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fabulous musician,” Sukey told them. “You should hear the songs she plays on her keyboard.”
    Whenever Sukey spoke, it was like I was eating one of the magical cakes in Alice in Wonderland . I grew taller and taller until my head bumped the ceiling, and the unhappiness of an hour ago shrank to the size of a pebble on the ground.
    We paraded around the room, eating cheese cubes and chatting with Sukey’s glamorous friends, while Mom and Dad hovered awkwardly near the exit, checking their phones and talking to no one. Every time I glimpsed their drab and miserable figures from the corner of my eye, I’d pretend I hadn’t seen them. I wished they would disappear so I could join Sukey’s glittering tribe and be one of them, happy and wild, with high-heeled shoes and feathers in my hair. But when we finished our circle of the gallery, they were still there, bored and impatient, waiting to claim me like a lost piece of luggage plucked off a baggage carousel.
    “Bye, Sukey,” I said, but Leon the Junkie had already twirled her away.
    I paw through the box, eager for more. At the bottom is a painting Sukey and I did together when she came to visit on my twelfth birthday. She was twenty then, almost twenty-one—a semi-adult, and as wondrous to me in her adultness as a movie star. I lived for Sukey’s visits, basked in them, and clung to each murmured confidence as proof that I was the person Sukey trusted most in the world.
    “Artists need their own space,” she said, flicking her paintbrush across the paper we’d spread out on the kitchen table. “As soon as you can, Kiri-bird, get yourself a room just for making music. You’d like that, right? You can’t make good art in Mom and Dad’s living room. It’s scientifically impossible.”
    There’d been some kind of drama with the art collective a few months back and Sukey had moved into her own place, a little studio where she could paint in peace. I’d never been there, but she’d told me all about it. She’d been working on a big painting ever since she moved in, and was already talking to some underground gallery about showing it when it was done. We hadn’t been to any more of her openings since the one at razzle!dazzle!space, but maybe Mom and Dad would let me come to this one. Denny could drive me; he was sixteen. Sukey promised she’d let me know as soon as she found out when it was going to be.
    “I’ve been working on a very avant-garde composition,” I informed her, pronouncing it avant-grad .
    Sukey laughed, a slow-motion twinkling of the vocal cords. I had a garage-sale Casio keyboard then, not even a real piano, and I was always making up songs with dramatic titles like “Heartstorm” or “Prelude for a Broken Wing.”
    “You gonna play it for me before I leave?” she said.
    I shook my head.
    “Come on, Kiri-bird. I don’t know when Dad’s going to let me see you again.”
    Technically, Sukey was banned from even visiting our house after Dad found out she’d stolen some money last time she was here—for paint, Sukey told me. For jars of gold and arsenic and ochre. This birthday visit had taken some high-octane pleading on my part, and even then Sukey was only allowed in the kitchen and living room and not upstairs.
    “It’s not finished yet,” I said.
    Just then, Dad appeared to let Sukey know it was time for her to go home, which was no longer the same thing as our home.
    “Can’t she stay for dinner?” I said, playing the birthday card for all it was worth.
    “That’s okay, babe, I have to get going anyway,” said Sukey, which probably meant she was fiending for a cigarette. “But let me give you your present.”
    I fidgeted with anticipation, wishing Dad would leave the room. He was standing there with his hairy arms crossed, watching her warily, like he thought she was going to give me something inappropriate he was going to make her take right back—birth control pills or a stolen piece of jewelry.
    “I didn’t have