Marla is playing with things on my dresser: a tube of lip gloss, a fringed lampshade, a glass hippo figurine from when I thought I was maybe going to start collecting hippos. Her fingers find the jewelry box with the star inside. I hadn’t thought to hide it. No one ever comes into my room.
“I don’t want to go with Astrid,” she says. Her fingers rub the velvety top of the box. My shoulders rise to my ears. She cannot open that box. “You know you’re the special one. We all saw what you can do in there, how you’re in control of them. Come on, Silly. I mean, Priscilla. Mom’s always said you’re the special one, and that we have to protect you and make sure you’re okay and love you most of all. Maybe there’s a reason?”
“No!” I yell. I leap toward Marla and the jewelry box and the star I’m hiding inside it. Marla jumps and fumbles with the box. It shakes and threatens to fall to the floor, but I grab it from her hands. “You can’t come in here and touch all my things,” I say. Marla’s eyebrows rise up toward her hairline, to her crooked middle part, and she’s either smirking or smiling, I can’t tell for sure.
“Then let’s get out of your room,” she says.
I agree. Not because I think it’s a good idea to go in Astrid’s closet. But because I cannot let Marla see that star.
Astrid and Eleanor take an afternoon nap. It seems impossible. I can’t imagine sleeping, maybe ever again. Marla knows the exact places to step on the usually creaky floor so that it doesn’t creak. She knows how to turn the closet’s doorknob without a sound, and how to breathe in time with Eleanor and Astrid’s deep sleeping breaths so that they can’t sense us in the room and wake up.
I’m scared of how often this means she’s been in here.
She’s already brought things into the closet. Leaves are stored in one corner. She’s brought in orange construction paper and black toothpicks, and a few of Mom’s old costume rings.
And as I should have guessed, everything from Mom’s package. The bug and the stones and the pens and bracelets.
I spot the photo album that Mom was looking at. The one with pictures of her gone sister. I don’t want to be in the closet with that. I don’t like the collection, and I open my mouth to tell Marla as much, but she puts a finger to her lips and shakes her head. The closet door is still open. If we want to talk, we’ll have to close the door and see what happens. I’m still convinced that if we tell Eleanor and Astrid about this closet, they’ll find a way to lock up all the closets, and no matter how scared I am of the bad closet, I’m even more scared of losing my wonderful closet.
I have never wanted to leave a place more, but Marla hangs on to my elbow, her fingernails pressing into my skin. The twins breathe and shift in their sleep, and before I have a chance to sneak back out, Marla shuts the closet door with a muffled click.
We are stuck in the bad closet.
The leaves go black.
Black and sheer and veiny and then so, so big. They float up a few inches above our heads and hover there, like they may choose to suffocate us.
It starts to rain.
Marla’s smiling. I always forget about the tiny dimple that dips into her skin right next to her lips when she grins. I forget how straight her teeth are, and how she is maybe the prettiest sister, when she is not being the meanest sister. Even with circles under her eyes and a strange stringiness to her hair, she is pretty. Healthy-Mom pretty.
“I caught Mom in here a few days before she left. Looking for something. I think if we find out what she’s looking for, she’ll be okay,” Marla says.
“She thinks her sister’s in here,” I say. I don’t mean to agree with Marla, but I’m so distracted by thoughts of the sister and what is true that it comes out.
“Then we’ll find the sister,” Marla says. Her eyes are wide, and she’s bouncing on her toes. It makes me motion sick.
The walls are rotten-pumpkin orange. I have a headache.
“I bet Mom sent this all on purpose! So we’d bring it in here! She totally knows!” Marla pulls at my elbow. I’m already paying attention, but she wants more. “It’s like a scavenger hunt! We have all the clues. I’m so positive. This will work. We’ll figure it out.”
I’m impossibly tired of hearing Marla talk about Mom.
“What if Mom doesn’t know anything? What if Mom doesn’t want to get better? What if the closets caused all the problems? What if there aren’t any solutions?” I’m yelling even though we are supposed to be staying quiet. It feels so sweet, to feel my throat strain and to hear my own voice filling up the closet.
“Watch!” Marla says. She leans over the Arizona pens and the bug in amber, which she’s put in the same corner of the room.
It doesn’t take long.
The pen leaps up. It triples in size. The bug breaks out of the amber and grows too. It grabs the pen—it’s a bug who knows how to draw, and I’m shaking and covering my eyes.