My own big bed. We all thought it would help me sleep alone. Instead, I woke repeatedly every night, crying until one of them came in to turn on the light and begged me to try again, to please just lie down and close my eyes. They plugged a night-light into a low wall socket, and I played with toys in its pool of yellow light on the floor until the sun rose. I was tired, and so were they. I listened to them argue about how maybe I should sleep in their room with them—She has to learn boundaries! The book says she’ll get used to it; she is not in charge.

I fell asleep on the school bus, in class, everywhere but in the bed in the room meant for me. I became, according to their side of phone conversations, angry, demanding, unmanageable.

I only remember being exhausted. And scared.

But when Joellen came each week, we all pretended we were fine.

“Yes,” we said. “We’re happy!”

Joellen smiled and smiled, scribbled her notes, and hugged me goodbye.

The mom was nearly always in tears, neither of them patient when I spilled my milk or missed the bus to school. It was probably weeks since any of us had slept a night through. We didn’t go to the lake or to the library anymore. The mom slept in late on weekends, the bedroom door closed sometimes until lunch.

The mom’s mom came to visit on a Sunday afternoon—an older white woman with a short, sensible haircut and perfume I could smell down the hallway. She shook my hand in greeting, and we ate the Subway sandwiches she’d brought for lunch. Afterward, they thought I was napping at last, but I lay in the bed and listened to them talking in the kitchen, the mom’s mom’s voice not at all modulated.

Beautiful room all to herself; she doesn’t know how good she has it. This sleeping nonsense is only the beginning; it’s all genetic—these kids are unknown quantities. You have no idea the kinds of chaos she’ll bring into this house, into your life, into our family’s life. Why are you punishing yourself? Why do this to us? I understand you’re trying to do a nice thing and you feel sorry for her, I mean of course we all do, but she’s just not capable of gratitude. This isn’t your problem. Don’t you deserve to be happy?

I lay still and listened hard, but the mom did not respond. She only sniffed and blew her nose again and again, and I wondered what new problems my “unknown quantity” would reveal. If my not sleeping was just the beginning, what kind of future was I in for? Was I a late-blooming werewolf? One more thing to worry about.