Kit Marlowe measured the moon with her thumb.
It was a trick her grandmother had taught her when she was seven years old, standing on the back porch in bare feet while the grown-ups argued about money inside the house. Hold your arm straight out, close one eye, and cover the moon with your thumbnail. If it fits, the moon is where it should be. If it doesn't fit, something is wrong.
For ten years, it had always fit.
Tonight, it did not fit. The moon sat in the middle of her thumbnail with room to spare on both sides, small and pale and wrong, like someone had switched it for a smaller one while she wasn't looking. Or like the moon had moved farther away. Or like — and this was the thought that made Kit lower her arm slowly and stare up at the sky with her mouth open — the moon had changed shape, and nobody else had noticed.
"That's not possible," Kit said out loud, to no one, because it was eleven o'clock at night and she was alone on the roof of her mother's house in Graywater, and the only other living thing up here was a moth banging itself against the porch light.
But it was possible. It was right there. The moon was bigger than her thumbnail.
Kit was seventeen years old, and she collected things nobody noticed. It had started when she was small — a red button in the parking lot of the grocery store, a single silver earring on the bus, a ticket stub for a movie she had never seen. She kept them in a tin box under her bed, the kind that used to hold tea. The box was full now. There were forty-three buttons in it. Eleven earrings, none of them in pairs. A key that didn't open anything she owned. A marble with a tiny crack in it, like a lightning bolt frozen in glass. A photograph of a dog she had never met. A bus ticket to a town she had never been to, dated three years before she was born. A silver thimble with someone's initials scratched on the side. A single white glove, left-handed, soft as a sigh. She knew the story of every one of them — not the real story, because she couldn't know that, but the story she had given each of them: the button belonged to a sailor, the earrings to a girl who only ever wore one, the key to a house that had burned down. It was a game she played with herself, and it was the only game she had never gotten bored of.
Her mother said it was a phase. Her mother had been saying it was a phase for ten years.
But the moonlight was different from the buttons. The moonlight was the one thing Kit collected that nobody else could see her collecting, because she did it at night, in secret, with jam jars. She set the jars on her windowsill when the moon was up, and by morning they were full of something that wasn't quite light and wasn't quite water — a pale, silver shimmer that moved when she tilted the jar, like it was still deciding what it wanted to be. She had twenty-six jars now, lined up on the shelf above her desk, each one labeled with the date in her grandmother's handwriting — no, in her own handwriting, which looked more and more like her grandmother's every year.
Her grandmother had been the one who taught her about the moonlight. "Moonlight is just sunlight that got lost on the way home," her grandmother used to say. "And lost things need someone to keep them. That's you, Kit. You're the keeper of lost things."
Kit remembered the first night her grandmother had shown her how to catch it. She had been seven, and her grandmother had brought two jam jars and a step stool out onto the back porch, and she had set the jars on the railing and told Kit to be patient, to be quiet, to let the moon come to the jars instead of chasing it. They had sat there for an hour without speaking, watching the sky, and then her grandmother had held a jar up to the porch light and there it was — a shimmer at the bottom of the glass, pale and silver, like a fish in a dark pond. Kit had laughed so hard she nearly knocked the jar off the railing, and her grandmother had caught it with one hand and said, "Careful. That's somebody's lost light. It took a long time to get here."
Her grandmother had labeled that first jar in her own careful handwriting — JUNE 12, FIRST MOONLIGHT — and she had put it on the shelf above Kit's desk, and every jar after that had gone beside it, year after year, until the shelf was full and Kit had to start a second row. Her grandmother had died in the winter, quietly, in her sleep, and the last thing she had said to Kit, the night before, was, "Keep the jars full, love. And if the moon ever looks wrong, you tell someone. You don't carry it alone."
Kit had never told anyone. There had never been anything to tell. Until tonight.
Her grandmother had been dead for three years. Kit still kept the jars. She still kept the buttons. She still kept everything.
Tonight, Kit climbed down from the roof and went to her room, and she did what she did every night: she counted the jars. Twenty-six. She checked the lids. All tight. She held the newest one up to the light of her desk lamp, and the shimmer inside it moved, slow and silver, like something breathing.
And then she saw it. The jar from last night — the one she had set out on the windowsill at dusk, the one that should have been full by morning — was empty.
Not half full. Not a little bit full. Empty. The glass was clear. The moonlight was gone.
Kit picked up the jar and turned it over in her hands. The lid was still on tight. She unscrewed it and put her nose to the rim. It smelled like nothing. Like cold air. Like a room nobody had been in for a long time.
"That's not possible either," Kit said.
She put the jar down. She went to the window. She looked up at the moon, which was still too big for her thumbnail, and she thought about the fact that in ten years, the moon had never been wrong before, and neither had the jars.
And then she saw the button.
It was sitting on her windowsill, right where the empty jar had been. A small, round, dark blue button, with four holes, and a thread still caught in one of them — a thread that was warm, like it had just been cut. Kit had never seen this button before. It was not one of her forty-three. She would have remembered a dark blue button. She remembered all of them.
She picked it up. It was warm. Not from the sun — the sun had set hours ago. Warm like a hand had just been holding it. Warm like someone had just been here, standing at her window, in the dark, while she was on the roof measuring the moon.
Kit looked out the window, down at the street, at the empty sidewalk, at the dark houses, at the town of Graywater sleeping under a moon that was too big. There was no one there. There was no one anywhere. But the button was warm, and the jar was empty, and the moon did not fit behind her thumbnail.
She closed her hand around the button. She put it in the pocket of her pajama pants. It was the first time she had ever put a button in her pocket instead of in the tin box. It felt different. It felt like the beginning of something.
"Okay," Kit said to the moon. "I see you."
The moon did not answer. The moon never answered. But as Kit stood there at the window, with the warm button in her pocket and the empty jar on her desk, she had the strangest feeling — the feeling that the moon was looking back at her, and that it had been waiting for her to notice.
She went to bed. She did not sleep. She lay there in the dark, listening to the house settle, listening to her mother snoring softly in the next room, listening to the moth still banging itself against the porch light, and she thought about the moon, and the button, and the empty jar.
At 3:00 in the morning, she got up. She went to the window. She held her arm straight out. She closed one eye. She covered the moon with her thumbnail.
It still didn't fit. But now, it was worse. The moon was smaller than it had been at eleven o'clock. It barely covered half her thumbnail, pale and thin and impossible, like it was shrinking. Like it was going out. Like it was disappearing, slowly, one night at a time.
Kit lowered her arm. Her hand was shaking. She looked down at her pocket, where the button was, and she thought about her grandmother, and the tin box, and the twenty-six jars of moonlight on the shelf above her desk.
"Somebody is taking the moon," Kit whispered. "And I think they're leaving the pieces behind."
She didn't know how she knew. She just knew. The way she always knew when something was lost, and where it was, and who it belonged to. It was the one thing she had never been wrong about.
She opened her hand. The button was still warm. It was warmer than it had been before, like it was heating up. Like it was trying to tell her something.
Kit put the button back in her pocket. She went to her desk. She took down the oldest jar of moonlight — the one from the first night her grandmother had taught her how to catch it — and she held it up to the window, to the too-big moon, and she watched the shimmer inside it move, slow and silver.
And then the shimmer stopped moving. It went still. It went dark. And for one terrible second, the jar was as empty as the one from last night.
Then the shimmer came back, all at once, brighter than before, like it had been holding its breath.
Kit put the jar back on the shelf. She sat down on her bed. She looked at the moon through the window, and she made a decision — the kind of decision you make at 3:00 in the morning, when you're seventeen and the moon is too big and there's a warm button in your pocket that doesn't belong to you.
Tomorrow, she was going to find out who was taking the moon.
And she was going to get it back.
She fell asleep with the button still in her pocket, and she dreamed of the moon — not the moon in the sky, but a small, pale moon, no bigger than her thumbnail, sitting in the bottom of a jam jar, waiting for someone to let it out.
---