“No!” I say. I don’t want any princes. I wasn’t looking for a boy to dance with. I wasn’t looking to dance at all. I only wanted to know if there’s some other life we could be living. If in some other reality, we are princesses at a ball and not girls stuck in a house with a sick mom and a clueless dad.
Marla points at the line of Barbies I’d set up near the closet door. “Did you think they were going to turn into people? That they would become our sisters? This is so stupid. Let’s go back into Eleanor’s closet. Let’s make a Rome diorama. You know Rome is Mom’s favorite city?”
“I thought we could do better than regular boring cities,” I say. “This is better.”
The Barbies are still only plastic dolls with the pinkest lips and stiff joints and never-changing expressions. The closet did nothing for them. They didn’t become princesses. They didn’t turn into more sisters. They aren’t dancing on the boat with me.
Maybe if I touched them they’d turn into real people, but I don’t do it. I’m not sure I need any more sisters, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m the wrong one to have the special closet powers. I’m too scared and silly to do anything with them.
The shoes I brought inside aren’t becoming worn, like the fairy tale, although they are dancing. In the air. Clacking their heels, stepping up and down the walls, tapping and balleting and making complicated patterns in the space above our heads. Astrid and Eleanor can’t stop giggling at them. They are falling over themselves with delight. It doesn’t matter how bad a mood Marla is in. I get to be proud of the way Astrid and Eleanor are smiling.
“What do you think happened after, with the princesses?” Marla says. “I mean, if you think there’s some meaning there, then what happened next?” She won’t give it up. The boat I’m on has found a perfect lazy rhythm. I want to let it put me to sleep. An UnWorry sleep, the kind I haven’t had in way too long. I don’t let the closet expand to a larger size. I want to stay in the boat near my sisters, not journey on the lake by myself.
“They lived happily ever after,” I say. Marla’s face shifts, and I guess I’ve given her an answer she likes. She’d never admit it, but she likes the world I’ve created too. At least a little bit.
“I feel some Happily Ever After feelings when I get out of the closets,” Marla says. We’re all thinking of that dreamy post-closet state, the transformation that I only wish we could hold on to.
“It’s not Happily Ever After if it doesn’t last,” I say.
“For now, this is amazing,” Eleanor says. “You’re amazing. We’re amazing!” She grabs my hands as I step off the boat and spins me around. It’s dizzying. The dancing shoes come down to the ground, and Eleanor squeals. I’m not sure she’s done that since she was much, much younger than me. She imitates the shoes, mimicking the steps they’re making across the ground.
Then Eleanor and Astrid and I are dancing with the dancing shoes. And maybe we are not the Twelve Dancing Princesses, but by the time we are done, our feet are tired, the dancing shoes are worn and have broken heels, and I feel good and pretty and full.
Close enough.
Eighteen
Dad’s voice calling for us is the first thing we hear when we leave the closet and the sparkling lake and golden trees.
“Girls? Marla? Silly? El? Where are you all hiding?”
“We’re here, Dad!” I push out of the room and into the hallway without checking to make sure I’m not covered in glitter or water or accidentally wearing dancing shoes. My much smarter sisters stay behind and clean themselves up before joining me.
“I got a call,” he says. His voice has serious gravel in it, and his face is a wrong gray color. “Everything’s fine,” he says, even though it’s definitely not. “But your mom had a little driving problem.”
Marla starts groaning. She doesn’t ask questions, she simply holds her head in her hands and groans.
“What does that mean?” Eleanor asks. She’s sweating above her top lip and all over her collarbone. A slick sheen I’m dying to wipe off for her.
“She hit a tree,” Dad says. His voice is shaking but he’s got a smile on, and the effect is awful. It’s impossible to guess how we should be acting, with him smiling and turning gray and rolling his cell phone between his hands like it’s clay and not an electronic device. “Tapped it, really. Lightly.”
Astrid takes a few steps away from the conversation, toward her room.
“It was a very small tree,” Dad says.
I start laughing.
Not because it’s funny. It is far from funny. But I’m still a little dizzy and loopy from the closet, and even I know there’s something terribly wrong with that clarification.
“No one’s hurt,” he says. He doesn’t seem to hear me laughing. I keep it under my breath, hold it in so hard I’m sure my face is turning red and my shoulders, then elbows, then hands are shaking. “These things happen.”
“Where is she?” Eleanor says. Her hands are sweating too.
Dad takes a deep breath. So deep the floor below him creaks. This house is so old and strange it feels things with us.