Hush by Judy Brown, Eishes Chayil

mother informed us that she was running away to Israel. Actually, she said that she was going for only one week, but I knew that she was really abandoning us forever.
    It was all my fault, really. The night before, my mother had tucked me into bed at seven thirty, my father had kissed me good night, and they had left my room looking quite relieved. I had lain in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, imagining it to be a small fluffy cloud floating slowly into my room, hovering gently over my head so that I could drift off into a deep, deep…death sleep. I smiled mysteriously. Being dead was fun. I got to lie completely straight, my arms and legs in a perfect line, my head laid back romantically on the pillow, my eyes closed prettily, and my lips just slightly open…like that. Perfect.
    Then my parents would come in and wail and my siblings would stand at the door, their scared eyes wide open, and I would lie there as pleased and as dead as could be. I hadn’t quite figured out how I would see the whole scenario if I couldn’t even open my eyes. At first I just ignored this, but then I realized that there was simply no way I could see through my eyelids, and what was the point of being dead if I couldn’t see how sad everyone was. So I stopped playing dead and to my great annoyance found that I was still not sleeping. I tried counting sheep. I counted and counted and in the middle I switched to cows and then to monkeys, who were, on the whole, a lot more interesting. That’s when I heard the mice. Actually it was the steam making all those squeaking noises, but it occurred to me that perhaps they were trapped. Horrified, I visualized the tiny gray mice stuffed into the narrow metal tunnels, scuttling desperately back and forth, scratching at the iron with their tiny paws, squeaking mournfully while I lay in bed.
    Quickly, I jumped off my bed. Quietly, I tiptoed downstairs to the basement. Slowly, I pushed open the heavy metal door to the boiler room and stared at the huge round boiler and the pipes tangled all over the ceiling like metal hissing snakes. I could not hear the squealing anymore. Maybe the mice had already escaped. I turned back to go upstairs, and that’s when I saw the closet near the boiler room wide open with a neat stack of chocolate bars piled on the top shelf.
    My heart lurched. So that was where my mother hid those chocolates. I felt hungry. It was hard work trying to sleep. So I settled down on the floor near the closet, tore open a chocolate bar, and ate.
    My mother found me just like that, munching on chocolate at ten o’clock at night. She stood there, her eyes opened wide, and I began muttering something about mice and pipes that did not convince her at all. I began telling her another story, this time about sleep and sheep, but my mother’s eyes only grew wider. So I stopped talking, stuffed the last piece of chocolate into my mouth, and watched her eyes slant angrily. She shook her finger threateningly into my face and said that she had had enough of my nonsense and she simply could not believe that I had been up all this time. She followed me all the way up the stairs, raving about what chutzpa I had and that I would not get chocolate for the next month.
    I explained to her that it wasn’t me; it was my hormones. (My sister had told me that she was learning about hormones in science, and that they were the things that made you grow and jump.) My mother said that she didn’t care. I should carry myself and my hormones back into bed this split second if I knew what was good for me. I went glumly back to bed wondering what hormones really were.
    But that wasn’t all. The next morning I woke up late again, lost my shoe, my gloves, and my glue, had a big argument about what I would eat for breakfast, spilled the milk, dropped the egg, burned the bread, and finally, with the van beeping crazily outside, pulled on the wrong coat. At first my mother yelled, then she threatened, and