She didn’t even ask me why. Ever since we’d moved in with Grandaddy Opal, she had been like that, keeping to herself, sleeping late, working long hours at the shop. She even forgot my eleventh birthday. I knew it was because she blamed me for Dane’s melting. That’s why she couldn’t look at me or be both ered with caring for me anymore. She had figured out the truth about me, just as I had. She knew that I was a mistake, nothing special at all, not even real, and Dane had melted from the shame of it. Back at our old house, when things were good and right and Dane still lived with us, Gigi used to get up in the mornings and fix me breakfast, and the two of us would tiptoe around and whisper so we wouldn’t wake up Dane, and we always found something funny that we Were just dying to laugh out loud at but couldn’t because of Dane. Now, when there was no reason to be quiet, there was nothing funny, and Gigi didn’t get up until after I’d gone off to school. If I wanted to see her at all, I had to go down to the gift shop.
