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of the trees, a fairy coming to rest in the branches. She wondered if anyone out there could hear her mother's horrible cries coming from Bree's room, the Crying Room as she called it now.
    ***
    Wednesday night, Polly cracked a window in her bedroom and thought enviously of Bree breathing in all that fresh air. If Polly had been the one to run away, she'd have loaded up
first with food and warm winter clothes. It was just like her sister to leave without figuring out how she'd survive, expecting Polly to swoop in and save her.
    Polly walked into her sister's room and rummaged through the dresser, picking out socks, a turtleneck, and long johns. She'd just slipped Bree's mittens into her pocket when she heard voices downstairs.
    "Polly?" her dad called up. "Olivia's here."
    Polly leaned against the wall, weak with relief. She'd been waiting for Olivia to come to her senses about Carly and beg for forgiveness, but before Polly even had a chance to be gracious, she heard Olivia's voice followed by Carly Leyland's.
    Polly reached out, knocking one of Bree's pictures from the wall. Kneeling to pick it up, she came face to face with a photo of the Fab Five grinning in front of Jenny Gardner's lakeside cabin. This was their Before shot. Before the drugs, before Aaron and Brad, before the lies.
    As Polly hung the photo back on the wall, Carly laughed—actually
laughed
in Polly's living room while her sister was on a missing-persons list. They'd hated each other ever since Carly's father offered Baba an exorbitant price for her house, and Polly's grandmother told him that that kind of money was for people who didn't know how to be happy. Carly called Polly's grandmother a lunatic, a nut case, a tree-hugging, devil-worshiping hag.
    "Don't stand too close to Polly," Carly liked to tell the other girls at school. "She's got her grandmother's fleas."
    Now, Polly heard Carly's sticky-sweet voice downstairs, the one she used around adults. People over thirty loved her; she was so well dressed and polite. And her father did so much for the community, building affordable housing, setting aside land in his subdivisions for parks and libraries.
    "Mr. Greene," Carly said, "I couldn't believe it when I heard. It must be awful for you. I really hope everything turns out all right."
    Polly rolled her eyes. Carly just wanted to know when the search parties would be leaving the woods so her dad could fire up his bulldozers.
    "I'd better go see what's keeping Polly," her dad said.
    Polly got into Bree's bed. The sheets still smelled like her sister, kind of sickly but sweet. She heard her father in her room next door, then he tapped softly on Bree's door.
    "Polly?" he said.
    "Tell them to go away."
    "But it's Olivia down there."
    Polly shook her head even though he couldn't see her. That wasn't Olivia.
    "Tell her to go," she said.
    She sensed him hesitating, then heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. Maybe she'd been wrong about him needing her
to grow up and be strong for him, because he did the most remarkable thing. He went down there and lied for her. He protected her the way he would a baby and told them both that she was asleep.
    ***
    Polly had stopped setting her alarm for school, but on Thursday her mother came in at seven, dressed in her work clothes. She'd missed a button on her blouse.
    "All right," her mom said. "Time for school."
    Polly rubbed her eyes. She was still halfway in a dream where she and Bree were in the woods picking mushrooms. Polly had to constantly knock the poisonous ones out of her sister's hands and ask her how she could be so stupid.
    "What? I thought..."
    "I have to go into work for a few hours." Her mom twisted her hands. "There's no choice. And you need to go to school. You need some normalcy."
    Polly could have told her there was nothing normal about junior high, but she was still groggy, and her mother's deadened eyes stopped her.
    "What about Dad?" Polly asked.
    "Your dad went home."
    Disappointment hit