In the old house there had been a castle made of sugar. Their grandmother had made it long ago, so long that the sugar had taken on a yellowish tint in some places, grayish in others. Some of the corners looked as if something had been gnawing on them, and the top of one of the turrets was broken off. But it was still a marvelous thing, big enough to be house Sophie’s dolls, the smaller ones. How she had begged to have it in her room one summer. It was embarrassing to think about now. She had wanted it more than anything in her life then. She had wanted to put her littlest dolls in the towers and have them look out of the windows. Her sister Gindy had finally pointed out to her that there was no inside to the castle. It was sugar all the way through in most of its parts. No doll or sugar princess would wave from the turret or traipse down its sugar stairs or dance in the ballroom (for surely there must be a ballroom). It was a fact she was unwilling to face when she was seven.
That was years ago though. Their grandmother lived in Swans Hill now and they couldn’t visit her, only do facetime. Their aunt lived in the old house, and the sugar castle had disappeared, no one knew where. Colin had said that maybe it had been left out in the rain and had melted, which made Sophie cry. Virginia smacked Colin, not too hard. He had threatened to tell their parents (violence against Colin was strictly forbidden), but he hadn’t. He had said, “Who will play the game with us?” which made them all sad. No one would play the game with them ever again, Sophie had thought, and she was right.
The game had only taken place at their grandmother’s house. When they played it, they had to call her by her name instead of grandma. Loretta, but in the game, she was Lady Loretta, a soothsayer and herbalist. They all had roles which changed from one time to another, but their grandmother was always Lady Loretta. She had a stall at the market (the dining room table) and they came there to buy her magical wares and for her to give them quests.
In the years after, Virginia had pointed out that the game was probably so she didn’t have to chase after them all day long, and Sophie had pretended to agree when Colin argued with her. (Sometimes she sided with one of them, sometimes the other. As the middle child, she felt she had the right to switch.) The quests had been fanciful, but often involved real objects or places. The ones for Colin were easier, because he was the youngest and because he had CP. When they started playing, he was only four and had used a walker to get around. Now he had walking sticks with a cuff for each wrist.
In the here and now, Sophie was in the fifth grade and Colin in third. Virginia was in seventh grade, and she had become interested in boys, which Sophie found disgusting and suspicious. It was fall, a rainy afternoon. She and Colin had finished their school work early but were still huddled over the computer. Colin was playing a game while Sophie watched him, thinking her own thoughts. He liked to have her watch, and seem to be listening to his running commentary, but it was easy to pay just enough attention that he didn’t get mad. Virginia was upstairs, doing a zoom with her friend Sandra Z (one of three Sandras in her grade), and probably they were talking about Robert, who Sandra liked.
“You should stretch,” Sophie said. “Your legs are going to get cramped up.”
Colin ignored her. His avatar, Jory, was entering a graveyard, looking for an artifact to use against the General Controller, who wanted to take over Angarad, the town where Jory and his friend Kimi lived.
“Did you have trouble with your math?” she asked, although she knew that he probably hadn’t. He had a head for numbers, as their mother said. Sophie’s head didn’t like numbers. It liked art. She missed the art room. It wasn’t the same doing stuff in the dining room, which was their classroom “for the duration,” as her mother said.
The art room was only three blocks away. Sophie kept thinking about her last art project, a paper mache sculpture of her family, which she’d made in a flattened sort of three dimensions so that it could be hung on the wall. It was brightly colored, with real objects attached – one of Gindy’s hair clips in paper-mache Gindy’s hair, one of her mother’s wooden spoons, her father’s tie. She considered it to be her masterpiece, and it made her mad that it was locked away in the locked up school.
She knew better than to talk to her mother about it anymore though. Her mother had said that she’d just have to get over it, that it wouldn’t be forever. She had pulled Sophie on her lap, which meant she was feeling sad and guilty, and so Sophie allowed it, although she knew she was too old for that.
“We should steal Gindy’s phone,” she said to Colin. “So she’ll stop talking to stupid Sandra.”
He nodded, but she knew he wasn’t listening. He was whispering Jory’s words to himself as they appeared on the screen. Where have you gone, Kimi. I will find you. He had already been up to this point in the game three times and just ahead was the place where he always died, when Jory entered the mausoleum in the middle of the graveyard. You had to get past a trio of ghouls and he hadn’t managed it yet.
Sophie lay down on the couch. It looked as if it was going to rain again. Even if the sun came out now, most of the afternoon was gone. It was like being in prison. A prison where they were all shut up in different rooms. Sophie and Coin in the dining room. Gindy in her bedroom. Their mother in her office, where she was teaching a class online.
“I hate this,” Sophie said, but Colin paid no attention. He was hunched over the keyboard, his walking sticks fallen onto the floor beside him, staring into the computer screen as if it were a door he could go through. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself someplace else. In the art room at school. On the bus going downtown. At her friend Megan’s house. Somewhere, she though. Somewhere that’s not here. She concentrated hard, pretending that she could transport herself with the power of her mind, clenching her fist and screwing up her face, but she could still feel the scratchy material of the couch under her arms.
Outside, the leaves were blowing around, making twists and spirals in the air. When the sun showed for a minute, the leaves seemed to twinkle in the air as they fell, like floating gold coins. “I’m going outside,” she told Colin. He didn’t even nod this time. She took a post it note and wrote Going outside. Not coming back, then stuck it at the top of the computer screen.