Getting Thin: A Ghost Story

Getting Thin

By Kaiya Hart

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Kaiya Hart – Author

Copyright 2013 Kaiya Hart

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All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance

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Cover Art ‘Getting Thin’ Copyright 2012 Wendi Smith

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For Mom and Dad

Chapter 1

The woods are quiet. Peaceful. Birds sing in the trees, their trilling voices echoing in the early morning air, which is silvery and pinkish gray, like the inside of a pearl. A soft mist of humidity clings to the black, fern-grown earth near the river, and snakes up from the slow moving, mud colored water in smoky tendrils. I am sitting on a rock, a large, gray boulder that looks strange and out of place here in central Illinois, something that does not and never did belong. Just like me. It was brought in by the same family that once lived in the ruined house before me, placed in this once lavish courtyard when there was laughter and music pouring out the windows rather than weeds. There isn’t much left of the structure, a couple ground floor rooms that are missing at least one wall each, exposing them to the world like the rooms of an open dollhouse. The upper floors are little more than a shadow of a memory; only a few, blackened boards remain, the last of what was once pictured in magazines and admired for its architecture. The stairs are utterly gone, a few rotten, spiked bits of wood thrusting out of the wall to show where the grand, sweeping staircase once stood. I don’t have to imagine it in all its glory; although it was gone long before I was born, I have seen it. I sit upon my rock and study the charred, black ruin and think it is ominous that I can relate so well to this ruined mansion left to rot here in the woods. It is just more proof that I am broken beyond repair. The thick rope wrapped around one of the remaining beams creaks softly above me, but I don’t look. Not yet.

This is, perhaps, not the best place for me at this moment, but here I am anyway. I am waiting for him in this wild, forgotten place and thinking deep thoughts. Mostly about Roxy, my best friend, the root of the ache in my heart, the reason for the empty longing that has swallowed all other emotions. Thoughts of Roxy are, as always, predominant, but sometimes other things creep in a little. Like my Uncle Sonny and what happened to him. It’s really just flashes of him the way he used to be before the ‘Incident’, back when I was still small enough for him to toss in the air, back when he used to call me ‘his Evie,’ and never Eva. I think about his long fingers dancing over piano keys, about his deep laugh and warm voice, and about how he would come get me from home just to teach me something new, like how to bait a hook or how to track a deer through the woods. I remember how close he could get to a doe and her fawn, how they would look at him with huge, liquid eyes full of trust. I think about how much alike everyone always said we were and I think about how much pride I took in that, even after he was gone. I see now that our similarities did not end with the things people could easily see, such as our ash silver hair and pale, luminescent gray eyes, but with those things that no-one ever wants to discuss. Roxy, pushes her way back in, though, and it is a relief; thoughts of Uncle Sonny are like razor blades against my soul, slashing the delicate fabric of me into shreds, changing everything I thought I knew. Roxy is dancing around in my head with a sort of wild joy as my memories of the last year swell over me like a tsunami, a vast wave ready to break and swallow what little sanity remains to me. I sit on this granite rock, picking at a spot of blood on the sleeve of my letterman’s jacket and waiting with the shadow of my deeds hanging over my head and I think. Of Roxy. Roxy running as if she were born wild, her endless legs stretched taunt, golden face glowing with a fierce joy, so bright that it would frighten me at times. Roxy dancing as if the music she listened to had possessed her. Roxy, who was always laughing, laughing, laughing. I think about her warm hands and the cool silk of her cheek and her stubborn streak, which was wide enough to keep us both going when I wanted nothing more than to quit. I think about Roxy, my hero, my destroyer. And I think about getting thin.

I am two people. The girl I was the day I met Roxy, and the girl I became after. That second girl is a stranger to me even though she has my gray, oddly gleaming eyes, still beyond my understanding for all that she wears my skin. She is a separate entity to me, one that is neither the angel Roxy was, nor the demon she became, just a regular girl that got a little too thin. There are those who will call that an insanity plea, but it is really just the truth. Sometimes I stand outside that other me, watching what I have become, wondering how it all went this far.

I am neither as tall as Roxy, nor as exotic. I am quite small, barely five foot three inches, with bones so thin they might belong to a bird. I look so frail, so breakable now, like some poor, dumb rabbit. Sometimes my heart aches to look in the mirror because it doesn’t even seem like me I’m looking at. There really is nothing all that remarkable about me, in my opinion. I look at my reflection and think I’m cute, but not the sort that is ever the center of the picture. That was Roxy, through and through. She was the superstar. I was just the background for her beauty. In fact, if not for the odd, silvery color of my hair and my large, pale eyes, there would be nothing that would separate me from a thousand other ordinary girls. I am the girl next door; all American and, in the end, utterly forgettable. Except there is nothing sweet, cute, or lovable about what is inside me, nothing breakable at all; there is only the howling wolf of my rage and the devouring dark.

I often stand looking into the silvered plane of the mirror, scrutinizing that other me, searching for some sign of my madness upon my heart-shaped face; the madness within has grown to a point that it is difficult to believe that it hasn’t left an indelible mark upon my face, some shadow that cannot be erased. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of it caught in the sly crook at the corner of my mouth, in the soft gleam of those translucent gray eyes, so bright that sometimes they seem to glow with an eerie, lunar light, the singular part of myself that I always loved, even back before Roxy, when there wasn’t much of anything about me that I didn’t hate.

The creak of the rope, soft and ominous in the soft green world of the wood, brings me back to the present. I shift on the rock, suddenly aware that I’m sweating. The letterman’s jacket is far too large, made for much wider shoulders and someone with more height. The sleeves keep dropping over my hands and I keep pushing them up, the motion automatic and comforting. Every once in a while a spicy, rich scent rises up from the jacket, sparking a thousand memories of him, as if some part of him is caught in the wool and leather for eternity. In the bathroom mirror this morning, the jacket made me look much smaller than I really am, a child lost in her father’s coat, though this jacket does not belong to my father. It hung down longer than my tight running shorts, but that was okay. I wore it on principle, not as a fashion statement. A reminder of past sins. I wanted him to see me and to know, to understand that it was me all along. My pale skin and hair stood out shockingly against the black collar, and my eyes… My eyes disturbed me; if there is any stain upon me that could be seen, it lies within the shine of my irises. The calm, clear gray of them is so much brighter than it used to be, too bright, full of a mad sparkle that gives even me the chills. This morning, that was the only indication I could find of the horrors I’ve committed. Maybe I just wanted to see it; no one else ever seems to look at me with anything resembling the fear that I have earned. Not until I begin to hurt them, anyway. When my reflection peered back out at me, brilliantly exposed by the harsh vanity lights, I was startled once again to find myself looking at a girl who did not look as I expected. She didn’t look like a killer to me. She never does. She always looks delicate and slender and just a little like a china doll and, okay, maybe even faintly pretty. I am okay with how I look and that is always strange to me. I might even like myself. That wasn’t always true. Not until Roxy. Before her I was completely different. Before her I was sure of my own ugliness. Before her I was positive that beauty makes the world go around. Before her I thought I knew so damn much about everything and was jaded right down to my fat little toes. Then she came and she remade me.

I remember her the way I first saw her, standing on the black-top driveway next door. She wore cut-off shorts and a green t-shirt so faded with washing that the words printed on it were ghosts, pale images beyond recognition. Her black, glossy hair was pulled up in a tail with two pure white streaks running back from the crown of her forehead. There was something wild and electric about her, as if she might explode off the pavement at any second. There was a freedom to the way she moved as if she just didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She was everything I wanted to be, everything I had always dreamed of and never had the courage to hope for. She was beautiful. Not the way models in magazines are beautiful, but the way jagged lightning dancing in the soft, purple belly of a storm cloud is beautiful. She was slender and graceful, and full of life. So full of it that she glowed. Everything about her pulled me to her, made me want to love her. I could see that, even then, watching her from my bedroom window at the corner of our house, seeing her through a reflection of myself, the way I was then.

I was fat. There is no nice way to say it, and, really, I wouldn’t use it if there was. The words ‘obese’, ‘big-boned’, or ‘plump’, (oh those delightful euphemisms!) do not adequately touch what I was on that day with summer lying just ahead, still a golden, warm promise on the chill doorway of spring. The vision of Roxy below, innocent of her own beauty and the purity of it was a perfect balance to me as I stood with the soft, well-read pages of my book dangling from the sweaty sausages of my fingers. Fat is the only word that can convey not just how I looked, but how I was inside, where it really counts. The pasty rolls of my flesh hung from my bones in doughy, shapeless folds, the round moon of my face was framed by an unflattering, chin length bob that my grayish-mousey hair (born old, Uncle Sonny would say, laughing because we shared that trait) was always cut into. My eyes were a pretty color, but they were also mere slits among the flesh of my face. My mouth was always turned down slightly, as if frowning was all I knew how to do. No clothes ever fit me right, not even the ones that were supposed to be my size. I often compared myself to a very large, human-shaped marshmallow melting over a fire; everything about me was only vaguely human in my eyes. Was I ugly? I thought so then, but now I think that I wasn’t even that. I was just a lump of unworked clay dropped upon the floor of the world, waiting for someone, anyone to take the time to make me into something.

Fat. It is a word that is both blunt and full of visual echoes. When I say it, I conjure up so many things, not the least of which are memories of who I used to be. I may not have been as ugly as I thought, but I certainly wasn’t pleasant to behold. That word smells like sour sweat pouring down to hide in the dark creases no amount of soap can cleanse. It is a dirty, basement smell, a rotting smell. Both my sisters would shake their pretty, golden heads if they could hear me and they would say I’m being too harsh. Neither would meet my eyes while they said it, just as my father would not look at me while assuring me that I’d someday outgrow my ‘puppy fat’. I knew I wouldn’t and I was right; I didn’t outgrow it, I outran it instead. I knew even then that my fat was not just a result of being young, and for all the lies I’ve told myself over the years, that was one thing I’ve never denied.

Only Roxy was ever completely honest with me – and herself. She was neither cruel, nor sympathetic to my plight, but she didn’t try for polite, either. That wasn’t her way. She used to say that polite was what people were by the force of society, not by nature. She was all about being true to her nature. From the very first she made it clear that she wanted to be my friend based on more than my outer appearance, but neither would she sit around listening to me whine about it, friend or not. She told me, in that honest, husky voice of hers, that did I wish to complain of my weight, I would first have to make a real attempt to change it. I think she knew I wouldn’t, that I couldn’t; diets were not and are not in my nature. I’ve no love for what might be; the present is always, to me, all that there can and will be and there is no change to be found in the present. That was the philosophy which allowed me to have ten custard filled donuts instead of one, a whole box of cookies, or a pint of ice cream whenever the mood took me – which was about once a day in summer. It is also why, I’m sure, I didn’t notice when Roxy began to mold me, or see the physical changes it wrought until my sister, Aileen, pointed it out. I think differently now. I look ahead, I make plans, but that is just Roxy’s influence and teaching at work. Everything I am, she made me, a poor reflection of herself upon the distorted mirror of the world.

That day. That fateful, damnable, exquisite day in early spring, I knew nothing of her and she knew nothing of me. Our friendship had not yet been born, my worship of her had not yet begun and she was just the pretty new girl, so far above me that I could only watch her, overlapped by my own transparent reflection, wishing with all my heart for a friend like those the characters in my books always found and knowing that fat, sweaty, invisible girls did not ever have friends like those just as no one ever writes books about them.

Invisible. That is another word that belonged to me. I walked the halls like a ghost, the other kids flowing around my vast orbit without actually looking at what they were avoiding and that was one hell of a feat. Even the teachers would look to me only rarely and they often had to check their seating charts for my name. If I’d gone to a school where my classes were a hundred or more strong, it would have been understandable. However, my class had a grand total of 70 students and the entire high school had just over 300 students. I am a reader, but don’t let that fool you. I was wholly unremarkable. So completely middle of the road that I could easily have fallen off the planet and no-one besides my family would have noticed the difference. Eva who? That would have been the common refrain, I am sure, even among my parent’s friends. I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m simply stating the facts, because these things are important to the rest of this sordid, ugly tale. I was unknown, unrecognized, and even in my own small, homey, quaintly cozy little town – named Grendel, of all things – I was a shadow that everyone saw without seeing. Except for him. He saw me and, consequently, certain of his friends were forced to acknowledge me, but that was never a good thing. He was the one person that everyone in school tried to avoid, if they could, and that is a story that doesn’t matter until later.

I looked at the ghost of myself lying over Roxy’s reality, at my pasty skin that wouldn’t tan, but burnt a somber, dangerous, brick red that remained a few days until it peeled away in long strips to reveal only more grub worm white beneath. My thick arms were like meat slabs curled over a belly that always appeared under the hems of nice blouses, no matter how much I tugged. It was faintly embarrassing looking through this to her, a slim, perfect picture of what a teenage girl should be; it reminded me that I was a world apart from ever being able to expect more out of life than sitting around reading books and wishing for the life I found within them. She didn’t hold still, even when she wasn’t moving to help get boxes out of the car and moving van, but would bounce on the balls of her feet. It wasn’t an anxious movement, or a nervous dancing, but almost as though she couldn’t contain her joy at simply being alive.

I instantly dismissed her. I’m not ashamed of that; the world is full of beautiful people who are plastic and cruel, people who never see anyone like me as worth their time. Back then, I would have agreed. Someone like that, someone so physically perfect and obviously thrilled with her own existence had no reason to think different. I didn’t imagine in her a best friend to confide in or someone to which I could cling and whose popularity – and it never occurred to me she wouldn’t be popular – would raise my status among others our own age. I did not, as some girls might have, run over to introduce myself, hoping with sweaty desperation that she would accept me, the way Leslie Frick often ran after the cheerleaders, doing anything and everything for them, no matter how dirty or embarrassing, just so she could stand in their shadows.

I had no illusions about myself. I knew I had very little to offer anyone in the way of friendship. I didn’t have exciting ideas, I was never artistic or intelligent, and I didn’t have any way of making a new school easier to cope with. Hell, there were whole weeks when I even questioned if I had a personality. I’d spent all my life going to school with the same people; Grendel, Illinois is a small town, but, save for one, they never looked twice at me, even in pre-school. Even the cheerleaders, to whom I should have presented a large, easy target, didn’t see me. They didn’t even bother to tease me on occasion, when they were bored. They saved their cruelties for people who had a chance at being more than they already were, crushing them down to dust every chance that they got so that they could revel in their superiority. I was less than invisible, really, a non-entity, barely worth the time it took to avoid me in the halls. That was how low on the high school totem pole I was.

I saw Roxy and knew she would be one of them, one of the cheerleaders on the pompom squad, one of those girls with more activities than classes and a football player for a boyfriend. I didn’t hate her for that; I would have been the same way if I was that pretty, with soft, golden skin and cheekbones that Cleopatra would have envied. At least, I always thought I’d have been that way, back when I assumed popularity was a genetic birthright, like green eyes or blond hair. I wasn’t jealous of her. It’s the luck of the draw and as far as I was concerned, I drew a blank. It wouldn’t change a thing to be bitter.

I remember Roxy looking up, too far away for me to see the color of her eyes, which I assumed would be brown. She raised her hand in a hesitant wave. I drew back from the window, head dropped, pretending I hadn’t been watching her, wondering what it was like to be born into perfection in a world where physical beauty was all that really counted. I went back to my book – some fantasy novel full of women who wouldn’t know ugly if it ran up and bit them – and back to the potato chips I kept stashed under my bed and I tried to pretend that I wasn’t thinking about the new girl moving in next door or how much I wished I looked like her.

My sister, April, used to say, when she was still living at home, that I could try to diet. She wasn’t cruel about it – or, at least, no more cruel than she was about anything else. She really wasn’t nasty or condescending or disgusted the way some sisters would be when they were pretty and saddled with a fat lump as a sibling. She was just concerned. April likes everyone to be happy, at least in the family. She doesn’t give a shit about anyone outside it, a fact well known around Grendel, and the reason no-one gets in her way. The teachers who can never remember my name still use hers as an example of who no-one wants to be. There are school legends concerning her temper, usually involving broken windows, dented lockers, and on one very memorable occasion, a shattered coffee mug. I always told April there was no point in being skinny if I had to be miserable as well. I couldn’t count calories; it would take all the fun out of eating. I was miserable anyway, calorie counting or not, but I ate what I wanted and pretended that made it all better.

The house next door had been up for sale for nearly a year. After old Mrs. Kendal died, her daughter didn’t want it; she had moved to Chicago and wanted nothing more to do with Grendel. Unfortunately for her, neither did the rest of the world. Very few moved to Grendel. They only left and rarely returned. Some came back to raise families, married to people they’d met at college, or they came back because there was just no place in the outside world for someone from a small place with no fame or notoriety. No-one from outside ever moved in, though, at least not in my lifetime. Grendel liked it that way. So the house next door just sat empty and gathering spider webs in the windows. Until Roxy.

Roxy chose the room right across from mine. It had always been Mrs. Kendal’s sewing room because it got the morning light. She had been in there every morning I could remember until the day she died; she used to sew all the costumes for the church and school plays, all the wedding dresses, and all the cheerleaders brought their uniforms to her when they needed refitting. She’d had one of those huge, industrial sewing machines against one wall, and swatches of fabric in every color and shape had been hung from small racks, over the doors and in the closets. Her dressmaker’s dummy used to spook me when I was a kid; I always thought it was going to start moving around late at night, dancing in whatever wedding dress it wore. Sometimes I imagined it coming over to the window to crawl through, to climb through the gnarled, spread out branches of the tree next to my window and slip into my room where I was helpless. I often had nightmares about it that woke the whole house and brought my mother rushing into my room, her face so tight and pale it looked as if it had been painted.

I watched, carefully hidden behind my flower pattern curtains, which Mom had picked out for me when I was five, as Roxy’s father hung hers. He was a big, muscular man with blond hair and a booming voice that might have been intimidating if it wasn’t so cheerful. He held her curtains up to the window – though they didn’t look much like curtains to me, just strips of gauzy black and lavender – and Roxy directed him with her hands. I could hear them clearly through the window which had been opened, presumably, to air out the room. She laughed often, usually at some joke he was telling that didn’t seem funny to me. Her laughter wasn’t fake, though. It was obvious she really did find him humorous. He called her baby doll, and anytime they stood close to each other, he had his hand on her shoulder, just as though he thought someone might swoop in and try to steal her away.

He brought up the frame for her bed, which was silver. The headboard was twisted like vines with little gleaming leaves molded out of it. She hung posters of several different bands, most of which I didn’t know the names of. Her parents brought in a dresser and a vanity of rich, dark wood, carved with delicate, knotted vines. She never took a minute to sit in the plump, lavender armchair her parents positioned near the windows. She was busy unpacking boxes and putting things where they belonged. Tiny, glass perfume bottles lined her vanity, each a different color and catching in the light, casting bright patterns of greens, reds, blues, and purples across the walls. There were slim little models with twisted wires for arms and heads so that necklaces and bracelets could be hung over them. The sun ran over her jewelry in a rainbow of emeralds, sapphires, and rubies. On her windowsill, she sat a tree twisted out of silver wire and hung with sparkling black stones for leaves. A tiny dragon sat beneath intricate, winding limbs, curled up as if asleep. I peeked out a hundred times, longing to own something so beautiful and so obviously personal, something that I knew couldn’t have been bought in any store. She fingered each thing she unwrapped, looking at it and tracing the lines of it as though each one was precious to her. On the dresser, she put dragon sculptures of different sizes and colors, the smallest capable of sitting comfortably in the center of her palm and the largest requiring two hands to hoist it up. She turned them this way and that until she was happy with their positions, then she moved on.

In came the bookcase. Again, made of the heavy wood that gleamed a soft, dark red, again heavily carved with leaves and vines. That was my first real shock; I would never have expected her to have read anything beyond fashion magazines. I didn’t even bother hiding behind the curtain then; I love books best of all things. I always have. For someone like me, someone who had no friends, and didn’t much care for herself, books were an escape. They were friends that would never betray or criticize or run away. They were company in my lonely existence, reassuring voices that made me believe that ugly girls could become beautiful, find true love, and change the very fabric of who they were. Books gave me hope for a future that was not the one I saw spreading out before me, a long shadowland of hiding in corners, of never doing anything important, a life that was threaded with constant fear of the unknown and where courage was never discovered, only mediocrity. For me, books made the person. Those who loved them were ultimately better than those who shunned them. Thus Roxy instantly became more impressive in my eyes.

She began filling the shelves of that bookcase and, even though it was quite large, in the end its shelves were packed to capacity and there were books lined up on top, like the Queen of Heart’s card soldiers standing face to back, and held in place by wrought iron dragons for bookends. Still she didn’t rest. She didn’t even pause to admire her handiwork. She went right on unpacking clothes and jewelry, and makeup. She made her bed with a lavender comforter and black pillow cases. Over the top of that, she scattered silver throw pillows, some square, some round, some shaped like tootsie rolls, and one so large she could have sat upon it like some Buddhist seeking enlightenment. Some were beaded, some were embroidered, some gleamed like silk, others like velvet, and still others looked like corduroy. Every box her father brought to her was immediately cut open, gutted, its contents put away, and broken down to lay upon the growing pile of flattened cardboard. I couldn’t help but admire that; I am the sort of person that avoids doing what I must until the very last second. Or, at least, I was then. Watching her place her things and finish her room in a few hours when it would have taken me weeks, was almost magical. In the end, that room looked as if it had always been that way, as if she had always lived there and I forgot all about Mrs. Kendal’s sewing room.

Those curtains were almost never closed. Through her window – which was often open, despite the lingering chill of spring – drifted a myriad of music. Sometimes it was fast and wild, sometimes slow and melancholy, sometimes with the high, strange notes of bagpipes. And she would read. Sitting in her armchair or sprawled across her bed, she always had some sort of book in hand. I couldn’t see the titles and told myself they were probably romance novels rather than real books. Still, I was fascinated; I’d have bet money that any girl with her looks couldn’t find a library with a map, compass, and a guide to point the way. I watched her a lot when I thought she wasn’t looking, half wishing I had the courage to call over from my window and ask what she was reading.

One day, about a week after she moved in, I looked up and realized I wasn’t the only one watching. She was sitting at the window, chin folded in her hands, fingers tapping against her cheeks. I had a book in one hand, the fingers of the other curling through my extremely fine hair – which Mom kept saying would thicken up if I’d just stop tugging at it. She didn’t flush or sink back behind her filmy curtains. I did flush and my palms were instantly sticky with sweat. What are you reading? she asked, her husky voice floating through the branches of the oak tree between our windows.

Dickens, I said quietly, because I rarely talk loud, even when I’m fighting with my sisters. That is one thing that hasn’t changed. The sound of my own voice startled me; I’d been alone with my own thoughts for so long that I’d forgotten the sound of it. I expected her to vanish right then, if she even heard me.

Instead, she wrinkled her nose. Ick. No offense, but, well… ick. She rushed on, as if she was embarrassed by her lack of tack and felt the need to explain to me before I could think she was a horrible person. He’s all ‘poor, poor me, depression, depression, depression’. He doesn’t even make it that interesting. I mean, if you are going to write characters that make people suicidal when they read about them, at least offer a free noose with each book. She stuck out her tongue and I fought back a high pitched, startled little giggle. So, you know, I don’t really care for Dickens that much.

I shrugged, at a loss, and was shocked to hear myself say, me either. It’s on the reading list. For school.

She rolled her eyes, which, right then, I would have sworn were pure black. Why can’t they ever pick someone interesting? Like Poe or Hugo?

If someone had yanked the very world from beneath me like a magician pulling a tablecloth from beneath a vase, I don’t think I could have been more shocked. "You read Poe and Victor Hugo?" I felt struck, as if someone had thrown ice down my t-shirt. I was certain, at first, that it was some kind of joke she was playing.

And King, Tolkien, and a lot of others. Just not Dickens. Never Dickens. I didn’t ask her what she really had against Charles Dickens. I was too busy being stunned. The subject never came up again and I’m sorry now; it’s one of those things I’ll never get to ask her, one of those unanswered questions I can only guess at.

Roxy! a voice called from outside her room, distant and cheerful.

That’s my mom, she said, standing up. I’m Roxy, by the way. Roxy Corlain. She tilted her head, reminding me that I was supposed to answer.

I’m Eva Jacob.

Eva, she said, smiling just a little. I like that. It’s a pretty name. She shifted from foot to foot and threw a glance over her shoulder at the closed door, as if expecting to find her mother already there. I have to go. Are you going to be around later?

I… I’m not sure, I said. It might seem strange that I shrank from her, as much as I wanted to believe she was as nice and interesting as she seemed, but I knew enough about girls like her to be wary.

She looked disappointed, casting her eyes down and slumping her shoulders. I immediately wanted to take it back, tell her I had no life and never had, that I was likely to be in my room that night, the next day, and every day after that until school forcibly drug me from it. I didn’t, though. Well, maybe tomorrow, then. She looked up, suddenly smiling warmly, as if that prospect had brightened her whole day. I’ll see you later. She turned and left without giving me the chance to protest. That was Roxy. She always found a way to get around things so that it worked out the way she wanted. If it didn’t go her way today, there was always tomorrow and she found constant hope in that. Had she really been like other people, I’d have been in a lot of trouble because there was no denying her once she set her head to something.

I avoided my room that night, trading it for the living room where my parents watched T.V. and kept flicking surreptitious glances at me; I didn’t often choose their company. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being with them, I just preferred to be alone. They aren’t bad, as far as parents go. They’ve never hit me, they don’t yell too often, and if I need something, they find a way to get it. I just can’t connect with