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slanted ceiling. The only way to get there is a staircase so steep and narrow that your feet don’t fit on the steps, and you have to climb sideways.
    Before he left, this room was my father’s office. One night right after, when I couldn’t sleep, I went up there to think. There wasn’t much in the room, a few pens and pencils strewn among the dust bunnies. A couple of storybooks that my dad didn’t want piled on the built-in shelves, one of them the old,marked-up copy of Grimm’s . In the corner of the room, a white half-finished model of something, I didn’t know what. Someone’s dream home that would never be built.
    When I was little, I couldn’t go to sleep unless I’d said good night to Rapunzel’s miniature tower and the dwarves’ tiny cabin and listened to my father tell me a story. That night, on the floor of my father’s almost-empty office, I thought about the fairy tales, how they were basically the stories of screwed-up families: Stepmother hates gorgeous stepdaughter, wishes her dead. Father dies and leaves two older sons with the money and his youngest son with nothing but a cat. Father lets his crazy wife talk him into leaving his kids to die in the woods. You could read this kind of stuff in the newspapers, I thought, except fairy tales were jazzed up with gnomes and fairies, fancy outfits and happy endings.
    The newspapers weren’t much on the happy endings.
    I couldn’t bear what was left in the room, or what wasn’t left, so I sat under the skylight and looked straight up. A full moon was centered perfectly in the skylight like a gift. I stared at it until it burned itself into my eyes. Everywhere I looked, there it was. So, a trade-off: the moon for my father. Seemed magical enough.
    The next morning, my mom found me sleeping on the bare floor in a wad of blankets. She didn’t complain, so I stayed. My easel is set up right in front of the windows, directly under the skylight.
     
    But the moon is hours away and I can’t paint now, not with the substitute teacher’s voice grinding in my head. And I refuse to do any other kind of homework out of principle. I go to the backyard and call for my cat, Pib. We’ve got a huge yard, six-foot cedar fences on the sides, a thick wall of trees at the back. Perfect for keeping out reporters. I hear the rustling first, then see Pib slinking through the wet leaves. He sidles up to me, but as soon as I reach down to pet him, he bounds away, making for his favorite tree. It’s a crazy old oak, with rough whorls of bark bunching around its base like a rumpled nightgown, and a deep black hole hunkering under twisted roots. The bark whines as Pib’s claws sink into it. Sometimes Pib just hangs there, stapled to the brown trunk, looking over his shoulder, daring me to catch him.
    I turn from the tree and pretend I’m not interested in him anymore. Behind me, I hear the scraping sounds of his claws as he backs down the tree. I wait a few more seconds till he’s creeping up behind me, then I turn to grab him. Too slow. He takes off again, racing up the side of the tree, striped lemur tail lashing the air. He meows and then keeps his mouth open so that he seems to be grinning. He could play this game all day.
    Even with Pib, I’m It .
    “Hey, Tola,” a voice says.
    Mr. Rosentople’s dark head pops up like a hairy jack-in-the-box over the fence. I can’t see the rest of him, but I know that he’s standing on top of a stack of stones he piledon his side of the fence just for this reason. All the better to see you.
    I want to say, How’s your delinquent son, Miles? When do you think he’ll end up in jail? Or maybe, How’s the recluse wife? Did you bury her in the basement?
    I settle for: “Hey, Mr. R. How are you?”
    “He left us a prize again,” Mr. Rosentople says.
    “Who did?” I know who, and I know the prize, but I don’t like talking to Mr. Rosentople. I don’t like looking at his stupid hairy face. He has handlebar eyebrows .
    “Your