IN THE MORNING, JUNE OPENED HER EYES feeling as if she had awakened into a new world. She looked at her clock. It was almost ten. She sat up and stretched, then went to her window and looked outside.
Fairyland. The snow had formed improbably tall caps on fence posts, birdhouses, mailboxes, and trash cans. Every twig on every tree supported a ridge of sparkling snow. The world had turned pure and white and clean.
June thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Then her mother came into her room and sat down on her bed with this awful frozen expression on her face.
Paula had gotten a new board game for Christmas. Wes had refused to play it with her, and she’d gotten really mad at him. She started doing things like not telling him about his phone messages, informing on him for every infraction of household rules, and refusing to help him fold his laundry, a task she had once undertaken with great pride. Wes, in a self-involved fog, had hardly noticed he was being dissed by his little sister, which made her even madder.
But on the morning of New Year’s Day, Paula walked into the living room and found her brother lying on his stomach on the carpet playing with her new game, making designs out of the colored tiles and little men. She almost choked with indignation.
“Who said you could play with my game?!”
Wes looked up and grinned. “Nobody.”
“Well, you can’t!” she said.
“You don’t want to play?”
“You said you didn’t want to. You said it was stupid.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Wes said.
Paula stared at him.
“Do you want to play or not?” he said.
“I have to eat breakfast.”
“So eat your cereal in here.”
“We’re not supposed to.”
“Mom’s at aerobics, and Dad went to play racquetball. I won’t tell, if you promise not to spill.”
Paula could find no fault with Wes’s offer, and a few minutes later she was sprawled on the floor with a bowl of Froot Loops, explaining the rules of the game. Wes pretended not to understand even the simplest instructions, forcing Paula to explain things over and over, which delighted her, even though she knew he was just acting stupid to tease her. They were just getting started playing a real game when the phone rang.
“I bet it’s your secret girlfriend,” Paula said.
Wes jumped up and checked the number on the kitchen phone. It was June. As he lifted the receiver, Paula shrieked, “Hi, Wes’s Secret Girlfriend!”
Wes just laughed and closed the kitchen door and leaned back on it.
“Hey,” he said into the phone. He listened, sliding slowly down the door until he was sitting on the floor. After a few more seconds, June stopped talking.
She said, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Omaha. Three hundred fifty miles away. She might as well be moving to Neptune. In two weeks she would be moving to Neptune.
Sani-Made, after all their talk about hiring her dad permanently, had decided not to renew his contract. In fact, they had fired him. On New Year’s Eve, just as he was leaving work.
It wasn’t the first time her dad had been let go suddenly. In the workout business, getting axed was almost normal. The company owners let him come in and do the dirty work, and then turned around and did the same thing to him.
Her dad shrugged it off. “Next!” He’d accepted the Omaha job twenty minutes after getting fired by Sani-Made. In fact, he was driving down the next day, leaving the task of packing up and moving to June and her mother.
“Omaha-Benford Bank has a house for us,” he said. “One of their foreclosures. It’s in a nice neighborhood. You’ll like it.”
Like it? They’d never lived anyplace long enough for her to like it. June knew better than to argue. Her father’s business migrations were a force of nature — the universe conspiring to seek out every scintilla of happiness inside her and rip it out, bloody roots and all, and turn her life to a stinking pile of crap. That was what it was about. He could have gone on to his new job all by himself, let her and her mom stay in Minnesota until the end of the school year, at least — but no, he had to have the family together, as if a few months apart would somehow damage them. Damage? How could they be any more damaged than they were already?
Still, that was what scared her, what kept her in line. If she threw a screaming fit and refused to leave, what would happen? Would her family shatter? Sometimes it felt that way — one wrong move and everything would fly apart.
She spent most of the day in her bedroom making piles of stuff. Stuff to keep, stuff to give away, stuff to throw away, stuff she hadn’t decided about. The throwaway pile was biggest. It included all her schoolwork, clothes from last summer, old magazines, empty and almost empty makeup containers. The downstairs phone rang. June stopped what she was doing and listened. She heard her mom’s voice, a short conversation that she couldn’t quite make out, then her mom coming up the stairs. She concentrated on making a perfect stack of folded T-shirts. Her mom looked in through her bedroom doorway.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Making piles,” said June.
Her mom sat down on the bed. “That was Wesley again,” she said.
“I thought it might be,” June said. She had turned her cell off after talking to Wes that morning.
“I told him you weren’t feeling well, and that you couldn’t talk to him.”
June nodded.
“I’m sorry. He seems like a nice young man.”
“He is.” June spoke in a voice so small she could hardly hear herself.