Wild Awake

almost more than I could stand. My face crumpled. “Dad said we couldn’t have any.”
    I fought back the tears that were stabbing at the corners of my eyes. Beside me, Denny stared into his Game Boy screen and Mom kept up her wheedling hum.
    “Oh, honey,” said Sukey. “Come with me.”
    Without so much as a second glance at Dad, she took my grubby hand in her soft, vanilla-scented one and led me on a personal tour of the gallery. Our first stop was the snack table, where she poured me a cup of lemonade, rose-pink and thick with sugar, the kind that leaves sour flecks of lemon pulp on the back of your throat after you swallow. I remember the clear plastic cup and the square paper napkin I used to hold my Ritz crackers, salty and oily to the lemonade’s sweet. We took our snacks and made a slow circle around the crowded room, stopping in front of each of Sukey’s paintings. Every five seconds, another one of her friends would tap her on the shoulder and she’d spin around, beaming, to greet them.
    “Hey, Neale,” she’d say—or Wanda, or Feather, or Björn. “This is my little sister, Kiri.” Their kindness, when they smiled at me, was mixed with bafflement, as if they could hardly believe that such a rare and dangerous creature as Sukey was related to such a plain and pudgy one as me.
    When we said hi to Leon, he plucked the yellow flower he was wearing out of his buttonhole and slid it behind my ear. Leon was half Japanese, half German, and for a Cradle-Robbing Junkie he looked awfully dashing in his suit.
    “Her name was Ki-ri, she was a showgirl,” he sang, twirling me around like a ballerina while Sukey clapped her hands and laughed and laughed. When he was finished twirling me, he twirled Sukey, then dipped her like a tango dancer and kissed her on the lips. I looked on in awe and jealousy. The rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to Sukey: She laughed and cried and yelled and danced without checking Dad’s face first to see which one she was allowed to do. It was like she didn’t even know you were supposed to.
    Sukey’s friends reminded me of the acrobats in Cirque du Soleil, which Dad’s business partner, Sydney, had given us tickets to see—like at any moment they were about to swing from the ceiling, leap from the table, walk on their hands. They smelled like fizzy drinks and twitched a little, like mice. I’d never met adults like that before and hardly believed they existed.
    “Kiri’s a fabulous musician,” Sukey told them. “You should hear the songs she plays on her keyboard.”
    Whenever Sukey spoke, it was like I was eating one of the magical cakes in Alice in Wonderland . I grew taller and taller until my head bumped the ceiling, and the unhappiness of an hour ago shrank to the size of a pebble on the ground.
    We paraded around the room, eating cheese cubes and chatting with Sukey’s glamorous friends, while Mom and Dad hovered awkwardly near the exit, checking their phones and talking to no one. Every time I glimpsed their drab and miserable figures from the corner of my eye, I’d pretend I hadn’t seen them. I wished they would disappear so I could join Sukey’s glittering tribe and be one of them, happy and wild, with high-heeled shoes and feathers in my hair. But when we finished our circle of the gallery, they were still there, bored and impatient, waiting to claim me like a lost piece of luggage plucked off a baggage carousel.
    “Bye, Sukey,” I said, but Leon the Junkie had already twirled her away.
    I paw through the box, eager for more. At the bottom is a painting Sukey and I did together when she came to visit on my twelfth birthday. She was twenty then, almost twenty-one—a semi-adult, and as wondrous to me in her adultness as a movie star. I lived for Sukey’s visits, basked in them, and clung to each murmured confidence as proof that I was the person Sukey trusted most in the world.
    “Artists need their own space,” she said, flicking her paintbrush across the paper we’d spread out on the kitchen table. “As soon as you can, Kiri-bird, get yourself a room just for making music. You’d like that, right? You can’t make good art in Mom and Dad’s living room. It’s scientifically impossible.”
    There’d been some kind of drama with the art collective a few months back and Sukey had moved into her own place, a little studio where she could paint in peace. I’d never been there, but she’d told me all about it. She’d been