Free Pointe by Brandy Colbert Page B

change anything. Not the fact that his face is deceptively friendly or that his smirk is playful. Almost cute. It doesn’t matter that he looks young and normal and maybe even charming.
    His eyes peer at me, like he’s alone with me in this room. The twist of his lips is so bold.
    His
eyes.
    I leave the
Tribune
lying on the kitchen floor, pages tented haphazardly over the tiles. I take the stairs two at a time until I reach my room and flip open my laptop, type Chris Fenner’s name into a search engine. I don’t know how my hands stop shaking long enough to pull up the associated images.
    His hair is longer now, his face a bit older, his jaw concealed by the beard.
    But it’s him.
    He told me he was eighteen. But if he’s thirty now and we were together four years ago—that means he was twenty-six then.
    My boyfriend was Trent and Trent is Chris and Chris is the person they think kidnapped Donovan.
    Abducted him. Drove him across the country.
Violated
him.
    But would he do that?
Could
he do that? He was my boyfriend, but Donovan knew him, too.
    They were
friends.
    Or maybe they were more. Donovan had a good family and a nice house and friends who cared about him. I don’t think he’d have run away to live with Chris if he didn’t want to
be
with him.
    I squeeze my eyes shut, try to think about this with a clear head, but it doesn’t help. Nothing can help. There are only two options, and I have to find out the truth as soon as possible.
    Because either Donovan ran away with my boyfriend after he abandoned me, or I was charmed by the scum of the fucking earth.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    MY ROOM AT JUNIPER HILL WAS PAINTED THE COLOR OF CELERY, which is funny because that was a safe food for my roommate, Vivian. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at the walls almost dreamily, like she was fantasizing about her old meals of celery and rice cakes and apple slices.
    Juniper Hill accepts only a few patients at a time and costs a lot of money. I didn’t know this when my parents dropped me off, and the counselors and Dr. Bender wouldn’t discuss money with me. Once I came home, I snooped until I found the bills and felt bad that they’d spent so much on me. Especially when all I’d needed was some time. It’s not like things were easy back then. Trent stopped showing up to his job, stopped answering his phone, stopped loving me. Then Donovan disappeared.
    They said I was a restrictor—that I was trying to lose weight by severely limiting my diet. All I know is that Donovan consumed all of my thoughts and I lost my appetite each time I imagined him dead in a ditch somewhere—or being abused. And I thought about those things every single day. Multiple times a day.
    And Trent. Was he with another girl, telling her all the things she wanted to hear? His favorite food to steal from the convenience store was packaged snack cakes, the sticky, chocolate kind loaded with preservatives. We’d shared them as we sat on the hood of his car and the taste reminded me of his kisses, so I couldn’t eat them after he left. Then chocolate was banned altogether because it reminded me of him, too. Same with foods that were baked or sweet or wrapped in cellophane. Soon I could hardly eat anything without thinking of him, and by the time Marisa forced me onto her office scale in front of my parents, I was finally down to double digits and that much freer of Trent.
    I was thinner than anyone else in the junior company. Even Ruthie, who’d been more or less the same size as me since we were toddlers. I was probably thinner than every student in my class at school, too. Sometimes I caught the other girls glancing at me too long when we changed before gym class, and I wondered if they knew how marvelous it felt to truly take control of your body, to possess the kind of daily discipline most people won’t know in a lifetime.
    But Mom and Dad trusted a bunch of Middle America hippies