The Bad Ones by Melissa Albert

Author:Melissa Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I DIDN’T TALK MUCH DURING dinner. Usually my mom was chatty and pleased when she had both her daughters at the table, but tonight she was quiet, too. At one point my dad said, “Any word from Becca?” and my mom said, “I think she’d have let us know, Paul.” And that was the end of that.

“How’s the pain flare?” I asked as my mom stood to help clear the table.

“Better,” she said, not quite looking at me. And it was, I could see by the way she moved. Then she nodded at my plate and said, “Hunger strike?”

I looked, too. Chicken in cream sauce over yellow rice and bright boiled carrots. I’d moved it all around, cut the chicken into little pieces. The few bites I’d taken had sickened me.

“Sorry,” I said.

When the kitchen was clean, everyone headed off to their corners, I lingered. A strange sensation rolled through me, glittering everywhere, then compacting in my gut. It was so intense it took me a minute to identify it as hunger.

I stood at the counter dipping a spoon in peanut butter, then in honey, and licking it clean on unhygienic repeat. When the honey was gone I ate half a pack of stale chocolate wafers. It wasn’t enough.

You look tired, my sister said. But had there been something in her eyes? A certain widening? And my mother. Had she looked at me at all?

My stomach made a sound it had never made before. I went to stand in front of the pantry. On its bottom shelf were baking supplies: white sugar, brown sugar, a can of sweetened condensed milk. I surveyed them with a sense of doom.

Then I shut the pantry firmly, went to the sink, and filled a glass. I drained and refilled it. I drank water until my stomach hurt, until I could hear it sloshing, until I didn’t have space for anything more.

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