"One day she's going to be a star," Stuart whispers to me as we watch her lanky body do an impromptu one-handed back handspring as she holds a script in one hand and says her lines.

"I know," I say, because it has to be true. And it takes me a minute to realize that I'm talking to Stuart Silsby again; the boy I'm supposed to still be hating from seventh grade. I guess it's all because of Sasha and all her visualize world peace/love each other stuff. What good am I at trying to end wars in Africa or freeing Tibet if I, myself, can't even stop hating Stuart Silsby?

"You were good up there," I whisper to him, still watching Sasha.

"Thank you," he says, lifting up the collar of his shirt. "I know."

I look at him with my eyebrows up kissing my hairline, a look that's meant to say, you're an obnoxious jerk.

He smiles, a car salesman smile, and says, "You were good too."

Everyone else goes home. I pretend like I have a ride and hide out by the soccer field under the bleachers. I whisper-sing my song over and over again for hours. I practice it and practice it. My dad used to sing this song all the time when I was little, way back before my parents even got divorced. It's about being corny like Kansas in August and loving this wonderful guy. I can still remember him twirling me around the living room, giggling.

That was a long time ago.

I'm the first one up. Nobody else is even in the hallway waiting yet, because we signed up for time slots.

"Go ahead," says the woman who's in charge of music. "Come in and let me hear you. Liliana, right?"

"Right."

"Good job earlier. Let's hear if you can sing."

I pull myself up onto the stage, ignoring the stairs. I open my mouth and the notes come out, playing into the darkness, loud and true as gunshots. They drill their way into everything.

"Good," she says when I'm done. "Good. Send the next one in."

I open the auditorium door. Sasha gives me five and rushes in.

"I'm here! I'm here!" she says. The door shuts behind her. I wait for her. She'll give me a ride home.

At home, there's another note on the refrigerator: He's coming tonight. Please vacuum. And dust. And heat up the spaghetti I left in the fridge. Don't forget to wash the dishes. Please. And throw away this note, too. We'll be in around nine.

Love, Mom Warmed-up spaghetti. Oh boy, that sounds good. Not. No mention of doing my homework either. She must really be excited. I go to the hall closet and pull out the vacuum. When I plug it in, sparks of electricity fly from the outlet and I get shocked by the bursts of white and blue. I close my eyes and see the red of my lids. All the colors of the flag.

"Damn it."

I look around like there's someone there who saw the whole thing, but I'm alone. I close my eyes and hear wild horses stampeding towards the house. They're getting closer, closer ... they'll trample me. I have to think of a diversion. I hold up the vacuum and point it at the picture window. "Back! Back!"

Sometimes I am so weird I can't handle myself.

I thump the vacuum back on the floor, pull the plug back out and look at the rug in the living room. In the family room. Fine. Hall. Fine. Guest room. Fine except for a piece of maroon blanket lint, which I pick up with my fingers and put in the pocket of my pants because I'm too lazy to put it in the trash. My room and my mother's room are okay too, I guess, but he won't be going in there so it doesn't matter, right? Yep. Right. Let's say that sometimes my mom is a flannel-mouthed liar where men are concerned.

As I get the dustrag and polish, the phone rings. I jump.

"Liliana?"

It's my sister.

"You going to be there awhile?" she asks.

"Uh-huh," I say.

"I'm coming over."

"Okay."

"I'll be there in ten minutes," she says and hangs up.

I hang up too. I put the dustrag and polish down on the kitchen table. I have ten minutes to do my homework before she comes. I can always dust while she's here and maybe she'll help. Panic settles in near my heart like I've got indigestion, and I don't know if it's about my homework or if it's about my sister and whether or not she'll have another bruise, or if she knows that I called her husband and threatened him. But I disguised my voice. Nobody could tell, right?

I haul out my vocabulary sheet and the dictionary and start pumping out definitions. I've just finished my geometry when she comes in. There are no new bruises, which is a damn good thing, or one ugly fellow might have lost an appendage, and it isn't one you write with or walk on, if you catch my meaning.

"I'm worried about Mom," Jessica says and she pulls her hand through her hair and some of the strands break off. She used to have beautiful chestnut hair, hippie hair, long and straight and as thick as algae, but she's cut it off and had Brian's cousin perm it a few times, so now it's almost orange like she's a 1980s woman; it's kind of the color of rust, and split-ended and so brittle that it cracks when you touch it. She doesn't have bangs either because Brian hates bangs. And she doesn't wear makeup because only tramps wear makeup. All that macho stuff.

"Liliana," she repeats, turning on the faucet to get herself some water, "I said I was worried about Mom."

"Mom's worried about you," I say and then bite my lip. Saddle up.

She drinks the water in gulps and puts the glass on the counter. "I don't want to talk about that now."

"How come?" I pick up the rag and squirt some fizzy polish stuff on the kitchen table. I work the foam around in circles, making it as shiny as a mahogany bar on the set of one of your movies.

She glares at me, outlaw eyes. "I just don't. I'm worried about Mom."

"How come?" I ask again, same words, different question.

"Because of that man coming." Her voice breaks a little, making her seem more damsel-in-distress than outlaw. Her hands are red and flaky. She gets eczema when she's stressed.

I look away from her hands and focus on my own, stalling for time. "Mike O'Donnell?"

"Uh-huh."

She refills her glass and gulps the water down the same way dad does, and her throat is so skinny I can see her Adam's apple bob up and down when she swallows, like a man.

"You've met him before, haven't you?" I ask. I try not to look at her old jaw bruise, but it's there like a neon sign, flashing at me.

"Yeah, when I was a kid."

"You remember him?"

"No. Not really. He was tall. Weird blue eyes."

"So why are you worried?"

"I just don't think she knows what she's getting herself into."

"Oh."

"I mean he's staying here with you. He has family. Why isn't he staying with them?"

"Maybe some people don't like staying with their families," I say, thinking of how awful it was to stay with her and Brian when I was little, with him yelling at everything all the time.

She grabs another rag from beneath the sink and I pass her the polish. We walk into the living room to do the end tables and coffee table and she says, "I think he wants Mom's money."

"What money?"

"That's just it. There is no money, but he probably thinks she has some."

"Why?"

"That's what these men are like. And she has the house. She could sell it."

"Jessica." I take the polish back and squirt the end table. "You don't really think that."

She nods. "Brian does."

I move the lamp from the table and mutter, "Brian doesn't know everything."

This is for sure, because he doesn't even know how to be a man. No man who hits his wife does. Right?

Jessica's face tightens up, and she looks like she's about to run away like a buffalo who's just seen a hunting party on the horizon, so I add, "I think he just has a crush on her."

"I hope so," she says and rubs along the sides of the coffee table, sticking the rag in the crack where the leaf drops, moving it slow and hard to get out all the dirt.

"I tried out for a play today," I say because this seems safe, like something that won't make her run. "A musical."

"Good. Good." Wet drops of sweat, tiny but visible, show up at the edges of her hair and she rubs. "I'm pregnant. But don't tell Mom. I don't want her to know yet. I'm not far along."

"Oh." My voice comes out weak, like a whisper, because it can't get louder than my heart, which has started thumping in my chest louder and more serious than a herd of spooked steers.

I stare at her stomach. It looks flat. How could there be a baby in there?

"Don't you want to congratulate me?"

I think of Sasha's little brother and his head stuck in the bars of the crib, even if that wasn't really true. What if that happens to Jessica's baby?

"I'm sorry." I leave the living room, go into the kitchen and drop the rag into the sink. It splashes me; suds cling to my hands and shirt like tears.

She comes thundering after me. "What do you mean you're sorry?"

"It's just ..."

How do I tell her, my sister, who has wanted a baby her entire life, that I'm afraid of what will happen? That this baby means she will never leave Brian. That it will become Brian.

She whips me around by my shoulder and I look up at her face. It's red. It's almost crying.

"What. Do. You. Mean?" she asks again, each word a bullet that makes my courage recoil with the backlash.

I do not saddle up.

I reach around and hug my sister. I can feel her spine. "I mean congratulations. I'm sorry I can't hug you right. My hands are wet."

I move away and smile at her. She smiles back. She looks happy with her mouth and worried with her eyes, but the water does not spill onto her cheeks.

"You'll make a great mother," I say.

"You think so?"

"Yeah."

Because my sister is the type to worry, and it isn't good for her, I don't tell her some things.

My mom says that if my sister keeps fretting about everything like Mike O'Donnell or the way Brian scowls at me, or the eczema problems, she will give herself at the very least an ulcer, or maybe even cancer. My mother says there is a definite link between cancer and stress.

People who are pregnant aren't supposed to worry, either. It can hurt the baby.

So I don't tell my sister about what I'm worrying about, which isn't whether or not this Mike guy has a crush on my mother. It's about whether he's really a bad hombre who killed a man in a bar. The little stress lines appear between my eyebrows because of those boxes he sent and the headlines.

I don't tell her that I worry her baby will die like Sasha Sandeman pretended her baby brother did, or that I'm afraid that Dad is gay. I don't tell her I'm worried that the letters and emails I write to congressmen just get thrown away while people die and rot in their jail cells without even a tin cup to clang on the bars like in Rio Grande.

I don't tell her I'm worried that I'll never be good enough for anything, or that her husband will beat her and then beat her baby.

I don't tell her anything. I don't tell anyone. Just you.

When my stepfather died, he did it when we were having lobsters and steamed clams at my Aunt Shirleen's. She's really rich, the kind of rich that wears big diamonds and has whirlpools instead of bathtubs. When my stepfather died my mother cried for a long time, and held me all night, sighing, "What am I going to do now? What will we do? Who will love us?"

All that sort of stuff. All I remember about it are those sentences she kept repeating and being smashed against her chest as we slept in a twin bed downstairs at Aunt Shirleen's. All I remember was being suffocated against my mother's breasts as she cried and wondering how babies who are breast-fed can stand it, being that close, so close that every breath you take in through your nose smells completely of your mother, obliterating everything else.

That's how I feel now, suffocating, everything smelling of one thing: Mike O'Donnell's arrival. My sister has gone off to see her stupid husband with the meaty hands, and I've eaten my leftover spaghetti. I've called Nicole and talked until her mother made her get off the phone. I would call Sasha, but she doesn't like talking on the phone unless it's necessary. She prefers to talk in person so she can see what the person does while they talk, see what movements they make, where their eyes go, whether they look blank or startled. She says people can lie on the phone too easily. I think she just likes studying people so that she can use it in her acting.

When my stepfather died, it was the first time my mother was without a man there to tell her what to do, which bills to pay first; without a man to hold her and snore her to sleep each night. She started dating my stepfather before she divorced my father. She once bragged to me that she's never been without a boyfriend for over a week. It's been three hard years since my stepdad died, and that's a long time to be single for a woman whose previous record was a week. She's had dates, of course, and some men lasted a month, but it wasn't the same thing. I think about this and how my mother must feel as lonely as I do right now, sitting in the living room, all my homework done, the encyclopedia open to the entry about Hannah Dustin. There's nothing on television and it's too late to call anyone because it's a school night. I've already watched one of your movies tonight: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. My mom says I only get one movie a night on school nights.

Mr. Wayne, please don't ever show this letter to my mother because she'd kill me. Although, you're dead, so of course you can't show her the letter. What am I talking about? God, Nicole is right. I am a freak.

My dad sent the child support check yesterday. My mom ripped it open with the edge of her nail, just sliding it through the paper, the same way she opens Christmas presents. She smiled and sighed and then her face turned all hard. "That man is so dumb, how could I have ever married him?"

My lips tightened and my eyes narrowed, the way yours do when you see a cattle thief making his way into the saloon, and I said, "He's not dumb."

"He switched around the numbers and he spelled 'hundred' wrong. Plus, how late is this check?" She arched her eyebrows at me, turned her back and put the check in her wallet. "What would you call it then?"

"Forgetful," I said.

She turned back around and pulled me to her, wrapping me up in one of those big hugs of hers, and said, "That's all fine and good, except when he forgets about my baby."

Since she couldn't see me, I rolled my eyes.

Did you ever not get a part? Were you always the star?