Trixie smiled, rolled her eyes. I continued: “They’d both gone into Paul’s room. They’re not like a lot of brothers and sisters. They fight, but not all that much. They talk to each other, find out what’s going on. There’s things they talk about, Sarah and I have no idea. So Angie was in Paul’s room, and they’d turned on some music in case I decided to put my ear up to the door and listen in.”

“Which you would never do.”

“So I take the two backpacks, and arrange them along the stairs on the way down, as though they’d been knocked by someone who hadn’t seen them.” I paused. “And then I went down to the bottom of the stairs, and arranged myself across them.”

“What do you mean, arranged yourself?”

“Like, you know, I’d fallen. I worked my legs up the first four steps or so, lying on my stomach, then put my head down on the carpet at the bottom of the stairs, with my arms stretched out.”

Trixie didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally: “You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“You didn’t spread some ketchup around? Like from the corner of your mouth, or out of your nose?”

“The broadloom is really new,” I said.

“You pretended to be dead.” Trixie wasn’t asking a question, just making a statement.

“Well, wounded, anyway. I could have been knocked out. Not necessarily dead. A concussion or something. It’s not like I wanted them to assume the worst thing right off the bat.”

“So they came out and found you?”

“Not right away. After about five minutes of lying there, I was getting a bad crick in my neck. I decided I needed to make a sound, a falling sound, so I slapped my hands on the floor as hard as I could. But when we were picking our upgrades for the house, we got the expensive underpad, so it hardly made any noise at all. So I got up, and jumped as hard as I could on the floor, then got back into position as fast as I could.”

I took a breath. “I guess Angie heard it, because she showed up at the top of the stairs first, and I guess she took the scene in pretty fast, because she screamed, and then Paul showed up behind her, and Angie came down the stairs, and I was doing a pretty good job of not moving, and holding my breath—”

“So you were trying to look dead.”

“And Angie was calling out my name and asking if I was okay, and I guess I had my eyes open just a slit, to see what was going on, and I notice that Paul isn’t there, and the first thing I think is, Doesn’t he care? His father’s broken his neck and he doesn’t want to offer me an aspirin or something?”