Sacred (9 page)

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 I
didn’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 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 notebook
wasn’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, lethargically at first, I found that they were stuck, or shackled, weighed down by the increasing pressure of the sand.

Sand is like that. A single grain weighs practically nothing; a handful is a pleasant weight in the palm; but combined, the force of all those little granules is overwhelming, desperately powerful, and inescapably heavy.

My heart began to beat faster; my head thrashed from side to side as I struggled to pull myself out of the mire. The warmth of the sand’s top layer was gone now, its cold, heavy weight pressed on my chest like a hand, and I knew in an instant that I would die there, buried in the sand.

Was it relief I felt? I think so. The weight of the sand was making it harder and harder to take a breath, and in a moment, the sand would crest over my nose and mouth, making breathing impossible, anyway. I stopped thrashing and lay perfectly still, considering the press of the sand. It was an embrace—that’s what it was, a sweet embrace, an escape, an excuse to stop fighting.

But as grains of sand began to roll across my face, ensnared in my eyelashes, covering my lips, my heart leapt in fear and protest. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, and I felt myself thrashing against the weight of the sand, struggling to free myself, to sit up, to stand.

I’d hesitated too long—the sand was overpowering, its weight too much to fight—but I fought anyway and managed to stretch one hand upward. Still, I couldn’t break the surface.

How far had I sunk? I lost all perspective; was I reaching up or down? Where was I? Could I still feel my feet?

My desperation was overwhelming. My lungs burned with my final breath of air, and my fingers stretched hopelessly, searching for something, anything, to grab on to.

And then someone grabbed my hand. The grip of warm, real flesh pulling me to the surface.

Ronny! My heart soared. My brother, my friend. In my dream state, I forgot for half a moment that he was dead … that his hand would not be warm and strong anymore.

And then I remembered. This hand could not be my brother’s. I felt tears seep from my still-closed eyes, mixing with the sand that shrouded my face.

Andy, then, it must be Andy. I forced my fingers to grasp back, and I felt myself being hauled up, felt the sand releasing me begrudgingly.

Then my arm was free of the sand, and my head emerged next, and my shoulders and my body, and I opened my eyes, blinked away the sand, and smiled up at my savior.

Green eyes looked down at me, full of concern and another emotion I couldn’t quite name—bright green eyes, the color of life.

Will.

A curl of his dark hair fell across his beautiful olive-tinted forehead, and his smile blinded me.

In my bedroom, my eyes popped open. The overhead light shone down too brightly, and I shielded my eyes against it. I stumbled to my feet and over to my window, yanking the window down, the panels of my curtains falling still as the wind was blocked.

I was dazed, unstable on my feet. My clock told me it was 2:02 a.m. I shook my head and pushed my hair out of my face. I was still dressed in my jeans from the stable, but I shivered with cold. My dream felt too real—the press of the sand, like the press of death, still lingered on my skin.

It had been Will. Will had rescued me. What should I make of this?

Don’t be silly, Scarlett
, I admonished myself.
It was just a dream. No one is saving you
.

No one was saving me. The truth of these words resounded in my empty chest, and I forced back the useless
sobs that threatened to overtake me. I shook the thought from my head and pulled open the top drawer of my dresser, finding my nightshirt.

I changed quickly and set the alarm for 6:30, just a few hours away, and pulled back the covers of my bed. Then I switched off the light and stumbled into bed, closed my eyes, and slept again, blissfully dreamless this time.

SIX

D
ay Two of junior year wasn’t all that different from Day One—or from the days that would follow, I guessed. The teachers seemed to be warming up to the idea of homework, and all of my core classes assigned projects that would be due over the next several weeks.

Mr. Blaine, my AP American Literature teacher, dropped well-worn copies of
The Bell Jar
on our desks. “Read the first fifty pages by Monday, people,” he told us. “And don’t be surprised if there’s a quiz.”

Most of the other students moaned, but I didn’t mind. I was good at this—being a student, answering questions. The right answers came easily to me, and I had always liked the way teachers treated me: with respect and a knowing smile, as if they envisioned big things in my future.

I’d read
The Bell Jar
already, of course—twice, actually. The first time had been during the summer between
freshman and sophomore year. At the time, I’d considered Esther to be a big crybaby. I wasn’t impressed by her depression. Why bother getting out of your pajamas? Come on. Because there was a whole big, beautiful world out there, and you can’t ride a horse in a nightgown, or go snorkeling, or look pretty for the school dance.

The second time I’d read Plath’s book had been last spring, shortly after my brother died. This time, Esther’s worldview didn’t seem so hard to relate to. Death was coming, after all … it was just a matter of time before it arrived.

But I hadn’t gotten stuck in my bathrobe, at least. I continued going through the motions of life, and I thought that I was doing pretty well, actually, especially compared to Esther.

Mr. Blaine looked at me a bit sheepishly as he set the paperback on my desk. I knew what he was thinking … he was wondering how I was going to handle such a downer of a book, considering what had happened to Ronny.

My anger threatened to resurface. If he thought I was so fragile, then why didn’t he pick a different book, something more uplifting? And I was tired of the way everyone kept looking at me—like I was going to break, or something, at any moment.

So I gave him a big, broad grin. “One of my favorites,” I said, tapping the book.

Mr. Blaine looked relieved. “I figured you’d probably read it already.”

“No problem. I’m sure I’ll notice new stuff this time through.”

“I’m sure you will,” he answered, clearly pleased with my attitude.

The rest of the morning passed inconsequentially, save for the uproar caused by Lily’s outfit. Today she’d donned a pair of demolished skinny jeans—I think there were probably more holes than fabric—with an off-the-shoulder oversized short-sleeved sweatshirt. It was an eighties style, I gathered, and she did look pretty fabulous … but Mr. Steiner said she was breaking about six different dress-code rules and sent her home to change.