I trip, even though I was standing still.
The thumbtacks have been transformed into stars. Some are gold, the color stars are supposed to be. But the others are neon yellow or purple and glowing, alien-like and strange against the surface of the night I created. The pipe cleaners have turned to vines that wrap around themselves and the rod, which somehow still stretches over my head, but now into infinity, since the walls have vanished and been swallowed up by the night. More pink vines worm their way over the ground, which is a fluorescent green, but instead of being fake plastic turf, it is actively growing at the pace of a centimeter a minute.
It is beautiful.
Not only beautiful—strange. It is everything I placed inside the closet, but better. Weirder. Alive.
I lie on the ground and look up at the stars I have created. When I was little, Astrid and I used to talk about rearranging the stars in the night sky to make our own constellations. I have done exactly that now.
The closet stops feeling like a closet. It is timeless, placeless space. The grass tickles my arms as it grows at its ridiculous rate. Soon, if I look to my left or right, I can barely see above the growth. That doesn’t matter, as long as I can look up at the stars.
When Mom was doing well, she asked me once what I like so much about the stars. I wasn’t sure. “The sparkle?” I said, but that wasn’t right. “That there are so many? Or that they are all there but sometimes you can’t see them, but when you can see them, they’re the best?” Mom nodded along with all of it. She used to be a good listener.
“They don’t really sparkle,” she said after a while. I was squinting my eyes to better see the shapes they made in the sky. It was working. “They glow. It’s warmer, sweeter, deeper than a sparkle. They glow, and make things seem unending and okay.”
“They glow,” I said.
“How bad can it be in a world where you only have to wait until night to see the sky glowing, telling you warmth can always, always poke through?” She sighed after she spoke, and I thought that was it, that was the moment when Mom would shift from sad to happy, from sleepy to awake.
I want to hold a star.
One star in particular seems to glow in my direction.
I’m warm and golden feeling.
I could never feel this way without the magic, without the help of the closet and the stars and the night sky I made myself.
I could never feel this way in any other part of the house.
I reach up on my tiptoes and grab at the night I created. Something warm hits my palm, and I close my hand around it and pull down. The star dislodges from the sky without much trouble. It has a bit of a heartbeat. An unusual thump of heat in my hand.
I am holding a star.
I keep thinking about the sad, lost way my sisters and I have been wandering around the house and the road to the lake, and the takeout dinners Dad thinks we like ordering and the piles of fabric in Mom’s sewing room that never get turned into anything.
I think about Mom at the police station and Dad using all his energy to smile and Eleanor choosing to spend Christmas and New Year’s and spring break and Sunday mornings with her secret boyfriend instead of us. I think about Marla.
I think about Mom’s sister.
And it’s all so sad that it feels like I won’t be able to handle it. Like I won’t be able to leave the closet and face the real world.
So I do what I’m certain the closet wants me to do. What I’m allowed to do but my sisters can’t. I take that little star with me.
Only yesterday, Marla was completely unable to take a tiny handful of dirt out of the closet, but something inside me tells me I can steal something magical from this sky.
Maybe it’s my sisters telling me I’m special, or maybe it’s some twin-like bond I have with the closet, but I know how badly I want to take something with me into the real world, and I feel sure the closet will let me.
Because the closet gives you what you need, and I’m special, when it comes to closets, and I need this.
The star buzzes in my hand, and I decide that is confirmation that this is what I’m supposed to do.
The rest of the fantasy night fades away when I head back into my bedroom, but I manage to hang on to the star. It doesn’t fade with the rest of the magic.
My sweaty hand is strangling its glowing heat. When I look at it in the bright light of my bedroom, it’s even more startling: pointed and throbbing and a golden-orange color that I have never seen before. Sunset Nectarine. Pumpkin Marigold Moon. Autumn Candlelight.
Maybe when I grow up I’ll be in charge of naming new Crayola colors.