“I don’t know why I let her go out dressed like that,” Linda Gibson chided herself as she walked through the door. Her eldest daughter was there to greet her. “It was very sweet of you to give Dawn your hand-me-down clothes, but I think she needs to grow into them a bit more before she can wear them.”
Linda didn’t wait long enough for a reply, but rather turned towards the staircase and in the direction of Dawn’s bedroom. “You’re practically an adult,” she muttered more to herself than to Zoe, “and she’s ten years old. Of course she tripped over that skirt. It would make more sense for her to wear Mikey’s…”
And with the door to Dawn’s bedroom shut behind her, that was the last Zoe could hear.
“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Mikey now appeared in the doorway. “Dawn’s almost as big as I am.”
“Did she trip over her skirt?” Zoe asked. That didn’t sound like what Dawn had said in the locker room. She’d said she’d gotten dizzy.
Mikey got a far-off look in his eyes for a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it. “Yeah, she stood up and the skirt practically fell off her.”
But it had been tight around her waist when Zoe had found her. Was this just a ripple from the changes that had happened to Dawn already, or were things still changing? And why had she gotten younger in the first place?
The sound of Roger’s car pulling up the driveway drew Zoe away from her thoughts.
“You know what?” Mikey said, “I think I’ll go dig through my closet and see if there’s anything I can give to Dawn.”
Zoe pursed her lips as her brother went up the stairs and her father entered the house. Something would need to be done to fix this, and soon.
