Rules for Stealing Stars (5 page)

“It was weird,” I say. “Like a dream or a nightmare. But not scary, except sort of scary, because it was in my closet and I didn't know what was happening, and it would have been pretty if I was, like, outside watching the sky? Or if I had made it come to life from a diorama, but I don't know what might happen in there. It has a mind of its own. Eleanor's seems all comfortable and safe. Mine's different. It's impulsive or something. It's in control.”

“It's so
unfair
,” Marla says before throwing her hands in the air and stalking out of my room. I don't call after her; I wouldn't know what to say.

I'm on my own again, which is exactly what I was trying
to avoid. But the shakes in my leg have stopped, and a tiny bit of that warm-sun-lightbulb seems to be inside me now. In my veins, sort of. Or my heart. I guess I'm not sure. It's the beginning of a feeling and not a whole, complete, expressible thing yet.

It's almost nice enough to make me want to venture back into the closet, close the door again, stare at that lightbulb that maybe-possibly isn't a lightbulb, and see what else I can get. It feels like I swallowed a bit of the warm light. Apparently I needed that. I've been cold inside since Mom got sick again. This ugly moment in time comes with its own weather pattern. It comes with a chilly temperature down to my bones and a tightness in my chest and a funny dry taste in my mouth, like I'm craving a gulp of water.

So the warmth in the closet, the orange light, the hypnotic dance it did above my head, felt especially good. I want more.

But not alone.

Eight

I
t used to be that we would all sleep through the night. It used to be that once my lights were off and my door was closed, I would be all alone until the next morning.

I guess it's not that way anymore.

Sometime after midnight I wake up and Astrid is sitting at the foot of my bed, and Eleanor is hovering above me.

“What did I tell you?” Eleanor says. I am waking up from a dream about frogs and princesses, so it takes me a while to figure out what she means.

“Mmmmm,” I say.

“I said not to go in any closets while we were gone,” Eleanor says. Astrid doesn't say anything. She does, however,
keep a warm hand on my foot, which has snuck out from under the covers. I decide it's her way of telling me she's not as mad at me as Eleanor is, or maybe even that Eleanor isn't as mad at me as she seems to be.

“You left. You wanted ice cream,” I say. It's not an accusation, it's the truth.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Eleanor says. “Marla woke up with nightmares because you went in there alone. She almost went and got Mom. Not okay! Didn't you listen to Astrid? Didn't you hear her say that we are maybe all supposed to be in there together? Why'd you have to go and ruin that?”

“I didn't ruin anything! I just gave it a try, to see if mine was special too. So we wouldn't miss out. We can all go in it now!” I say. Maybe I am better at standing up to my sisters when I'm half awake and partly dreaming, because my voice is clearer and stronger than ever before.

“We trusted you, and you went ahead and did this anyway. We should never have let you in to begin with,” Eleanor says. A small part of me believes her, that I was being bad when I tried out my own closet without them, but then I remember all the summers that they've been going into their closet without me. And the last few weeks when they've left me alone in the drafty kitchen at breakfast, wondering if Mom has coffee or wine in her mug.

Even the way they disappeared to get ice cream was wrong. If they didn't want me to go in alone, they shouldn't have left me alone. That's what I'm thinking, even if those aren't the exact words that get out.

“It's my closet,” I say. “Marla shouldn't have told you, anyway. She had no right to tell you. I thought she was on my team.” Eleanor shakes her head like I don't understand anything at all, and Astrid squeezes my foot, which either means
it's okay
or
stop talking
. I stop talking.

“We're all on the same team. We're on team Don't Get Hurt in Some Scary, Unknown Closet That We Know Nothing About,” Eleanor says. “It could be like mine, or it could be something all its own.” She is speaking too loudly for midnight. Astrid tries to shush her, but Astrid is not really the shushing type, so it comes out less like a shush and more like a sigh. “The closets aren't all good, you know,” Eleanor goes on. Her eyes are slits, and she has the same look on her face she used when we told scary stories last summer using flashlights and whisper voices.

“Don't freak her out,” Astrid says in her very quietest voice.

“There have to be rules! Her closet might be bad like yours!” Eleanor practically yells. I shush her too. My shush comes out more like a regular shush, but Eleanor doesn't like it, and she wrinkles her nose in my direction.

“Whose closet is bad?” I say. They said the other closets didn't work, not that the other closets were something to be really, truly scared of.

“You think we're telling you more secrets now?” Eleanor says. She's too close to shouting, and if she doesn't quiet down, Mom or Dad might wake up. “We're wishing we could un-tell you secrets. We're not about to tell you or Marla more now.”

“You said Marla and I aren't a team anyway,” I say. But I always knew we were, and I feel a little bit glad to not be the only one on the outside.

“Enough with the teams.” Eleanor rolls her eyes, because the twins have never understood why Marla and I would be jealous of their automatic allegiance. Eleanor and Astrid take it for granted, how special they are together, how bonded they are, how full and bright and shiny their private world together seems.

In some ways, Eleanor and Astrid's twinship is its own magic closet, filled with mysterious things no one else can see or experience.

“Show me what happened in there,” Eleanor says. I'm not able to argue with her serious tone, and I think maybe if I tell her all about it, she'll be excited with me instead of disappointed and angry. So I start describing the lightbulb and the orange glow.

The warmth.

“No,” Eleanor says, walking to the closet and opening the door with a flourish. “Show me.” She steps into the closet, turns on the light, and crosses her arms over her chest. She's sweating. I wonder if it's because she's nervous about the closet or if she had a Mom encounter when she came back from seeing her secret boyfriend. Most of Eleanor's sweating is Mom-related. Astrid and I follow her, and I shut the door behind me.

“What did you bring in with you earlier?” Astrid says.

“I didn't bring anything,” I say. Eleanor looks at me funny. Astrid coughs.

We wait for the closet to do its thing, and soon enough the light turns a pinkish color and the orb spins and lowers and the whole thing is much more frenetic and hyper than the lovely, slow dance from earlier. The light flickers a speedy rhythm, like a strobe light; then the spinning hastens and the orb that used to be a lightbulb shrinks to the size of a dragonfly, grows wings, and buzzes around the room, goading us on. Eleanor presses herself against the wall and looks like she wants to leave, but I chase the bug that used to be a light. It's like trying to swat a mosquito when it's buzzing in your ears, but instead of waving my arms around to scare it into leaving, I'm waving my arms around trying to outrace it and get it cupped in my palms.

“I don't like this!” Eleanor says. “This isn't relaxing! This isn't why we do this!”

Astrid sits with her back against the wall and giggles, watching me. I think this is exactly why we do this. My heart's pounding in the good way, the way that lets you know you're alive and capable of having fun.

“Look at Priscilla. Stop thinking about yourself. Look,” Astrid says to her twin. I am getting out of breath, racing back and forth. The closet expands to accommodate my burst of energy and my desire to play tag with this
thing
. At first it's only a few steps wide, then large enough to fit all the happiness I feel and the frantic energy of the buzzing orb. Larger than the whole house, it seems. I can't ever get the little thing in my hands.

“It's crazy enough out there,” Eleanor says, gesturing to the closet door. “Why would you want more craziness in here?” I'm not sure if she's asking me or Astrid, so I say nothing and continue running and waving and letting my heart buzz in time with the orb's little wings.

I can't believe we're letting Marla sleep through this. We are terrible sisters.

But she's a terrible sister too, for telling them I went inside without permission. So I guess none of us really know how to be good at the sister thing, which is weird, since we've been doing it our whole lives.

“This closet is Priscilla's,” Astrid says. She looks so pleased, so ridiculously glad that I am having fun. I stop for a moment to catch my breath, and the orb keeps zipping around me. I liked Eleanor's closet, but Astrid's right, this one is distinctly mine in a very different way. Not homey and sweet, but buzzy and fun and thrilling.

Eleanor's eyebrows look like they are working very hard to reach each other across the bridge of her nose. I get the feeling there are still more and more secrets they are keeping from me, but it's hard to care when the orb buzzes near my ear and then dashes to the far corner. I sprint after it and laugh when it takes a sharp turn, changing directions and tripping me up.

“Don't you want to have fun?” I call out, but Eleanor leans against the wall and crosses her arms as I flop on top of Astrid in a giggling fit. Astrid tickles me, and for a moment we are younger and sweeter and sillier than we've ever been. I think if we were brothers we would play like this all the time: raucous and physical and piled on top of one another. But my sisters and I usually stay in our own spaces, touching for brief moments, then releasing.

I try to pull Eleanor into our wrestling, so that we can be a mess of limbs and laughter on the ground. I wouldn't mind watching the orb from down here—letting it do a
dance above our heads. Swatting at it from our backs.

“Don't be scared,” I say. It's the oldest I've ever been. But Eleanor shakes her head.

“You haven't seen what I've seen,” she says. “You don't know about the bad closet.” I can't stop myself from shivering, even in here.

“My closet—,” Astrid starts.

“Not now,” Eleanor interrupts.

Can't anything be just wonderful and nothing else?

“It's time to go to bed,” Eleanor says. “We'll discuss the closets, all of them, in the morning.”

I don't necessarily want to leave the warm, pink-lit space, but I'm too tired to put up a real fight.

The orb lands on my shoulder, and I wonder, for a moment, what would happen if I took it out with me. If it would fill my whole bedroom with its pulsing glow. I have a feeling that even though the diorama went back to normal when the door was open, this might be different.

I might be different.

I can't do it now. I'm certain Eleanor has all kinds of rules about that, too. But I don't have whatever creeping feeling she does about the magic. I have the sense that it would be okay if I took things out of the closet and into my world. Maybe Eleanor simply doesn't understand the closets
the way I do. Maybe that's why her closet needs a diorama and mine doesn't. I let myself smile for three seconds, with the delicious idea that I know more than Eleanor for once.

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

T
he 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 storyteller. 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.