Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  I don’t say anything. But I walk with stiff limbs and a tight chest and angry, shallow breaths. I’m light-headed and aching and don’t even really want ice cream anymore.

  When we get there, the first thing Eleanor does is lean across the counter.

  “Hey you,” she says, in this voice I’ve never heard that is too husky. Marla rolls her eyes.

  The boyfriend tucks some of Eleanor’s hair behind her ear and she kisses his cheek.

  He’s not as cute as I’d hoped. His arms aren’t the right size for his body; they are a little too long and a little too skinny. He has braces and squinty eyes. But the way those eyes look at Eleanor is good.

  I am torn between letting her have him and ruining it all.

  I’m fighting back some evil side of myself that I didn’t know I had. The evil side is winning. It’s like I’m so tired from trying to be good that I’ve worn myself out and don’t have it in me anymore.

  “I’m Priscilla,” I say, popping up next to Eleanor. I’m pumping with energy. Everything that’s been wrong and confusing and frustrating is gathering and focusing in on this one moment. “One of Eleanor’s sisters.”

  I hate myself for doing it. But I also hate Eleanor for making me want to do it.

  She coughs. She blushes. She steps on my foot so hard the pain screeches in my body.

  “Hey, cool,” the secret boyfriend says. “I had no idea you had sisters. I would have made sure to send you home with extra ice cream every day.” He winks at me.

  “Maybe I wanted all the ice cream for myself,” Eleanor says. She’s saying it to both him and me, and I wonder how much damage this is all causing. I’m desperate to be close to her and dying to hurt her the way she’s hurting me, all at the same time.

  “I like raspberry chocolate chip,” I say. He scoops me and Eleanor overfull cones and loads on the sprinkles. Eleanor’s isn’t bigger or sprinklier than mine, and I can see her noticing that. She licks the cone halfheartedly and doesn’t take her eyes off her secret boyfriend as he gets cones for Marla and Astrid.

  Marla nibbles at her boring vanilla and we sit, all four of us, at a table in near silence.

  “You couldn’t let me have one thing?” Eleanor says when the secret boyfriend is busy helping someone else.

  “You still have him.” I take a huge bite of ice cream and it freezes my teeth, gives me a monster shiver.

  “I’m sharing him now, I guess. I’m going to have to tell him about the family,” Eleanor says. Something terrible has taken over her face. “I’m going to have to tell him why he can’t come over and visit with all my adorable sisters. You know, you never used to be a huge brat. You used to get it. You used to—”

  “You used to do a lot of things differently too,” I say. I pull my shoulders down and back. I stick out my chest and wipe ice cream off my chin. I don’t look away from her gaze, even though it hurts so much for her to hate me in this moment. I care and don’t care.

  Eleanor goes back to the counter and makes a big show out of playing with her secret boyfriend’s hair. He feeds her a bunch of different flavors from tiny plastic spoons, and I get it, she has something special and new and lovely and we don’t.

  “I’d have done it if you didn’t,” Marla whispers in my ear before we head home. She bumps her hip against mine, and I know she’s saying it to make me feel good, but it feels so, so sour.

  We walk like that, me and Marla side by side and Eleanor and Astrid a few steps in front of us, and even though I was so close to being one of them, I’m now on a team with Marla, and I know for sure that I am one hundred percent incapable of doing anything right.

  “We should have gotten a cone for Mom,” Marla says, like it wouldn’t have melted on the walk home. “She loves Oreo ice cream. That would have made her day.”

  None of us say anything.

  Marla looks from me to Astrid to Eleanor and back again. She starts kicking stones when she realizes we’re not going to respond.

  Everything about the walk home hurts: My flip-flop breaks, so I have to hobble with one shoe on and one off and pebbles keep sticking their sharpest edges into my bare heel. The sun is strong this time of day, and my scalp hurts from the beginning of a burn there.

  Marla shifts into a terrible mood, and she keeps moving her bracelets around, repositioning them over and over. There’s still a patch of wrong-colored skin underneath them. Every step closer we get to the house, the more groan-y and impossible she gets.

  The twins don’t seem to notice. I keep almost telling them to look at Marla’s wrist, but I’m too scared to talk to Eleanor now that I’ve ruined everything. So the bracelets stay on and I don’t get a good look at whatever’s happening underneath them.

  “It’s so UNFAIR!” Marla yells, so sudden my heart does that jumping-then-dropping thing it does when I’m swinging too high on the swing set by our old school. She punches her thigh with her fist. “I try so hard! I try so, so, so, so, so hard! And none of you care! All you can talk about are closets and boyfriends and stupid stuff that doesn’t matter. And I don’t get anything, even though I try the hardest and do the most and love her the deepest and understand her the best!” Marla’s not looking at us, but at the rest of the world—the giant pine trees and the pine needles covering the pavement and the mountains that are so far in the distance they almost look like fog.

  We don’t rush at Marla. We would, if that’s what she needed, but it’s not. We don’t contradict her either, because in some ways she’s right. We stay quiet and let her yell at the ground and the sky and the too-happy-looking clouds.

  When she’s all out of tears and words, we sit on the side of the road for a moment and catch our breath. We’re all four of us a little teary and strange. Too tired to keep walking, too overwhelmed to speak about it.

  “We can tell Dad that Mom needs to go Away again,” Eleanor says at last.

  “No!” Marla interrupts before the sentence is even over. “Don’t send her away! Why do you always want to send her away?” She is going to spiral into another freak-out if we don’t nod our heads and keep walking, so that’s what we do. For Marla.

  It’s a slow street. There aren’t many cars. And it feels good to be shoulder to shoulder for a few minutes, without speaking.

  There was a summer Mom was doing really well, and she took us to get ice cream every day, and we would sing songs on the walk home in loud voices. Mom would wave at trucks until they honked their horns for us, and we were raucous and ridiculous. I wonder if we’re all thinking about that right now.

  Fifteen

  Mom collects fabric. She once made a pink sundress for my teddy bear and a wedding gown for my favorite doll and a wool coat for my stuffed cat because I was worried he was getting cold in the winter months. Those are things that happened, even though they don’t fit in with the Way Things Are Now.

  We’re not allowed in the sewing room, but the door’s open and when we walk by it we see Mom’s in there. I wish I could say she’s fallen asleep in the chair or on the little couch she does the hand-stitching on. But that is not the case. She’s on the floor. Her legs are splayed. It is a terrible, sudden kind of sleep. She’s right in front of the sewing room closet, like she’d been pulling at the door and fell asleep from the effort.

  I see her first. “Mom!” I exclaim, which brings Marla immediately to my side with Eleanor and Astrid not far behind.

  “Oh,” Astrid says. “Oh. Oh.”

  Eleanor puts two fingers on Mom’s neck and the fingers of her other hand on Mom’s wrist like she’s some kind of doctor, and I don’t think I’ll ever be as old and together and sure as Eleanor.

  “Do we need to call 911?” I say. It seems like the right thing to say. Like maybe I can be good in this situation too, but Eleanor shakes her head, and I guess she already knows what’s going on.

  “She’s napping. We’ll let her nap.”

  “We should tell Dad,” Astrid says, but she’s stepping aside, away from the situation
. She picks at a piece of floral wallpaper that’s starting to become unglued.

  “No!” Marla says.

  “Astrid, take the girls into my closet,” Eleanor says.

  “Now?” Astrid says.

  “Now.”

  Eleanor is a boulder. She won’t even look our way. She’s wholly focused on Mom and her pulse and propping her up and checking the mug on the table to see what’s in it. We are useless, compared to her.

  “We can go to the mountains,” Astrid says. She takes a diorama that’s in the sewing room, one she gave Mom, who loves mountains, allegedly.

  I don’t know what Mom loves anymore. Not us, I don’t think.

  I erase that thought as quickly as possible. Thank myself for not saying it out loud.

  The mountains are nice. They shimmer into existence a few moments after we enter the closet, diorama in hand. For a moment, they’re transparent and not real, but they quickly become solid and real and enormous.

  They are purple and covered in glitter. Exactly the kind of magical place I’ve been hoping to visit since I first went in the closet with the park diorama.

  They sparkle hard.

  They sparkle enough to make us laugh and wonder at the prettiness and want to stay in the closet all night.

  We lie beneath them, in their shadows. If we were in my closet, I’d want to climb them, I’d want to go on an adventure on their glittering slopes. But Eleanor’s closet is for feeling at home. Ladybugs swarm our knees and give us tiny ladybug kisses. An owl with huge eyes settles on a rock nearby. He doesn’t squawk or flap or anything. He watches.

  It is weird to think of an owl being sort of like a parent, so I don’t say it out loud, but that’s probably what I need, so it’s what the closet is providing.

  “Let’s stay here,” I say

  “Maybe we really should,” Astrid says. I had expected her to say no.

  “Eleanor would hate it.” I feel like I should stand up for Eleanor, after what I did to her today.

  “Eleanor doesn’t want to be one of us,” Astrid says. She doesn’t take her eyes from the top of the mountain, a place that glints in the sun.

  My stomach turns and wails. “We should check on Mom,” I say. “We should check on Eleanor. She shouldn’t be doing that alone. We shouldn’t be in here while she’s out there. She’s fourteen. She’s not a doctor.” I’m scared for her. We are making so many mistakes.

  Astrid looks farther up, past the mountaintop. Far, far away.

  “Don’t you think Mom would want to see this?” Marla whispers. Astrid is so distracted watching strange yellow clouds bounce in the sky that she doesn’t react.

  “Sure,” I say, but I don’t know what Mom likes or wants.

  “I’m going to bring a little bit of the dirt out,” Marla says. “Show her how it sparkles. I won’t tell her where it’s from. Yet. But she probably needs to see something really beautiful right now. I think it will help.”

  “Maybe?” I can’t imagine a handful of dirt causing any real trouble, so I keep my mouth closed and let her do it.

  “We could stay,” Astrid says. “I meant it, earlier. Maybe it would actually be better for us.”

  “Better to never go back to the real world?” Marla says. Her voice wobbles.

  “They’d forget us after a while,” Astrid goes on. “We’ve noticed that if we stay for a long time, we sort of . . . fade. Like, once Eleanor went in by herself in the morning, and by dinnertime Mom and Dad seemed foggy about her. Like they couldn’t quite think of her name, and they didn’t ask where she was.”

  “That sounds terrifying,” I say.

  She shrugs, like a slow fade away from everyone’s memory is no big deal. “Yeah, I mean, sort of. Yeah,” Astrid says, like I’m not understanding something. Marla doesn’t say anything at all, and that’s even worse. “It’s nice, though, to think you could disappear for a while. And when Eleanor came back out, it was fine.” Astrid is so pale and spacey anyway, she’s always been half faded. She’s never fully there.

  “I don’t want to fade away,” I say. I touch Astrid’s shoulder and she clicks back into herself, the moment over. She shakes her head, undoing some kind of dizziness that was in her brain, and I dig my fingers into her arm to keep her here, unfaded. Marla clings to the scoop of dirt that she thinks will cure Mom.

  “Yeah, of course,” Astrid says. “Me neither. Let’s go help Eleanor. You’re right. Of course you’re right.”

  When we step out of the closet, Marla opens her hand to make sure the rocky dirt kept its magic.

  It didn’t.

  Her hand is empty. The diorama’s intact and simply a diorama again. The world is magic-less and Marla’s face is hopeless, like she really thought Mom was going to be cured by a pile of glittering dirt.

  I’m starting to think Mom’s not going to be cured by anything at all.

  “I’ll think of something else,” Marla says. “She’ll be okay.”

  “We’ll be okay,” Astrid says.

  I swallow nothing, hard.

  Sixteen

  Eleanor is under her covers. All the way under. It’s a signal that we shouldn’t ask her what happened.

  The sewing room door is closed. So is our parents’ bedroom door. It must have gone badly, while we were at the mountain, letting Eleanor deal with it all by herself. No wonder she wants to pretend we don’t exist.

  I fall asleep quickly, once I’m in bed. I’m light-headed after the closet, the memory of Mom asleep on the floor and Marla’s disappointment fading into nothingness.

  Mom’s still sleeping in the morning when I get up.

  Dad’s hunched over some huge book in the never-used dining room. “I’m reading about demons,” he says.

  “Demons?” I sit on one of the straight-backed chairs and look around the bottom floor of the house, as far as I can see from here, for signs that my sisters are awake and about. I think they’re awake, but right now they’re nowhere to be found.

  “And deals with the devil. And tortured souls. And witches,” Dad says. “Anything that makes good things go bad.”

  “Why?” I think it’s because he’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with Mom too, but Dad mumbles something about his upcoming semester at the university and some unit he’s going to do, and we don’t end up having a real conversation.

  “Stories are the most important, useful things we have to understand the world around us,” Dad says finally. This he makes eye contact on, and I wonder if he could be right.

  “Will you tell me more about ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’?” I say.

  “Hm?”

  “The story? With the shoes? And the closets?”

  Dad puts down his demon book for a minute. He flips through his legal pad like he’s looking for something. He adjusts his glasses because he’s serious about the situation.

  “I made a list of stories and fables and myths about sisters for you,” Dad says. “That’s not the only one about siblings.” This is typical Dad. Not quite understanding me but really, truly believing that he does. The smile on his face is all kinds of proud of himself, and I know he thinks he gets me, and I don’t want to take that away from him.

  “Wow. Thanks,” I say.

  “We’re two peas in a pod.” Dad emits a happy sigh, and I wonder if this is the only time all day either of us will be really happy. Who knows what else might happen to make the house sad later today? “We both really get how to look for answers. We’re both curious. We both know the stories in these books are more than pretend. They’re real, they have real things to teach us. Maybe you’ll be a professor like me someday. What do you think, Silly?”

  “Professor Silly,” I say, hating it.

  “I know things don’t always make sense,” Dad says. He’s taken off his glasses, which means he’s settling in for an important talk. “I know you’re looking for answers to hard questions. But things are getting better now, and I think with how strong our family is and how smart and curi
ous you are, it will all start to make sense for you. The world.”

  “You think the world will start to make sense.” I want him to hear how he sounds. His big proclamations. The way he’s gripping the sides of his books like they are anchors, life rafts, in a stormy sea. Doesn’t he hear how hollow it all is?

  “Now that we’ve moved here and Mom’s getting better.” He smiles to himself and puts his glasses back on, conversation over.

  There are so many things to say that I go mute. It’s annoying, how that happens. The more things I want to say, the less I actually can. Eleanor’s not like this. She gets an uppity, fast-talking voice when she needs to speak her mind. And Marla yells out her temper tantrums. Astrid writes long letters when she’s upset.

  I’m Silly. I say nothing, but I blush and look at the clock, which tells me it is way, way too late for Mom to still be asleep.

  It’s terrifying that Dad thinks Mom is doing better. If he doesn’t see how bad things are, what are we supposed to do? I think about the mountains and the idea to escape there, and I think Dad would be the first to forget us.

  Or Mom, if she’d been drinking all day.

  I guess they’d both forget us.

  I feel like I have the flu. A very sudden, very painful flu.

  “Speaking of sisters, where are mine?” I say. I can’t sit here with him pretending Mom’s getting better when every day she’s getting a little bit worse.

  “Let’s see. The beach maybe? Eleanor went to get ice cream. Which is funny—it’s a little early for ice cream,” Dad says like it’s only occurred to him this moment.

  “And Mom?” I say, hoping he’ll admit how worrisome it is that she’s sleeping.

  “I’m sure she’s reading or something,” he says. “Anyway, I should get to work, chickadee. You’ll hold down the fort for me? I’m going to the office.”

  He doesn’t have to go to the office. It’s summer. He could do his research right here. But he wants to leave too. We all need to leave sometimes.

  He abandons most of his papers on the table, so when he’s out the door I look through them. There are notes about everything from evil witches in Eastern European fairy tales to Bible verses about the devil to something called The Metamorphosis.