Sacred (12 page)

I was hungry. More than hungry, I was ravenous. I made my way out to the kitchen and started rifling through the refrigerator. I found juice and eggs and bacon, and I pulled them eagerly from the shelves.

The smell of the cooking food brought my father out from his bedroom; he looked at me with surprise. “You’re up early.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I answered, focused on turning the bacon quickly, before it burned. In another pan the eggs cooked, and I stirred them often so they wouldn’t brown.

Toast popped up from the toaster behind me, and Daddy pulled it out and buttered it.

Soon we were sitting together, a large plate of bacon, eggs, and toast in front of each of us. Steam wafted up from the plates and I closed my eyes as I breathed in the warm buttery smell of it all.

My hand shook a little as I lifted my fork. I looked up quickly to see if Daddy had noticed, but he was busy stirring milk into his coffee.

The first bite of yellow eggs tasted better than anything I could remember, ever. Slightly salty, rich, absolutely nourishing and delicious. Then I bit into the bacon—crisp in one spot, juicy in another. I followed this with a gulp
of the cold, sweet juice, and then ate more and more and more.

When I pulled my eyes away from my plate, Daddy was watching me. He smiled. “It’s good to see you with an appetite, honey.”

I smiled. “Hungry today,” I admitted.

“Then eat!” He gestured to my empty glass. “More orange juice?”

I nodded, and he pulled the pitcher from the refrigerator and filled my glass.

He ate too, and after a few minutes I had sated myself enough to talk. “Mom still asleep?”

Daddy’s mouth turned down. “Still sleeping. I need to have a little talk with the doctor,” he said. “It seems that she’s gotten pretty dependent on those sleeping pills he prescribed.”

I was going to say something, ask a question, but there was a knock on the door downstairs. I rose to answer it, but Daddy stopped me.

“I’ll get it, hon. You just finish your breakfast.”

As he left the room and headed downstairs, I scraped the last bits of egg onto my toast. I felt happy and full of energy. It was the best I had felt in a long time, since before …

But I wasn’t feeling quite well enough to think about that.

I took my dishes to the sink.

“Scar?” Daddy called up to me. “There’s someone here to see you. A boy.” His voice was quizzical.

I grabbed my book bag and trotted down the stairs. Maybe
it was Jake; he lived just up the street and had trig with me. Last night’s homework had been pretty tough … maybe he had a question.

But it wasn’t Jake. Standing in the doorway, his green eyes flashing angrily, was Will.

I stopped halfway down the stairs. “What are you doing here?”

He smiled at me, but only with his mouth. His eyes were still the same, a dangerous flash of green. His smile, it seemed, was for my dad’s benefit. The eyes were for me.

“Can I walk you to school?” he asked.

“You must be Will Cohen,” Daddy said. “I talked to your dad a couple of weeks ago.”

Will pulled his gaze from my face and forced himself to focus on Daddy. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Wenderoth.”

“Just John,” Daddy insisted, shaking Will’s hand. “We’re all pretty casual here on the island.”

“John,” replied Will. “Well, John, do you mind if I walk your daughter to school this morning?”

“It’s fine by me,” Daddy said. “So long as Scarlett wants you to.”

They both turned to look at me as I stood like a scared rabbit on the stairs. Truthfully, what I wanted was to turn back up the stairs and bolt for my bedroom, but I didn’t.

“Sure,” I said, trying to make my voice light, friendly. “I’ll see you later, Daddy.”

“Have a good day, kids,” he called after us as we made our way down the porch steps and through the front garden.
I heard the click of the front door closing, and then I was alone with Will.

Suddenly, with something that felt like restrained fury, Will took me by the elbow and led me forcefully out my front gate and down the street, toward the corner.

“We need to talk,” he growled through his teeth.

His grasp on my arm was strong, and I felt the heat of his hand through the thin layer of my thermal. Above us, the sun shone brightly. Today would be hot.

I tried to yank my arm away, but Will just tightened his grasp.

“Ow,” I said, feeling panicky. “You’re hurting me.”

Instantly, Will dropped my arm. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He stopped and turned to me. His face was anguished, tortured. “What are you doing?” he asked me, running his hands through his hair.

“Me? What am
I
doing? You’re the one who showed up at
my
house, totally uninvited. What are
you
doing?” I reached out to push him, but Will’s quick eyes found the cut on my wrist and his hand shot out, encircling my arm.

“What’s this?” His voice was dangerous.

“It’s nothing. A scrape.” I pulled my arm back. This time, Will let go, and he watched as I yanked my sleeve down to cover my wrist. I scratched off the scab and I felt my wrist bleeding again, soaking into my cotton shirt.

“How did this happen?” he moaned, and I had the sensation that he was talking about more than just my cut.

“It was an accident.” I lied smoothly. “And anyway, what’s it to you? It’s none of your business.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Will said. “It’s absolutely my business if you get hurt, Scarlett. Even if
you’re
the one hurting yourself.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I spat out another lie—“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would I hurt myself?”

Will ignored my bluster. “I don’t know,” he said. The anger was gone from his eyes, but he still looked pained, as if it was his fault I was hurt. “But I’m not a kid, not anymore. If you’re hurt, even if you’re hurting yourself, I won’t just stand by and watch.”

Then he reached out and brushed my cheek with his hand. I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to lean into his touch, take the comfort he was offering. But I felt scared and ashamed, so instead I pulled away, wiping the traitor tears angrily from my face.

“Just leave me alone,” I said.

“For now,” he answered.

I listened to the sound of his footsteps as he headed through town, toward school.

I didn’t feel like going to school anymore. Breakfast felt leaden in my stomach now, a heavy ball of food I didn’t want to have anything to do with. Who did Will Cohen think he was? What right did he think he had to show up at my house and interrogate me? Had someone put him up to this … a teacher, maybe?

Or did he have some kind of hero complex? Maybe he’d heard about Ronny and had decided that he was going to save me or something. Whatever it was, I felt my old bilious
friend Anger rising in my chest, forming a crust of bitterness around my heart, protecting me from the other emotions that threatened to flood me—shame, and fear, and inescapable loneliness.

I yanked my cell phone from my bag: 7:32, half an hour still until school started. I punched in Lily’s name, hit Send, and waited for her to answer.

“Yo,” she said after the second ring.

“Hey.”

“Where are you?” she complained. “I went to your house but your dad said
Will Cohen
walked you to school? I don’t think Andy’s going to like that,” she said, singsong and full of laughter.

I loved Lily. “Do you feel like going to school today?” I asked.

“Not really.” Always game for anything—that was Lily. She didn’t take anything seriously, a quality that sometimes irritated me but right now felt just right.

“I think we’re about due for a mental health day,” I suggested.

An hour later, when we should have been trapped in European History, Lily and I were instead strolling along the boardwalk, trying to blend in with the tourists. Lily was sipping some chocolatey coffee confection topped with whipped cream, but I’d chosen a mint tea instead. The breakfast that had tasted so good felt like some kind of alien invader. I hoped the tea would settle things down.

Lily was wearing her sunglasses and her eyes darted back
and forth over the crowd as she enjoyed playing secret agent. “We’ll have to get off the boardwalk soon,” she said to me in a stage whisper, “before we’re spotted by the fuzz.”

I rolled my eyes at her mock-theatrics, but acknowledged that she was right. Our tiny island was far too intimate to allow us to ditch class so publicly; we’d be ratted out in no time by one of the shopkeepers if we didn’t keep a low profile.

“Snitch at eleven o’clock!” Lily hissed, pulling me behind a parked truck and crouching down as Mrs. Antoine, our French teacher’s wife, whisked by us on her bicycle.

“That was a close one,” I whispered, enjoying the dramatic tension. “Maybe we should go somewhere a little less obvious.”

Lily pursed her lips, thinking, still crouched behind the truck. “I know the perfect place.”

The thing about an island is that there are lots of beaches. A half mile out of town, there’s a piece of shoreline where the tourists gather to snorkel and feed the fish, especially our island’s famous orange Garibaldis, who are practically as tame as house cats. Not much farther, if you’re willing to climb down a fairly treacherous cliff, there’s a little inlet of sand and sun that tourists rarely bother with.

Scrambling down the cliff in my sandals was a challenge, but nothing compared to Lily’s descent in her four-inch espadrilles. I suggested she take them off, but she shook her head. “It’s good practice,” she told me. “If I can make it
down this cliff, negotiating the cobblestones in Brazil over winter break should be no problem.”

“You’re going to Brazil at Christmas?” I felt panicky. Two weeks of vacation without Lily?

“Yeah,” she said, hopping down the final couple of feet and landing neatly on the sand. “The twins want to see a river dolphin.”

I clambered down after her. “A river dolphin? You have to go all the way to Brazil to see a river dolphin?”

She shrugged. “They’ve got the biggest kind in Brazil … the pink ones.”

I shook my head. “Sure,” I said. “Why not? Pink river dolphins.”

“Wanna come?”

For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine traipsing through Brazil searching for pink river dolphins with Lily, the twins, and their parents. It sounded pretty tempting, and I was sure they’d be happy to have me along to entertain Lily. But missing Christmas … I knew it would be torturous to sit in our big, empty shell of a house, knowing that Ronny would not be taking the ferry home for the holidays, but it seemed even more excruciating to imagine my parents with no kids home at all on Christmas Eve.

“Nah,” I said. “Not this year.”

Lily seemed to understand my thought process. “Maybe next time,” she suggested.

The sun was warm on my skin. I lay down on the sand and tried to relax. European History would be over by now; I’d be in trig, a class I shared with Andy. I wondered briefly what he’d make of my absence.

I felt Lily casually plop down next to me on the sand. “Ah,” she said. “One more chance to tan before summer’s over for good.”

Only in places like California can you even pretend that the beginning of October still qualifies as summer. But a tan?

Looking over, I gasped. Last I’d checked, Lily had been wearing red jeggings and a white, belted tunic. “Lily!” I said. “Someone will see you!”

“It’ll be their lucky day,” she answered, eyes still closed. Aside from her black panties, Lily was completely naked. She hadn’t been lying about sunbathing in Italy; except for her rose-colored nipples, her heavy, round breasts were darkened to the same even bronze as her shoulders and stomach. Her belly, even when she lay on the beach, was not totally flat. Instead, like that of the naked beauty in the Art Deco mural on our island’s casino-turned-theater, her stomach was gently curved, a little soft, and perfectly lovely.

Her legs, too, were rounded—not fat, but not thin, either. She looked healthy, beautiful, more like a woman than I imagined I ever would. Shading her face with her hand, she peeled open an eye and peered at me.

“Well?” she said. “Are you going to just sit there with your mouth open, or are you going to catch some rays?”

I’d seen Lily naked lots of times before when we got dressed up for parties and dances, when we tried on clothes in shared dressing rooms. But I’d never seen her like this, luxuriating in the feeling of the sun on her skin, fully sensual and completely comfortable. Suddenly, I felt very, very young, and terribly awkward.

“I’m kind of cold,” I mumbled.

Lily snorted. “I don’t think so,” she said, closing her eyes. “But stay dressed, if you want.
I
plan on having a tan for the Halloween party.”

I was torn. I wanted to be like Lily, free and cosmopolitan. But I felt frightfully small-town and full of nerves.

The beach was completely deserted. There were a couple of seagulls, but they weren’t paying any attention to us. The waves came and went, came and went. The sun felt hot on my head, and I considered how good it would feel on my bare skin. Lily’s eyes were closed; she might even have fallen asleep.

“What the hell,” I muttered to myself, and reached down to the waist of my shirts, pulling both layers off together. I shoved down my skirt and jeans and kicked them, along with my flip-flops, in a tangled, sandy heap. My hands hesitated a minute before unhooking my bra … but I did it, and tossed it on top of the rest of my clothes, then flopped stomach-down into the sand and squeezed my eyes shut.

A breeze passed across my skin. My hair, still braided, fell to one side, and my bare back felt like an offering to the sky.

My muscles were tensed almost to the point of spasm, I realized. So I focused on relaxing—first my toes, then my calves, all the way up my body to my shoulders, my neck, even my face muscles. I relaxed my lips. I relaxed my nose.

As I lay there, warming in the sand, I listened to the drumming of the waves against the shore. The rhythm was
soothing, like a heartbeat, reliable and steady. I heard the gulls calling overhead; farther away, above our cove, I heard the occasional rush of an engine as a car sped by.