Free Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos

worst thing anyone can do. And then her body jumped, jerked like a person’s body who wakes up from a dream of falling. Again, her mother’s voice was saying, “Oh, Clarey,” tricking Clare into trust and hope, mocking her. There may have been a tiny piece of Clare that knew it wasn’t true, but the rest of her ached, pulsed with the idea of her mother as a bully, of her mother hating her.
    Back in her room, lying on her bed, Clare heard the front door open and shut, and she looked out the window to see her mother setting off across the lawn, her step jaunty, almost dancing. Coatless, her mother swung her long, bare arms as though it were summer, a picnic basket in one hand, a thermos in the other, and entered the woods that separated their house from the house next door.
    By the time she came back, it was late at night; Clare was in a thick, dull sleep, so the huge front door’s slamming was just a thud in her head, muffled—almost no sound at all.
     
     
     
    And because Clare was eleven years old, alone, and in trouble she could not see her way out of, on the fourth day—a Sunday—Clare woke, breathed for a minute or two, got out of bed, and reentered her daily life.
    “First a shower, then breakfast,” she instructed herself firmly, as though she might refuse. As soon as she stepped into the shower, she realized she’d gotten it backward. Her head had been hurting for days, but under the falling water, the headache opened like a rose—bright red, layered, and complicated. The pain beat inside her face, her ears, down the back of her neck. Clare turned off the water and sat down on the edge of the tub, gasping, her ears ringing. Food. She needed food.
    Downstairs in the kitchen, wrapped in her bathrobe, she grabbed the first thing she saw—a banana—wolfed it down, then threw up in the sink. Chocolate milk, next. Better. While she sipped it, she made herself two pieces of toast, buttered all the way to the edges and cut diagonally the way she liked, then sat down and ate with her eyes closed. It was one of those moments when eating is like prayer. Clare gathered her strength. She put her faith in the crunch of bread, in the saltiness of butter on her tongue; she took their goldenness into her body and, afterward, felt that her soul had been restored—at least enough so that she could mount the stairs, take a real shower, and put on her clothes. As she brushed her teeth, she examined her reflection in the mirror.
    “Same old Clare. Same old face,” she told her face, reassuringly, and it was almost true. Skin pulled a little tightly across her cheekbones, faint purplish smudges under her eyes, but basically the same as ever.
    “Same old Clare,” she said again and almost laughed with relief.
    Clare put a notebook, two pencils, and, for company, a copy of Anne of Avonlea (the Anne book with the fewest sad events in it, apart from Anne of Ingleside , which Clare despised for its silliness and overuse of points of ellipsis and which she believed in her heart had not been written by L. M. Montgomery at all) into her backpack. Then she went downstairs to the library, where, for reasons unknown to Clare, her mother had started sleeping at night.
    She was there now, on the sofa, covered with the brown, fringed cashmere blanket they’d had forever, and curled in toward the sofa’s high back. Clare was glad she couldn’t see her face, but she stood looking at her mother’s hair falling over the edge of the sofa, honey-colored and gleaming like a waterfall even in the semidarkness. That was how her mother was, catching all the available light in any room and making it part of her. Grief was there suddenly, all around Clare; the room was filling up with it, so she held her breath like a person underwater and turned her attention to what she’d come for: her mother’s purse. It sat neatly on a bookshelf. Clare removed the wallet and took out her mother’s ATM card and then, without even a glance at the