"Empty your savings," her mother said.
Simone stared at her. "What?"
"You heard me. Whatever you've got. That keyboard money. Empty it."
"That's not—you can't buy another one. You can't buy that vase. It was a quarter at a rummage sale, Grandma said—"
It was the wrong thing. She knew it as it was leaving her mouth. Her mother's face did something terrible.
"Don't you tell me about my mother's vase," her mother said, so low it was almost a whisper. "Don't you stand there and tell me what it cost."
"I didn't mean—"
"Give me the backpack."
Simone took a step back. Her mother took a step forward, and before Simone could think whether to let go or hold on, her mother had a hand on the strap and was pulling, and the backpack came off one shoulder and then the other, and Simone's arms went with it a little way before she let it go.
It was a small black backpack, the regulation kind St. Brendan's required, with a navy patch on the front pocket. Her mother unzipped the main compartment and turned it so the mouth faced the light. The math workbook came out and went onto the sofa, the one place nobody was ever allowed to set anything. Her choir folder. Her pencil case. A bruised banana from lunch she'd forgotten to eat. A permission slip she'd been meaning to have signed. Her mother's hand went deeper, raking along the bottom seam where crumbs and pencil shavings collected, and then, with a sound of impatience, she unzipped the front pocket.
Simone had kept the money in the front pocket since June. She'd kept it in her room before that, in a sock inside a boot in the back of her closet, until the day she came home and found the sock on the floor and seven dollars gone and Micah in the backyard with a new pack of trading cards. After that she had carried it with her, every day, everywhere, in a zippered pencil pouch with a cartoon cat on it that she had outgrown years ago. It was the only place she could think of that was always with her and never in the house without her.
Her mother found the pouch. She unzipped it with her thumb. The bills inside were folded in half and sorted, ones and fives and the two twenties from Christmas, with a sticky note on top in Simone's careful handwriting: *186. Need 54.*
Her mother looked at the note for a second longer than she needed to. Then she pulled the bills out, all of them, in one motion, and the sticky note came out with them and fluttered down onto the rug next to a piece of the vase.
"That's mine," Simone said. She heard her own voice go thin as thread. "I earned that. I fed the cats. I *earned* that."
"And my mother earned that vase. Every day of her life." Her mother folded the bills over once more and pressed them into the back pocket of her slacks. "This doesn't cover it. Nothing covers it. But you're going to learn that when you break something in this house, it costs you something."
At the table, Micah had climbed back onto his chair. He had the goldfish bag in his lap again. He wasn't eating. He was swinging one foot under the table, slowly, back and forth, and watching. Not smiling. Simone would remember that later, when she was trying to be fair to him, which she would hate herself for trying to be. He wasn't smiling. He just looked like someone watching a show he had seen before and knew how it ended.