i.
The bell rings and Amanda Bontemps looks at her bumpy with calluses hands, and imagines what her fingers will look like when she pays the stack of bills splashed with crimson. She wonders if they’ll become long and spindly, if the meat will be thawed away, and whether she would finally have piano fingers.
She grimaces at the thought. Derek Southward, who had once imagined the twisting of her colorless lips was a smile through a body-filled school coridoor, escorts her to her locker and then the grocery store.
He says, “Your eyes are purple, you know.”
Amanda’s shoulders travel up and down to indicate a question. She knows her eyes are brown, and blinks at him to tell him so, at the same time quickening her pace.
“No, under.”
Derek stops, forcing Amanda to do the same. With a big open hand he caresses the shadows with his thumb, then leans down and kisses her where he touched her. Derek puts his arms around her and she hugs him back, grateful she can lean on him for a little while. But Amanda breaks away quickly, before she feels too safe or loses too much time.
She has to get home soon, to make lunch and supper and prepare an exact dose of medicine, and study for her finals and practice playing the piano for her mother, and then run to the gas station for some of the evening and half the night. For Amanda the bags under her eyes become heavier than the groceries Derek is carrying for her.
They reach her house and she covers her face.
“Look, if things get too hard, you can always move in with me, you know.”
Amanda stiffens and at first Derek wishes he had said nothing; but he sees a bald spot on her head and knows that under long sleeves of a hot summer day there are thin red lines on her wrists. He worries, but other than muscling a path amid protesters picnicking on the lawn and reporters flocking Amanda’s garden, he does not know what to do.
“Did you know your mother is mentally ill?”
“Suicide attempts! How many suicide attempts were there?”
“She wears corpses! Burn her sable fur!”
Derek presses his hand to her ear, covering the other with his shoulder so she won’t hear their shrieks. But Amanda does hear, and feels bile at the back of her tongue and her breathing hitches when she sees Mr. and Mrs. Southward in the crowd, wearing ‘Save the Animals’ t-shirts and holding a white transparent with big red letters: She’s Unstable, She Has A Dead Sable.
He blushes and squeezes her hand. “Yeah. But the offer still stands.”
They stop before the door. Amanda hates herself for considering and hates the dimples that appear on her pale face and the warm feeling in her chest. Then Derek opens the door to let her in, closes it behind her before passing her the groceries, and she remembers why she rarely smiles. When it dies she wants to scream, and she cannot make a sound other than that of fingernails scratching pastel paint off a wall.
