Rules for Stealing Stars Read Online Free

ever happened with you and Mom before?” Eleanor asks, but she knows it hasn’t. She knows this is the day I have moved from special little Silly who needs protecting and turned into just another one of the girls.
    It’s weird, how something can feel good and bad at the same time.
    â€œWhat’d you do to upset her?” Marla says.
    â€œI hate this house,” I say, which doesn’t answer any of them, exactly, but also answers all of them, I think.

Five
    T he curtains are drawn and the room is dark, except for a crack of light peeking through the bottom of Eleanor’s closet. Astrid and Eleanor picked out heavy navy curtains when they decorated their new room, and they almost never leave them open, so it’s night in here even when it’s daytime everywhere else. Astrid says she works better with just a few night-lights on, and Eleanor is almost never inside anyway. So the way the closet light breaks through the darkness right now is unmistakable. A cut in the night.
    I know instantly that’s where their secrets are kept.
    I guess closets are where we all keep our secrets. Dadkeeps the books that are too adult for us to read in his closet. Astrid and Eleanor have always kept pictures of boys they like in their closets. In my closet in our old house I had a story I wrote about me being LilyLee’s sister and living with LilyLee’s family. Of course now there’s only other people’s discards in my closet, which is yet another reason to hate the New Hampshire house. I don’t even get a place to store my secrets.
    Mom’s secrets must be in closets too. Maybe she keeps extra bottles in there or something.
    â€œI want to go in,” I say, pointing to the line of light below their closet door.
    â€œNo!” Marla says, her voice cracking and desperate. A whole complicated series of looks are exchanged between the twins, and I understand that even if Marla was invited in before me, we’ll always be the younger ones and they’ll always have each other.
    â€œShe needs it too,” Astrid says to Eleanor. “Don’t you think?”
    â€œI’m more than a whole year older,” Marla says. It’s not the first time she’s used that as an argument for something. She’s a stickler for a certain kind of fairness: if she wasn’t allowed to swim to the deeper part of the lake until she turned eight, I shouldn’t be allowed to do it until I turn eight a whole year later. Since she got a new bike when sheturned ten, I shouldn’t have one when I’m only nine. She wants her extra year on me to matter in some measurable way, whereas I’d rather pretend she and I are twins too, able to do everything together like Eleanor and Astrid.
    â€œYou can’t leave me out there with Mom when you’re all in here,” I say, not realizing how true that is until I’ve said it. If there’s a tornado, you all hold hands and anchor one another so that no one gets swept up alone. We are in the middle of a tornado, and it’s not okay for them to hold on to one another and sacrifice me to the spinning, violent force. “It’s not about how old I am. I can’t do it all by myself. Didn’t you hear how she talked to me? I can’t be included in that but not included in this.” I get a pang of fear that they won’t listen. That I’ll have Mom calling me a disappointment on the other side of their bedroom door while they all escape into secrets without me.
    â€œI shouldn’t be lonely when I have three sisters,” I say, like feelings and families are simple scientific facts. Cause and effect.
    There’s a certain kind of shock on Eleanor’s face, and I think she’s never heard me say so many words at once, and so clearly.
    â€œWe’re in charge, okay?” she says.
    I nod. It’s not anything new. They’re always in charge.
    Marla makes a series of noises that must