Free Dread Locks by Neal Shusterman Page A

words. We just stared. You know the “three-second rule”? That brainless notion that if food hits the ground, it’s not dirty if you get it off the ground in three seconds? Well, when something falls into mud, that doesn’t really apply. There was more mud on those strips than there was beef.
    “I think I’m gonna hurl,” said Dante.
    “Don’t,” I told him. “She might eat that, too.”
    We just watched, stupefied, as Celeste pulled every last piece of pot roast, every carrot fragment, every little shriveled pea out of the mud and ate it, licking her fingers when she was done. Then she washed it down with a container of milk. It made me shiver, because I thought of the way Ernest had guzzled those leftover milks from empty tables. The way my brother downed a half gallon the other night.
    “She didn’t even wipe the mud off the meat,” Dante said.
    “She liked it,” I told them, and the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that it was true. “She liked the dirt more than the meat.”
    Dante stuck out his tongue. “Well, that’s just sick.”
    And although I had to agree, it brought to mind something I had heard about cravings. People think pregnant women crave pickles, but the truth is, each pregnant woman craves something different. It has to do with what your body needs at the time. My mom craved lemons every day that she was pregnant with Katrina. I always used to say that’s why she turned out so sour. It’s not only pregnant women who have cravings, however. Celeste was having a strange craving for some other reason. I have heard of people craving mud. That was supposed to mean your body needed certain minerals. But craving and eating are two different things.
    “She’s gone nuts,” Freddy said, and left it at that. They thought this was an isolated incident, just one freakish girl with a weird taste for muddy meat—but I wasn’t so sure. Over the next few days, I kept an eye out for things like it, and I found that there was a whole earthen feast going on.
    ... Like the girl in ceramics class who, while throwing a pot on the spinning wheel, didn’t just use her fingers; she leaned over and began shaping the pot with her tongue.
    ... Like the girl who dipped her hand into her boyfriend’s trail mix, only to find there were actual parts of the trail mixed in with the nuts and raisins.
    ... Like the kid who kept biting his fingernails just to get at the black nail jam underneath.
    ... And like Celeste Kroeger, who kept knocking her plate “accidentally” into the mud, day after day, then scooping it back up from the ground and eating it, mud and all.
    I asked Tara about it as we sat one afternoon having a picnic among the bobbing insect heads of our secret oil field. She just shrugged.
    “People are weird,” she said. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
    “Yeah—but eating dirt and rocks and stuff? I mean, what could make a normal person do something like that?”
    “The key word here,” said Tara, “is normal. A normal person wouldn’t.”
    “So then you agree that there’s something up with them?”
    Again she just shrugged—but a little less comfortably this time. “Could be just some stupid, trendy thing they saw on TV I read about some kids who heard you could get drunk on water, so they drank so much that they got brain damage. Stupid.”
    I ate my sandwich, mercifully free of anything that wasn’t supposed to be in there. No sand, no rocks. A side of me wanted to leave the whole situation alone, but there was another, darker side that couldn’t let it go. It was the same side of me that somehow sensed Tara knew more than she was telling. Sometimes, though, you make a pact with yourself. I’ll pretend there’s nothing wrong if you pretend there’s nothing wrong. It’s called denial, and it’s one of the strongest pacts in the world. Just ask all those people who were still drinking champagne while the Titanic went down.
     
    I was standing on the rocky