Free All Fall Down by Megan Hart Page A

Sunny knew were wrong—her craving for a meal from McDonald’s, for one thing. How once she’d taken the money from selling her pamphlets, only two dollars, and spent it on a cheeseburger. It had been the best thing she’d ever tasted, but she’d been so nervous about eating it she’d thrown it up almost at once. Maybe her mother knew about Sunny’s hatred of John Second. Her mother loved John Second. Maybe she’d somehow known how Sunny had dreamed so many times of what might have happened if she’d gone with Josiah when he left the family.
    Maybe it was something else so dark and rotted that Sunny couldn’t even imagine it.
    All dead in cult suicide.
    That’s what the television said. All dead. Suicide. They made it sound so nasty, something terrible and shameful. They didn’t know anything about the family, she thought as the buildings outside the car window became empty fields, then trees. This was the road she’d stumbled down so early in the morning. Or maybe it was another one, so many places in this world, so many things to see, and she was still alive to see them all.
    Josiah had been on the TV screen. A woman had been shoving a microphone toward him. His familiar face had been more than serious, grim even, but he’d looked out from the TV as though he could see Sunny right through it.
    “Sunny, are you… We’ll be home soon. We’ll get you home.”
    Liesel wasn’t taking Sunny home. Home was Sanctuary. Liesel was taking Sunny and Bliss back to the big yellow house at the top of the steep driveway, where she would feed Sunny’s children junk and sedate them with television. Where Sunny would sleep in a bed so soft it had to be made of sin.
    Sunny curled her fingers against her palms, feeling the sting of her nails in her skin. Pressed harder. Small pain, getting deeper. She pressed so hard her fists shook, and she tucked them between her knees to keep them still.
    Sunny thought again of Bethany, the things she’d shouted about the world. Sunny had made her own lists over the years of wordly things she wanted to taste or touch or smell or try. She’d drifted to sleep at night imagining the tug of denim between her legs instead of her own flesh pressing together beneath a long skirt. She’d lifted her hair from her neck, thinking how it would feel to cut it all off. Pinched her cheeks and bit her lips to take the place of cosmetics.
    That was why she’d been left behind.
    “We’re here,” Liesel said as she pulled into the garage. She twisted in her seat to look at Sunny with wide eyes. Her mouth had thinned with a grief Sunny didn’t understand. Liesel hadn’t known any of the family. “We’re home.”
    Liesel was waiting for something, though Sunny didn’t know what it was. More tears, probably. Shame, prickling, heated her face at the memory of how she’d lost control in that store. Mama would’ve been ashamed.
    From the backseat, Bliss let out a cry, so Sunny had the excuse of focusing on that. She got out of the car to unbuckle her daughter from the complicated straps of the seat they’d forced her to use. She pressed her face to Bliss’s sweet baby head, nuzzling the fine hairs before cradling her. Liesel was still staring as Sunny lifted Bliss out of the car.
    “I’ll be okay.” Faced with Liesel’s obvious anxiety it seemed the thing to say, and the words tripped easily enough from Sunny’s lips. “We’ll all be okay.”
    Liesel nodded. “Yes. You will.”
    They were both lying. Her mother had sent her out into the world, and that had been bad enough. Sunny’d been found unfit, left behind, abandoned. That was worse. But the worst part of all was not that she’d failed to make her vessel pure enough to leave with the others. The worst part was knowing she’d been given what she’d always secretly hoped for, she was out here in the world, and nobody was coming to take her home.
    Nobody ever would.

Chapter 9
    A t the sight of his mother, Happy jumped down from the