17

BAD WISHES

We hadn’t eaten dinner, so we stopped at Serious Pie for some pizza, but I wasn’t very hungry and the food, because I was feeling sad, didn’t taste very good—well, maybe the pepperoni and mushrooms did, because pepperoni and mushrooms always taste good.

“So much for my wishes,” I said.

Mom patted my hand. “Sounds to me like you’re praying, Violet, not wishing. When we wish, it’s usually for something frivolous.”

“Frivolous?” A new word.

“Something not serious. Like what you want for your birthday. Prayers are for more serious things,” Mom said.

“Like?”

“Like at night when I pray for you and Daisy to be safe or when I pray for the sick babies in the nursery.”

“But Daisy told me you’re mad at God,” I told her.

“Mad doesn’t mean I stopped believing. There are just some things I don’t understand.” She sighed loudly.

“There are some things I don’t understand, either—like why Roxanne Diamond acted the way she did. And that’s probably why, on the way here, I wished something bad,” I confessed.

“What?”

“I wished Roxanne Diamond would be sad and cry . . . a lot. That’s bad, huh?”

“Prayers and wishes should always be good, but we all think bad thoughts when our feelings get hurt. It’s human, V. And about what happened with Roxanne, I blame myself. I should have listened to my inner voice when it warned me that coming here wasn’t a good idea.”

If Mom was blaming herself, I figured I could, too. “Maybe if you hadn’t been there, she . . . ,” I blurted, then shut my lips tight to keep any more words from flying out.

“She what?” Mom asked.

“Never mind,” I said. “And please don’t get that stung-by-a-bee look on your face. I really hate it when you do that.”

“Stung-by-a-bee look?”

“Yep. That look you get when you’re mad or your feelings get hurt or you don’t want to talk about something. It’s what you always do . . . and Poppy does it, too. It’s like a warning not to say anything that’s not nice.”

For some reason, that made her start laughing—hard—and for a long time. And soon, I started giggling, too. It was as if we’d caught a disease, the laughing disease.

The silence that came after the laughing spell made me kind of nervous, so I broke it. “Maybe we should just go back to the way it was before . . . when she was kind of dead.”

“But she’s not dead, V.”

“If she doesn’t want to have anything to do with us, then it’s kind of like she doesn’t exist, so we should pretend she’s dead. That way we won’t have to be sad about her. And I promise not to make any more good wishes or prayers about seeing her.”

“Or bad ones?”

I stared into my mother’s hazel eyes for what felt like a long time before I answered, “Or bad ones.”