My Life in Dioramas Read Online Free PDF

bent to pet him.
    She looked at me. “Kate, I need you to get started straightening up your room. The realtor wants minimal clutter.”
    Studying her—her droopy eyes, her puffy lips—I was worried she was getting sick, or already was. “Are we having spaghetti and meatballs?” I asked.
    â€œYeah, they’re in the fridge,” she said, heading into the kitchen. “I made the sauce this morning.”
    She left the room and the song ended and I wasn’t sure why, but I felt relieved.
    I went upstairs and found a mostly empty box in my closet and started packing my glass animals. Starting with the elephant first felt right since it was the first one I’d bought. I’d always hated going to garage and barn sales with my parents, looking at all the old smelly stuff, until I’d found a small gray glass elephant a few years before. After that I hadn’t minded trolling through other people’s junk so much because I had a mission. It had been another few weeks before I found another glass animal, a flamingo. It was mostly clear but had enough pink glass blown inside that there was no mistaking it was a flamingo. Even though I’d never actually been on a plane before, it made me want to go to the nearest airport and buy a ticket to Florida or San Diego or wherever flamingos lived. Then came the frog and the poodle and the panda, and before long I had a whole mini mantel full of them.
    Packing them made me sort of sad, but I didn’t want somebody to knock one over and break it during the open house. Actually, I didn’t even want anyone to know they existed or to know anything about me. So after I was done, I started to stash anything that had anything to do with me under my bed.
    (Which first required me to go down to get the vacuum so I could get rid of some dead, dried-out stinkbugs under there. Gross!)
    I took photos of me and Stella off my bulletin board.
    I took the ballerina print over my bed off the wall.
    I even flipped over my bedspread, an elaborate paisleypattern that I adored, to the plain orange side on the reverse.
    When the room finally looked like I’d never lived there, I went downstairs.
    â€œThat was fast.” My mom turned away from the stove, where she was stirring her sauce.
    I took an apple slice from a bowl she had put on the table and couldn’t think of the last time she’d actually gone to work. No wonder they couldn’t pay their bills. “Any conferences or networking things this weekend?”
    â€œNope.” Still stirring her sauce.
    â€œSeems like things have been slow.” I bit the apple and it was sour. She put lemon juice on them to keep them from browning, which was great when you were mentally prepared. Otherwise, not so much. “Shouldn’t you be, like, asking for extra hours or something? Drumming up new business?”
    She set her spoon down then crossed over to the sink to wash her hands.
    â€œI need you to go out to the barn,” she said. “Make sure those kittens haven’t made a mess. And you have some old ballet shoes out there, I think. Just try to tidy.”
    I thought it was smart not to push on the topic of her not working very hard to save our house. I was going to take matters into my own hands, anyway.
    â€œNo problem,” I said.
    When she left the room, I grabbed a Ziploc bag and a spatula, shoving the bags in my hoodie pocket and stickingthe spatula in the back of my jeans, just in case I got lucky and could collect some fecal matter this afternoon.
    The barn was quiet and there were no signs of the kittens or any of their poop. They weren’t idiots; they didn’t poop where they slept. So I picked up my old ballet shoes and shoved them behind a few cans of paint on a shelf, and went out to walk around the yard. There had to be some fecal matter out there somewhere. But my first walk through the garden and along the stream turned up nothing. So I doubled