Free Rules for Stealing Stars by Corey Ann Haydu Page B

scared to explore. Even if Marla likes it.
    After all, Marla is odd. She likes poetry and worrying and the way things look in the rain. She likes Mom more than Dad. She likes eggs more than pancakes. She likes burnt toast and asparagus. She likes the New Hampshire house.
    Of course she’d want to check out the bad closet, whatever that means.
    When Marla opens the door, the magic lingers, like with the other closets.
    There are flowers on the floor. Not stems, only petals. Layers upon layers of them. They are so purple they are nearly black, and they have a mean-looking sheen.
    There is what looks like a tiny house. Doghouse-size. Made of piles of stones. I think it would be hot to touch. Or very, very cold, maybe. There are wings flapping so fast that I can’t see what’s attached to them, but the wings are silver and look sharp. The closet walls are dripping a dark-pink fluid. It is thick and strange—not water or slime or pasta sauce. More like wax. Glowing, gorgeous, luxurious wax.
    It is beautiful.
    Not beautiful in a way I understand. But beautiful.
    It looks the way I sometimes feel late at night when I don’t want to think about Mom anymore—heavy and purple and dripping and strange.
    â€œWow,” I say. I’m not sure the word comes out, or if it’s just my breath, which I can see in a blast of air, since it is freezing cold in the closet.
    Marla holds one of the petals up to me, and I wish it would fade already. In my closet it would.
    â€œYou’re keeping the magic alive,” Marla says.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œTouch this,” she says. She looks focused, like she’s solving a math problem, and I think if I obey she’ll close the door and make it all go away. So I touch the petal.
    It shimmies and shudders. It grows.
    â€œIt’s you,” Marla says. “Come farther in.”
    I step back instead. The edges of magic start to fade. I take another step back, and the sharp corners of the things in the closet blur. The too-strong, too-sharp, so-sweet-it-hurts smell of a thousand flowers grows fainter.
    â€œNo,” I say. “It’s not me.” I take another step back. The magic recedes further. The petal in Marla’s hand crumbles and disappears.
    â€œYou’re what’s special. I mean, me too, I think. But you most of all. It wasn’t the combination of the four of us in Eleanor’s closet that made it all better. It wasn’t some sisterhood power. It was you.”
    I take four more steps back and everything else in the closet disappears, and we are looking at Astrid’s normal, empty closet, and not at some awful, beautiful, weirdly familiar nightmare.
    â€œI did it all on my own,” Marla says. “No diorama. Just, like, me. It sort of . . . looks the way I feel.”
    My heart hiccups. The magic didn’t stay, wasn’t growing the way it seems to when I’m in the closets, when I’m in control. But still.
    â€œI brought things inside late one night too. But I don’t need to bring things in. I only need me and my feelings and that’s it. I mean, I can’t do it in the other closets. You can do special things in all the closets, I guess, but at least this one closet lets me do stuff. It’s a way better closet than Eleanor’s. It’s like your closet, right?”
    I don’t like the way her Marla-feelings looked.
    â€œNo,” I say. “It’s not anything like mine.”
    â€œWell. I wouldn’t know,” Marla says. “You haven’t invited me in yours.”
    Her hand touches my forearm, and I can’t believe how icy it is. So cold it’s nearly hot, like I’d imagined the stone house might be. Right on that strange and mysterious line where the two extremes become one.
    â€œAre you okay?” I say, because she doesn’t seem the same.
    â€œIt’s so cozy in there,” Marla replies, which is not at all true. “I wish I