Lara glared. “Come on! Aren’t you even going to ask about the fake dead rat?”
“A fake dead rat sounds cool,” Benny commented. “Though not as cool as a real dead rat.”
Ima pushed away her plate and folded her arms across her chest. “There will be no talk about dead rats, real or otherwise, at this table.”
A long stretch of silence wrapped around the room. Suffocating it.
Then Caroline spoke.
“Lara’s right,” Caroline said. “I did something bad. With a fake dead rat. I don’t know how Lara found out.”
Eyes narrowed, Lara turned toward her sister. “Like that even matters! You did something horrible.”
Dad dropped his cup of soda, causing shards of glass to shatter all over the floor. He let out a sound that was half choke and half hiccup. “Lara,” he said after recovering. “Maybe it’s time for you to take a break. How about you go someplace quiet?”
If Lara hadn’t already been well and thoroughly mad, that would have riled her up plenty. Why was she the one being scolded like a child and told to go away when Caroline was the one who had broken the rules? It wasn’t fair. Nothing about this was fair. So the words continued to spill out of her mouth before she could think too much about what they meant and whom they hurt.
“Take a break? You mean like you took a break from work because you couldn’t do your job right?” she asked. “No thanks.”
Her words were mean. Lara knew that. But they also happened to be totally and completely true. There couldn’t be anything wrong about that, could there?
“Sheesh,” Noah muttered next to her. “You so need to learn when to quit.” Lara ignored him.
But the pinched, lost look on Dad’s face . . . Lara could not ignore that. The moment she saw it, she realized what she’d done. And the weight of it became impossible to bear. She wanted so badly to run away—away from the dinner, the house, and life in general. Of course, she couldn’t. She couldn’t even move from her chair.
Ima closed her eyes. No one else said a word. “Perhaps we just should not talk until dinner is over.”
Nobody objected.
Lara finished every morsel of food on her plate. She tasted none of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: THINGS SAID, THINGS UNSAID
Not yelling at Lara required every bit of self-restraint that Caroline possessed. Even then, she felt a scream rise up in her throat—not a computer-voice scream, but an actual scream.
She resisted the urge, barely.
She probably deserved it. For all of Lara’s cruelty, she hadn’t actually said anything that wasn’t true. Caroline really had done a horrible thing.
Of course, her sister had been horrible too—not to Caroline, perhaps, but to Noah and Benny and Aviva and especially Dad. She had no idea what had come over Lara, nor did she care. Too many feelings swirled up inside Caroline’s chest. She could not keep track of the colors and shapes that streamed through her mind.
Although it seemed impossible that the horrible dinner would ever end, it did. Caroline offered to help clean up, but Ima shot that idea down in the space of approximately two seconds.
“You need to talk with me and Dad,” Ima informed her. “Your sister can help Aunt Miriam clean up.”
Lara nodded, and shot Caroline a look. Which Caroline ignored.
Caroline’s whole body trembled as she walked toward the living room, where Dad and Ima awaited her. Trouble—real, honest-to-goodness trouble—had always been something other people suffered through. Usually that person was Benny, or occasionally Lara or Noah. Now? Caroline was facing nothing but trouble, all on her own.
And as much as she wanted to blame Lara, she knew the biggest mistake had been hers.
She sank into the couch and waited for her lecture.
“I think we can all agree that tonight has been very . . . eventful,” said Ima. She looked as though she’d just swallowed several pieces of Dad’s gross brisket.
“That’s one word for it,” Dad muttered under his breath. He still looked out of sorts. Caroline longed to hug her father, to comfort him, but she wasn’t sure she could stand being touched at the moment.
Ima cleared her throat. “Caroline, please explain this rat incident.”
Caroline stared at the screen of her tablet. She needed to start giving it words, explanations, something that would somehow make Ima’s lips un-purse themselves.
The blank screen stared back, taunting her.
Dad squeezed her shoulder in a surprising comfort. “Maybe you should start at the beginning,” he said softly.
She supposed that made sense. And so Caroline began to type.
She tried to explain. About Marissa and Helena the zebra and Micah and everything else. Tapping all of that out letter by letter took a lot of time. Finally, Caroline finished. She pressed “speak” on her tablet, and she waited.
As her computer voice spoke, Caroline stared into the swirly flowers on the pillow she cradled in her lap. It was certainly easier than looking at Ima or Dad.
“. . . so that is what happened,” the computer voice concluded.
Nobody spoke, though Ima let out a sigh. Caroline bounced in her seat.
To her surprise, Dad was first to break the silence. “Well, Lina-Lin, that’s quite the pickle you’ve got yourself into,” he said. “I have to admit that I did not see this coming.”
Caroline glanced up to see that her father was fighting back a grin. Now that certainly was an unexpected development.
“Joseph, this isn’t funny,” Ima said in a very Ima-like voice. “You could have done a lot of harm to that girl, Caroline. And I really don’t know how I feel about you being friends with this Micah boy.”
This time, words came easily to Caroline as she typed. “Please please please don’t make me stop being friends with Micah.”
“We don’t want to tell you who you should be friends with,” Dad said quickly.
Ima grunted, but did not contradict him. The lump in Caroline’s stomach
