Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “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.

  Six

  The closet door is still there, at the edge of the park, when we’re ready to leave. Waiting for us. Once it’s open, the park fades before disappearing completely.

  I think I might be sunburned. Mom and Dad are asleep or quiet or whatever it is they are after a drink and a fight and a lot of slamming doors.

  I need to tell my sisters about the weird comment Mom made, about having had a sister, but I have too many questions about the closet first.

  “So none of the other closets do anything at all?” I say.

  Astrid and Eleanor exchange a look. Marla clears her throat.

  “Mine doesn’t do anything,” Marla says.

  Astrid is silent.

  “The other closets don’t work,” Eleanor says. “I told you that.”

  Astrid stays silent.

  “What about my closet?” I say.

  “We can try it,” Astrid says.

  “Maybe someday,” Eleanor says.

  “It won’t work either,” Marla says.

  “Who knows, now that we’re all together, maybe everything will work,” I say. “Like Astrid says.” I’m sort of dreamy-feeling from the park. My brain feels like it’s quilted or stuffed with down, pillowy and soft. Comfortable. I need it to last. I need my closet to work. I need to spend every afternoon in a new world in the closets, as strange and beautiful as today’s park.

  Astrid must be right, I think. It’s what we get in exchange for a sick and sometimes mean mother. Sister-closet powers. It’s what we get instead of a family that has dinner together every night with vegetable sides and cloth napkins and super-easy conversations about how everyone’s day was.

  “What kind of place are we going to visit next?” I say. My sisters all look tired. “LilyLee’s family goes on vacations in the French Riviera. Can we make it look like the French Riviera? I have a postcard, I can show you.” The postcard I have isn’t even that special. It’s a curve of sand hitting a bright blue ocean, and white sailboats dotting the water. You can see the algae beneath the surface, a darker shade of blue. Pretty but not spectacular. I collect postcards, so I know which ones are truly beautiful and which are sort of blah.

  I love the name, though. The French Riviera. It’s a place where I could paint watercolors and drink drinks out of pineapples and eat little éclairs, which I know for sure are French.

  “That’s not how we do it,” Marla says. She’s already pissed, I can tell. Everything sweet from our time in the closet is fading fast. She hates that I’m a part of it now. She hates that we are better as a foursome than they were as a threesome. “Maybe you should leave the diorama ideas to Astrid.”

  “We can do so much better than France,” Astrid says. Her hair’s in her eyes, and she keeps having to pick it out. It’s long and fine and gets whiter and whiter the deeper we go into summer.

  “You coming with me tonight?” Eleanor says, abandoning the conversation like it doesn’t matter at all, now that her secret boyfriend is obviously texting her.

  “Where are we going?” I say. Eleanor laughs. Not meanly, but enough that I know she still thinks of me as a lesser being. Our being a team in the closet doesn’t matter out here, in the real world. She’s drawing a line, with me and Marla still on the stupid-little-sister side. />
  “I was talking to Astrid. We’re going out,” Eleanor says, her voice taking on this haughty tone she uses when she’s asking me to please clean up my stupid toys (even though I don’t have toys anymore), or when she’s explaining why eighth-grade math is way harder and more legitimate than fifth-grade math.

  She starts trying on shoes. I had no idea she had dozens of sandals. Silver ones and ones with heels and ones with so many straps they look like torture devices.

  “Where?” Marla says. I know when to give up, but Marla doesn’t. She has a gloomy look on her face. It wouldn’t be the worst idea to shove her back in the closet, I think. Have her stay in that peaceful state forever.

  “Ice cream. Then a friend’s house,” Eleanor says. That means they’re seeing her secret boyfriend. I say as much, and Eleanor huffs and won’t reply, but she decides on these red flip-flops that Marla and I both covet.

  “What about us?” Marla says. “You want us to take care of everything? Entertain Dad? Help Mom hobble around?” She’s saying it like Eleanor and Astrid are leaving us forever, like we didn’t just spend the afternoon together in their closet having basically the greatest experience ever. I wonder if Marla even knows how to be happy.

  “We can go back in the closet together, Marla!” I say. “Astrid, can we borrow your planetary diorama? Will it work? Will we float around in space? Oh my God, I’m so excited.”

  “No!” Eleanor says. She turns red, redder than the sunburn from the park in the closet, redder than her red flip-flops, almost. “No closets without us. Absolutely not. Are you listening?” She’s staring right at me, so she knows I am.

  “Chill,” Astrid says. She isn’t trying on tops or shoes or hairstyles. I wouldn’t be either. Eleanor is the only one of us who knows how to do those things. LilyLee’s mother takes her clothes shopping and taught her how to French braid and how to match shoes with belts, and LilyLee says she taught her how to apply blush and eye shadow the other week too.

  These are things we’ve never learned.

  I’m pretty sure Eleanor’s wearing too much blush, but I wouldn’t know the right amount of blush, so I don’t say anything.

  “You went in without us,” I say, hoping Marla will back me up. She doesn’t, but she doesn’t dispute me either. And with Marla, sometimes her not arguing with me is the same as her standing up for me.

  “It wasn’t some huge thing,” Eleanor says. “We didn’t do it that often until recently. Don’t make a big deal out of it, Silly.” Her cell phone is buzzing with texts from the secret boyfriend, and she’s flitting her hands around nervously, but it doesn’t stop her from being Big Sister Eleanor. “We’re trying to keep you safe. No experimenting. New rule.”

  “There weren’t any rules before you forced your way in,” Marla says, like somehow this is all my fault now. Like without me holding her back, she’d have been able to go on closet adventures any time she wanted without any of Eleanor’s wrath or Astrid’s quiet worry.

  “You look pretty,” I say to Eleanor instead of agreeing with her or arguing with Marla.

  “I do?” Eleanor looks genuinely confused. She stares at the mirror and combs her hair with her fingers. “There’s this girl who works at the ice cream place, and she always looks perfect. Like her nails and the length of her dresses and a different necklace with every outfit. What’s that like, do you think?”

  “Boring,” Astrid says. She throws a necklace around her neck. The kind with big plastic beads from the craft cabinet threaded with no pattern or sense onto a thick black string and tied with one of Mom’s shaky-handed knots.

  Sometimes I think I want to be more like Eleanor, who tries so hard and is so pulled together. But right now I want to be Astrid, who doesn’t care.

  Eleanor and Astrid leave out the front door. The ice cream store is a short walk away, and Mom and Dad won’t notice that they’re gone.

  “That’d be so cool,” LilyLee said when I told her Mom and Dad don’t notice, so we never have to ask permission to go anywhere or do anything.

  LilyLee isn’t always right.

  Seven

  Marla and I try to have a nice evening alone together.

  Or, I try. Marla mopes.

  We sit on the couch in the living room and watch TV, but after a while we’re not watching TV at all. We’re waiting for Mom to go back to bed. She is eating dinner by herself in the dining room and keeps dropping her utensils and swearing at them. She’s drinking from a mug instead of a glass, which is a bad sign. It means she doesn’t want us to see what’s inside.

  We’re watching an old movie version of Annie that Mom turned on before she started dinner. I think we’d both like to change the channel—movie musicals aren’t our thing—but sometimes when Mom is in a mood, anything can set her off. So we sit tight and tense on the couch and wince whenever a knife or fork clangs to the floor.

  “I have something to tell you,” I whisper. I think maybe Marla and I can figure out what’s going on with Mom together, if I tell her about Mom’s mystery-sister. Since Eleanor and Astrid want to leave us alone, Marla and I can have our own secrets. “It’s about Mom.”

  “Mom’s fine,” Marla says, before I can tell her what Mom said.

  Fine. I’ll figure it out myself.

  I sing along with Annie under my breath.

  As expected, Mom doesn’t ask where Eleanor and Astrid are, and Dad doesn’t come out of his study.

  Near the end of the movie, Annie sings the song “Maybe” for the second time. It doesn’t do much for me, but I hear a sob coming from the other room. Mom.

  If there is a worse sound than Mom crying, I haven’t heard it. Everyone says nails on a chalkboard are the worst, but I’d take that any day over this.

  Marla and I look at each other and reach for the remote, but when I get my hands on it, I can’t decide whether to turn the TV off or lower the volume or do nothing at all.

  “Should I get Dad?” I whisper, and slide closer to Marla on the couch. At least I’m not alone.

  “He won’t know what to do,” Marla says.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “Well, he’ll make it worse.”

  Annie stops singing, but Mom doesn’t stop crying.

  “My sister loved this song,” Mom says. I think that’s what she says. Her words are mushy and slurred. I’m scared when she sounds like this. I want to shake her until the words come out clearer, crisper. I want to disappear, and I know exactly how to do it. I’m about to suggest to Marla that we sneak back into Eleanor’s closet, that our sisters would understand if they knew how dire the circumstance was, but she gets up from the couch, puts her shoulders back, and clears her throat.

  “I’ll check on her,” Marla says. It’s a terrible idea. Night crickets chirp out warnings. The sun goes down the whole way. It’s a sure sign, all of it, that it’s too late to save anyone.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t do that?” I say. Eleanor would grab her elbow and jerk her back down to the couch. Astrid would distract her with an art project and a few bits of gossip about Eleanor’s secret boyfriend. But I make a sound like a lamb and blink my eyes a lot and give up before the words are even out of my mouth.

  “She probably wants company,” Marla says. “She’s probably lonely.” I wonder if we’re whispering low enough for Mom to ignore us. The house seems too drafty and quiet, and the loud Annie finale hasn’t started yet.

  I should stop Marla, but I don’t know how. I let her go. I run upstairs before I have to hear what happens to her. I don’t want to know.

  I’m a bad sister.

  In my room I can’t hear much of what’s happening in the rest of the house. Sometimes I hate that, feeling disconnected from my sisters. Marla can hear the twins through their shared wall, and of course the twins have each other, even though Mom and Dad offered to let them have separate rooms in the New Hampshire house. I think they could tell Mom wasn’t thrilled with the idea of turning her sewing room into a bedroom. />
  She doesn’t like us going in the sewing room at all.

  I try to distract myself by writing a postcard to LilyLee. The challenge of postcard writing is that you want to get across the most important things that have happened in the last few days, but you can’t say anything too personal. It’s an art form, like Astrid’s dioramas, or at least that’s what I tell myself.

  I have a huge collection of postcards, and I go through five different pine tree New Hampshire ones, trying to craft the perfect three sentences to explain what happened today.

  But I never get it right, because I can’t stop looking at my closet door.

  It looks like Eleanor’s. The same white wood. The same blurry brass doorknob that could use a good shining. The same squeak of the hinges when I open it, which I do, slowly, like its magic might pour out if I’m not careful.

  I’m going to go inside.

  It’s probably not magic, anyway. It’s probably a normal closet like Marla’s and Astrid’s. Probably only Eleanor got the special closet, because Eleanor is exactly the kind of girl who would get a special closet. I am not that kind of girl. I don’t deserve it.

  I take all the clothes and shoes and broken umbrellas and suitcases and missing-strapped backpacks out of my closet. I am close to certain that Astrid and Eleanor unloaded their closets’ contents into mine. Eleanor’s closet is now empty of everything but magic. So I have to make a huge pile of other people’s stuff in the middle of the room.

  I consider getting one of Astrid’s dioramas, since that’s what makes the magic happen as far as I can tell, but I need to try to do this secretly, without getting in trouble. I don’t want them to find out and keep me out of Eleanor’s closet for good. And they’ll notice a missing diorama. They might even notice a moved diorama.

  When my closet’s cleared of every last mitten and empty jewelry box and fleece vest, I walk all the way inside and close the door behind me. Wait with the light on for something to happen. Wait for nothing to happen. Wait.