What she should have done, she realized belatedly, was count the number of seconds that her mother was gone. From the moment she had walked out that door and gotten into her car and driven away, Emily should have started counting. Then maybe she’d know if a few minutes had passed or not.

“You stay here,” her mother had said in a terrible hurry when they drove up to the cabin. “Mommy has to go away, but I’ll be back in a few minutes. You stay here and don’t go anywhere, OK?” Emily had reached her skinny, pale arms up to her mother for a good-bye kiss and hug, but her mother had simply kissed her own hand and then placed it on Emily’s head. Then she walked out, got in the car, and drove away.

And now Emily was stuck here, waiting for a few minutes to be up so that her mommy would return and take her home.

When Emily got bored of counting things she started singing to herself. She sang songs she had learned in school about stars and ballgames, but she stopped when she got to the song about the spider. During that song, when she sang the bit about the rain, she realized that she had to go to the bathroom. She stopped singing and looked around the cabin even though she already knew it by heart and knew there was no bathroom. She looked longingly out the windows at the bushes next to where her mommy had parked the car, but she was afraid to leave the cabin. Her mommy had said very specifically to stay here and not to go anywhere. Until she came back Emily would not leave the cabin.

Still, she had to go. She tried to ignore it, but soon she was doing the pee-pee dance, crossing her legs and jumping up and down, holding herself to keep from peeing in her underwear. Her mommy had told her not to have that soda before they left, but Emily had been so thirsty and the soda was so cold. Her mommy told her not to, but she did. She was always doing things her mommy told her not to. Then mommy would yell and Emily would cry. Then mommy would cry and lock herself in her bedroom for the rest of the night.

This morning all her mommy had said was that Emily should get dressed and get in the car. Before they left Emily had begged for a drink, just something to quench her parched throat. Her mommy had said no, said they were going on a long car trip and Emily would only have to go to the bathroom and they had no time to stop anywhere. But Emily drank it anyway. And now she had to pee beyond anything she ever knew.

She saw a small pot on the stove. She knew it was bad, she knew it was gross, but she was running out of ways to distract herself. She reached up on her toes and with the very tips of her fingers she pulled the pot down. She put it on the floor, pulled down her underwear, and squatted over the pot. The whole time she did this Emily kept her eyes on the window, certain that her mother would choose this moment to drive up and walk in and catch her. Emily thought her mother had always had awful timing like that, always waiting until Emily was right in the middle of doing something wrong to catch her.

Emily knew she wasn’t a bad girl, but sometimes she wondered if her mommy knew that, too.

When she was done she pulled up her underwear even though she hadn’t wiped herself. She would take a bath as soon as she got home and clean herself extra well down there. Meanwhile the pot smelled and Emily wondered what to do about it. She thought herself particularly clever when she came up with the idea to drag a chair to one of the windows, climb up onto it with the pot, and dump the disgusting contents outside. Emily looked for her mother’s car in the distance, but the cabin seemed to be in the middle of a woods and all Emily could see were trees and bushes.

Emily hadn’t realized how dark it was getting outside until she saw that the clouds were turning pink. The daylight had just slipped by her. Her heart did an extra-hard beat and her stomach began to hurt when she saw the clouds. They were pink and orange, which meant it would be night soon. Night, and still no mommy to come pick her up.

She tried to control her fear by singing to herself again. She sang the song about the little star again, but that just reminded her that it was growing darker by the minute. Soon Emily could hear the “Who? Who?” of owls outside, and every once in a while a rustle in the bushes. Once, a black bird had flown into the cabin and sat on the stove staring at Emily. Not moving. Not making any noise at all, just staring at her. So Emily just stared back at it, too petrified to move, and it finally flew away.

The darker it got the more scared Emily became. There was a box of matches on top of the pile of split logs next to the stove, but her mother had told her to never touch matches. Emily so desperately wanted her mommy to come back and take her home that she ignored the matches. Instead she just sat in the middle of the cabin watching the shadows grow long around her until they filled up the cabin. Only a little light came in through a window next to the stove, light from the moon and from the stars that weren’t blocked out by the trees.

A small part of her said she should just ignore her mother and leave the cabin, but in Emily’s mind she saw this as a test. She was also more scared of leaving the cabin and venturing out into the woods alone, at night, than she was of staying inside. Her mommy was just testing her to see if she was really as bad as she seemed to be. All those times she had been bad had made her mommy cry and lock herself in her room. There was no way Emily was going to be caught this time. When her mommy came to pick her up, she’d be right there in the cabin, waiting, just like her mommy had told her to.