Free Sacred by Elana K. Arnold Page B

entry I included a caloric breakdown with a total for the day at the bottom of the page.
    The first three days I’d filled in later, after the fact. The very first page was May 11—the day after Ronny had died. It, as well as the two pages that followed, were blank save for the date across the top and a “0” at the bottom.
    From there on in, the entries resembled something of a wave pattern. Some days were full; others were less so. Only two other pages besides the first three were entirely empty; the first, a week after Ronny’s death, was the day of his funeral. The other was from just a few weeks ago, the day that a package had arrived from Ronny’s college roommate, full of his books and some notes his friends had written to us.
    One of the notes had been from the girl Ronny had last been seeing, Helena. She had written Ronny was the smartest, funniest, nicest guy I ever dated. He talked all the time about his family and growing up on Catalina. He especially loved to tell me about his baby sister, who he said was the prettiest girl he knew. I tried not to get jealous. Know that lots of people loved your Ronny, and that he will be deeply, deeply missed .
    I’d taped that note to the inside of the yellow notebook’s cover. I knew it by heart, but still I liked to read it.
    I turned to a new page and entered the date: September 7. I recorded: Mealy apple. 1 bite . An apple is about 110 calories. For one bite, I recorded 5 calories. One sugar cube: 25 calories. Then there was dinner. Rice and fish: 150 calories for the rice. Salmon is the richest fish; I gave it 300 calories. Then there was the sauce that Mom had poured over it … it hadn’t tasted buttery, but sort of sweet, like teriyaki. A quick check on my laptop told me that a cup of teriyaki has about 250 calories. She’d poured less than a quarter of a cup on my fish … I figured 30 calories. Grand total: 510 calories.
    I felt relief course through me. The calorie count was less than I’d thought it would be. Then I felt a flash of panic that perhaps I’d missed something or miscalculated somehow, so I did the math again. But I was right; all I had consumed today was a piece of fish, a scoop of rice, a sugar cube, and one bite of a mealy apple.
    Then a flood of emotions hit me, and my notebook slipped to the ground. I collapsed on my bed as heavy sobs rolled through me, burying my face in my pillows to muffle the sound.
    What was I doing? Who was I becoming? My body felt weak and tired, my skin felt very, very fragile, my hair felt lank, and my bones ached as they pressed into the firm mattress.
    I had to stop this. I needed to stop. Even more, I wanted to stop. Maybe this had started off being about Ronny, but I knew that this was not what Ronny would want for me—to whittle myself away like a piece of driftwood until all that was left was too brittle to survive even the slightest fall or jostle.
    But even as I thought these thoughts, aware of their truth, I felt compelled to pull myself up to make sure my notebookwasn’t bent or twisted on the ground. It lay sprawled like a broken bird on the wooden floor of my bedroom, its cardboard covers wings that would never fly. I picked it up gently and closed it, then slid it back underneath the bed. I was so, so tired.…
    In my dream, I lay in the sand, the sun warming my face, a slight breeze drifting across my body. My eyes were closed and I felt so relaxed, as if I might never move, as if I was somehow connected to the beach beneath my body.
    At first, I didn’t realize what was happening when I began to sink. It seemed as if I was just nestling more perfectly into the divot I’d carved into the beach with my body. But gradually, as the taffy-long seconds of my time-distorted dream stretched by, I realized I was sinking.
    The sand began to break in little waves over my fingers and toes first, cold and granular, and then my ankles and wrists started to sink, and when I tried to move my arms,