Free Heartstopper by Joy Fielding Page B

about this.”
    “You’re starting to scare me.”
    “What have you got to be scared about? Even a maniac would have more sense than to mess with you.”
    Tears instantly filled Delilah’s eyes. So now she was so repulsive even a maniac wouldn’t touch her. She raised the can of Coke to her lips, didn’t lower it again until the can was empty. By then her tears were gone. She stood up. “Would you like me to put on the TV, Grandma?”
    “No. There’s never anything on the damn thing. Maybe you should go out again. Have another look around.”
    “I’m tired, Grandma. Besides, Mom’s probably with Dr. Crosbie.”
    “No. He has his kids tonight. You don’t think she’s been in an accident, do you? Your mother’s not the best driver in the world, you know.”
    “I think someone would have phoned.” Where
was
her mother? Why
hadn’t
she called? “Why don’t you get ready for bed, Grandma. It’s late and—”
    “—and your mother’s not home. And a young girl is missing. And how am I supposed to get any sleep until I know she’s safe and sound?”
    “You’ll make yourself sick,” Delilah warned, although she didn’t believe it. Her grandmother was a force of nature. She was indestructible. She’d survive Armageddon. Grandma Rose and the cockroaches. Sounded like a good name for a band.
    “You can get ready for bed, if you’d like,” her grandmother was saying. “You don’t have to keep me company.”
    “I don’t want to leave you alone.”
    “That’s all right. I’m used to it.”
    Delilah rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as she approached the sofa and leaned forward to give her grandmother a kiss on her dry, flaky forehead. Was it her imagination or did her grandmother flinch at her touch? “Sheriff Weber said to call him if Mom wasn’t back by midnight,” she said as she walked from the room.
    “Midnight?” Rose repeated, as if it were a four-letter word.
“Midnight?”
    The angry epithet followed Delilah up the stairs and bounced off the pale pink walls of her bedroom. She sank down on her narrow twin bed, the white-and-pink-flowered comforter billowing up around her wide hips. Pink broadloom covered the floor; pink-and-white-checkered curtains framed the window overlooking the street; a pink lampshade sat atop a delicate white lamp that itself sat atop a white dresser, the dresser hand-painted with pink flowers. It was the ultimate little girl’s room, Delilah thought. No cliché had been forgotten or left out. And it didn’t matter that its occupant had long ago outgrown the doll-size bed and lost interest in the plush, stuffed animals lining the bookshelves. What mattered was the dream of feminine perfection. What mattered was the ideal.
    Except Delilah was as far from the ideal of feminine perfection as a girl could get. Even as a child, she’d fallen short of the room’s expectations. While she’d weighed only a puny six pounds at birth and was a pretty average-sizedtoddler, her weight had begun to climb in the years following her mother’s second divorce and had continued its steady ascent, reaching a peak of 163 pounds over the Christmas holidays. While, at five feet five inches tall, this was more than enough to label her as heavy, it was hardly enough to qualify as obese.
    She glanced toward the window, her gaze falling to the computer on her desk. Her classmates regularly posted such horrible things about her on their websites. They called her names and made vile, lewd comments about her sexuality. Joey Balfour was the worst. And Greg Watt. To think she’d once thought Greg kind of sweet. One day, when she’d worn a new blouse to class, he’d actually told her she looked nice. That simple statement had kept her afloat for weeks. She’d replayed the compliment endlessly in her head—
You look nice. You look nice. You look nice
—until eventually the words became warped and indistinct, like a CD that’s been played too many times. At any rate, those words had