At first Ivy puts almost nothing in the Yard Sale box. She’s always been kind of a pack rat. One Christmas, when she was five, she saved the wrapping paper from her three favorite presents and pinned it on her bedroom wall. We thought it was so cute. But when she puts the paper in her To Keep box, my mom tells her it’s ridiculous.

Ivy starts to cry and tells her she needs the memories of that day. Then my mom starts to cry and gives in. But when she wants to keep some silly old duck towel that was mine when I was a baby and then hers, my mom puts her foot down. “We can’t save everything!” she says, all annoyed.

By the third day, I join Ivy in her room and help her go through things to avoid end-of-the-day battles with my mom. I hadn’t realized how many of my old toys she’d taken.

There are certain toys and books that, when I see them, bring me right back to the times when I played with them. I remember the stories I made up as I played with a certain doll or where I sat when I read certain books. I wish we could keep all this stuff and give it to our own kids, but there won’t be room in our new place, wherever that will be, and we can’t afford a storage unit. My parents seem to be on the phone all the time, talking with different housing people about available apartments. Every time they hang up the phone, they seem a bit more defeated, and it makes me scared that we aren’t going to find a place to go. I spend less and less time talking with Micah, and I skip the party, too. All I want to do is sit in my room and hold the things I’m going to have to let go of.

And then I start getting messages from Cybil.

Missed you at the party.

Everything OK?

Can you come to the beach today?

Hope to see you soon.

I don’t reply to any of them, even though a big part of me wants to. It would be fun to go to the beach and pretend nothing terrible was happening back at home. But I don’t think I can do that right now.

Micah stopped by once to help me sort through things, but I can tell it depressed him just as much as it does me, so I told him he didn’t need to.

Every day, the house disappears a little bit more as the packed boxes pile up. The bookcases are all empty. The pictures on the wall in the living room have been taken down, leaving bright squares on the walls where they used to be and the wallpaper hasn’t faded.