“Faith?” I whisper. Sarah rouses and stretches.
“She’s downstairs,” Molly says. “Your aunt was on a field trip or something with your cousin Pete and they picked up Sheila on their way back. They all got home a few minutes ago.”
“What’s she telling them?”
“Faith said, ‘I’ll go tell them Parker’s having a bad day.’”
I hear Petey—it can only be Petey—pound up the stairs, but other footsteps catch up. Then slower steps thump back downstairs again. Two other sets of footsteps come and stop outside my door. After some murmurs one keeps walking and I can tell it’s Sheila and she goes into her room and shuts the door. My door opens and closes again.
Faith kneels down and takes my hand.
“Everyone’s home,” she says, “but they’re going to let us be. They’re all worried about you. Especially Sheila.”
“Sheila? Why?”
“Why not?” Molly asks. “It would take a pretty hard case not to worry about you after this morning.”
“Molly!” Sarah says in her scolding voice, but I shake my head.
“It’s okay. She saw? Or heard? Everyone did, didn’t they?”
No one answers. I reach out of the covers to clamp Sarah’s arm onto my waist and snuggle in and smile a tiny bit again.
“I don’t care. I’m glad I saved everyone from another boring Wednesday.”
“And, she’s back,” Molly says.
“But you don’t have to be, Parker,” Sarah says in her trying-to-tell-me-something voice. I think I’m going to be hearing a lot of special voices for a while.
“I want to be.”
“I know, but you don’t always get to decide. It’s only been three months. You walked around like a zombie for a week afterwards and then made that stupid Star Chart and you’ve been a ticking time bomb ever since…”
“And I exploded.”
“You did, and it was epic!” She squeezes me. “It’ll be the top story at all our high school reunions. But I think we have some work ahead helping Marissa recover from the trauma.”
I laugh and it hurts. It feels weird to laugh after so much crying and my body aches all over: my stomach, my throat, the muscles in my face, and my eyelids feel swollen.
“And this is just the first time,” Sarah says. “Not the last. You gotta let it out when it comes, not bury it under all those stupid stars if you don’t want to explode every few months. It’s been how many years since my dad left and I still cry sometimes.”
“You do? Why don’t you tell me?”
“It’s not a secret. Your furniture moves around now with new people in your house and you don’t tell me every time you bruise your shin. It’s just the way things are now. There’s no point in saying oh yesterday I heard the ice cream truck drive by and it reminded me how my dad would always say that it only plays music to say they’re out of ice cream, but if I said nuh-uh and please enough times he’d say okay and buy me a Neapolitan ice cream sandwich, so I sat on the couch for a few minutes and my eyes got a little wet, but it wasn’t a huge thing, just one of hundreds of little things happening all the time.”
“But you know you can tell me, right?”
“I’m telling you now. Exploding today wasn’t you getting it all out, it was just getting the last three months out. More’s coming and you need to let it out when it does. Don’t store it up or you’ll explode again, and again, and again…”
“No more gold stars?” I sigh. “I don’t know, every time I get one it feels like I’m coping.”
“Hiding. Burying. Adding a little more gunpowder to the keg that blew up today.”
I sit up and hug Sarah as tightly as I can. “How’d you get to be so smart?”
“Experience,” she says. “Experience I wish I didn’t have.”
I let her go and lean against the headboard.
“Did something happen this morning?” Molly asks. “I mean, why today?”
“It’s her dad’s birthday,” Faith says.
“And other stuff,” I say. “You know some of it about Sarah and me… and… well, I guess I need to catch you up on a few other things.”
“First,” Faith says, “I’ve been hearing a lot about standing in front of trains. You know I certainly would if it came down to it; I just think it would be better for all of us if we didn’t have to.”
“Okay.” I smile. “No trains.”