First Tibby brought up the box of Entenmann's crumb donuts, but then the crumbs reminded her of rodent pellets, so she ran back to the kitchen and shoved them into the back of the cabinet.

Then she thought of ice cream, but she didn't want to go where the ice cream was. Instead she grabbed a box of dinosaur fruit snacks—Nicky's favorite—and brought them upstairs. Her eyes fixed on Ricki Lake, she systematically chewed through eight packages of garish gummy dinosaurs, tossing eight silvery wrappers on the floor.

For Jerry Springer she drank two liters of ginger ale. After that she threw up in fizzy Technicolor. After that she watched the shopping network for a while.

Three-quarters of the way through Oprah, her phone rang. Tibby turned the volume way up. She hated to miss even one word. Oprah was very sympathetic.

Try as she did to avoid it, Tibby could still hear the voice on her answering machine. “Uh, Tibby. This is Robin Graffman, Bailey's mom.” Long pause. “Do you think you could call or come by? The number is 555-4648. Room 448. Fourth floor, make a left when you get off the elevators. Bailey would really like to see you.”

Tibby felt the pain invading her chest again. Her heart was not right. Pain exploded in her temple. She was having a heart attack and a brain aneurysm at the same time.

She looked at Mimi's box. She wanted to curl up in those soft wood shavings and breathe in Mimi's salty rodent smell and sleep until she died. It didn't look hard.

Carmen dialed the numbers. She half expected to hang up when she heard a woman's voice pick up, but she didn't. “Lydia, this is Carmen. May I speak to my father?”

“Of course,” Lydia said hastily. Did Carmen seriously think that Lydia would bring up anything unpleasant?

Her father's voice came quickly. “Hello?” She heard both relief and fear in his voice.

“Dad, it's Carmen.”

“I know. I'm glad you called.” He sounded mostly like he really was glad. “I got the package. I appreciate your thought.”

“Oh . . . good,” Carmen said. She felt herself being tugged into the comfort zone. She could apologize. He would be overly understanding. In under two minutes, all would be shiny again. Life would go on.

She had to fight on. “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

She felt his silent pressure not to do it. Or was it her own pressure? “Okay.”

Go go go, she commanded herself. Don't look back. “I'm mad at you,” she said a little brokenly. She was glad he stayed quiet.

She took a breath and dug into the skin around her thumbnail. “I'm . . . disappointed, you know. I thought we'd be spending the summer together, me and you. I really, really wish you'd warned me about moving in with Lydia's family.” Her voice was shaky and raw.

“Carmen, I'm . . . sorry. I wish I'd warned you. That was my mistake. I really am sorry.”

He finished with a note of finality. He was closing it off again. Cauterizing the wound before there could be any more bleeding.

She wasn't cooperating. “I'm not finished,” she declared. He was silent.

She gave herself a few moments to steady her voice. “You've found yourself a new family, and I don't really fit into it.” Her voice came out squeaky and bare. “You got yourself this new family with these new kids. . . . B-But what about me?” Now she was completely off the road and driving fast. Emotions she hadn't even realized she felt were flying past. “What was the matter with me and Mom?” Her voice cracked painfully. Tears were falling now. She didn't even care if he was listening anymore; she had to keep talking.

“Why wasn't your old family good enough? Why did you move away? Why did you promise me . . . we'd be closer than ever?” She broke off so she could try to catch her breath. “W-Why did you keep saying we were, even though it wasn't true?” She was flat-out sobbing now. Her words rose and fell on waves of crying. She wondered if he could even understand what she was saying.

“Why does Paul visit his drunk father every month, and you visit me two or three times a year? I didn't do anything wrong, did I?”

She stopped using words at all and just cried, maybe for a long time; she wasn't sure. At last she got quieter. Was he even there?

When she pressed the receiver to her ear and listened, she heard a muffled sound. Breaths. Not dry, wet.

“Carmen, I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

She figured she might believe him, because she realized that for the first time in her life he was crying too.

Tibby was sinking into sleep the next afternoon when a knock came at the door. “Go away!” she barked.

Who could it be? Her parents were both at work, and Tibby had scared Loretta sufficiently to keep her away forever.

“Tibby?”

“Go away,” she said again.

The door opened partway. Carmen's head appeared. As she took in Tibby's horrific appearance and the mounds of crap on the floor and bed, Carmen's face grew pointy with concern. “Tibby, what's going on?” she asked in a soft voice. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” Tibby snapped, sinking back under her covers. “Please go away.” She turned up the volume. Oprah was coming back after a short commercial break.

“What are you watching?” Carmen asked.

With the shades pulled down, there wasn't much to look at besides the TV and the hulking piles of mess.

“Oprah. She's very sympathetic, you know,” Tibby snapped.

Carmen waded through the piles and sat on Tibby's bed. It was testament to her concern, because Carmen hated any mess she herself hadn't made. “Tibby, please tell me what's going on. You're scaring me.”

“I don't want to talk,” Tibby said stonily. “I want you to go away.”

The phone started ringing again. Tibby glared at it as though it were a rattlesnake. “Don't touch it,” she ordered.

Beeeep, went the answering machine. Suddenly Tibby dove for it, furiously searching for the volume dial. She dropped the whole thing on the carpet.

Still the voice on the machine came through loud and clear. “Tibby. It's Bailey's mother again. I want you to know what's happening here. Bailey's not doing so well. She has an infection and . . .” Tibby could hear the woman sucking in air. Her lungs sounded like they were full of water. “We—we'd just really like you to come. It would mean a lot to Bailey.” She sobbed a little and then hung up.

Tibby couldn't look at Carmen. She didn't want to see anything. She could feel Carmen's eyes digging little tunnels into her brain. She felt Carmen's arm come around her shoulders. Tibby looked away. An infinite number of tears hovered behind her eyelids.

“Please just go.” Tibby's voice wobbled.

Carmen, being Carmen, kissed the side of Tibby's head and got up to leave.

“Thanks,” Tibby whispered after her.

Unfortunately, Carmen, still being Carmen, arrived back in Tibby's room about an hour later without being invited. This time she didn't even knock. She just appeared.

“Tibby, you have to go see her,” Carmen said softly, floating in Tibby's half dream at the side of her bed.

“Go away,” Tibby ordered groggily. “I can't move.”

Carmen let out a long breath. “You can so. I brought you the Pants.” She laid them down over Tibby's feet. It was the only place in the room where they wouldn't be swallowed by ravenous mess. “Put them on and go.”

“No,” Tibby rasped.

Carmen disappeared out the door.

Tibby chattered and shivered. Didn't Carmen understand that her heart wasn't working and her brain had an aneurysm and her nose ring was getting infected?

She fell into comatose sleep for hours and awoke to see the Pants glowing at her in the bluish light of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The Pants were telling her that she was an awful person, and they were right. She sank back down, feeling the weight of them on her feet and ankles. They seemed to weigh about fifty pounds. Who could walk in such heavy pants? “Surprise yourself,” Jay Leno told her. She stared at him. He had not just said that.

She leaped out of bed, scared, her arrhythmic heart racing. What if there was no time left? What if it was already gone?She pulled off her pajamas and pulled on the Pants. She stuck her feet in a pair of wool clogs. Her hair was so dirty it had gone around the bend. It looked clean again.

She realized once she was out on the sidewalk that it was almost midnight and she was still wearing her pajama top. Who at the hospital would let her in to see Bailey at midnight? Didn't visiting hours end by eight?

She backtracked and got her bike from the open garage. She didn't have very much time. Bailey was afraid of time.

She raced through the streets. The traffic lights on Wisconsin Avenue were flashing yellow.

The regular entrance to the hospital was mostly dark, but the emergency entrance was alight. Tibby walked in and past the assortment of miserable people in plastic chairs. Even emergencies grew boring after people waited for a few hours in this place.

Luckily the woman in the reception box had her head tilted down. Tibby walked right by. She struck out for an elevator.

“Can I help you?” a passing nurse asked her.

“I'm, uh, finding my, uh, mom.” Tibby lied badly. She kept walking. The nurse didn't come after her. She took fire stairs up to the main floor, hovered in the stairwell until the coast was completely clear, then sped to the elevator.

There was a tired-looking doctor in the elevator. Tibby rummaged around her brain for excuses, until she realized he really didn't care what she was doing. Obviously he had better things to think about than hospital security.

She got off at the fourth floor and immediately ducked into a doorway. The floor was very quiet. The reception area was to the left, but a sign indicated that room 448 was to the right. There was a nurses' station farther down the hall to the right. She barely breathed as she moved along the wall like a spider. Thank goodness, room 448 was close. The door was partially open. She slipped inside.

She stalled in the little vestibule. From there she could see Jay Leno up on the ceiling-mounted TV doing his shtick in silence. She could see no parents in the chairs by the windows. She had to make herself go in.

She was afraid she would see a different Bailey, a leftover Bailey. But the girl sleeping in the bed was the same as the girl she knew. Only she had tubes sticking out of her wrist and a tube in her nose. Tibby heard a high-pitched little gasp escape her own throat. There was more emotion bubbling around in there than she could hold back.

Bailey was so tiny under the covers. Tibby saw the flutter of pulse at her neck. Gently Tibby reached for Bailey's hand. It was made of bird bones. “Hi, Bailey, it's me,” she whispered. “The girl from Wallman's.”

Bailey was so small there was enough extra room for Tibby to sit on the bed next to her. Bailey's eyes stayed shut. Tibby brought Bailey's hand to her chest and held it there. When her own eyelids started to droop, she lay back gingerly, resting her head on the pillow next to Bailey's. She felt the soft tickle of Bailey's hair against her cheek. Tears slipped out of her eyes and went sideways into her ears and onto Bailey's hair. She hoped that was okay.

She would just stay here holding Bailey's hand for all time, so Bailey wouldn't be afraid that there wasn't enough of it.

That night was the celebration of Koimisis tis Theotokou, the Assumption of the Virgin. It was the biggest Greek Orthodox holiday after Easter. Both Lena and Effie joined their grandparents in the small, plain, lovely church for the liturgy. Afterward there was a small parade, and then the whole town got busy eating and drinking.

Grandma was on the dessert committee, so she and Effie made dozens of trays of baklava with every conceivable kind of nut in the filling for the delicate pastries. Grandma had intensified Effie's training now that the summer was almost at an end.

Lena had one glass of strong, rough-tasting red wine, and it made her feel tired and sad. She went up to her room and sat by her window in the dark, where she could watch the festivities from a bit of a distance. This was the way she liked to enjoy a party.

Down on the sidewalk and in the little plaza a few yards down from Kostos's house, the celebration became more boisterous after sunset. The men drank loads of ouzo and got very expansive once the music began. Even Bapi wore a big, silly smile.

Effie drank a few glasses of wine herself. There was no official drinking age in Greece. In fact, even their grandparents pushed wine on Effie and Lena on special occasions, which probably made Effie much less interested in drinking than she would have been otherwise. Tonight, though, Effie was flushed and exuberant. Lena watched her sister dance to a few songs with Andreas the waiter and then sneak off into an alleyway with him. Lena wasn't worried. Effie was carbonated, but under that she was possibly the most sensible person Lena knew. Effie adored boys, but even at fourteen, she didn't abandon herself for them.

Oia, tonight, had two equally vivid full moons, one in the sky and one in the sea. If Lena hadn't known better, she wouldn't have been able to pick the original.

In the moonlight she saw Kostos's face. He didn't notice Lena's absence or care. She felt sure of it.

I wish you cared, Lena told him telepathically, and then wanted to take it back.

She watched Kostos approach her grandmother. On her tiptoes, Valia hugged him and kissed him so hard, Lena wondered if she might strangle him. Kostos looked joyful. He whispered something in Valia's ear that made her smile. Then they began dancing.

Dinky, small-town fireworks erupted from the plaza. In a way, those were the most awe-inspiring kind, Lena decided with a tiny chill. Unlike the Disney World variety, these homemade ones had a sweet crudeness you could respond to. They showed the effort and the danger, while more polished presentations hid it.

Kostos spun Grandma around. Laughing, she managed to keep her feet under her. He ended the song with a dramatic dip, bending Grandma practically in two. Lena had never seen her grandmother look so happy.

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren. It was just a poignant fact of island life that whole generations left to set up real lives in other places.

Lena let the tears dribble past her chin and down her neck. She wasn't exactly sure what she was crying for.

Even after the late hour at which the party ended, Lena couldn't sleep. She sat by her window watching the moon. She waited for breezes to feather the edges of the sea-moon. She imagined all the happy inhabitants of Oia falling into deep, drunken sleep.

But as she craned a little out the window, she recognized another pair of elbows in the far window of the second floor. They were Bapi's wrinkly elbows. He was sitting at his window, staring at the moons, just like she was.

She smiled, both inside and out. She'd learned one thing in Santorini. She wasn't like either of her parents or her sister, but she was just like her Bapi—proud, silent, fearful. Lucky for Bapi, he had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it.

Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that same courage.