Free Lost & Found by Jacqueline Sheehan Page B

flicked a glance at the girl. “I’ve known a few cross-country people. Really, it was the shoes. You wear them only if you really mean business.”
    Elaine asked her the sort of questions that she dreaded: where did she came from, what did she do before being an animal control warden. She had settled on a stock answer. “No children, used to work in child care, not married, just coming out of a relationship, and trying out the island.” She was surprised at how well her answers worked, how easy it was to change who she was. Rocky was more comfortable asking the questions and quickly turned it to Melissa.
    “I haven’t seen you with your mother before,” said Rocky.
    “I stay at my Dad’s in Portland some of the time. Every other weekend. Sometimes more if I have school stuff.”
    Elaine’s mouth tightened up as if she had set her teeth together. “We’ve done it for so long, I sort of forget that it must sound strange. We’ve been divorced since Melissa was eight.”
    Rocky didn’t have to watch long to see what Melissa was doing with her dinner. The girl patted her stomach and said, “I’m so full from eating after I ran, I don’t know how much I can eat.” She put lettuce, sprouts, and cucumber slices on her plate. She went to the fridge and got a lemon, and squeezed it on her salad. Then she put a golfball-sized portion of spaghetti on her plate with a tablespoon of sauce. She elaborately sliced the cucumber into eight pieces like a pie. The spaghetti was pushed around and rearranged without onestrand going into her mouth. She ate a mushroom from the sauce and suddenly stopped.
    “Did you put oil in the sauce, Mom?”
    “Oil? No. Well, I had to use a tiny bit of oil when I sautéed the mushrooms.” Elaine shrugged her shoulders. She looked down and tucked her highlighted hair behind her ears. Rocky knew this was not the first time that the girl had questioned her mother about ingredients.
    Melissa was the kind of kid that Rocky had not wanted to work with at the counseling center. Not at first, but after awhile she had begged her director, “Don’t give me one more starving girl!”
    Rocky’s mantra as a therapist had been, “I don’t specialize in eating disorders,” and because another therapist at the clinic did, she had sent all the determined starving young women to her. Ellen was the perfect therapist for girls with disordered eating. She was round, unembarrassed by her own girth, and no threat to girls who were in competition for deprivation. The unhappy army of girls, defined by skin, bones, and grit, found solace with Ellen. Rocky had watched them arrive for their weekly meetings, hardly allowing their sit bones to touch the chair and pulling their osteoporotic spines straight. From her office, she could spot their skin, desperate with goose flesh and extra hair, trying to warm the bodies that insisted on living without fat.
    None of her training had truly prepared her for the tenacity of anorexia or the pure malevolence of the voice of an eating disorder that wrapped around the girls like a smirking python. With Ellen as resident specialist, she was off the hook. Ellen went to all the eating-disorder conferences, talked about eating disorders during lunch (which Rocky foundparticularly distressing), and became absorbed by the world of restricting. All of this meant that Rocky passed on the big-eyed skinny girls with their hair pulled back tight and their baggy pants and big sweatshirts worn to hide the clatter of their bones.
    And then Ellen left. She married a dentist and moved to Albany last winter. The director of the clinic said to Rocky, “We have to talk about our clients with eating disorders now that Ellen is gone.” She knew what this meant, and a solid sense of dread had lodged in the back of her throat. She tried everything to escape them.
    “It’s not ethical to offer services that are beyond our scope of expertise. We can refer out. Let’s put this in the job