to my closet, I check the mailbox, looking for a note from LilyLee. I've been sending her postcards every other day, but there's nothing from her. Two weeks ago she sent a postcard of Boston Common and said she would feed the ducks for me. And a week before that she sent a postcard of some old-time movie star and a list of movies we should watch when she visits Labor Day weekend.

For the first time, I wonder if she'll even come.

“Is the mail working?” I ask my sisters.

“I got a package from Henry,” Astrid says. We all pause at the name Henry. His name is a huge stop sign in the middle of our morning. Red and warning and dangerous to pass through.

“Quiet!” Marla says. She turns on the mixer, a rumbling sound meant to cover up the conversation. Nothing has ever made Mom angrier than when Astrid started going out
with a boy named Henry last year.

Astrid presses her lips together.

“You're letting him send things here? What if Mom sees?” I say.

“When's the last time Mom left the house, even to check the mail?” Astrid says. It's a fair point, but still. Not worth the risk. It's bad enough that Eleanor has a secret boyfriend. Astrid shouldn't also be in contact with Henry. If Mom's ever going to get better, it will be because we've all been good. Doing all the things she hates will only make Mom sicker.

I think it but don't say it.

Eleanor looks up from her phone. “What should I wear to dinner at his birthday party?” She's missed the whole conversation, that's how much she must like the secret boyfriend. She hasn't told Marla and me his name. And if we asked whose birthday party she's going to, she'd make something up. But still.

Marla turns the mixer on even higher. She drops a bag of chocolate chips on the floor not once but three times. It doesn't make a very satisfying or loud sound, but I guess it makes Marla feel better.

“Maybe something green?” Astrid says.

Eleanor wrinkles her nose. This is not the answer she wanted. “Why?”

“I like green?” Astrid has already lost focus, and I think Eleanor and I are going to laugh about it, but we don't. Or I sort of do, but Eleanor wipes away a few tears.

“I need more help than that,” she says in a small voice. She is starting to sweat. It always starts on her forehead; she can't hide the shine there. “I need someone who knows stuff.”

What she means is: she needs a mom.

We all look at the stairs, the trail to our parents' room. Then we all look away, just as quickly.

There's nothing left to say, so everyone returns to our activities and the thoughts in our heads. It's the perfect time to sneak away with an egg.

The egg and I go into my closet. I hold it between my hands, cupping it. When the door's closed the light goes cozy and pink again, but the egg doesn't move.

Until it does.

It shakes and shudders.

It grows and cracks.

It breaks open.

I was thinking a creature of some kind would emerge, but sunshine is what bursts out of the shell. Beams of light, the same yellow as the yolk of an egg, the same sheen the
whites have when one's first cracked open.

I reach my hands up to touch the beams as they shoot from the broken shell, and discover they have texture to them. They make my fingers tingle, almost putting my hand to sleep, but not quite. It's the feeling of a sparkle. The sunbeams sparkle against my hand. I've never felt a sparkle before. I like it.

I love it.

The closet doesn't flood with light. The beams stay independent, like lasers decorating the space, crisscrossing in the air above me and next to me and eventually through me, so that my middle, too, gets that sleepy, sparkly sensation.

The beams pick me up in the air and fly me around. They roll me, like I'm rolling down a hill, but I'm in the air, so it's smooth and strange instead of stumbly and awkward.

I never want to leave my closet.

Except that I want my sisters in here with me. I want to be all together. I don't want to be alone anymore.

And if Astrid's right, the closet could be even more incredible with all four of us in it, harnessing some kind of sister power.

So I leave the warm feeling, the sunbeams and their
pretty pattern, the unusual sensations, tickly and soothing at the same time. The trip in the sky, carried by sunbeams. I want to get my sisters in here with me. I want more eggs and more beams and more feelings of calm and happiness and easiness and thrill.

When I emerge from the closet, Astrid's already in my room.

“Priscilla,” she says, a one-word sentence that says more than a whole paragraph could.

“I needed to,” I rush to say.

“You have to come downstairs,” she says. “Eleanor needs our help. Mom's roaming, but El needs to get to the birthday party.”

“Whose birthday party?” I say, even though I know the answer. I want her to admit Eleanor does bad things too.

“You know whose,” Astrid says. “Don't make it harder, okay? Having a secret boyfriend is making this tolerable for Eleanor. So.”

“This is making it tolerable for me,” I say, and gesture toward the closet door. Astrid sighs.

“I won't tell this time.” She twists a silver-blond strand of hair around her thumb and releases it. It stays pin-straight, of course.

I step closer to my sister. She smells unusual: Like salt
and wind. Like the ocean and a roll in a meadow. Like a place we've never been.

I breathe it in deeply, so she knows that I know she's been in a closet today too.

Eleven

“S
he's unwinding,” Marla says.

Mom likes to “unwind” before dinner, which means she likes to open a bottle of wine and get the rest of us piled into the TV room to watch the Disney Channel for a while so she can enjoy her unwinding by herself.

The problem with Mom's unwinding is that we can't sneak outside when she's at the kitchen counter.

Actually, there are a lot of problems with Mom's unwinding, but most of them come after.

Eleanor's in a green dress, hiding in the downstairs bathroom. The dress cuts low, lower than anything I've seen her wear before. I want to put her in the running shorts and
T-shirt she wears for soccer, and some muddy sneakers.

She has a purse. Her hair is curling at the ends. She has lipstick on. No wonder she's hiding.

“We can't interrupt unwinding time,” I say. We are having a sister meeting in the bathroom, with the faucet running hard and the fan making its too-loud noise. I don't know that any of this actually hides the sounds of our whispering, but we've agreed to at least pretend together that it does.

“You only need to get her out of the kitchen for a minute,” Eleanor says. She's gripping her phone in one hand and the bottom of her dress with the other. She's near tears. I don't like this new side of Eleanor. Eleanor is supposed to be calm and eternally correct and sure.

“Don't upset Mom,” Marla says. “Can't you wait until she's done? She'll fall asleep when she's done, probably.” Marla's wringing her hands and has her Marla-pout on.

We don't know when she'll be done. Unwinding takes anywhere from a half hour to three hours, and there's no predicting it. There's no predicting Mom's moods.

“I'll do it,” I say. “I'll distract her.” I want them to look at me the way they did the other day in Eleanor's closet. Like I am old enough and solid enough to be a full-fledged sister, and not simply The Youngest or The Baby or Silly.

We concoct a plan where I distract Mom and lead her
up to my room. Marla will follow us up there to help out if I freeze and forget what to say and do, but she looks sour about it.

“You'd never do this for me,” Marla whines. “You're such a kiss-up.” I hate her voice when it sounds like this. Astrid is the lookout, staying down by the stairs to tell Eleanor when it's safe to sneak out. She'll cough really loud to cover the click of the front door closing.

When we get to the kitchen, Mom's unwinding with a photo album. I peek over her shoulder. The pictures are of Mom when she was Marla's age, and another little girl who looks a lot like me.

I elbow Marla, hoping she'll see the photos and start asking questions, so that I don't have to. Maybe I'm wrong and Mom has mentioned her sister before. Maybe we really are bad daughters who don't care about anything but ourselves, like Mom says when she's been drinking.

But Marla is too focused on Mom's face and the expressions passing across it, instead of what is causing those expressions to occur.

“Mom? Will you come to my room?” I say, like I'm supposed to. I step closer to her and ignore the way she smells. I want a better look at the pictures.

“Why?” Mom says.

I hadn't thought about an answer to that question. I
thought she'd follow me upstairs simply because I'd asked, even though that's never happened before.

Silly, Silly, Silly
. I call myself the name I hate, as punishment.

“I have a bunch of questions about your sister,” I say. It's not what I mean to say. But my mind gets too hyper and too hazy when Mom is sick, and I make terrible decisions. It's all queasy regret the moment the word
sister
comes out of my mouth.

“You saw her?” Mom says. Her voice is far away, except that it's right here. The strangeness of that gives me chills. New Hampshire gives me a chill in general. It is never hot here. Only ever warmish with a breeze. I want one hot day.

“You mentioned her. Is that her in the pictures?” I say. Marla stands next to me with her mouth open and her arms loose at her sides, like my stupidity is making her stupid too. I think I can hear Eleanor and Astrid mumbling in the bathroom, and I wish I could tell them to be quiet.

Mom rubs her temples. She takes a sip from her glass of wine. Then another. Her teeth are already stained a scary purplish color.

I try to guess at how she's feeling and how she'll respond. But there are a thousand options, and whichever one I think it will be is probably wrong. There's always some new response, some strange hiccup that I hadn't expected.

“She won't let me in,” Mom says, her finger tracing the heart-shaped face of the girl in the pictures. “She won't come out. I can't get her.” I feel my forehead scrunching up so much that I'm giving myself a headache. Or maybe Mom's giving me a headache.

“Can we talk about it in my room?” I try again, knowing full well it's a lost cause. I got distracted and sloppy and ruined everything. Typical.

“You don't have a sister,” Marla says. “Mom doesn't have a sister.” She elbows me without moving her gaze from Mom's drooping face.

“You think I didn't care enough about her?” Mom says, hearing something entirely different than what was said. “You think it was my fault?”

“No!” Marla says. “I don't know!” Mom gets off her stool and drains the rest of her wine. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. It's not very graceful. One of her feet hooks around the other, and she stumbles. “I didn't know,” Marla says. I want to cover her mouth. I should say something so that Marla stops speaking, but I'm mute. “You've never mentioned her before.”

“You think I forgot all about her,” Mom says. “You think that's the kind of person I am!”

Mom's moving toward the cabinet that holds more bottles, and Marla steps in front of her, blocking her path.

It happens fast, while I'm trying to think of more words to get Mom calmed down or talking about something else, something less upsetting.

Marla takes one step closer to Mom, and Mom grabs

Marla's wrists. One in each hand.

I look away.

I am the kind of sister who looks away.

Marla yelps, a surprised, animal sound, and I run up the stairs, straight into my closet.