The Withdrawal Method

PUSHING OCEANS IN AND PULLING OCEANS OUT

IT'S APRIL AND the world is opening up like a hand with something secret in it. The world is all, Hey I've got something to show you, so you lean in and go, What? You go, Show me! And you look and the fingers peel back and then whammo there it is, green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain.

The world is melting but it's almost all water anyway. The world is like 75 percent water. It's a ball made of water and some mountains and other stuff, some trees and hills and deserts. Buildings and roads. People walk around on it and we're like 75 percent water too. My dad Greg is 236 pounds, which makes him 177 pounds of water, like a hundred thousand glasses of water, maybe more. He's a bathtub full of water — bigger than a bathtub, a kiddie pool. Anyway, my dad Greg is a whole lot of water. And Mom is the moon.

You learn all this water stuff in grade five science. The units are called The Earth and The Human Body. And in The Human Body we learned about vaginas and wangs. Big whoop though, right? Vaginas and wangs, big whoop.

It's springtime and you've got to make sure that Brian wears his rubber boots because of all the mud. Like Granny says, Brian's slow and only seven, and my dad Greg'11 forget if I don't do it. But my dad Greg calls me Big Gal or BG for short because I'm responsible and mature for my age (nine).

Brian crapped his pants four times in class already this year so one of his teachers called home to see if maybe he needs diapers and my dad Greg said no so they said well okay make sure he wears pants with elastics around the ankles. Get it?

But one time he came home with a diaper on anyway and my dad lost it. He called them up at Brian's school and said fuck and everything, I heard him. He said, Are you telling me how to raise my fucking kid? And then after, he went and sat on his bike in the garage for like thirty hours or something.

My dad Greg won't let us talk about Mom. He took all the pictures of her that were around the house away and hid them somewhere. One time we were having lasagna for dinner and I tried asking him if he could remember if Mom's favourite food was lasagna because mine is but my dad's is burgers. I had to get it from somewhere! But he didn't say anything, just kept eating. And when I asked again he gave me a long quiet look that I could tell meant: stop.

TODAY'S WEDNESDAY, April 8. That's the first thing you do when you get to school, write the date in your workbook at the top of the page. You're supposed to do cursive but I print because cursive looks messy and in my printing all the letters are the same size, it looks like a typewriter if I do say so myself. Then I sit for a bit and start to pinch my eyelashes and pull away, and sometimes you get a few little curls of eyelash and you sprinkle those down onto your book. You keep doing that and eventually you have a little pile of black eyelashes, and you organize that into a perfect square on the empty page. But I hide it with my hand when Mrs. Mills comes walking by.

There are some things you just have to keep secret. Like for my birthday last year my dad Greg bought me a diary with a lock and everything, and he told me I could write whatever I wanted in it, about my day or if I was mad or whatever, and I could lock it up and they would be my secrets. But you write things down and they can get found. People can read it and know everything. It's better to keep your thoughts in your own head, you have them there for a second and then they're gone and you're the only person who will ever know what they were. You think things to yourself and they're safe.

So anyway it's the last day before Easter weekend. Because it's the last day I haven't done too much work, just wrote the date in each of my workbooks (le 8 Avril en francais) and did the eyelash stuff and then didn't do anything else because this year I'm going to help hide the eggs. I've been planning all day where I'm going to hide them — places that are easy for Brian but not too easy. This year it's me in charge of the egg hunt because last year SOMEBODY forgot where he put them and then like a month later all this chocolate melted into our TV.

Easter's about Jesus or something? We don't do religion at my school.

Oh — anyone calls Brian a retard, I'll kick their ass.

Another thing we learned in The Human Body was about periods. Girls get their period and blood comes out of their vagina. Not me though, even though it can happen as young as ten. I've been making sure to keep my legs tight together or cross them so nothing's getting out. If I have to pee I hold it to make the muscles stronger so my vagina will never let out any blood. It'll be the toughest vagina in town, not like all those other wimpy vaginas, dripping all over the place like one of Jared Wein's nosebleeds.

You get your period and you also get boobs. Some of the girls in grade six have boobs. Like Kelly Sanchez (she's already twelve, though). They stick out of her shirt, she looks like she's hiding Easter eggs, ha ha ha.

What I remember most about Mom was when she came back from the hospital and only had one boob. They cut off the other one and gave her a special bra to make it look like she had two boobs, but sometimes around the house she didn't wear it and her shirt just sagged on the one side. But that's just what I remember, I was only four. She was tired and they'd shaved her hair off. She just lay in bed and my dad Greg made me be quiet around the house, all the time, right until she went back to the hospital and then it was the end.

FINALLY AT THREE fifteen the bell rings. Everyone goes running out into the hall and it's Easter. I get my bag at the rack and I'm putting on my jacket and Jared Wein comes up and goes, Wanna walk home? Jared's okay, he wears glasses that are always falling down his face and he has to scrunch his nose to move them back up. Igo, Yeah. Also he usually gets a nosebleed.

On the way home from school Jared and I go down to our fort in the woods to check if it's okay. There's a path with trees that grow over from each side and make a tunnel, the branches bend in and touch over top and you have to duck when you're walking along. Then it opens up and that's where our fort is. We call it The Inner Sanctum, and it always needs fixing because teenagers come down and drink beer and light fires and mess everything up.

It's been raining so today The Inner Sanctum is wet and sort of cool, and dark, and it smells like worms. There's a log to sit on so Jared goes and sits there and he pats the log beside him like he wants me to sit down too, but I get a stick and I start whacking the ground until it breaks. It breaks into a smaller piece, and then I whack that on the log, and it breaks even smaller, and I throw that piece into the woods. There's a beer cap on the ground so I pick it up and sniff it: pennies and sugar.

If we stayed late enough it'd get dark and we could lie back and look up at the sky and see the moon up there through the space in the treetops, white as bones, full or half or waxing or waning (part of The Earth was to learn about the moon) and we'd lie back and I'd maybe let Jared put his head on my tummy and we'd both look up at the moon and I might tell him, That's my Mom, Jared, that's Mom looking down. Then I'd wave at the moon: Hello, goodnight! But I wouldn't cry. I wouldn't cry or anything.

But we can't stay that late because I have to get home for Brian. Besides, if Jared Wein gets a nosebleed we don't have any Kleenex.

We fix up The Inner Sanctum and Jared goes to his house and I come home but Brian's not there yet. My dad Greg usually gets in at five thirty from his job at the parking garage. If he's not home for dinner you got to make hot dogs, one for you and one for Brian. Sometimes my dad Greg'11 leave you a note and sometimes he won't.

INGREDIENTS TO MAKE HOT DOGS FOR DINNER:

Okay. You take the hot-dog wieners out of the freezer. You take a paper towel. You put one of the hot dogs on the paper towel and you put it in the microwave and you microwave it for i: io. You take the other hot dog and other paper towel: repeat. Then you put the hot dogs in the bread and a piece of cheese on the wieners and you can even do them together at the same time, and you microwave them on a paper towel for forty-five seconds. I put mustard on mine, and ketchup, in two straight even lines. Brian has them plain. If they're too hot make Brian wait because if not he'll just stuff them in his mouth and burn himself and he'll cry and then you have to hug him and rub his hair and stuff.

Oh, I forgot to say to WASH YOUR HANDS. Before and after making hot dogs, with hot water and soap. There are germs everywhere and if you get them in your mouth you could maybe get, I don't know, cancer or leukemia? Not really, I'm not an idiot. But kids get leukemia all the time and then they have to get bones from their brothers or sisters. I'd have to get bones from Brian. Or give him some of mine.

IT'S 4:06 AND I'm washing my hands when the bus pulls up outside. It's always the same: it sounds like Granny when she gets all wheezy, then the doors open and you can hear all the kids screaming inside the bus, and then the doors close and it roars and goes away, and then it's quiet. Brian comes in the front door with his backpack and he sees me and yells, Hi! and he gives me this big hug and yells, Hi! again, and then I tell him to wash his hands.

Sometimes Granny comes by to see if we're okay before my dad Greg gets home. She's his mom and smells like cigarettes and old people. He doesn't have a dad.

But today it's just me and Brian. We play Trouble. We eat Fruit Roll-Ups — me: grape, Brian: orange. Sometimes I let Brian win Trouble, sometimes I don't. I have to help him move his men. He's always red. I'm always blue. Today though he wins by himself.

I let Brian watch Tv at five, but only for half an hour. After last Easter when the TV got ruined my dad Greg bought a new big-screen one and put a satellite dish on the roof. There are lots of satellite channels that are inappropriate for kids. We're only allowed to watch channel z — my dad Greg's rule. He watches TV a lot now. Not me. TV ROTS YOUR BRAIN!

I clean up. I make sure the games are all square on the shelf. The edges have to be even and matched up equally, which is called symmetry. We learned it in math.

And then I wash my hands. Sometimes I wash them too long and they get all pink and sore, but that just means they're clean.

Hey, I almost forgot: it's Easter, almost. Moron!

AT 5:34 THE GARAGE door goes up and the bike comes growling inside like always, and then my dad Greg is in the kitchen in his security guard uniform and he picks me up under one arm and Brian under the other and spins us around. I sometimes forget how big my dad Greg is: he's like four of me, maybe more.

We sit at the table in the kitchen while he makes beans and toast and eggs for dinner. He sings, Beans, beans, the magical fruit and makes fart noises and stomps around like he's crazy, and the whole house shakes. Brian laughs but then he does that thing where he starts rubbing his face with his knuckles, so my dad Greg has to come over and put Brian on his lap and hold his hands for a bit. Wanna stir the beans, BG? he says to me, so I go over and do it.

When everything's ready my dad Greg puts the beans out on plates with the toast and eggs. He puts mine down and he points at it to show me the toast is cut in triangles and there's an egg on one side and the beans in a little neat pile on the other, how I like it. Symmetry.

After dinner he tells me to go do my homework while he gets Brian ready for bed, but I don't have any homework (because it's Easter) so I go up and clean my room, make sure everything's straight and lined up and there's no dust anywhere. I have my own Handyvac but I'm only allowed to use it once a week and I already used it on Sunday.

Then it's almost bedtime. I put on my pajamas and go brush my teeth and wash my hands. After, I go into Brian's room to say goodnight, but he's already asleep with this big smile on his face, so I lean over the railing and whisper-yell, Goodnight Greg! to my dad Greg who's watching Tv and he turns down the volume and whisper-yells, Goodnight BG! and I go into my room and wait until it's exactly 9:oo so I can get in bed.

For a bit I lie there thinking about Brian's Easter egg hunt and running my hand over the pillow, feeling for feathers sticking out. I pull them out with my fingernails and drop them behind the bed. One time my dad Greg moved my bed to put up a shelf for my books and he found a big pile of feathers and asked me, Are you taking feathers out of your pillow? I said no. It felt weird, but my dad Greg just smiled and said okay.

Lying in bed, through the window I can see the moon. It's just a sliver but it's still there. Soon there'll be no moon at all for a few days, a new moon, and then the moon will come back like it's just been hiding or taking a break, slowly, bit by bit, until it's full and as big and round in the sky as the sun.

I started thinking Mom was the moon when I was little. It was a secret from my dad Greg. I could talk to her and stuff, every night. I know it's dumb now. But it's like tradition and there's nowhere else she can be. Sometimes you can see her and sometimes you can't but every night all around the world Mom the moon is busy pushing oceans in and pulling oceans out. Tides. And all us people are basically water too and at night the moon pushes us into sleep.

11:38. I'VE BEEN lying staring at the moon and planning the egg hunt for like three hours. I'm going to have to make a list, write it down so I don't forget, so nothing happens like chocolate getting into the Tv again. I keep thinking about Easter, imagining Brian going around with his little basket and finding eggs, all smiles and laughing and happy.

But maybe I have insomnia? Insomnia is when you can't sleep, my dad Greg has it sometimes. You just stay awake forever. You can die from not sleeping. Yeah, I think I have insomnia. I should count sheep.

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twentyeight twenty-nine thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five thirty-six thirty-seven thirty-eight thirty-nine forty forty-one forty-two forty-three forty-four forty-five forty-six forty-seven forty-eight forty-nine fifty fifty-one fifty-two fifty-three fifty-four fifty-five fifty-six fiftyseven fifty-eight fifty-nine sixty.

Nothing. Sixty seconds is a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour times sixty seconds = three thousand six hundred seconds. Twenty-four hours in a day =?

Hold on, I need to write this down. I just have to turn on the light and find a paper and pen.

24 hours in a day = 1440 minutes = 86,400 seconds. And that makes… 604,800 seconds in a week. How many seconds in a year? Whoa, hold on.

31,339,600.

The other thing you can do if you can't sleep is have some warm milk. So I wait until exactly 12:00 midnight and get up to go down to the kitchen. I stop on the stairs. My dad Greg is still up. I can hear the TV. I lean over the banister and look into the den, all quiet. Like a spy.

The TV's on. There's a lady moaning, like she's being hurt or something? My dad Greg has the sound way down, but I can hear it. He's sitting on the couch — I can see him, with his feet sticking out from under a blanket. He's sort of twitching or something and the couch is going creak creak, and the lady on the TV is going uh! uh! and he's making noises too, like grunting. Creak creak, uh uh, grunt grunt.

I take another step down on the stairs and lean even more over the banister so I can see the TV and there's a lady with her boobs shaking and flopping around, like slapping up against herself, and now there's a man on her too with his butt in the air and I realize he's humping her, and the blanket on the couch is shaking in time with the boobs and the butt and I can see my dad's face and his face is different, it's like a secret side of him I've never seen, mean and hungry and weird, and the couch goes creak creak and the lady with the floppy boobs goes uh uh and my dad Greg goes grunt grunt. But then something in my tummy goes gloop and I have to pull away from the banister because my head is all funny, and I turn away and run upstairs to the bathroom.

And then I'm washing my hands. I didn't even turn the lights on, so now I'm washing my hands in the dark with hot water and lots of soap, hard, and the water's too hot and it hurts and I can already feel my hands burning from it, I know they're going pink but I don't care.

I hear someone behind me but I don't look. I hear my dad Greg go, BG. He leaves the lights off and comes over, so he's right behind me. I still don't look.

He reaches over and turns off the tap. My hands are sore, my stomach still feels weird and like gurgly. BG, he says again. I don't turn around. We stand there in the dark. Then he reaches out to put his arms around me but he sort of stops and just stands there, and then he pulls a towel off the rack and holds it out to me, but I don't take it. I just want him to go away.

PENIS: DINK DICK wang schlong dong winky wiener cock peter rod pud monkey johnson prick willy member purplehelmeted-warrior tackle twig-and-berries banana sausage meat doodle noodle package privates one-eyed-monster rocket hard-on boner steamer stiffy erection.

THE NEXT MORNING I wake up at 7:47 but it's not really waking up because I didn't sleep very much, obviously. I have to wait until exactly 8:oo to get out of bed, so I just lie there for thirteen minutes thinking. The curtains are closed now, my dad Greg must have come in during the night and closed them, and that makes me feel weird — the idea of him being in my room when I'm sleeping, looking at me, standing over me, being there.

Through the curtains the light comes in grey, and I can hear the rain hissing outside. I decide it'll have to be an indoor day, which means games, so at 8:oo I get out of bed and go into Brian's room, and he's just lying there with his eyes open like he's been waiting for me. He looks at me and smiles and goes, Hi! I lift the covers and crawl under. Brian hugs me. He's warm.

Brian it's almost Easter, I go. Are you excited for the Easter Bunny?

He kicks his legs and goes, Yes! Yes!

That's cute, how he still believes in the Easter Bunny? I put my arm around his chest and I can feel his heart beating. Bub bub, bub bub, says his heart. I rub my hand on his chest and he kind of purrs like a cat. And then I slap him on the tummy and he laughs, so I do it again. I leave my hand on his tummy and it's like round and I can feel the dent where his bellybutton is. And then, sort of quick, I move my hand down a bit and touch his wang, just to see: it's small and weird, a little rubber tube.

Brian's gone all still. I smack him again on the belly. Wanna get up? I say, and he goes, Yes! Yes! and nods his head so hard he nearly shakes me out of the bed.

TOP SECRET LIST OF EASTER EGG HIDING PLACES! (SO FAR)

Kitchen — between the Wheaties and Sugar Crisp boxes

Kitchen — in the handle of the silverware drawer

Kitchen — on top of the breadbox

Kitchen — in the fruit bowl

Kitchen — under the kitchen table (stuck with tape!)

Den — between the couch cushions

Den — on top of the VCR

Den — under the lampshade

Hallway — on the frame of the picture of me and Brian

Stairs — one egg on every stair, in the corners

MY DAD GREG spends the whole morning in the garage working on his bike, which is good, because after me and Brian play like a hundred games of Trouble, at lunch (1:24) when he comes in to heat up some Chunky for us he's weird and doesn't look at me really. He puts our bowls of soup down and coughs and just stands there for a minute. Then he grabs an apple and goes back into the garage. Then at precisely 4:09 he sticks his head into the kitchen where I'm reading Harriet the Spy and Brian's colouring and he says, Hey, stopped raining, taking the bike for a spin. The way he says it is too happy, like he's trying to be happy, and he's got this fake smile. I just nod okay. He's quiet for a bit, then he goes, You okay holding down the fort? So I nod again and then he's just gone.

Granny's coming tomorrow to make us Easter dinner. At 5:14 she calls and says, Happy Easter! and tells me about the great ham she got. Ham? Grody. But I don't say that. I say, Yum. I say, Sounds good Granny. I tell her my dad Greg is out on his bike but should be back soon and she asks if we're okay. I say, Sure. Then she wants to talk to Brian. He gets all excited and takes the phone and yells, Hi! and Yes! and then just laughs a lot.

When Brian hangs up I notice something sort of smells so I get down and sniff his bum. Yup. He crapped himself. This is one thing I can't handle: crap. So I tell him to just stand in the middle of the kitchen until our dad Greg gets home, not to touch anything. I open the window and sit there watching him, glad he's wearing pants with elastic ankles.

My dad Greg gets home at 5:58 and smells Brian right away and goes, Woo-wee buddy! He picks Brian up over one shoulder like a fireman and carries him upstairs. The tub goes on. I can hear them both laughing from my spot at the kitchen table and the water splashing around while my dad Greg washes the crap off my brother.

After dinner (fried baloney, Tater Tots, hot V8) we watch a movie on satellite. My dad Greg tries to get us to all sit on the couch together with the blanket overtop like usual. I tell him I'm okay and sit on the floor. The opening credits come on and I can feel someone like nudging me in the back with their toe. I just stare at the TV as if I don't notice but it's hard to focus on the TV, it's like I can see the pictures but my brain can't figure out what they are.

The movie we watch is The Parent Trap. My dad Greg is all excited because it's a movie that was out when he was a kid. At dinner he told me, It's more for girls than boys — you'll like it, BG. When he said the name I thought, Cool, a parent trap, what an awesome idea. You'd dig a hole and cover it with sticks and leaves, maybe put a case of beer on the other side for dads. Something else for moms? Then dads would come along and be like, Oh great, beer! and when they went to go for it they'd fall through and into the hole. A parent trap. Then you could study them and stuff, poke them with sticks, do experiments and tests.

But it turns out to be Disney! The worst! There's this girl and she's got a twin sister but she doesn't know or something, and then they try to get their parents married. There's no trap really, just a plan, and not even a good one. I squirm around on the floor a lot and my dad Greg keeps going, You want to come up here with us? But I don't say anything to that.

The movie gets done at 8:58, kind of late, so my dad Greg hustles us off to bed. And then goes back downstairs, so I'm left lying there wide awake, thinking about what he's maybe doing down there under the blanket with the groaning ladies on the Tv. But I guess I'm tired from the night before so after not too long I forget about my dad Greg King of the Perverts and start to get really sleepy and before I can even check out the window to see the moon I fall asleep.

I WAKE up and I feel swampy and slow but I have this idea there's something I should be doing. It's — 4:17 a.m. There's something, but everything feels cloudy and my brain is only just winding up, still maybe half asleep. I roll over and then I'm drifting off to sleep again, when it hits me.

Easter.

The egg hunt.

In like three hours Brian is going to get up and go hunting for eggs and I forgot to even finish my list, let alone hide any eggs. I wait until 4:20 (which isn't perfect, but this is an emergency) and swing my legs over the side, get out of bed and it's like slow motion, all heavy and weird, and in the dark my room is sort of blue from the moonlight through the window.

Moving out into the hall I still feel underwater, swimming, looking around, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark. Wait. There's an egg on the floor outside Brian's room, a little dark lump against the carpet. I lean down and it's like I can't believe it and for a second I think maybe the Easter Bunny really did come. But then I realize who would have put it there, who knew it was my job and went and did it himself anyway.

I pick up the egg. The foil around the chocolate is starting to peel so I smooth it down and put it in the pocket of my pajamas. I look at my dad Greg's bedroom door which is closed with only black showing from the crack underneath, and then I start to tiptoe down the stairs, slow.

Guess what? There are eggs lined up in the corners of each stair JUST LIKE I WROTE ON MY SECRET LIST. The eggs go into my pockets and it's like I'm doing a weird kind of front crawl or something, down one step and reaching, then the next, eggs into my pockets, but feeling I'm maybe sinking, maybe drowning, and the house is dark and still with only the hum of the fridge from the kitchen to prove the world is even alive.

I move around the house, silent, leaving the lights off, looking in all the spots I wrote down, taking the eggs and loading up. Between the cereal boxes: check. On top of the vcR: check. All of them. He's put them in other places too, stupid places like lined up on the kitchen counter. Way too easy. But even finding eggs in places I didn't have on my list makes me feel weird — my hands go prickly for a second, I feel my face hot. Once the egg disappears into my pocket the feeling goes away.

Around 4:50 my pockets start to get heavy — they're sagging and bulging with eggs. I look around one more time but I'm pretty sure I've got all of them. So I go to the back door and put on my shoes.

Outside it's still dark. The sky is navy blue, almost purple, all clouds left over from yesterday's rain. There's no stars. Only the moon glowing in a little white fingernail behind the night. I shiver a bit in my pajamas, and it's hard to walk with my pockets full of eggs, the way they swing heavy at my sides. I have to hold my pants up by the waist to keep them from falling. I close the back door quietly and drop a single egg there. The porch light shines off the silver wrapper. It twinkles.

I go out across the lawn all wet from a day of rain, soaking the bottoms of my pants and cold on my ankles, and then onto the street where my footsteps echo a bit, tap tap tap in my runners on the pavement. Every twenty steps exactly I drop an egg. I count twenty and duck and put one down, then twenty and duck and put one down, again and again all along the curb of the street. I put one right in front of Jared Wein's house and think about knocking on his window, getting him to help, but I decide no, this is something I have to do on my own. Then at the end where there's the path I look back and there they are, all in a line lit up by the streetlights.

Down the hill at the end of our street, along the path, into the woods. Eggs dropped all the way. It's dark because tonight the moon's not enough but I know the way by heart: where to step, where to duck. When I come to the entrance to the tunnel that leads to The Inner Sanctum, I stop. I've only got two eggs left, but I made it. From way up above, Mom the moon is looking down. She's faint and out of focus, just the corner of her face like she's turning away and every now and then little wisps of darker cloud go past like smoke. All around her the night sky is a big murky sea but she shines out of it far away and watching, up there.

I haven't brought anything to dig with, nothing to make the hole for my Parent Trap. There's a broken beer bottle behind the log so I use that, holding it by the neck and using the jagged edge to carve into the mud. I use my feet too and my hands — dirt gets up underneath my fingernails and sticks there. I go down on my knees and can feel the earth cool and wet through my pajamas. But I keep digging, I dig and dig and I'm sweating even though it's cold out and I'm shivering and digging and covered in muck.

As the hole gets deeper and deeper the earth gets wetter and once I'm a ways down there's water at the bottom collecting in a little pool. I stop for a second and think maybe it's from the ocean, that this is water that flows in a river all the way from the coast underneath the surface of the world and I've tapped into it. An underground seaway, linking all the water on the planet.

In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you've got inside you — Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang — depending on what you've got. And right then, right when I'm thinking that — I swear — the clouds break up a bit and even though she's gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

From my pocket I take the two last eggs and open my fingers to plop them one at a time into the water at the bottom of my Parent Trap. But I don't. I look down and the water's gone black again. The hole's not big enough for a parent. It's barely big enough to trap a cat. I'd need like a digger and a crew of a thousand Jared Weins to make a Parent Trap big enough for my dad Greg, to trap him there and keep him for a while and teach him a lesson.

So I put the eggs back in my pocket and I squat there beside the stupid useless hole in my pajamas in the mud, kind of cold and it's five in the morning and for other people tomorrow will be Easter but not us. This year there won't be any Easter. There's nothing that makes my dad Greg sadder than seeing Brian sad, and if there's no chocolate for Easter Brian'll be the saddest he's ever been ever, and my dad Greg will be even sadder. But I'll have saved two eggs. Later I'll give my brother one in secret and I'll have one too and no one will ever know.

Right then I hear a voice go, Hey, and nearly fall over. I have to put my hands down in the mud to stop myself.

It's my dad Greg. He's standing at the entrance to The Inner Sanctum. The branches are low so he has to duck and it's still dark so he's like a black hunched-up shadow but it's definitely him. Hey, he says again. But he doesn't come in.

My heart's going crazy. I wait for it to slow squatting there in the mud, seeing what my dad Greg's going to do. He doesn't move and I don't either. We both just wait for something to happen. It's like in Trouble when you've got one guy left and Brian's got one guy left but they're both in their homes and you're just popping the popper and popping, trying to get out.

We wait for a long time, me and my dad Greg. Both our breath comes in clouds. He sits down after a while in the mud but still doesn't say anything. I don't either. My hands are covered in mud, and I can feel mud stuck up under my nails and drying in streaks up my arms but I don't really care. I'm tired.

After a while the sky starts to lighten a little, going greyish up through the branches of the trees. The moon's fading. Soon it'll be morning and the moon will be gone for the day, and then the next night she probably won't be there at all.

I start thinking maybe if the world is like a person and underground seaways are the tubes, making the world go on, then when the tides go in and out it's like the world having its period. Like the blood of the world rushing in and out and making everything grow. It's a big thought like the kind you have to say out loud when you think them and it kind of makes me go whoa a little bit. But I can't tell my dad Greg about it, about periods and stuff. Not him. Even though he's over there just waiting for something, I'm not sure what.

So then he goes, Hey, in a weird sad tired voice.

By now the light is morning light. It came so quick, it's pale and thin but it's washing over the night, erasing the night.

And my dad Greg goes, Hey, again, and that's when I realize he's showing me something. He's holding out his hands, cupped together. I can't see so I have to get up and take a step closer. It's the eggs. They're all there in his big hands, like twenty of them, maybe thirty. I found them, he tells me, like he's proud.

And I say, Yeah. I look at his hands, my trail of chocolate eggs collected in there together like grapes. I put my hand in my pocket to make sure I've still got the two extras.

You found them, I tell my dad Greg. You found them all, I say.