Rules for Stealing Stars Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my very first friend, Dana,

  and my very first librarian, Timmie:

  for the love of stories, moments of magic,

  changing New England seasons,

  happiest memories

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Everything is standard Sunday morning today except for a streak of glitter on Astrid’s cheek and the way never-tired Eleanor keeps yawning like a cat.

  And of course, the house itself, the one Mom grew up in that we are now being forced to finish our growing up in: old and wallpapered in mostly pink and yellow roses and filled with photographs of Mom when she was eleven, like me, or twelve, like Marla, or fourteen, like the twins, Eleanor and Astrid.

  Dad’s in charge of Sunday breakfasts, so I get a heart-shaped pancake, and Marla gets a pancake shaped like a teddy bear, and Eleanor and Astrid share a pancake as big as the entire pan, which they call the Monster Pancake.

  Last year Eleanor said we could all have regular-shaped pancakes now, but Dad made a big speech about whimsy and never being too old for it. Then we talked about the “Myth of Peter Pan” and staying youthful and playful forever or something. Dad’s a professor specializing in fairy tales and stuff, so it was all pretty typical.

  “How do you want your pancake, sweetie?” Dad says to Mom. We all heard her telling Dad she didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. We all heard Dad coax her downstairs.

  “Not hungry,” Mom says. “Coffee fine.” When she speaks in fragments instead of full sentences, it is a bad sign. When she won’t participate in family rituals like Sunday morning pancake shapes and pajamas, and singing along with radio and TV jingles filtering in from the living room, it is a bad sign.

  “I’ll get the coffee!” Marla says. Her voice is overbright. She is smiling and eager. She’s only ever this way around Mom. We are all different around Mom—exaggerated, desperate versions of ourselves. Astrid is spacier, Eleanor is sweatier, Marla is sweeter, and I am sillier. It’s probably why everyone but Astrid calls me Silly. Not Prissy or CC or Cilla or any of the other 117 nicknames you could come up with for the name Priscilla. Just Silly. Always Silly.

  Marla pours Mom a cup of coffee. It’s a precise movement, like coloring in the lines or measuring a cup of flour. Nothing splashes onto her hand or the counter, and for a moment, Mom is enjoying her first sip of coffee and Marla is peacock-proud and Eleanor and Astrid are actually at the table instead of whispering secrets or squirreling away in their bedroom for hours without me.

  For the one moment, I am not totally devastated we moved to the summer house in New Hampshire and away from our home in Massachusetts, and I think: Yeah, okay, this feels good.

  I sing along with some local mattress store commercial playing in the background. Astrid hums and giggles; it’s always been easy to make her laugh.

  “What’s on your cheek?” I say, since it’s easier to ask questions when someone’s laughing and happy and relaxed.

  She reaches for the glitter on her face and with a swoop of her finger it’s gone, like magic.

  Astrid’s eyes look paler and her skin rosier.

  “Don’t watch me so closely,” she says. “It makes me nervous. Like you’re going to figure us out.” She winks and it’s possible that she’s making a joke, but it’s every bit as possible that she’s telling me she truly has something to hide.

  They’ve been cagey lately, my big sisters. The twins keep disappearing into their room, which they always do when we’re at the New Hampshire house. But now that we live here, it’s even worse. I have asked a dozen times what the big deal with their room is and why they sometimes wedge a chair under the doorknob to lock me and Marla out when they’re in there, but they only ever smile and tell me they’ll take me to get candy later.

  I don’t want candy. I want to know what they’re doing all the time, locked in their room. I want to be one of them.

  “Another Monster Pancake?” Dad asks. He twirls his spatula like a baton and does a sort of jig along with our singing and humming. It’s goofy and childish and embarrassing but mine.

  “I think we’re done, right?” Eleanor says, giving Astrid a look that isn’t hard for anyone to decipher. She is declaring Sunday morning over, and special twin time beginning. I’m not ready to let the morning go, though.

  “I’m not done,” I say. “I’ll have another pancake.” Eleanor clears her throat and reaches for her phone, which has been going off with dings and buzzes and snippets of pop songs ever since the move six weeks ago. She says it’s her friends back home calling her, but I’m almost sure that’s a lie. LilyLee, my best friend from back home, doesn’t call or text or chat nearly that much, and she’s a pretty dedicated friend.

  Besides, everyone knows Eleanor has a secret boyfriend, even if she won’t admit it.

  Everyone meaning me, Marla, and Astrid. It’s not the kind of thing we tell Mom and Dad. That’s what makes him a secret.

  “Can we be excused?” Eleanor says. I’d like to clamp my hand over her mouth and superglue her to the chair.

  “Come on,” I say. “Can’t you hang out for a few more minutes? Can’t we do something together? I’m bored.”

  “Silly,” Mom says. “Don’t whine. You sound like Marla.” It’s not great that her only few words this morning are about me bothering her. She is wearing the same clothes as she was yesterday, and they are wrinkled and slept-in.

  It’s official: she is not doing well.

  I don’t look at Marla’s face. It will be crumpled with sadness after that comment.

  “Don’t you get bored here?” I ask Mom. I mean it as a real question, not a whiny one, but I’m not sure she can tell the difference right now. Dad makes a dozen mini pancakes. Polka-Dot Pancakes, he calls them. They’re the kind he likes best. He puts bacon in the pan too, but not for long. Like me, he likes his bacon soft and chewy. We have a lot in common.

  “I get bored everywhere,” Mom says with a shrug. Astrid stares at her orange juice, and Eleanor wipes her own forehead. Marla pours Mom more coffee, like that is some sort of antidote for boredom.

  “No one’s bored,” Dad says. “There’s a lake. Go to the lake. You girls love the lake. Gretchen? You want to take them to the lake? I’ll clean up here, pack you a picnic. You and the girls can spend some time together.”

  “No, thank you,” Eleanor says befo
re Mom has a chance to say no as well. “Astrid and I have a whole thing we’re working on.”

  “I’ll help,” I say.

  “It’s not the kind of project you can help with,” Eleanor says. Astrid looks sorry, like she’d like to say yes to me but can’t. Eleanor thinks eleven is too young for everything, but Astrid knows eleven is not that young at all, especially in our family.

  “I’m too tired to take anyone anywhere,” Mom says. Of course she is tired. She was up all night doing her routine, where she wanders from closet to closet, opening and closing the doors. Sometimes she steps inside for a few minutes or an hour. She’s always the saddest the mornings after her closet searching.

  I stayed awake last night too, listening.

  I opened the door to my own closet, trying to see whatever it was Mom was seeing. But all I saw were old suitcases and winter coats. I can’t even step all the way inside my own closet, it’s so full of things that smell like dust and grandparents. It seems like more things get piled in every year. Like someone is sneaking in extra coats and duffel bags and rain boots and broken umbrellas.

  “We’ll watch a movie later,” Astrid says. “We’ll play Monopoly. We’ll make a collage to send to LilyLee.” Astrid kisses my forehead, a thing that no one else ever does. That one gentle touch against my sunburned skin is enough.

  I’ve stopped needing very much at all.

  Two

  I knock on Astrid and Eleanor’s door in the late afternoon when the house is lonely and quiet. No one answers. No music is playing. I don’t hear their voices. I don’t smell anything or sense any movement behind the wooden door with the hand-painted ELEANOR AND ASTRID’S ROOM sign on the front.

  I am officially crazy curious.

  Marla catches me with my ear against the twins’ door. She sniffs, this noise she makes when she thinks she’s better than me.

  “They won’t tell you what they’re up to,” Marla says.

  “They won’t tell you either,” I say.

  “They already did,” Marla says.

  I can’t tell if she’s lying. Marla is the kind of person who lies, but not if she’s positive she could get caught. I squint, trying to see her better, but all I see is her dark mane, knotted at the ends, and her big blue eyes and the way her skirt rides up too far on one side.

  Marla reaches for the doorknob, like she’s about to go in, and I seethe with jealousy. It comes all fast and unexpected, a feeling with force.

  “We have to protect you, remember? That’s what Mom says. You’re special or whatever,” Marla says. She’s always mad at me for things that aren’t my fault, like the way Mom babies me even though she barely is able to even vaguely support or interact with anyone else a lot of the time.

  Before I have a chance to respond, we hear a crash over by the stairway. Multiple clunks. A yelp. And a little-girl cry.

  “Gretchen?” Dad, from his office, has heard the same series of noises. He doesn’t call out to see if me and Marla and the twins are okay. I don’t know if my sisters notice that kind of thing, but I always do. When a crash or a bang or a yelp happens in LilyLee’s house, her parents call out to ask if she’s okay. When it happens here, Dad rushes to Mom. He breezes past Marla and me in the hallway and peers down the stairs. We follow him and see her in a lump at the bottom.

  “Oh!” Marla says, and rushes down before Dad is able to hold her back. Mom is crying the kind of tears that don’t make noise, and she’s hovering her hands over her ankle as if she’d like to hold it but can’t bring herself to touch the tender part. We hover too, the three of us reaching toward, but never touching Mom.

  “I fell,” she says, and I’m laughing because it’s such an obvious statement that it must be a joke, but Dad doesn’t laugh, and Marla’s breathing speeds up. I look at Mom’s face to see if she was being dry and funny the way she sometimes is in upsetting situations, but she’s glazed over and pale.

  “What do we do? What do we do?” Marla says. She’s waving her hands like she’s trying to shake bugs off her fingers.

  “Let’s lift her up,” Dad says. “Marla and Silly, can you help me get her to the couch?”

  “Silly should go to her room,” Mom says. Even now, even in her state of absentness, she’s doing this weird protective thing. “This is probably a little scary for you, right, Silly?”

  I shrug. I don’t think I’m any more or less scared than Marla.

  “I don’t want you to see this,” Mom says. “Go to your room.” Like it’s fine for Marla to see everything bruised and bloody and blurry and out of place.

  “What about me?” Marla says. I would say she asks this exact question at least a dozen times every week.

  “We need your help!” Mom says. “Silly’s too little for all this.” Mom’s words sound mushy and soft. They wind together, overlapping and turning a sentence or two into one mega-word.

  “Right. Yeah. Of course,” Marla says. She hooks her hands around the back of Mom’s knees. She’s moving like a cat, like a kitten, like the most delicate creature on earth. But Mom screams out in pain from the touch, and Marla scampers away.

  “Okay, okay, let’s call an ambulance, right? I have my phone here, so I’ll do that? And we can let the girls go upstairs?” Dad puts a huge hand on Mom’s head, a reminder of how very small she is in comparison. I wish he didn’t say everything like a question.

  “Stop trying to be Prince Charming,” Mom says. Her voice has pins in it. Pins and knives and cactus needles and thorns. Everything sharp. She calls Dad Prince Charming a lot, and mostly with a sneer when Dad’s trying to help her. It always catches him off guard.

  Marla and I freeze, like sad marble statues, and I’m sure my breathing stops too, and my heart, and my mind. All of it freezes waiting for whatever’s next.

  “Go to your rooms,” Dad says. “Both of you. Don’t come out until dinnertime.”

  We don’t go to our rooms. We go to Eleanor and Astrid’s room.

  Or Marla goes to their room, and I sneak in behind her. There’s no chair under the door today, but they still don’t want me to come inside. Marla tries to shove me out the door, but I hang on to the frame and stand my ground because I am a sister too, and she can’t change that by being a completely impossible human.

  “Oh. They’re already gone,” she says. Her shoulders droop, and mine do too, even though I don’t know what we’re missing, exactly.

  Astrid and Eleanor are nowhere to be found, which is strange since I know they came up here earlier. But all over the floor and their beds and dressers are Astrid’s shoe-box dioramas. She makes them all the time, but I had no idea she had this many. One for every day of the month. Maybe for every day of two months. I’ve never seen them all out at once, a collection of little scenes and imaginary worlds.

  Pipe cleaners and glitter and construction paper and wallpaper samples and neon shoelaces and Christmas bows litter the room—the remnants of her creations. Astrid is the only person in the world who can make a brand-new universe with a few rhinestones, a bunch of wrapping paper, and Popsicle sticks.

  Usually the dioramas are hidden under the bed or displayed on bedside tables.

  “What is all this?” I ask, not really expecting an answer.

  “It’s for Eleanor’s closet,” Marla says. I have so many follow-up questions I’m worried I’ll choke on them, but Marla drags me out of there and tells me to go to my room for the rest of the day or I’ll never find out anything, and I either believe her or am so tired from all the commotion with Mom that I don’t have the energy to argue.

  They should call me Sleepy, instead of Silly, because that’s mostly what I am these days. Sleepy and small, every time something else goes wrong in this terrible house.

  Three

  The next day, I’m the only one awake in the whole house, even though it’s past nine. Plus, I’m starving for pancakes. It’s not Sunday, though, so there won’t be any pancakes from Dad, and I don’t know how to make them myself. Or bacon. I gu
ess I don’t know how to do much of anything. For instance, I’m freaked out by the iron, and no one taught me about doing laundry or fixing holes in my pants or talking to my mother. I can’t do the useful things Eleanor is able to do or the sort of weird things Marla knows about—like folding hospital corners when she makes the beds or showing off her expertise with Mom’s fancy label maker or deciding which attachment to use on the vacuum cleaner, based on what kind of surface you are vacuuming.

  Dad comes down at ten. It’s weird, since he’s usually hard at work by now, either at the university preparing for classes, or working on one of his fairy-tale research projects. He made us sandwiches and brought them to our rooms last night for dinner, but he didn’t let us come downstairs or see Mom when they got back from the hospital.

  There are a lot of weird things about Dad, but one of them is that he doesn’t really sleep. He doesn’t seem to need it.

  “Try not to worry,” he says, instead of explaining anything that’s happening.

  Marla comes downstairs next. She’s still pajamaed and slippered and shuffling her feet instead of picking them up to walk. Her too-long brown hair is in a not-quite-as-long brown ponytail, and her cheeks are blotchy. She picks up a cereal box to read the back of but doesn’t start yelling at me for finishing off the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.

  She is different. Not a little. A lot.

  “Where have you been?” I say. “What’d you guys do last night? And this morning?” After Mom’s fall I sat in my room and read books and wrote LilyLee angry emails about how mean my sisters were being. I strategized ways to look and act older so they’ll start treating me like I’m one of them.

  Marla shrugs and smiles. She’s beyond pleased that she’s one of them now.

  Eleanor comes downstairs next. She yawns the whole way down the stairs—from the top step to the sloping, broken one at the bottom. Her hair is a nest. It’s hard to even recognize Eleanor when her hair isn’t shiny and her clothes aren’t pressed.

  Then Astrid emerges. She is transformed too. Her blond hair is twisted and twirled on top of her head. She kisses my cheek and hugs Dad.