As it was, I couldn’t sleep anyway. Or maybe I might’ve been able to sleep if I tried, but I couldn’t go into the room that Ros and I had once shared.

At great risk to injuring my back, I moved all the furniture back to where it had been before the dinner party, pulled the sailcloth back, and watched the rain. The sound was really nice, and every so often a breeze sent a cloud of mist into the living room, which felt like being by the seaside.

I looked at the sailcloth we’d jerry-rigged. It was a really good, if ridiculous, effort. It reminded me of the Halloween costumes I’d made for Touch and Ros, concoctions out of poster board and staples and hot glue that’d completely fallen apart by the end of the evening. But the homemade-ness—the falling apart–ness—was part of the charm. There was a looseness about them that I liked—even in their imperfection, you could tell that they had been loved. They were lumpy and ragtag, but that was part of what made them good, I thought. There was something about them that was so clearly human.

I looked out into the rain and called Phoebe.

“Bonjour,” she said. “How you doing?”

“Okay,” I said. “We can talk about it—I want to tell you about it—but I called because I had some yeti thoughts.”

“Hit me,” she said.

THE YETI COSTUME,
or Power Jam, Season Three

The next week disappeared into a blur of yarn scraps—white and gray and icy blue. They stuck to my clothes. I found them in my bed. Merino and acrylic and nylon, shedding fibers. And glitter. So much glitter. There was glitter everywhere. It clung to Jacques’s fur, gave his misery some pizzazz. Phoebe shook it from her scalp and called it fairyland dandruff.

If we weren’t working with art supplies, I was walking in the woods while Phoebe did the more complicated sewing, searching for treasures the same way that Ros and I used to. My best find was a bough from the white tree in the woods back behind the Hidden Fern (I thought about going in to talk to them, but couldn’t quite strike up the courage). Phoebe almost cried when I showed it to her.

We brought all our treasures into the costume shop, lined them up on the windowsill, and taped a big sign over them that said IMPORTANT—PLEASE DO NOT CLEAN.

Between the two of us, we averaged a case of LaCroix a day.

Benna told us she was happy to see we were onto something, but she was worried about our tooth enamel.