Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott Read Free Book Online

and let you hear it too. Then I'll leave you there, roll you in their ashes and put matches in your hands, and when the police come they'll know you were bad and ran away and came back to punish them for forgetting you. After all, you sent those angry letters home. They gave them to the police and hope you never come back."
    Letters? I never ... Ray grins at me. God-monster, ruler of my world.
    When I don't say anything, he kisses my forehead. "Be good today. Be very, very good."
    He is whistling when he leaves for work.
    I stare at the picture of the baby for a long, long time, and then put it back in Ray's room, face up on his dresser, next to his hairbrush and picture of his mother. Her hair was dark too.

34

    O NCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A little girl. Now there is a new one.
    There is always a new one.

35

    MORNING, MY MORNING. I LIE ON the sofa and watch TV. After a while I get up and get the piece of paper I brought home for Ray out of the trash, turning it over to the clean side. I find a pen in the kitchen, next to where he keeps the shopping list, same things on it every week, and sit down at the table.

Dear Vanessa Judith,
You look pretty in the paper, shiny new
not broken. Be better than I was, am.
I didn't write the letters that came. I never
wrote any letters but this one. Don't ever
listen to anyone who asks if you want
to know where I am.

    I stop and put the paper in my pocket. It's a stupid letter and I can't find the words to say what I want, feeling happy she's here and safe, angry she is so pretty and new and not smeared like me, and babies can't read anyway. Stupid.
    In the park, I crumple it inside my fist, squeezing tight, and drop it into a trash can.
    "You were here yesterday, weren't you?" someone asks, not Jake, not a boy, but a woman, and I turn to see the tired-looking cop staring at my hand still crushed into a fist, red from where I squeezed the paper like I could force the words out and let them float up into the sky.
    Ray does not like cops. Once one came to the door to ask if we'd seen a guy who'd stolen two cars, and then asked me if I was sick because he said I looked pale and Ray said I had the flu and did the officer have a card, he would call if he heard anything and then sat watching the door for two hours after the cop left, knife in his hand with my throat right under it. Waiting.
    I don't like cops either.
    "I thought you were homeless yesterday," the cop says. "The clothes and everything. But then how do I know how kids dress now? Where do you go to school?" She squints at me. "What happened to your throat?"
    Across from me, a little boy kicks another little boy in the leg.
    "Fight," I say. "My brother."
    "He do that a lot?"
    I shake my head no. She is still looking at me.
    "You hungry?"
    I shake my head no again but she pulls out a candy bar, and my hands are reaching for it even as she says, "I bought this earlier but it melted some and I hate melted ... oh. You are hungry."
    I do not look at her as I swallow, breaking the candy apart with my teeth, breaking it as fast as I can to get it inside me.
    "When's the last time you ate?" she asks.
    "Lunch." That is the right answer and I did eat yogurt for the first five minutes of my soap, Storm waiting to see if her baby was all right or if it was going to be born with a rare disease that only the doctor she used to love could cure. Then I had to run for the bus, heart thump-thumpthumping in my chest.
    "I'm Barbara," the cop says, holding out her hand, and I think I pause too long before I take it. Her skin is very warm.
    "Cold hands you've got there," she says, and pulls something out of her pocket. A card, which she hands to me.
    SAFE HARBOR , it says.
    "It's a special place," she says. "For teenagers who don't--who might need a safe place."
    There are no safe places, but I nod and say thank you like Ray did when he got the card from the police officer and put it in my pocket like I will keep it.
    "I have to go now," Barbara says,