I watched her, shivering so hard I thought I heard my teeth moving.
She didn’t notice me. Or she did, but it didn’t matter. Nothing could reach her when she was like this.
She just kept eating, tiny bites at first, then bigger ones, like the food was running from her and she had to chase it down.
After a while, she set the spoon aside and leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the cupboards. Her whole body went rigid, the way stray cats do when they’re about to scream.
Instead of a scream, though, it was a sob, like a dog trying to cough up a bone and failing. She made a sound like she was breaking in half, and then her shoulders started to shake.
I wanted to turn away. I wanted to throw up or run until my legs fell off, but I just stood there watching her, because I was afraid that if I stopped looking, she might really disappear this time.
When she finally lifted her head, the light showed the streaks running down her face. Rivers of snot and tears and whatever else got left behind when a person lost control.
For a second, I thought she would see me and get mad, but her eyes just floated right through me, like I was a ghost or a bug on the wall. She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the shelf, fumbled it, then caught it on the third try.
She shook one out, stuck it between her lips, but her hands were shaking too much to work the lighter. She tried three times before she slammed the lighter down, hard enough that it skittered across the counter and landed in the sink.
Then she slumped over, arms hugging herself, and started to sob for real, the kind that comes from somewhere so deep it sounds like it’s not even part of the human body.
That’s when I went back to bed, feeling as if I had intruded on something I wasn’t supposed to see.
The next morning, Mom was gone.
Lillian was quiet. When I asked if Mom would be okay, Lillian just shook her head.
We walked to school together.
Lillian’s hand was ice in mine, and I squeezed it until my fingers cramped. We made our way through the crusted blue-gray world, and for once the cold didn’t even hurt, because somewhere inside me something else had frozen up first.
At the bottom of the hill, a murder of crows was picking at the carcass of a rabbit. Its fur was all dirty and packed with ice, eyes dry and black as glass.
The birds tore into it, not even pretending to wait their turn. Lillian stopped to watch.
For a minute, I thought maybe she was going to shoo the crows away, but she just stared, face blank, and I stared too, because I didn’t know what else to do.
Sometimes I thought the whole world was just a big empty field, and the only things in it were scavengers.
Not the crows or the possums or even the rats, but people like me and Lillian, picking over what was left behind, hoping for something soft or warm but never finding it.
When we got to school, Lillian drifted away. She was three years older, so her class was in a different section.
I got nervous when I saw Caiden waiting by the door to class, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of a jacket that looked too small on him now, wrists already sticking out from the cuffs.
I wondered if he’d say hi or just look through me, like what would happen in the hallways when you were a nobody or worse. A memory.
I gave him a little wave, the kind you do when you’re not sure if the other person wants it. He barely nodded, and then his eyes skipped over me, looking at the wall behind my head or the ceiling tiles or the gum stuck under the heater.
He looked different from before. Jaw all set, mouth twisted like he’d bitten something sour and was too proud to spit it out.
I tried again when we lined up for class. “Is your hand feeling better?” I asked, pointing at the bruise I’d noticed last week.
The words tumbled out. I wanted to show him I remembered, that I cared, even if it didn’t matter.
He jerked his hand away, shoving it in his armpit, and glared at me. “You don’t have to ask me stuff,” he said, real quiet. “Just shut up about it.”
I shrank back, my whole body folding up small. I wanted to disappear into the floor, or maybe just turn into air and float away so he could never see me again.
We were given a spelling list and told to “work in pairs,” which meant Caiden and I got stuck together at a table by the window.
