Free What Happened to My Sister: A Novel by Elizabeth Flock Page A

at any of them, getting tripped up on her gangly limbs. She’ll grow into them , Dr. Cutler,her pediatrician, said a couple of years ago. When she does, God help us all—she’s such a bundle of energy, that one.
    “Yeah, I’m starving. Wait, Mom, can we stop by the library on the way back please can we please cuz today I finished L and someone might check out the M and I can’t go out of order so please can we go please? I’ll run in you won’t even have to get out of the car pleeeease …”
    “Maybe tomorrow we can swing by the library,” I tell her, “but I’ve got a lot to get done this afternoon and you didn’t straighten your room like you promised you would last night, ahem, so you’ve got a lot to get done too, missy.”
    “Aw, Mom, please? It’ll be gone if we don’t pick it up today.”
    “Honey, I’ve got news for you: the M will be there tomorrow. No one is going to check out the M volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica tonight, I can pretty much guarantee you that.”
    “How do you know? Maybe someone will have to do a report on something starting with M like, like …”
    I can see her struggling to keep her argument from going south.
    “Like—Madonna?” I smile into the rearview mirror.
    “No, Mom,” she says, sighing and rolling her eyes. “They can get stuff on Madonna anywhere. Duh.”
    “Oh, oh wait I know: Malta,” I say. “Or wait: mold! Speaking of which, I have got to call the plumber—”
    “Or Mary, baby Jesus’s mother,” Cricket says. “Or mitts, like baseball! Wait, what’s Malta?”
    “It’s an island off the coast of somewhere I don’t know. Meerkats!”
    “Molecules!”
    “How do you know about molecules?” I ask. “Have you already covered that in science?”
    “Um, yeah, like eons ago, duh ,” she says.
    “Ex cuse me?”
    “Sorry. Mom, please please please can we stop at the library please please please please please …”
    She is like this, my Cricket, she chirps and chirps and chirps until it gets so bad you think you might have gone and lost your mind. It’s how she got her nickname in the first place. She doesn’t do it to be rude or mean. She is just a loaded pistol, that one, full of curiosity about every tiny little thing you can imagine. Which is why she’s checking out the Encyclopaedia Britannica one letter at a time and trying to memorize it. She has complete and total recall of anything she makes a point to remember. You’ve never seen anything like it. She could go on the Today show with it. Dr. Cutler says he’s never known a child with ADHD and a photographic memory at the same time, but that’s our Cricket. One rare bird.
    “Hush for a second, Cricket,” I say. Traffic’s a bear today—no one’s slowing to let us out from the school back onto Ferndale Road, and the line of cars is so long we could be here all night for heaven’s sake.
    “Look to the left and tell me when there’s more room between cars, will you?”
    “Can we please get the M today, Mom? Please?”
    “While I think about it why don’t you tell me—Oooo, they’re letting me in! Thanks, sir! Wave to thank the man, honey. Thank you!”
    I wave to the man in the Jetta and we are in business.
    “I can see you picking on your nails from the rearview mirror, Cricket—stop that. Now tell me about school today.”
    The pause is what I notice first. When you’re talking to my Cricket, there are no pauses. Ever. She’s staring out the window, but I look in the same direction and don’t see what could be so riveting unless you consider a big office supply store riveting.
    “Honey? You okay?”
    “If I tell you something, you promise you won’t get mad?” she asks, catching my eye in the mirror.
    What parent has ever heard that and not felt a little twist of nerves in their gut for what they’re about to hear?
    “Do I promise I won’t get mad? Well, did you break the law?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Did you hurt another human being or