Marie ignored me. “Libby, get towels so you can both dry off.”

“Do you know how to play rummy five hundred?” asked Ellen, holding out a deck of cards.

“I know how to play any card game you can think of,” Wilson said.

Ellen sat on the couch and put the deck of cards on the coffee table. Wilson plopped on the floor opposite her, took the cards, and started shuffling.

“Now, who’s the dealer?” he asked.

10

Climbing the stairs into Thomas’s room was like spiraling into space; planets and stars spun from the ceiling, where the Milky Way seemed to recede into the distance. Most of the astronomical stuff was constructed from styrofoam balls, erasers, paper clips, clay, and wire. We’d gone to see Kramer vs. Kramer the year before. The movie was soppy, he’d said, but he liked the kid’s bedroom walls painted with clouds. Thomas wanted a ceiling that was the solar system in a night sky. He’d spent months looking at National Geographic and encyclopedias, then drew the solar system across the expanse of the bedroom. It took several weeks of planning and sketching before he painted it in. I was allowed to do base colors on some of the planets, but Ellen helped him the most. She’d known how to render the planets so they looked textured and real, as if they had weight.

I lay on Thomas’s bed beneath all the celestial bodies. It was so dark that some of the planets were barely visible. He’d drawn them at an angle so they looked like they were spinning, suspended at different levels around the sun in the center, a beautiful burning ball lit from within. Ellen had left some areas nearly white and daubed others in deep oranges, golds, yellows, and all the glowing colors on that gradient. Thomas’s room felt peaceful and ordered, and I cocooned myself under a blanket until I was warm again. I wished Thomas were home and could help get Wilson McVay out of our house. He was still downstairs, relaxed on our rec room floor, playing cards, acting like he was Ellen’s big brother, doing crazy things to dangerous people. I had let him into the house even after Mrs. Boucher’s warning. And down by the bottling factory I had just given in, knelt on the ground, done exactly what Wilson said. Ellen had jumped from a moving car to save herself, but I couldn’t even jump across a creek or say, “No, I’m not getting on that bike.”