Free Sacred by Elana K. Arnold Page A

Isthmus, though when I pressed him he didn’t seem to want to say any more. I mean, can you imagine? As if Avalon isn’t safe enough! I guess when you’re coming from a big city like they did, you start to see danger on every corner.”
    “Where are they from?” Even though I wanted to believe that I didn’t care anything about Will or his history, my curiosity compelled me to ask.
    “Connecticut. Professor Cohen has tenure at Yale. His wife worked for the university too, before she died.”
    As soon as death entered the conversation, Daddy’s eyes, and mine too, shot across the table at Mom. She had been moving her food around her plate like a child who’d spoiled her appetite with too much candy. At the mention of death her fork stopped moving, just for one long beat, before it continued to stir the food.
    After a moment, she cleared her throat and set downher fork. She blotted her lips with her napkin, though I doubted she’d eaten a bite, and then said, “Well, I am plumb worn-out. I hope you two won’t mind if I call it a night and tuck in?”
    I looked at the clock over the stove: 7:42.
    Without another word, Mom stood up and walked out of the kitchen. She walked slowly, slightly stooped, and if I hadn’t known who she was, I might have mistaken her for Miss Agnes, the eighty-two-year-old lady who lived up the street.
    When it was just me and Daddy in the kitchen, I moved to clear the plates from the table. His hand reached out to stop me. “You’re not finished, are you? You’ve hardly taken a bite.”
    “Umm … I’m not really in the mood for fish,” I said.
    “Ah. Well, what sounds good?” he asked. “We can fry you up some eggs.”
    “No.” I sighed and sank back into my chair. “This’ll be fine.”
    It was clear he intended to see me eat the food. Daddy might not have been all that tuned in to my emotional state, but he seemed determined to keep my body functioning on all cylinders, if nothing else.
    It wasn’t that I didn’t like to eat, exactly. It was that I didn’t like to have eaten . Some might consider this a subtle distinction, but I didn’t think so. I had grown to embrace the sensation of emptiness, of being hollowed out like a freshly scraped jack-o’-lantern.
    I could have pointed to my mother’s uneaten food, but Ididn’t really want to fight. I just wanted to get to my room. So I chewed, and I swallowed, and I repeated the process until my plate was mostly empty. I tried not to think too much about where the food had gone.
    “Okay?” I asked at last.
    Daddy nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let me do the dishes tonight. You probably have a bunch of homework to do.”
    I didn’t argue, and I didn’t feel the need to remind him that teachers aren’t in the habit of assigning much on the first day. I just retreated down the hallway to my bedroom and focused on getting as far away from the rest of the fish as possible.
    My yellow notebook called to me, singing its siren song from beneath the bed. The door clicked closed behind me. It was dark in my room, and as I fumbled for the light switch, I was full of unreasonable fear. Something brushed against my cheek like a caress, and I choked back a scream. My fingers found the switch at last and flipped it up; a white moth fluttered in front of my face, then continued its random dance around my room.
    My window was open, and the white panels of my curtains reached to me like pale arms on the evening’s wind.
    I didn’t want to, but I had to … my fingers switched my room back into darkness for a fraction of a second, and then returned the light.
    My bed was next. Even though the pillows were just fine, I crossed the room and straightened them anyway—the fat rectangular yellow pillow, the square mint chenille one, the twin blue cushions.
    And then I knelt by the bed and extracted my notebook.
    Each page represented a day, and each day I’d recorded exactly what I’d eaten, and when, and with whom. Next to each