Ginger had always been good at hiding things.

She could hide a piece of candy in her dresser drawer and forget about it for weeks. She could hide under a pile of blankets so completely that only the tips of her toes showed. And once, she had hidden a frog in her room for almost an entire afternoon. That had not gone particularly well.

But lately, Ginger had been hiding something much harder to hide. Her tears.

She wasn't exactly sure when it had started. There had been a disappointment. Then another.

Someone she cared about had hurt her feelings. Something she had hoped would happen hadn't. And there were other things too—little things she couldn't quite explain.

None of them seemed big enough to cry about. At least, that's what Ginger told herself. So she didn't.

Whenever she felt the sting behind her eyes, she blinked very fast. Whenever her throat tightened, she swallowed hard. And whenever someone asked, "Are you all right?" Ginger always said the same thing. "I'm fine."

She had become very good at saying it.

One rainy afternoon, Ginger was in her bedroom trying very hard not to think about anything at all. She straightened the books on her shelf. Then she straightened them again. She put her shoes in a neat row beneath her bed. She sharpened three pencils that didn't need sharpening. She picked up a shirt from the floor, folded it, decided she had folded it badly, and folded it again.

Keeping busy helped. At least for a while.

Then Ginger noticed something on her dresser. It was a little box where she kept things that mattered to her. Inside were treasures that wouldn't have looked like treasures to anyone else. A button. A birthday ribbon. A tiny seashell. A photograph. A note someone had once written to her.

Ginger opened the box. She shouldn't have. Because there, underneath the seashell, was something that reminded her of the person who had hurt her feelings.

"Oh," Ginger whispered. She quickly closed the lid.

Her eyes began to sting. "No." She stood up.

She would find something else to do. Maybe she'd sweep the floor. Or organize her crayons. Or count all the books on her shelf.

Anything. But one tear escaped. Ginger wiped it away. Then another came. She wiped that one away too.

"Stop," she whispered. A third tear slipped down her cheek.

Ginger became angry. Not at anyone else. At herself. "I said stop."

But the tears didn't listen. Suddenly Ginger was crying so hard she couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to.

She sat down on the floor beside her bed and pulled her knees against her chest.

She cried about the thing that had hurt her feelings. Then she cried about the thing she'd hoped for that hadn't happened. She cried about being disappointed. She cried about being angry. She cried about missing someone. And then she cried about things she didn't even know she was sad about until the tears came.

For a while, Ginger simply sat there. Nobody told her to stop. Nobody told her she was being silly. Nobody told her that whatever had happened wasn't worth crying over.

So Ginger cried until she didn't need to anymore.

Finally, she wiped her face on the bottom of her T-shirt Her eyes felt puffy. Her nose was stuffy. Her hair was stuck to one cheek.

She probably looked ridiculous. But strangely, she felt better.

Not happy. Nothing had magically changed. The disappointment was still a disappointment. The hurt still hurt. And the thing she wished had happened still hadn't happened. But something inside her felt different.

Ginger looked at the little box on her dresser.

For days she had been trying to push all those feelings into some invisible corner inside herself. Apparently, they hadn't disappeared. They had simply been waiting.

Ginger climbed onto her bed and lay back against her pillow. Maybe crying wasn't what happened when you weren't brave enough. Maybe sometimes crying was what happened when you had been brave for too long.

She thought about all the times she had said, "I'm fine," when she wasn't. Ginger decided she didn't have to do that anymore.

She didn't have to tell everyone everything. Some feelings could still belong only to her. But she didn't have to hide them from herself.