Free Shock Point by April Henry Page A

to keep her gaze lowered, Cassie glanced around the room. Everyone seemed thin, and if this was an example of a typical meal, it was no wonder.
    Her gaze stopped on one girl. Around her neck a grimy cardboard sign hung from a string. In printed black block letters, it read, “I’ve been in this program for three years, and I’m still pulling crap.” Rebecca kicked her in the shin and Cassie looked down at her tray again.
    She picked up her spoon and slid it into her bowl. It was some kind of thin soup. White grains of rice and a few slices of carrot in a greasy-looking broth. She took a spoonful, brought it up to her lips. It tasted oily and rank, but she was hungry enough to overlook the flavor. It was warm and it was food. She dipped her spoon back down in the broth. Something floated to the top. A piece of fat, white and gelatinous. She prodded it with her spoon. Lazily, it turned over. Cassie put her hand to her mouth and swallowed, hard. On the back was something short and stiff. Bristles. She felt the corners of her mouth pull down at the same time as her stomach seemed to move up, pressing higher and higher.
    “What’s the matter?” Rebecca hissed without looking at Cassie or even seeming to move her lips.
    “I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat anything with eyes.” Cassie started at the small explosions of sound around her. She realized it was muffled laughter. A girl with short strawberry blonde hair and the bluest eyes Cassie had ever seen tipped her a wink. Her expression was kind, and seeing it made Cassie nearly want to cry again.
    Rebecca said, “The rule is you have to eat at least fifty percent. You don’t want to end up in OP on your very first day.”
    By trying not to think, by eating only the broth and leaving the bristly scrap of fat, as well as a chunk of pink and white bone, Cassie managed to eat roughly half. She wasn’t really here, she told herself. It was just an accident that her body was. Her heart and soul didn’t need to be touched by this place.
    The rest of the day went by in a blur. It turned out that Cassie’s behavior was wrong in a hundred little ways, from shifting in her seat that evening while they listened to a tape about the importance of exercise, to not keeping three feet behind the next person in line, to forgetting and making eye contact with some of the other girls. Rebecca was always next to her, whispering in Cassie’s ear, chiding her, riding her, correcting her.
    It was a relief to go to bed at 9:30, even though Cassie’s bed turned out to be nothing but a piece of plywood bolted to the wall, with only the sheet to cover her. No pillow. The girl who had winked at her during dinner—she heard Mother Nadine call her Hayley—elaborately cleared her throat. When Cassie looked at her, Hayley made a show of rolling up her own towel to use as a pillow. Cassie followed suit. No blankets, but it was so warm that they would have provided nothing but sweaty weight. There were bars on the windows, and once she turned out the lights, their housemother locked them in for the night. There was no way to escape.

eighteen
    April 13
    At 3:30 P.M., Cassie and Thatcher sat waiting in the coffee shop near school. Half an hour earlier, it had been crowded with students, but most of them had left to catch one of the Tri-Met buses that stopped every few minutes across the street. It was warm outside, a beautiful spring day, but Cassie’s fingers felt like ice. She curled them around a mocha, full fat, grande sized, even though she had read they had something like 400 or 500 calories. She figured she needed to keep her strength up.
    A woman Cassie judged to be in her mid-thirties came ticktocking in on low-heeled pumps. She was slender, with straight blond hair pulled back in a careless bun. She wore black pants and a crisp French blue shirt with the cuffs rolled up. As she took a narrow tan notebook out of her purse, she looked around the room.
    “Ms. Haynes?” Thatcher called