Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  We open the door and watch the magic fade.

  “No more secrets,” Eleanor says.

  I blush, like she’s heard what’s inside my head.

  And I’m so used to doing whatever Eleanor tells me to do, I almost share with them what Mom said, about the maybe-sister. Almost, almost, almost. These days it’s my favorite word.

  I almost tell them everything, but they look so sleepy and I feel so excellent and the opposite of anxious—UnWorried—that I decide it can wait.

  Nine

  The next morning Mom’s got her mug of hopefully-coffee and a plate with three slices of burnt toast. She likes it black. The kind of toast that makes the whole house smell like it’s burning down.

  “Have breakfast with your mom?” she says. Her voice is sweet so I can officially confirm she is drinking coffee, not wine.

  “Sure. I’ll make my own toast, though.” Mom’s burnt toast is one of those family jokes that never dies. It probably should have stopped being funny years ago, but we’ve kept it going, and it always gets at least a small smile from Mom.

  “I can make you something. You want eggs? French toast? I haven’t made French toast in ages.” I notice she’s not in her bathrobe or her ratty, worn-through jeans. She’s in a khaki skirt and this yellow shirt that isn’t quite dressy but isn’t sad and tired either.

  “Yeah, French toast,” I say. She makes it with cinnamon and hums to herself while moving the egg-soaked bread from a bowl to the pan. It’s all going really well, until the fried cinnamon scent turns and the French toast starts to burn in the pan.

  “What did I do?” she says. Her hands are shaking. I hadn’t noticed until she picked up the spatula. I try to imagine myself back in the warm light of my closet. I wonder what would happen if I brought eggs in there. Would they hatch? Would something spectacular emerge? There’s a pack of Post-its on the counter, and I grab one and scribble out the word eggs as a reminder. It looks like the start of a grocery list, but it will turn into a list of things to try in my closet.

  “That’s okay, it still looks good!” I say. “I’ll eat it. It’s all about the syrup anyway, right?” My cheeks hurt from how hard I’m smiling, and everything inside me has the same kind of ache—tired and trying too hard.

  “I used to be so good at this,” Mom says. She’s not crying, exactly. She’s flushed and embarrassed, I think, and it’s actually much worse. I know what to do with the crying. I don’t know what to do about this. Her hands won’t stop shaking. I hate it.

  “You’re a great cook!” I say, although Mom hasn’t cooked since long before we moved to the New Hampshire house. The correct statement would be: When you’re not sick, you’re a great cook.

  “Forget it,” Mom says. The spatula is loose in her hands now, like she’s given up so completely that she is fine with dropping it on the floor, mid-sizzle. The egg batter on the pan makes a sputtering noise, and the smell of burning egg mixes with the fried cinnamon scent. Mom puts the spatula on the counter with a sigh and turns off the burner.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” she says, shrugging before leaving the room. I wonder, the moment she’s gone, whether she was ever there at all.

  I take a few bites of the French toast, but the taste makes me sad.

  The house is quiet and Mom has floated back to her room, but Dad must be somewhere, so I look in all his usual hiding spots: the couch in the living room where he watches TV, the reading alcove upstairs with a book on myths and fairy tales and the yellow legal pad he takes notes on when he’s in professor mode, the front yard with the tiny vegetable garden he’s trying to grow, the back porch where he escapes with his paper.

  Bingo.

  “Silly!” he says, looking up at the sound of my hippo-slippered feet.

  “Dad!” I say, imitating his tone and smile. It makes him laugh—a hearty, full sound that I love.

  “How are you doing, princess?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Early morning for you, huh?” He folds his paper up, which means we are going to have a real talk. It rustles and flops in his face, and although at first he tries to make it neat, he gives up quickly and puts the whole messy thing aside.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I say. He nods seriously and puts his feet up.

  “Still getting used to the new house?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s big. And old. And . . . there are a lot of closets.” I don’t mean to bring up the closets and hate that my sisters are right to worry about me telling Dad all our secrets. I know not to tell him the details, but I want his thoughts, I want his advice, even if I can’t tell him what’s actually going on.

  “Scared of monsters in the closets?” he says. He’s joking, but there’s a gentle look on his face that I think means he won’t tease me if that’s what it is.

  “I didn’t have a closet in our old house,” I say. Our Massachusetts house didn’t have many closets at all. Mom said she liked that about it. She liked buying wardrobes and dressers. Antique ones with delicate knobs and engraved wood.

  Which is especially funny considering how obsessed she is with wandering into the closets here in the New Hampshire house.

  Dad nods again, his same thoughtful, serious face, and lets out a long, rumbling hmmmm.

  “You know ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’?” he says after a moment.

  “Isn’t it some fairy tale?” I say. I take a seat in the rocking chair. It squeaks with every rock.

  When Dad talks about fairy tales, especially princes and princesses, he gets this look on his face that reminds me of the look LilyLee’s parents get on their faces when they talk about things like their wedding or their first date or what they did when they were our age. He’s going to go off on one of his lectures.

  “A princess fairy tale. A good one. Don’t tell your mom, she’d be mad,” Dad says. It’s true. Mom won’t read any books with princesses, won’t buy us princess toys, or let us be princesses for Halloween. It’s funny, considering how much Dad loves fairy tales, that he ended up with someone who hates them. A lot of things about Mom and Dad are funny, I guess.

  “I don’t tell her anything,” I say. It slips out, accidental and huge. Dad pretends not to notice.

  “These princesses, in the story, are exhausted every morning, so the king surmises that they must be doing something scandalous every evening. Oh, and they have shoes. Their shoes are all ripped up and worn out every morning. They keep needing new shoes.”

  Dad is actually terrible at telling stories. His voice is nice and he sounds all excited, and you can tell he really, really wants you to enjoy yourself, but in terms of actually making sense, he fails every time. I wonder if he’s this way when he’s teaching classes too, or if he’s only bad at telling stories to his daughters.

  “So he takes their shoes and gives them to this prince, and tells the prince to, I guess, find out what’s wrong with the shoes? So the prince follows the girls into their closet, and inside is this magical world where they dance with other princes, or maybe not even princes, just really handsome boys, and the prince tells the king that’s what the girls are doing every night. Dancing in this magical world they get to through the closet.”

  “Then he marries one of them?” I say. I don’t mind the story, actually. Even the way Dad’s telling it. I like the big group of sisters, and I like their secret magical world, but I hate that in the end all that really happens is a wedding. That’s how fairy tales always are.

  “Then he marries one of them. He gets to choose which one to marry, since he solved the mystery.”

  “And the girls stop going dancing?” I rock more quickly. I like talking about the closets with Dad, even if he doesn’t know that’s what we’re doing.

  “I don’t remember,” he says. “I’ll look it up and get back to you.” Dad has these big books of stories from different cultures. Sometimes the same story shows up five different ways, told with a slightly different focus depending on the time and place and storytel
ler. I like that the same story can end so many different ways.

  Eleanor and Astrid and Marla come downstairs a few minutes later and join us on the porch. Eleanor wrinkles her nose at the smell still haunting the air of French toast gone wrong.

  They each have a piece of fruit and a bowl of cereal, and none of them asks what happened in the kitchen earlier. They know the answer.

  “The Dancing Princesses have emerged,” Dad says, winking in my direction.

  “Mom hates princesses,” Marla says, showing off for Mom even now, even when Mom is sleeping or doing whatever she’s doing upstairs.

  Dad picks his paper up again, the rustling of the pages signifying the end of the conversation, and we sit on the porch in silence, the mention of Mom heavy and hard enough to quiet us all.

  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

  “She’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 anythi
ng 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.