Of course she’d want to check out the bad closet, whatever that means.
When Marla opens the door, the magic lingers, like with the other closets.
There are flowers on the floor. Not stems, only petals. Layers upon layers of them. They are so purple they are nearly black, and they have a mean-looking sheen.
There is what looks like a tiny house. Doghouse-size. Made of piles of stones. I think it would be hot to touch. Or very, very cold, maybe. There are wings flapping so fast that I can’t see what’s attached to them, but the wings are silver and look sharp. The closet walls are dripping a dark-pink fluid. It is thick and strange—not water or slime or pasta sauce. More like wax. Glowing, gorgeous, luxurious wax.
It is beautiful.
Not beautiful in a way I understand. But beautiful.
It looks the way I sometimes feel late at night when I don’t want to think about Mom anymore—heavy and purple and dripping and strange.
“Wow,” I say. I’m not sure the word comes out, or if it’s just my breath, which I can see in a blast of air, since it is freezing cold in the closet.
Marla holds one of the petals up to me, and I wish it would fade already. In my closet it would.
“You’re keeping the magic alive,” Marla says.
“What?”
“Touch this,” she says. She looks focused, like she’s solving a math problem, and I think if I obey she’ll close the door and make it all go away. So I touch the petal.
It shimmies and shudders. It grows.
“It’s you,” Marla says. “Come farther in.”
I step back instead. The edges of magic start to fade. I take another step back, and the sharp corners of the things in the closet blur. The too-strong, too-sharp, so-sweet-it-hurts smell of a thousand flowers grows fainter.
“No,” I say. “It’s not me.” I take another step back. The magic recedes further. The petal in Marla’s hand crumbles and disappears.
“You’re what’s special. I mean, me too, I think. But you most of all. It wasn’t the combination of the four of us in Eleanor’s closet that made it all better. It wasn’t some sisterhood power. It was you.”
I take four more steps back and everything else in the closet disappears, and we are looking at Astrid’s normal, empty closet, and not at some awful, beautiful, weirdly familiar nightmare.
“I did it all on my own,” Marla says. “No diorama. Just, like, me. It sort of . . . looks the way I feel.”
My heart hiccups. The magic didn’t stay, wasn’t growing the way it seems to when I’m in the closets, when I’m in control. But still.
“I brought things inside late one night too. But I don’t need to bring things in. I only need me and my feelings and that’s it. I mean, I can’t do it in the other closets. You can do special things in all the closets, I guess, but at least this one closet lets me do stuff. It’s a way better closet than Eleanor’s. It’s like your closet, right?”
I don’t like the way her Marla-feelings looked.
“No,” I say. “It’s not anything like mine.”
“Well. I wouldn’t know,” Marla says. “You haven’t invited me in yours.”
Her hand touches my forearm, and I can’t believe how icy it is. So cold it’s nearly hot, like I’d imagined the stone house might be. Right on that strange and mysterious line where the two extremes become one.
“Are you okay?” I say, because she doesn’t seem the same.
“It’s so cozy in there,” Marla replies, which is not at all true. “I wish I could make the magic stay. Make it stronger. Use it in all the closets and be in control all the time. I hate that you’re able to do things I can’t do. Do you focus your mind? Did you know it was you that made things grow and move and become even more magical?”
“I’m not sure I’m anything special,” I say. If I was so powerful, I wouldn’t have let Marla be alone with Mom yesterday and I wouldn’t have ruined Eleanor’s night and I wouldn’t feel the way I do right now—small and breakable.
“Eleanor and Astrid don’t have what you have. Or what we have,” Marla says. “They have their twin thing and Eleanor’s closet, but they need those dioramas. You’re so used to thinking they’re the best, you haven’t even considered that maybe they’re not.” She rubs her hands together like a villain in a movie, so I take one of her hands to make it stop.
“That buzzing thing in there looked sharp. Like it could hurt you.”
Marla nods. “It hurts a little, I guess, if it flies into you. But it’s so pretty. And funny. It, like, teases, you know?”
I think of the lightbulb that shrank and turned pink and playful with me. “Sure,” I say. “I mean, I guess. It looked sort of mean. But it sounds like it’s, um, nice?”