Chapter 140

Three days is apparently how long my parents need to decide that the world is safe enough for me to eat breakfast in it again.

I spent Saturday mostly in bed, which I allowed because my body requested it in terms I couldn’t argue with, and Sunday I spent on the window seat in my room with a sketchbook I barely touched and a cup of tea that went cold three times. My mother came in and out with things, food, extra blankets, the kind of gentle hovering she does when she’s worried but knows that smothering me will produce the opposite of the intended effect. My father I heard mostly through walls, the low register of his voice on phone calls that he took in his office with the door closed, which is how I knew they were about something he didn’t want echoing through the house.

I didn’t ask what it was yet. I was picking my moments.

Monday morning I come downstairs dressed and ready for school, because lying in that room for one more day with nothing but my own head fo