“Oh, sweetheart,” said Mom, looking at Jasper. “What kind of—”
“It doesn’t matter right now,” I said, and Mom broke off midsentence.
My parents were still listening, but I couldn’t look at them, because there was fury in Jasper’s eyes. I could see it. Her jaw was set and she looked like she was ready to stand up, kick open the door, and run off and never look back. But I kept going.
“So she’s supposed to be living with her sister, in East Lake. But her sister’s husband—he’s . . . bad news too.”
“What kind of bad news?” asked Dad.
Jasper was shaking her head, staring at me. “You promised,” she said. “You’re supposed to be my best friend.”
“I am your best friend,” I said. “Or I’m trying to be.” I turned back to my parents. “He’s bad, like . . . physical. Violent. And when Jasper told her sister to leave him, her sister said no. She’s afraid she’ll lose her kids. It’s complicated. So she gave Jasper some money, and Jasper left. She checks in sometimes.”
Mom and Dad were having a silent conversation with their eyes. I couldn’t figure out what they were saying, but it looked serious.
At last, Mom said, “Okay. Well. I think maybe this is more than we can handle tonight. How about we all need to get a good night’s sleep and discuss this in the morning?”
Dad nodded. “I think that’s the right idea. And just in case anyone gets any funny ideas, you girls should both know, if anyone leaves in the night, I’ll call the police. Right away. End of story. Am I understood?”
Jasper and I both nodded.
Somehow, we all went to bed after that, like it was a normal night. We took quick showers, brushed our teeth, and crawled under our covers. Me in my bed, and Jasper on the floor in a sleeping bag and a borrowed nightgown.
“Good night,” I whispered.
Jasper didn’t reply. She just turned away from me.
I lay there in the darkness, staring at her unforgiving back, feeling like we’d come to a wall at the end of a very dark hallway. But then I happened to glance down at the rag rug next to her pillow. And I remembered the mouse.
“Where’d you go?” I whispered. I sat up and peered at the floor around the rug, at the spot where, a few hours earlier, a tiny body had been laid. But the mouse was gone. There was no sign of him at all.
I closed my eyes and slept.
Conversation O’Clock
When I woke, it was to the sound of Jasper snoring lightly on the floor beside me. She was curled up into a tiny ball and had sort of wiggled her way over toward my bed in the night, so that she was sleeping almost directly beneath me. I peered down at her and noticed for the first time that her lashes weren’t brown but a deep dark red. I lay there like that for a minute, watching her snore. She seemed so calm, so at home, curled safely in my room. But watching her put an ache in my belly. What would happen to her? I didn’t want her to wake up. I wanted her to sleep on and on. I wondered what she was dreaming about.
It was still really early. Outside the window, it was almost dark, but I could hear birds. I slipped carefully out of bed and stepped over my sleeping friend. Then I crept across the room. And out in the hallway, I did something I hadn’t done in over a year: I made my way down the hall to my parents’ room, where I knocked lightly on the door and then went in.
They were sleeping on opposite sides of the bed, as far from each other as possible. Mom had fallen asleep with her small reading lamp on, and her book had dropped to the floor beside her. Dad had his face tucked down, under the covers, but I could see the top of his head, where the hair was thinning. They faced away from each other.
Without stopping to think about it, I climbed up at the foot of the bed and slid in between them, into the narrow valley between their sleeping backs. I hadn’t done it in a long time, and I could feel how much bigger I was than the last time I’d tried to crawl between them. But somehow I fitted myself into the space, the same one Sam and I both crammed into on Sunday mornings. It felt good and snug. I wriggled a little, hoping they’d wake up.
When they didn’t stir, I turned to my mom’s sleeping back. “Rise and shine,” I whispered in her ear.
“Huh?” Slowly, Mom turned over and forced her eyes open. It took her a second of blinking to really see me. When she did, she sat up right away. “Leah? Is everything okay?”
I shook my head. “Of course not,” I said. “Can we please talk?”
Mom sank back against the headboard, back against her pillow, sighed, and reached for the glass of water by her bed. “Sure we can. Just give me a second. I’m not really awake yet.” She took a sip of water, a long slow swallow, and then shook her head. “Last night feels like a terrible dream. Where’s Jasper now?”
“Still sleeping.”
“Good,” said Mom gently.
“I didn’t want to wake her,” I said, “because I wanted to talk to you about her.”
Mom reached over across me and poked my dad in the back. “Paul,” she said. “Paul, wake up.”
He grunted in reply, and flopped over to face us, but his eyes were still closed. “Uhhhh,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Time to get up,” said Mom. “Conversation o’clock.”
He opened one eye.
“Your delinquent daughter wants to talk to you, and I think we should listen. Rouse thyself.”
Dad sat up and scratched his head. He looked down at me, lying there next to Mom. “Okay, let me have it, delinquent daughter.”
It was funny that, as terrible as the situation was, things felt better between us than they had in a year. As if a rubber band that had been stretching tighter and tighter every day had suddenly snapped and broken and all the tension was gone now.
I took a deep breath and sat up, then repositioned myself in the middle of the bed, so that I could look at both of them at once. “Okay!” I said. “I know I have gotten in all kinds of trouble lately. I’ve done a lot of things wrong. And, yeah, I probably deserve to be grounded—”
“I’m nearly certain of it,” said Dad.
“Hush!” said Mom. “Leah’s turn.”
“The thing is,” I continued, “that stuff is all about me, my mistakes. And I want to talk to you guys about Jasper, not me. Because she hasn’t done anything wrong. So can we hold off on me and just focus on her right now?”
“We can try that, Leah,” said Mom. “We can try. Jasper seems like a nice kid. She really does. She has a sort of glow, doesn’t she?”
“She does!” I blurted out gratefully. “She totally does. Honestly, I don’t understand how someone so great came out of something so terrible. It’s like she hasn’t had any chance to be happy, but somehow she knows how to do it anyway. It’s like she’s so full of joy, nothing can squish it.”
Mom didn’t say anything, just nodded.
“So that’s why we have to help her. Obviously, she can’t stay where she’s living any longer, or move back with her mom, but . . .”
Dad raised a hand. “Now, hold your horses, Leah,” he said. “We don’t even know what we’re dealing with. What exactly is her story? Even if what you told us is true, what about her dad? Her grandparents? Someone?”
“There are people,” I admitted, “but they just aren’t there. She’s never met her dad, and her mom drinks a lot and got in trouble for drunk driving and other stuff, so they took Jasper away to go live with her sister, but, like we told you last night, her sister’s husband . . . he hits her. I didn’t ask about more than that.” I took a breath. “You can ask Jasper, I guess. If you really want to. I’m not sure how much she’ll tell you. She’s pretty scared.”
“Poor girl,” said Mom. She reached out to me and squeezed my knee.
“That’s terrible . . . if it’s true,” said Dad slowly.
“Of course it’s true!” I said. “Why would she lie? Why would she run away if it wasn’t true?”
Dad shook his head. “People do all kinds of strange things, Leah
. You’re too young to really know that. But—”
I sat up straight. “Jasper’s not a liar!” I said firmly.
“In any case,” said Dad, “something’s very wrong in her life. And I feel bad for her. I just don’t know what we can really do. I mean, you can be her friend, of course, no matter what happens. And maybe if she needs a lawyer, we could help her financially. That might make a difference. But—”
“No. I don’t mean lawyers. I mean, can we help her? Just help her ourselves? Like I’ve been doing?”
Mom shook her head. “Honey, I know this is hard for you to understand. But sometimes, there are problems that aren’t ours to solve. That are simply too big for us to fix. Sometimes it’s better not to help someone. . . .”
“Better not to help someone?” I repeated slowly. “Is that what you just said?”
Mom frowned and pulled her knees up under the covers, hugged them close. “That isn’t what I meant to say,” she said. “I only meant . . .”
I could feel myself getting upset, but I wanted to stay calm. I wanted them to hear me. “But don’t you get it, Mom? She’s living in an abandoned house with no running water or electricity, because that’s better than home. She has nobody. Truly nobody. Except . . . maybe me.”
“Leah,” said Dad, “I love that you want to help. But you’re a kid. And I think what your mom means is that there are people trained for this kind of thing. There are therapists and social workers. The responsible thing to do is to call those people.”
“I knew you’d say that,” I said. “I just knew you would. That’s the Dad answer. But this time you’re wrong.”
Dad shook his head. “I don’t see what we can do for her. We have no place in this whole mess. We don’t know this girl, this family. We’re strangers, Leah.”
I looked up at my dad then, and I felt . . . disappointed.
“You’re only strangers if you choose to be strangers,” I said. “A few weeks ago, Jasper and I were strangers, and then we chose each other. You can choose too.”
My dad looked at me and held his hands up, as if to show me they were empty.
“This is exactly why Jasper was keeping secrets,” I continued. “This is what she was afraid of. She’d rather be alone in a storm than go wherever we’d send her.”
“Sometimes we have to do things that people don’t like, because it’s what’s best. That’s what it means, to be a grown-up.
I shook my head again. “And when we go to visit her at some group home, or something . . . and if she’s miserable, will you still think it was for the best? Because it’ll be your fault. For sending her away.”
Mom frowned slightly at that. “Even so . . . ,” she said. Then she paused and chewed at her lip. Which meant she was confused.
I watched her closely, and then I just said it. “Jasper should live here. With us.”
“Nope,” said Dad, practically before the words were even out of my mouth. “No way.”
“But why?”
“It’s just not possible,” he said.
Mom was frowning at Dad across the bed. “I think . . . I think what your father means to say is that as much as we’d love to take her in, it just won’t work.” She shook her head. “I want you to know I really am hearing you. I get that this is terrible. And I know why you feel the way you do. I can conjure up that guilt so clearly. How we’ll feel if this all ends badly. Do you think I don’t wake up every day thinking about how we sent him . . . your brother . . . off to camp, when he didn’t want to go?”
“Wait, what?” I said.
“Of course I’d love to just say, well, let’s just ignore everything and take Jasper in and nothing will ever hurt her again!” she went on. “But that’s a solution from a storybook. A happily-ever-after. She’s not a stray kitten, Leah. You can’t adopt a kid, just like that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because she has her own family,” said Mom. “We can’t know what her sister is feeling right now. She might be panic-stricken. And her mom could be in rehab this minute.”
“Okay fine,” I said. “But what if she isn’t? I mean, her sister is right there down the street in East Lake. Jasper’s been checking in regularly, and nobody even brought her food or anything.”
“Really?” said Mom. She was chewing her lip again. Now she crossed her arms tightly. “That just seems . . . hard to believe.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the truth. So what if her sister doesn’t care? Or what if she cares, but can’t deal with it for . . . other reasons. What if they make her live with her sister’s bad-news husband, and he hits her? Doesn’t that seem likely? What happens then?”
“Then . . . I guess she’ll go into foster care for a few years,” said Mom. “And I know that doesn’t sound ideal, but it doesn’t have to be bad. Look at what happened to Seth Jones, from your class in school—”
“Not ideal?” I said. “How would you feel if I went to foster care?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dad broke in. “That would never happen. You’d go to your grandparents.”
“So what if her sister says it’s okay?” I asked. “Then can she live here? Can we be her foster family?”
“We have a family, Leah,” said Mom. “We can’t just add a stranger into the mix here. We’re busy and distracted and limited already. The last year has been . . .”
“Horrible!” I said. “It’s been horrible and depressing.”
“Yes,” said Dad. “Exactly. So do you think we’re really equipped to take on an extra kid? Is that fair to Jasper?”
“Fair to Jasper?”
Dad nodded. “Fair to Jasper. To take her in when we’re . . .” He trailed off.
“That’s a trash reason.” I sneered. I couldn’t help it. “That’s some grown-up excuse for something you don’t want to do. It doesn’t even mean anything, and you know it. She’d way rather be here. She was just saying how great she thought Mom was.”
“Really?” said Mom with a small smile.
I looked from Dad to Mom. “Come on, please? Mom? Dad? Can’t you please wake up and realize I’m right this time? I really am right!”
It was true, and I knew it. Maybe magic wasn’t real, but this was the next best thing. So obvious. So easy. It was so close, right there. I could see a sunnier version of all our futures peeking out. I could taste something sweet.
Mom sighed. “Look, Leah, I’m going to be honest. As much as I get what you’re saying, your dad is right. We’ve been running on fumes. Even if Jasper’s sister said yes, and the social services people said it was okay and everything . . . I just . . . I can’t do more than I’m doing right now. Heck, I can’t even seem to buy laundry detergent. Some days, I lose track of what time it is. I manage to make a real dinner once a week, at best. I can’t take in an extra kid. I’m barely hanging on. Can’t you see that? We’ve been . . . struggling. You know it’s true.”
“I know,” I said. “But haven’t you noticed things have been . . . better? With Jasper? I haven’t been so . . . lonely. Or empty. She’s not extra work. She’s like . . . sunshine. Or vitamins, or a circus, or something . . .”
Unbelievably, Mom seemed to be listening seriously now. She nodded slowly at me. “Actually, yes, I did notice,” she said. “When she was here the other day, I felt . . . different. It was like we’d opened up a bunch of windows in the house.”
“See?” I said.
“But that was for a day, Leah. Not a lifetime. Not when she gets into fights at school or starts dating some horrible boy or something. I won’t be able to cope.”
“Well, if you say she can live with us, I promise not to date horrible boys. How’s that? Jasper can be the difficult one, and I’ll be the best kid ever.”
“Now you’re just being silly,” said Mom. “Of course Jasper is welcome to visit anytime. Like any friend of yours. No matter where she’s living. But people don’t just decide to adopt a fourteen-year-old.”
“Some people do! Mother Teresa took i
n a whole orphanage. We studied her in school.”
“I’m hardly Mother Teresa,” said Mom. “Most people aren’t. It’s just not something normal people do.”
“Something normal people do . . . ,” I repeated under my breath. “That’s a laugh.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Dad. He’d mostly just been sitting there, listening, but he was starting to get angry now, wearing out. I could tell. He was rubbing his forehead in a headachy way.
“Honestly? I don’t care about what normal people do anymore,” I said. “I don’t want things to be normal. Not if normal is what we’ve been doing for the last year. Normal is depressing. It’s pretending.”
“Isn’t that a little melodramatic?” said Dad.
I shook my head. “No! Ever since Sam died, it’s like none of us are really here. You guys are so . . . Well, Dad, all you do is stare into your phone all day, every day. And then pretend to play darts and go out to the garage and sit alone there, with your weird painting.”
Dad’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out.
“What painting?” Mom said.
“See!” I said. “Mom, you didn’t even know. Dad’s been painting a mural on the ceiling in the garage for, like, months now! Is that normal?”
“Really?” She turned to Dad. “What’s she talking about? A mural of what?”
But I wasn’t done. “Both of you . . . I’m not blaming you, exactly. I know you’re sad. But it makes things worse for me. Mom looks like . . .” I looked at her. “Like she’s going to break into pieces half the time.”
Mom nodded. And all she said was “It’s been hard.”
“I know it,” I said. “And until Jasper, I just sort of accepted that this was how things were going to be from now on. Hard and sad. But when I met her, it was like I got a do-over. I remembered how to laugh and tell people things. And I realized it’s not okay. The last year has not been okay. I have been so lonely,” I said, and I wasn’t ready to stop talking yet, but a sob snuck out and interrupted me.
“You’re right, Leah,” Dad said quietly. “We have a lot of fixing to do.”
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