Astrid’s mouth is too full of stars to respond. But she’s not grimacing or throwing up or changing into a lizard or a potato or anything, so something tells me it’s okay.
I put a star in my mouth too. We have a whole galaxy to get through, after all.
It doesn’t have a taste, so much as a feeling. It doesn’t really have weight or substance, so it’s more like swallowing hot air than an actual real thing. It’s warm inside me, but that’s it.
“It’s okay,” I say to Eleanor.
“I thought we were bringing the stars to Marla,” Eleanor says.
“I think we are,” I say. I don’t even know what I mean. Neither does Astrid. But between the stars I can fit in my pockets and tucked into the tops of my socks and the ones being swallowed so we can carry them out of the closet, we are making some serious headway on the pile. And I guess that’s sort of all that matters.
We don’t get full from the stars. We don’t get much of anything, except warm and ready to get Marla. Eleanor finally swallows one too.
“How’d you come up with this?” she says to Astrid, who is now devouring the things with an even confidence, a kind of determination I haven’t seen her have maybe ever.
“This thing Mom said,” Astrid says. “At the end of her note. ‘It’s all inside you,’ she said. Like, the night sky and the world and the ability to get Marla. It’s inside us. Or we can put it inside us. I thought she meant believe in yourself, or whatever. And maybe she meant that too. But it occurred to me that sometimes Mom can be sort of literal. And that we need both things—help from the outside and power from the inside? I don’t know. It’s stupid.”
Eleanor stares at Astrid like she’s an alien, which she sort of is, so I get it. I stare too. Because Astrid sees something and makes something else out of it, and I want to know how to do that. How to take a clothespin and make it a birch tree. How to take a shoe box and make it a universe. How to take a letter from Mom and make it a solution. How to take words and stars and fear and swallow them down, make them part of the whole.
I eat three more stars, and then the pile is gone and it’s time to save Marla. And hope that Marla wants to be saved.
I let us out. I’m still scared. I’m overwhelmed by the fast swallowing and all the warmth that is now both inside and in my hands, my pockets, slipping into my shoes. But it feels good to turn the knob and get a smile from Eleanor and a hip bump from Astrid.
We are able to hang on to the magic of the stars. We move farther and farther away from the closet, but the stars stay bright. We did it together, with my specialness and Astrid’s imagination and Eleanor’s solid, steady self. A little bit of magic and a lot of us.
Then we are in front of Astrid’s closet and laying down stars I took out in my hands. It’s a strange kind of ceremony.
There is only that one crack at the bottom of the door where light can get through, so we line all the stars against that space, in a row.
“Marla?” I say, putting my mouth up to that space. “We’re here. We’re here waiting for you, and you can come out.”
There’s a long silence, and we all hold our hands together like we might be praying but we probably aren’t.
“Hi,” Marla’s tiny voice comes through the door. Breathy, like Astrid’s. Tired. Not whiny at all. “I can’t come out. The door won’t open. And I don’t want to anyway.”
“Marla!” I say, and Astrid and Eleanor echo me.
“What’s that light?” Marla says. She doesn’t sound excited. She doesn’t sound much of anything.
“Stars,” I say, matching her hushed tone.
“I don’t need stars,” she says. “But they’re warm. I can feel them. They’re warming it up in here.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cold in there, huh?” I say. I look to Eleanor and Astrid. They’re saying absolutely nothing. “Bet the warmth, um, feels good?”
“I don’t mind the cold,” Marla says, but there’s a little question at the end of the sentence, like maybe she’s not totally sure of herself. “I sort of like the cold, actually. It’s refreshing.”
But I can see her fingers poking at the tiny crack between her side of the door and ours. Reaching toward the warmth.
“We want you out here with us,” I say. I press my hands against the closet door, remembering I have warmth and glowiness inside me, too. Remembering that we have a bit of magic in ourselves. I look at my sisters and nod to the door. They snap to it, finally, and touch their own hands to the door of the closet too.
“Whoa! What’s that!?” Marla says. At last her voice has a sprinkle in it of something aside from boredom and giving up.
“It’s us,” I say. “We’re here. All of us. For you. To get you out.”
“I’m really okay in here. Actually, it’s probably better for everyone if I stay. . . .” Her voice sounds even closer, though. Like her mouth is pressed right against the wood, like her whole body is trying to fit itself through the crack.
“We’re not okay with you in there,” I say. It’s so very true.