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after the girl was told not to take it to school because something might happen to it.

The girl picked up the small body from the floor. Its shattered head fell apart in her hands. One glass eye split in half and the little red mouth cracked into a frozen scream. She dropped it and ran outside.

Her father had left after watching TV and a car commercial came on. The girl thought the car looked nice and said so. Her mother agreed and this made her father mad. They started to yell again and the girl slipped out. She knew to escape to her own room. There was nothing she could do downstairs. After the yelling, slamming, and crashing, there was her father's quiet voice. The front door opened, then closed, and the house was quiet.

The girl sat on the front steps and looked at the dried blood on her bandaged foot, then gazed high over the tree tops where the moon had risen and a cool breeze ruffled her purple nightgown.

It's all my fault, she thought. If I helped Mommy more and did better at school, maybe Mommy and Daddy wouldn't be mad all the time and things could be okay again.
She thought about this for a long time, coming up with one plan after another to make her parents happy again. Then she remembered.

She remembered a better time, the best time of all in her short life. A time when her parents didn't fight and they loved their little girl.

She was climbing a tree and slipped. When she woke up, it was three days later and she was in the hospital with a bandage on her head and all her hair shaved off. The hair grew back, covering the scar, but she never forgot how she woke to see her parents holding hands.

Their life together then was good, but after she got home everything got back to normal too soon.

She decided she would do something to get them back together, for good this time. She was sure it had to be her fault that they were unhappy, even though she couldn't think of what she had done wrong. That was okay, she reasoned, so long as she fixed it.

She picked at a daisy's petals while she sat and let her mind walk. Her eyes glowed as she came upon her plan.

"Yes, yes, that's it," she breathed.

Earlier that week, her mother had gotten into a fight with Grandma. She had seen the bottles in Mommy's bathroom cabinet and they screamed at each other for a long time.

While her mother and Grandma were fighting, the girl heard how a bottle of Mommy's medicine and some of the stuff she drank at night could put you to sleep where you could never wake up. That sounded good to the girl, she was very tired.

Her decision made, she felt better than she had in a long, long time. She whirled around and around in the moonlight, catching its beams in her outstretched hands. The night sky spun as she fell to the ground, dizzy with joy. She had gotten up and brushed the grass off of herself when she saw her father's headlights weaving in the distance.

Tonight, she thought, right after Daddy goes to sleep.

Then she ran to the light.

Learn more about this author, Nunzia Falcone.
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