Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  Asking Mom if something’s okay is Marla’s favorite thing to do, but she doesn’t seem that interested right now. She shrugs and leaves a note on the counter, but the note says we’re going to the store for sodas, not to the lake for a swim. It’s a side of Marla I’ve never seen before.

  “What do you think Eleanor’s secret boyfriend looks like?” I say on the walk to the beach, wondering if maybe I can start a conversation in one place and make it go somewhere else. Marla shrugs. She seems already irritated by the sun and the sand the moment we get to the lake.

  Whatever calm she got from the closet is fading fast. I try again.

  “I haven’t heard from LilyLee in kind of a while. Do you think she has some new best friend?” I say. Marla shrugs.

  “Do you miss anything from home?” I say. Marla shrugs.

  “Did you ever hear of ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’? It’s one of Dad’s fairy tales,” I say. Marla sighs and tugs at the bottom of her bathing suit.

  “Why didn’t Mom tell us she has a sister?” I say, since being subtle isn’t getting me anywhere.

  Marla gives me a funny look. “Had a sister, I think,” she says.

  “Oh.” Of course I know she’s right, but I hadn’t thought about it in stark terms, and the word sort of bowls me over. Had a sister. It’s an awful thing, the past tense.

  “Let’s go in,” she says.

  No one else is on our patch of sand. This little area of the lake has always been only ours. We can see other families playing on the other side of the lake, at the other end of the strip of beach, closer to the lifeguard, or their own private coves, but we can’t be part of them.

  Marla runs to the lake and I follow, splashing in behind her. She scowls at me when I kick too hard at the water and it hits her face. Marla’s not much of a swimmer, so she stands in the water, up to her waist, and watches me bob up and down in an unofficial stroke I call Mermaid Swimming.

  I’m out of breath quickly and return to stand next to her. Our shoulders are burning, for sure.

  “She started talking about it when we moved here,” Marla says. “About her sister, I mean. But you know she says so many things that don’t make sense. . . .” She takes a few steps back, closer to shore, so the water is barely at her knees. “I don’t think we want to know what happened.”

  “Why? I want to know everything that’s happened to everyone,” I say. I mean it, too. I want to know about Mom and Dad and my sisters, but also LilyLee and her family and also the fairy tales and myths and fables in Dad’s office and the people on the other side of the lake and Astrid’s old secret boyfriend and Eleanor’s new one. I want to know it all.

  “There’s probably a reason no one’s told us,” Marla says. “And anyway, Mom needs her privacy.”

  These are Mom’s words, not Marla’s. Mom says them whenever we’re bugging her to tell us more about when she was growing up, or asking her if we can play in her room or use the sewing machine. “I need my privacy,” Mom will say, rubbing her eyes and raising her shoulders way up to her ears.

  “You’re not worried about anything?” I say. “Like that maybe the New Hampshire house is making everything worse? I mean, last night was bad. With you and her.” I dip back under the water, becoming a mermaid for three amazing seconds before popping back up to the surface. Mom doesn’t like us going underwater, but she’s never at the lake to stop us anymore.

  “It was fine,” she says. “Mom’s really stressed out from the move.” We moved almost two months ago now, so that explanation seems off, but I don’t say anything.

  Marla’s sick of the water already and mumbles something about sunblock and sitting down. We don’t have towels, so I think we’ll go to the dock, but she plops herself on the beach, a terrible idea in a wet bathing suit.

  I sit in the sand next to her and bury my feet in the wet parts. It’s sort of like after a decade of coming to the beach in the summers, we’ve suddenly forgotten how to do it right.

  Like Mom and her failed French toast.

  It all has me feeling limp.

  Marla lies back in the sand, and I can’t imagine the trouble that’s going to cause her already messy hair. Sand will get knotted in with the rest of the tangles, and she’ll be washing it out for days. She doesn’t seem to care. Like a starfish, she spreads all her limbs out wide, and I notice something on her wrist.

  I should have noticed it in the closet or on the walk down here or while we were wading in the lake, but I get so tired from watching Mom’s every move and expression and skin-tone change that I forget to pay attention to much else. Especially when it comes to Marla.

  “What’s that?” I say, pointing.

  Marla grabs her wrist with her other hand like she’s scared of letting me see, until she remembers it’s just the new bracelets circling the delicate bone. There are five of them, beaded and sparkling. Different colors, and I can see that each bracelet has a different word beaded on: KINDNESS, COMPASSION, BRAVERY, HONESTY, LOVE.

  “Mom gave them to me last night. A special present,” Marla says. “She got them last time she was in California.”

  Mom has gone to California a few times, and Arizona twice and Minnesota and Boston and Florida. She goes Away and gets better. But after a few months or a year, she always gets worse again.

  “That’s not how it goes in fairy tales,” I said to Dad when he first explained it to me. That someone can get better and things can be happily-ever-after and then get just as bad or even worse later.

  That was a long time ago now. I’ve understood the not-happily-ever-after-ness for a while.

  “What do the bracelets mean?” I ask Marla. I think I see something under the bracelets too. A shadow of something on her skin. A discoloration. A shade of light blue that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of Marla’s arm.

  “Mom says they mean that we’re all doing our best,” Marla says. She spins them around, and I lose sight of the thing I thought I saw underneath.

  “Can I have one?” I ask. I like the way they catch the light, the same way the ripples on the lake do, creating little specks of sparkle and shine. I want the one that says BRAVERY, but Marla gives me KINDNESS. I’m not sure what that means, but I assume it’s either the one she thinks I need or the one she thinks she already has conquered.

  “Poor Mom,” Marla says. “The house makes her sad. She said that the other day. She thought it would make her happy, but it doesn’t.” I hate the way Marla takes Mom’s side in everything, even now. I’m boiling, and it’s not from the sun. “You really should be nicer to her,” Marla concludes.

  I leave Marla on the beach. It’s a long walk back, but not long enough to walk off my steaming madness at what she said to me. The bracelet feels more like a demand now. A really, really unreasonable one.

  When I get home, Eleanor, Mom, and Dad are on a bike ride.

  “Mom went on a bike ride?” I say.

  “She did,” Astrid says.

  “I’m worried about everything,” I say. And I am—I’m worried about Marla in Astrid’s closet and whatever was underneath her bracelets, and Mom riding a bike, and the bracelets themselves with their too-encouraging words, and the clank of bottles when we take out recycling every other night. And the sister Mom used to have but doesn’t have anymore.

  “I have an idea. Don’t tell Eleanor and Marla, okay?” Astrid says. She doesn’t tell me everything’s going to be fine, and that’s why I love her the most.

  Astrid takes a white tulip from a vase in the kitchen. Dad must have bought Mom a bouquet, and that should be a good sign, but in our family it’s a bad one. Dad buys flowers for Mom when he’s scared.

  “Put the tulip on the floor,” she says when we’re inside my closet with it moments later. “Or pin it to the wall, if you want. That could be cool.” There are a few rogue pushpins already shoved into the wall, and she nods to them. I guess that means I should go for it, so I stab the stem of the tulip with a pin and let it hang. If it stays for too
long, I’m afraid a petal or two will fall off and what was once perfect will be ugly.

  I want it to stay beautiful and full. I want it to be fuller, bigger, more alive.

  Astrid grins and closes the door.

  “Just wait,” she says. So we do.

  “For what?” I say.

  “That.”

  The flower I pinned to the wall is growing. Even after what I’ve seen the last few days in the closets, it’s alarming to watch a small white tulip grow to the size of my entire body in under five minutes.

  “I came in here with one earlier,” Astrid says. Usually I am the one who sneaks into her room, not the other way around. I like being on this side of things. “Nothing. And now you’re here. And look at what happens. It’s you. You do this.”

  “I bet there is some special power to us being together. When the girls get back, we’ll see how much bigger it can get.”

  “I bet you can do even more,” Astrid says.

  I touch the stem, and the whole thing shivers and more petals sprout so that the bloom widens, becomes more spectacular. Astrid smiles and touches the tulip, but it does nothing under her hand. It stays large and changed from the closet, but nothing extra happens.

  Maybe it is me.

  Maybe.

  “It’s okay to have something the rest of us don’t have,” Astrid says. “We may look surprised, but we’re not.” She doesn’t seem defeated like Marla did earlier or angry like Eleanor. She is Astrid—gentle and distracted by beautiful things and wise but totally unaware of it.

  But the thing is, even though I think maybe she’s right, I don’t feel powerful at all. I feel the opposite. Small. Awed. Drowning in awesomeness. I touch the stem of the huge tulip and it twists like a corkscrew. It grows like a vine all over the room, more and more tulips shooting out of the one stem.

  I want to tell her about Marla and the magic she found in Astrid’s closet, but I know I’m not supposed to. Keeping Marla’s secret is the least I can do for her right now.

  Astrid puts her palm over my hand and holds it to one of the flowers. The petals all open and close in unison. Something like a song comes out. Like a music box or the handbells that they use in church.

  It’s so incredible that I cry. Choking tears that Astrid tries to squeeze out of me with a massive bear hug, but I can’t stop. It’s so astonishing my body can’t handle it.

  It feels like we are inside a flower. Inside a singing flower that I am somehow in charge of, that I made sing.

  “How’d you come up with that?” Astrid says. She’s crying too. It must be too pretty for either of us to manage.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You have a spark,” Astrid says, all wise and serious, and I think someday she’ll be one of those people who sits on mountaintops with their legs crossed and tells everyone else the secrets of life. “Eleanor knows it too,” she says. She looks at me hard, like she’s trying to outstare the part of me that thinks Eleanor hates me, finds me insignificant, wishes I weren’t her sister. “It’s hard for her,” she concludes, and that’s all she’s going to say on the subject.

  The petals grow larger, thicker, the song a little louder, and for a moment I feel a ping of terror that they could suffocate us, but Astrid’s body doesn’t hiccup with fear, and I know if there were a reason to be scared, she’d let me know.

  I like the feeling of the petals. They are sturdy and soft at the same time. I wrap myself in one of them, and Astrid does the same. I feel safe and protected for the first time ever in the New Hampshire house.

  “Can we stay in here all day?” I say. “What else can we bring in here?”

  “It’s better than the world out there,” Astrid says.

  “It is.” I unwrap myself and grab another silky-smooth curved triangle. Decide to hoist myself up, up, up, and see what happens. The petal smells perfect.

  The song shifts a little, quiets and complicates itself, the different blooms singing different notes.

  I grab on to one of the lower-hanging petals. It’s hard to climb. It swings a little when I shimmy. Every inch I travel, the farther away all our problems are. If I climb to the top, maybe I’ll be more like LilyLee—small and light and kind of clueless. I wouldn’t mind not knowing some things, come to think of it.

  All that time wanting to know all the secrets, and now I wish I knew less.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Astrid calls out. She’s laughing, and I tell her to grab on and climb up with me. I wait while she tries, but she can’t seem to get a grip. When I grab the petals they help me, but when she does, they reject her.

  “It’s not hard,” I say, swinging a few petals farther up.

  “It won’t let me,” Astrid says. “I’m only really good for the dioramas, I guess.” If it were Marla in here she’d throw a fit, but with Astrid there’s a shrug in her voice. She doesn’t need the same things the rest of us need. She has a whole wild world in her head, a perfect escape always at the ready. “I like watching you, though,” she says, and I’m surging with sisterly love, which is the best kind of love.

  I take another petal, wrap my legs around a new stem, and grunt as I shift into a slightly higher atmosphere. “What if I want to stay in here forever, climbing into, like, infinity?” I say. “What if climbing this flower is the greatest thing ever, and I have tons of energy and could keep going all day?”

  “Then I’m pretty sure it will never end,” Astrid says. “From what I’ve seen, the closets give you what you need. What you ask for.”

  “And your closet?” I say. I can’t tell her about Marla, but maybe I can make her figure it out on her own. Maybe I can hint about what happened in there.

  “It’s different,” Astrid says. And then in a much tinier voice, “I don’t know.”

  I get a spike of fear in my chest, but it disappears pretty fast in here. Outside the closet, the fear can last all day. The dread. In here it comes up and fades away in almost the same breath.

  I keep climbing, and Mom’s KINDNESS bracelet falls off my wrist and onto one of the petals.

  “I can’t wait to show LilyLee all this,” I call down. I think of the postcard I will try to write LilyLee tonight and how I’ll lead her in here when she visits at the end of the summer. The adventures we’ll have.

  “I think it’s only for us sisters,” Astrid says. “Maybe don’t worry so much about LilyLee.”

  “I guess.” I’m getting a little tired. The fear didn’t last, but it took some of my energy with it, so I look above me to see how much farther there is to go. What had looked infinite before is now closing in. A ceiling of white petals is the exact right distance away from me. I’ve reached the top, because I want to reach the top.

  Astrid is right. It is giving me what I want.

  I look for a way down. Climbing up the petals was relatively easy; figuring out a way down is much harder. I kick my feet around until they find a sturdy bit of stem. I wrap my legs around it and work my way down, gripping petal after petal.

  When I reach the place where the bracelet fell off, I blink about eight hundred times to make sure I’m seeing things right. The tiny blue circle of plastic beads has turned into a rope of sapphires. Massive, tennis-ball-size gems, in long strands braided together and hanging all the way from the flower to the ground, which seems like it must be miles below, but it’s hard to keep perspective from up here. It hurts my fingers, the sharpness of the stones, but they’re so beautiful and sparkly it doesn’t matter. I’m climbing down a jeweled rope. In a tiny universe of giant white flowers. Life couldn’t get much better.

  Eleanor’s closet made me feel safe. My closet makes me feel like I’m on an adventure.

  Astrid beams at me as I swing to the bottom. “Where did that come from?” she says. She gets up and comes over to touch the jewels. “You’re getting good at this, huh?”

  “Some bracelet Mom gave Marla. From Florida. Or Minnesota? I don’t remember. From one of her places,” I say. I don’t think Ast
rid will like it, and I’m right.

  “Oh.”

  “I had it on.”

  “Yeah . . .” Astrid stops fingering the sapphires and puts her hands in her pockets. Astrid never wants to talk about Mom.

  I guess only Marla really likes talking about Mom, and I don’t understand the way she talks about her, so it doesn’t count.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I let go of the sapphire rope.

  It’s beautiful, but that doesn’t matter.

  “Let’s go,” Astrid says. She goes to the door, and I want to weep, losing all the prettiness. “That’s enough for today.”

  If I hadn’t brought Mom’s bracelet in, we could have stayed all afternoon.

  Fourteen

  I’m sad about leaving the closet, so Astrid suggests ice cream.

  Everyone’s back home and obviously Eleanor is on board, since her secret boyfriend works there. Marla doesn’t want the three of us going alone, so she comes too, even though she doesn’t like ice cream.

  It is so like Marla, to be into crackers and sips of Mom’s coffee and the stinkiest cheeses, but to hate ice cream.

  “Don’t say anything strange,” Eleanor says. “Don’t tell him anything about home, okay? Actually, don’t say you’re my sisters at all. He doesn’t know I have a family.”

  “Everyone has a family,” I say. Eleanor’s all nervous energy. She’s not as sweaty as she gets around Mom, but she’s biting her fingernails and walking too fast.

  “I mean, he knows I theoretically have one. But I don’t need him to be thinking about it all the time.”

  “Don’t be a weirdo,” Astrid says. She gives Eleanor the heaviest kind of look, and I know that even though she has met the secret boyfriend, Eleanor didn’t introduce her as her twin. We can get away with that sort of thing in my family. We don’t look so sister-y, even the twins.

  “I don’t mind you guys coming, but it’s my world, you know? I want my own space that isn’t all . . . sullied.”

  We are the thing that makes Eleanor imperfect. We are the smudge on the clear, clean window.

  I’m hot with fury.