But I didn’t look back. I left the house, walked out the door, and didn’t bother to close it behind me. I ran blindly, and slid down the hill, scraping my knee on a stump. Then through the creek until I hit Berne Street. After that I stumbled in the direction of home.

I wasn’t sure what exactly had just happened. I only knew it hurt.

The Sad Game

The next morning was unbearable. I opened my eyes and immediately thought I might vomit. I stared around me at the bare walls, at the bare shelves. It felt like my life was disappearing.

As I lay there, my face in a pillow, I couldn’t decide whether I felt more angry or more guilty. I waffled back and forth between those two feelings, and it didn’t really seem to matter which I landed on. They both felt terrible. It didn’t matter which one of us was to blame. We had broken the Vine Realm. We had broken everything, and I was back to being a lonely girl in a silent house.

The only way I could think of to escape myself was to slip into someone else’s story and away from my own. To travel someplace where friends didn’t hurt each other and brothers didn’t drown and sisters didn’t ever get hit and parents didn’t leave or drink or go silent. Or where, when things like that happened, there was a way to solve them. I wanted to go to Hogwarts or Narnia, to someplace where broken things could magically be unbroken. Where there were wishes and potions and answers to all the mysteries. I wanted TV.

So at last I crawled out of bed and into the living room. Then for hours, I sprawled on the couch under the red blanket, covered in cookie crumbs and popcorn kernels. I couldn’t seem to think of anything I really wanted to see, so instead I just flipped channels, mostly catching glimpses of boring house renovation shows and cartoons for babies. But after a while, I landed on a weird old movie I didn’t recognize. On the screen, two guys were walking across a baseball diamond next to a cornfield. I sat up.

It wasn’t the kind of thing I would ever watch on purpose, but I found myself frozen with the clicker in my hand. Staring at the cornfield, which looked so much like Dad’s mural. The two men walked around for a while, talking about how beautiful it was there, almost like they were in love. Meanwhile the light was all glowy and hazy, which made me think I was probably right about them being in love.

Then they stopped walking, and one of them turned to the other and said, “Is this heaven?” in a real serious intense way. When he did, for some reason, my gut knotted. I gasped.