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“What?”
“I can’t have this conversation with you when you’re a thousand miles away.”
“Why? Are you hard? Are you horny, too? Man, this is bad timing.”
“You’re killing me.”
“If you were here, we could do all kinds of fun things. Well, maybe nothere, in your brother’s house, but you know what I mean.”
“Abs?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
I smile and hug myself around my middle. “I know. It’s so crazy. I love you, too.”
I’m so hungry.
My stomach growls really loud, and I push my hands over it, as if I can cover the sound with them. I haven’t had any food in three days. Only water.
Because I’m a bad girl. And I’m fat.
I don’t mean to be either of those things. I don’t eat too much, only what I’m given, and that never even fills me up all the way.
I have to sit in the living room, perfectly still on the couch, while the family I live with gets to have dinner in the dining room. This house is the biggest one I’ve ever lived in, with tall ceilings that make footsteps echo on the tile floor. It’s cold in here all the time.
I can smell the roasted chicken from the oven, and my stomach growls again. I feel sosick.Nauseous and empty and shaky. This morning, I was dizzy.
I just need a piece of chicken. Just a couple of bites, and I’ll be okay.
I can’t help the whimper that comes out of my mouth, and I hear everyone stop eating.
Oh, no.
“You want food, fatso?” It’s the oldest son who yells it, a laugh in his mean voice. “You can have the scraps.”
“No, she doesn’t get anything,” the daughter says. God, I hate her prissy voice. She’s so mean to me, and I have to share a room with her. It’s humiliating when she laughs at me when I have to change my clothes. “She’s fat; she won’t starve.”
There’s more laughter, and I have to fold my lips in so I don’t cry out. At least no one in this house has tried to rape me.
They just humiliate me here. And withhold food from me.
I’m always so hungry.
I can hear them scraping the silverware over the plates, and then they get up and start to take their finished meals into the kitchen.
I wish I could just have whatever they didn’t finish. I’d be happy with anything at all.
The youngest child, a girl about the age of eight, is the last to leave the table, and she looks around the room, then walks to me and holds out a big chunk of chicken that she must have hidden in her napkin for me.
“Hurry,” she whispers, and I snatch it out of her hand and shove it into my mouth. But as I chew, the mom comes in and sees what’s happening.
“Go to your room, Elizabeth.”
“Mama—”
“To your room.”
