Free Blind by Rachel Dewoskin Page A

so the word lasted a full ten seconds. “You can’t say
ass
at school. Only at home.”
    “Help me with this, will you, Jenna?” I asked. I felt for the edges of the cage and gently set the rabbit back down in it and went with Spark to get some paper towels from the kitchen. My mom now keeps everything in its perfect place on the counters or in the drawers, so I can find whatever I need. It’s the thing we’re most organized about. She tries to keep toys off the floor, but that’s been a bigger challenge. So I’m careful. Naomi reappeared, wearing tap shoes and carrying a bin of blocks, which she immediately dropped. I couldn’t tell whether by accident or not, but the noise was enormous.
    While Jenna and Naomi collected the blocks, Logan helped me mop up the pee puddle. Logan hates animals, except for Spark, whom she loves because he’s part of me. I could feel her thinking sarcastic thoughts. Logan and I know each other so well that most subjects require almost no discussion, including family and the fact that mine is better than hers, and she’s always over at my house, so that’s why it’s okay for her to complain about how many kids there are, how there’s always some kind of crisis or other and we’re always cleaning something horrible or looking for lost toys or consoling someone who’s hysterically crying or eating a dinner with so much shouting and interrupting and craziness it’s a circus. Calling my family a circus is Logan’s second favorite shtick. And coincidentally, since we were cleaning up after the rabbit, Logan got to say her first favorite thing about whatever drama is unfolding at the Silver house: “This is all because your parents are like rabbits.”
    Saturday morning, Bigs was not in her cage and no one knew where she’d gone. I heard my mom come down the stairs barefoot, carrying something she set down—a plastic basket, from the sound of it—and start looking right away. This meant she considered it a genuine emergency. Usually she “triages demands,” as she and my dad like to call it, which means throwing the laundry in first and taking care of whatever crises there are with the epic pajama washing already underway. But she went straight to the couch and ripped off each of its eight velcroed cushions. No rabbit. There were creaks and scrapes as she pushed the couch across the floor, checking behind or under it. She sighed. Still no rabbit. She unlatched and opened up the iron and glass cabinets, although how a rabbit would have launched herself into them—or opened the doors—is anyone’s guess. Maybe my mom thought Naomi or Jenna had stuffed Bigs into one—with the sculpture of us my mom made recently, a tangle of cooked, painted clay I can’t stand to feel for some reason. It’s the first thing she’s made (other than Baby Lily) since my accident, and she’s very proud of it. Sometimes she goes into the old carriage house in our backyard, where she used to paint, when she’s not hopping through the house with Baby Lily tied to her body or running the small country of our family.
    My mom headed out of the living room, and I heard the basement door swing open and, at the same moment, heard Benj come wailing and stomping down the stairs in his rain boots (which he wears every day, with Batman pajamas and a cape), creating such a thunderous racket that Baby Lily started crying, too. Crying is contagious in our house. I felt my way into the kitchen and crouched down, touching the floor under the counters until I got to the part between the stove and the fridge. I don’t know how else to explain it, except that my hands sensed her there, and sure enough, I reached into that small groove and felt fur. I grabbed Bigs, but as soon as I did, I knew something was wrong with the way she felt. She was too floppy, too limp, too . . . I don’t know, she felt like a toy.
    My mom was back in the doorway of the basement staircase, and she must have been watching, because she