"What did you do," her mother said.
"I didn't—I just got here. I just walked in."
Her mother crossed the room in four steps. Simone had not known a person could cross a room that fast. Her mother's hand closed around her upper arm, not hard enough to bruise, but hard enough that there was no question of pulling away, and she turned Simone bodily toward the shelf, toward the shards, toward the orange ball with her name on it, and pointed with the hand that held the phone.
"You broke my mother's vase."
"I didn't!"
"Your ball. In my living room. You broke my mother's vase. You're paying for it."
The words came out of Simone before she could arrange them, high and wet and already cracking. She hated how she sounded. She hated that her eyes had filled up so fast, because crying always made it worse; crying was what guilty people did, according to every argument she had ever lost in this house. "It was him! I wasn't even home! I had choir, it's Tuesday, I just got off the bus—"
"Don't you dare."
"Mom, it's *Tuesday*—"
"Don't you dare put this on your brother." Her mother's grip tightened. "Micah." She did not take her eyes off Simone. "Micah, baby. Come here."
Micah climbed down off the chair. He came around the end of the sofa slowly, holding the goldfish bag against his chest, and Simone saw him look at the ball and then at the shelf and then up at their mother's face, reading it, the way Simone herself read weather. He had their father's long eyelashes. Grown women in the grocery store stopped to tell him so.
"Did your sister do this?"
Simone said, "Micah."
He looked at her. For a second she thought—she really thought—he was going to say it. His mouth opened a little. Then their mother said, "Baby, you're not in trouble. Just tell me what happened," and something in his face settled, like a coin dropping into a slot.
He didn't say yes. He didn't say anything. He looked at the floor and gave one small nod, and then he looked back up at their mother with his wide wet eyes, and that was all it took.
"He's *lying*," Simone said. "He's lying, he does this, he—"