Then, as I’m watching the two of us, Mr. Riley does something I’m not expecting. He leans across the table and closes his hand over mine. Just from looking, I can tell that he’s holding on tight. I don’t try to pull away.
“Liz. Elizabeth. I care about you, but I can’t do this. You can’t come here anymore. I can’t risk my career.” He shakes his head firmly. “You need to talk to a trained professional. Someone who can really help you. I’m only your track coach, Liz.”
I blink at him through teary eyes. “But you’re the only person I have to talk to. You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“I know that. You know that. But other people might not see it that way.” He pauses. “What if I set up an appointment for you? I could ask around. What if I do some research and find a therapist who has experience with teenagers? I can find you someone good, I promise.”
I stare at my hands. I don’t say anything. I just shake my head.
We both stand up. Mr. Riley hands Hope the plastic spoon, and she bangs it against the high chair with glee. He puts his hand on my back and nudges me toward the door.
I look around the kitchen again. It’s so warm, so calm, so safe. I put my head down, resting it on his shoulder. “I don’t want to leave.” And I start to cry hard. My nose runs onto his shirt. He’s right; I look like shit. I don’t think that I care.
He folds his arms around me in a hug. I imagine his wife walking into the room right now, and what she might think if she saw us this way. But despite how it might look, I know for a fact that it’s nothing; there’s no reason for her to be upset with either of us. It’s just warmth and comfort. It’s innocent. After seeing the pictures of myself earlier, it occurs to me that this might have been the only innocent thing I had left.
He pulls back slightly, brushes a strand of hair from my sweaty forehead. “You’re miles from home. Do you want a ride? I could put Hope in her car seat. It’s no problem.”
“I’ll be fine.” He is pulling away, nervously glancing out the window, probably terrified that a neighbor will see me in his arms.
As I’m walking through his kitchen door, gearing up to start running again, he says, “I don’t care what you say. I’m going to find you someone to talk to.”
I don’t answer; I act like I didn’t even hear him.
Mr. Riley stares at his daughter. He shakes his head. Under his breath, he murmurs, “All right, then. I’ll see you at school, Liz.”
My family is awake when I arrive at home. My parents are used to my early-morning runs; they wave to me from the kitchen as I make my way upstairs.
Josie is in my bedroom. She’s at my computer. She’s looking at the pictures. Specifically, she’s staring at a shot of me and Vince, lying in bed together. Vince is winking at the camera, grinning widely. His teeth are yellow and crooked. No plans to visit Topher’s dad and get them fixed anytime soon, I’m sure.
Josie and I stare at each other.
“You’ve been gone for hours,” she says. Her tone is almost accusing. “I heard you leave. It was barely five in the morning.”
“And you came into my room? You thought it was just fine to go through my computer?” There’s an edge of irritation to my voice that strikes me as unusual. I don’t remember Josie and me ever fighting.
She shrugs. “Yes, I came into your room. What does it matter, Liz? Who is this guy?”
“Take a guess.”
She lets out a long, shaky sigh. “The mechanic.”
“He knows everything, Josie. He’s an asshole, but he’s not stupid.” I tug my hair free from its ponytail. “I had to do what he wanted.”
All the color drains from her face. “So you went along with it?”
“Yes. He told me he’d go to the police if I didn’t mess around with him. The pictures are just insurance.”
“So … he’s blackmailing you.”
I nod. I start to cry again.
But the information almost seems to reassure Josie. “So that’s it? You did what he asked?”
“I didn’t sleep with him. I’d rather go to jail than have sex with someone like that.”
“He didn’t try to force you?”
I shake my head. “Not yet. He said … he said it turns him on to know that I’m a virgin.” I swallow hard. “But it’s only a matter of time, Josie. He’s going to want sex. Then what will I do?”
Again, she seems oddly unconcerned. “He can’t force you to do anything. It would be rape.”
“It already feels like rape.”
She takes another deep breath. A corner of one of her false eyelashes has come loose; it dangles awkwardly in her line of vision. Her hair is in a set of Velcro rollers. She is calm, face perfectly made up aside from the crooked eyelash, the portrait of relief. “So you did it. You let him take the pictures. It’s over. Just ignore him from now on. We don’t have to worry anymore.”
I reach past her to switch off the monitor. “It isn’t over, Josie. It’s never going to be over. He’ll want more and more from me.”
My stepsister closes her hand over my wrist. She doesn’t blink as she speaks. “Liz. Listen to me right now. We aren’t going to tell anyone. You understand that, don’t you?”
Watching us, I would do anything—anything—to know exactly what she’s talking about. What am I not going to tell anyone? What do we know that’s such a secret?
She and I stare at each other in a silence that seems to go on forever. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen myself at a total loss for words around Josie.
Once I return to the present, I fill Alex in on everything I’ve seen.
“What do you think it means?” he asks, interested.
“I don’t know.” I close my eyes. “I wish I did.”
When I look at him again, his gaze is serious. “I think you will. I think it’s just going to take some time. Be patient, Liz.” And then he looks around, staring at the clear, sunny sky. “It’s a beautiful day,” he says, obviously trying to change the subject.
He’s right; it is a beautiful day. It’s late afternoon. We could go wherever we want with as little as a blink and a thought, but instead Alex and I walk through town together, taking in the sights, trying to enjoy ourselves even as we’re looking for Richie. If we didn’t have more pressing matters to attend to, I almost feel like we could have just been two ordinary people, relaxing and appreciating the fall. Alex and I have seemed to get more comfortable around each other in the past week or so, despite the fact that so many unanswered questions about my life have started to surface.
I feel certain now that I know where Richie is, and I’m also sure he’ll still be there when we arrive. He doesn’t have anyplace else to go. Still, walking along with Alex is almost nice; we’re moving slowly enough that my feet aren’t in intolerable pain.
We pass the Noank Creamery, where they sell homemade ice cream and fudge. Tourists love the place. It isn’t even a weekend, and there’s a line going all the way out the door.
Alex closes his eyes, smiling. “I wish I could eat,” he says. “I used to love ice cream.”
I stare in the window. There are families gathered around the small metal tables, children with ice cream smeared on their faces, parents clutching piles of napkins to clean up messes. Everybody looks so happy to be eating what’s obviously terrible for them.
“It’s poison,” I tell him. “I never ate there.”
He stops in his tracks. “Shut up. You lived here your whole life, and you never ate at the Creamery?”
“Well, my mom didn’t eat dairy, so that pretty much meant I didn’t eat it, either. And I didn’t eat sweets. They aren’t good for you. They make you fat.”
“Liz, come on. The way you used to run, you could eat a gallon of cookie dough and not gain weight.”
“It’s not about that, exactly.”
“Then what is it about?”
I press my lips together. I can feel my spine stiffen, my quads engaging as I stand completely still, gazing at
the smiling customers inside. “It’s about being in control.”
He shakes his head. “That’s silly. You’re so skinny.” And he pauses. “You ate birthday cake the night you died, didn’t you?”
“One bite.” As the words leave my mouth, I can almost taste it: the moist vanilla cake and creamy chocolate icing. I can feel a long-lost sense of power, of discipline, snap into place from somewhere within me. “Just a taste.”
He reaches toward me. He presses his palm against my flat belly, pinching the flesh. There’s no fat to grasp, only muscle and organs and skin. “A lot of good all that working out did you, dead girl.”
I close my hand over his arm. He barely flinches. “You want to know why I’m like this?” Even as I’m saying the words, it’s like I’m realizing their truth for the first time. Aha. Of course.
“Sure,” he says. “Why are you like this, Liz?”
I squeeze his arm more tightly. I don’t have to say anything; he knows the drill by now.
We both close our eyes.
We’re standing in the kitchen at my house. Everything is the same—the layout, the view of the Sound from the back window, the black-and-white-checkered porcelain tile—but everything is different. My mother stands in front of the open fridge in workout shorts and a sports bra. I can see all of her ribs. Her skin is pasty and white. She is in her bare feet, tapping her manicured fingernails against the fridge door.
“I forgot how this kitchen used to look,” I tell Alex. “It’s so different now.”
He looks around. “You aren’t kidding. Your mom and Nicole—they’re not very alike, are they? Nicole is—what? A flaky bombshell? And your mom”—his gaze flickers to her back, her torso, the visible outline of her spine—“what was she like?”
I think about it for a minute. Even when I was alive, sometimes it was hard to remember the good things about my mother; she was sick for so much of my childhood. But I hate admitting to Alex that I don’t have an abundance of happy memories of her. It doesn’t change the fact that I miss her. It doesn’t make me want to see her any less now. She’s my mother.
“Well,” I begin, “she was different, that’s for sure. She kept the house very neat, and everything was sleek and modern and clean all the time.” And I look around the kitchen. The walls are a pale, clean beige. All of the appliances are stainless steel: dishwasher, wine cooler, refrigerator, oven, microwave. There isn’t a dish in sight. There is no food on the countertops; no open cereal boxes, no bananas resting gently in a basket, no tortilla chips or soda bottles.
Now there’s always food strewn everywhere in the kitchen; Nicole likes to eat. And she redecorated after my mother died, too. Almost as soon as she moved in, the old appliances were gone, replaced by white ones. Nicole repainted the walls a light green and stenciled them herself with clusters of yellow lilies, their fragile green leaves and stems drawn so carefully by hand that they almost looked real. She hung photos on the fridge. I hate to admit it—it feels like a betrayal of my mother—but in plenty of ways, Nicole made it feel more like a home.
Except that it was a home when my mom was alive. It was just a different kind of home.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table. There’s a big, frosted glass bowl in the center. It is filled with shiny, lovely, artificial fruit: plastic apples, oranges, pears, and nectarines. Look—but don’t taste.
“I’m nine,” I murmur, staring at myself. I look so much like my mother: we are both wearing our long blond hair in two braids that fall almost to our waists; we are both thin, although my mother is frightfully so, whereas I’m just a skinny kid. We have the same eyes, the same nose, the same small ears, the same tiny attached earlobes. There’s no mistaking that I belong to her.
“How do you know how old you are?”
I don’t want to say it out loud. But I do. “Because my mother is going to die in a few weeks. I can tell.”
“Oh.” He swallows. “I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. “It’s all right. Just—let’s watch, okay?”
My mother reaches into the produce drawer of the fridge and emerges holding a big yellow apple in her bony hand. She stares at it for a moment, considering it.
“I’m hungry, Mommy,” I say to her.
“You just ate an hour and a half ago at Richie’s house,” she murmurs. “Your tummy is still full, honey.”
“But I’m hungry.”
She turns to me, apple in hand. “Okay. You want a snack?”
I nod.
She holds out the apple. “We can share. How about that?”
“Can I have mine with peanut butter?”
My mom’s eyes are a deep blue, the exact same shade as mine. Even in workout clothes—she probably just finished exercising—she’s wearing a full face of makeup. Her lipstick has been freshly applied.
I’m in a yellow-and-white plaid outfit, a matching top and skirt that seem overdressed for a playdate with Richie. And I notice that I’m wearing a little bit of makeup, too. It’s subtle, but it’s there: some blush, a little bit of silver eyeshadow, and lip gloss the same shade as my mom’s. It has all been applied carefully, with a deft, expert hand. It’s undoubtedly my mother’s work. She never saw anything wrong with letting me wear makeup, even at age nine.
“Are you sure you want peanut butter?” she asks quietly.
“Yes. Why not?”
“Peanut butter has a hundred calories per tablespoon. Eight grams of fat,” she says. “Now, Liz”—she leans toward me—“do you know how many calories there are in a gram of fat?”
I nod. “Nine calories in every gram,” I say. I’m reciting the fact from memory. Even at age nine, my mother is training me. Does she realize how sick she is? Does she even care? I want to scream at her, to shout for her to eat, to live, but I know it won’t make any difference. In a handful of weeks, she’ll be gone.
“So if there are eight grams of fat, and nine calories in every gram,” she prods, “how many calories are from fat?”
I bite my glossy lip as I’m thinking about it. “I don’t know.”
My mother’s face is solemn. “You don’t know how to multiply eight times nine, Elizabeth?”
I shake my head no.
“Seventy-two,” she pronounces. “That’s almost seventy-five percent fat. And how much of our diets should be made up from fat?”
I bite my bottom lip harder and stare at the tabletop. I look deeply embarrassed. “I don’t remember.”
“You do remember,” she says gently. “What did I teach you?”
“Thirty percent,” I say to Alex.
At almost the same time, my younger self whispers, “Thirty percent.”
“That’s right.” My mother smiles. “So do you still want peanut butter?”
I shake my head. I don’t look at her.
“I hate peanut butter,” I tell Alex.
“No wonder,” he says. “God, this is awful.”
“That’s my mom. She was always like this.”
We watch as my mother reaches, on her tiptoes, into the upper corner of a cabinet. She removes a small digital food scale. She weighs the apple. Then she takes it off the scale, cuts it in half, and weighs each half individually.
Before she sits down at the table, she reaches into another cabinet—this one full of prescription bottles and over-the-counter pill packets—and takes out a box of nondrowsy cold medicine. She presses eight tablets from their blistered pouches. She stares at them in her hand. They are small and red. There are so many of them; it seems like an impossibly large number of pills for someone her size to take. But she does it anyway, putting all of them in her mouth at once, swallowing them with a single gulp of water.
My nine-year-old self watches her do all of this as I wait, patiently, for her to hand over my half of the apple. When she finally sits down across from me at the table, she gives me a big smile. “Here you go,” she says, handing it to me.
“Thank you.” I stare at it. But I don’t take a bite.
“Yes?”
“Why do you weigh all your food?”
My mom stares at her own half of the apple. She takes the question seriously. She appears to think about it for a long time.
Finally, she says, “Liz, when you become a grown-up, life can get very complicated. Things happen all around you that you have no control over. You can’t control what happens to the people you love. You can’t control every part of your life. But you can control pieces of it. Tiny pieces. And sometimes, when everything else feels like it’s so much bigger than you, so much more than you could possibly manage on your own, it feels good to know that there’s something—even if it’s very small—that you can control completely.” She peers at me. “Do you understand what I mean?”
I nod. “I think so, yes.”
“Good. It’s a good lesson to know.” And she smiles again.
“She’s sick,” I murmur. “I knew she was sick, but my God. This is …”
“It’s terrible,” Alex finishes.
I look at him. I attempt a smile. “Control,” I say. “It’s like I was just telling you.”
We both stare at my mother and me, eating our apple in silence, the only sound coming from our jaws working the flesh of the fruit.
“Want to go?” he offers.
I nod. “Okay.”
Alex squeezes my shoulder with his cool hand, closing his eyes.
Back in the present, we keep walking. We’re quiet, the silence a tad awkward; I know we’re both thinking about what we’ve just seen together. We were strolling before, but now I walk with a purpose, more quickly, every step in my boots a tiny hell, to the end of the main drag and past all of the tourist traps—people love kitschy stuff from quaint New England towns—until we reach a cluster of newer, smaller homes behind the Baptist Church.
School is out for the day. Mr. Riley’s car is in his driveway. The lights are on in his house. And Richie is in his living room, rolling a ball back and forth across the hardwood floor with Hope.
“How did you know he’d be here?” Alex sits on the floor beside Richie.
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