Page 120 of The Glass Girl

“I’m standing up for someone. Is that wrong?”

“The world can be a very bad place, Bella. Sometimes we try to help people and they slip away anyway. And you have to let them go.”

“That’s some bullshit, right there,” I say, and I’m so mad, I don’t even care if she takes Fire, whatever exactly that is, away.

I stomp out of her office and slam the door behind me.

I’m on my bed, looking at the stars through the window high on the wall, when Brandy comes in. “Let’s go,” she says.

“Where?” I ask.

“The Star Pit.”

“The what, now?” I vaguely recall something like that from our handbook. I squint up at her.

“The Star Pit. We get to go now that we’re past our halfway point. I finally read the handbook, can you tell?” She giggles.

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Whatever it is.”

“Listen, they’re letting us outside for this one thing. We can’t do anything for Holly right now, so let’s do something forourselves, at least? I want to see it. Gideon says it’s cool. Please?”

“Is it some mystical land of understanding and enlightenment?” I ask, getting off my bed and sighing loudly.

“God, I hope so,” she says. “I could really use some enlightenment right about now because I am gettingverybored here.”

She grabs our parkas.

—

The Star Pit is a series of rocks arranged in a huge circle along the edge of a dug-out pit. It’s farther out than the goat and chicken pens, and as we walk to it, I can see the sky getting bluer and brighter and the stars sprinkling the sky like white crystals. There are already some kids sitting and lying down in the pit.

“What did the handbook say, exactly?” I whisper. I can see tendrils of my breath in the frigid air.

“You get to come here unsupervised if you reach the halfway mark with no more than one demerit. It’s just…I don’t know. You can look at the sky. Or talk. Or whatever. At least it’s something different at night than sitting in our beds or watching stupid movies and thinking sad things or dreaming about how fucked up we’ll get when we’re out.” She points offinto the distance. “And we aren’t entirely unsupervised right now, anyway.”

I look where’s she’s pointing. Tracy, Phil, Fran, and Chuck are sitting on lawn chairs, bundled up in blankets, around a fire.

As we get closer, I can make out Josh’s face, and Gideon’s, and Billy’s. And two other kids, Nick and one whose name I can’t remember. They all look up as we climb down into the pit. Gideon hands us a blanket.

“Welcome,” she says, “to the party for people who can’t party anymore. It’s like group with Fran, only no Fran and no absolutely traumatic poem, but we get the stars.”

Brandy and I arrange the blanket over our knees. It’s woolen and warm. I pull the hood of my parka over my head and stuff my hands in my pockets.

“We’re trauma-dumping,” Billy says. “Care to join?”

“What?” I say.

“Just listen,” Gideon says. “It will become clear soon enough.”

“At my last place,” drawls one of the boys whose name I can’t remember, “trauma-dumping was forbidden. Granted, it was a loony palace, and people were maybe a little more on edge there, but I’ve never understood how you can expect fucked-up kids to get together andnottrauma-dump.”

“How do you even forbid that?” Brandy asks. “You can’t forbid people to talk to each other.”

“Heh. Like, yeah, a counselor would literally come up and separate you, that’s how,” the kid says. “And you’d get written up. I mean, we were in group therapy once a day! How is group not one giant session of trauma-dumping for everyone involved?”

Josh scooches over a little, closer to me. He gestures to the blanket. “Kind of freezing here. Do you have a little piece to spare?”

Brandy nudges me slyly. I open the blanket a little and Josh slides in, pressing his side gently against mine. I can feel my face heat up.

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