Sacred by Elana K. Arnold Read Free Book Online Page A

least.
    He pulled away first and he smiled at me, a wide, boyish grin, as if he’d just won a prize.
    “Good night,” I said, and I slipped into the house, closing the door softly behind me.

FOUR

    E ven though Lily and her family got home three days before school started, I didn’t see her until the first day of class. They had all come down with some kind of flu—(“Ugh, airports are disgusting” was Lily’s explanation of how they got sick)—so even though I wanted nothing more than to spend the last days of summer chilling poolside at Lily’s house, I was stuck in my own sad little world.
    My mom rarely appeared before eleven a.m. these days, and when she did make it out of her room, I wasn’t entirely convinced that she was fully conscious. I know my dad had refilled her prescription for sleeping pills, though his brow was creased with worry when he was talking to the pharmacist on the phone about it. I heard the phrase “developing a dependency,” but when he saw me listening, Daddy quickly finished the conversation and hung up.
    There were no more guests; I figured my parents must bedipping pretty heavily into their savings to cover the bills, and I considered trying to find an after-school job to help out. When I mentioned this to my dad, he shook his head firmly.
    “Junior year is the most important,” he said. “This is the year colleges look at closely. You don’t want to be stuck on this island forever, do you?”
    Absolutely not. I wanted to go somewhere far, far away for college. This hadn’t always been my plan; I had figured I’d follow in Ronny’s footsteps and go to UCLA, if I could get in. Maybe we would share an apartment. But with Ronny gone, I found myself yearning for something very different … snow, maybe, and big mountains.
    So I resigned myself to just doing my best not to spend my parents’ money, which was one of the reasons I turned my mom down when she offered to take me to the mainland to do some back-to-school shopping.
    The other reason was that I didn’t know if I could stand being alone with my mom for a whole day. Our sadness separately was hard enough.… Sometimes at night, I heard my mother crying, and I knew that she must have heard my sobs too. Together, our pain threatened to be overwhelming. I think my mom felt the same way. Even around the house we avoided standing too close to each other, and we never touched. Eye contact was minimal. It was as if we each were a highly reactive chemical that, if combined, would explode.
    So I spent my last few days of summer much as I’d spent the rest of them—doing chores around the house and hanging out at the stable with Delilah.
    Every time she and I rounded a bend on the trails, I found myself expecting to see Will Cohen again. But all I saw was more of the same—dry grass, rolling hills, trees.
    I even revisited the trail where I’d met Will. I found the straw cowboy hat that had blown off my head that afternoon; dismounting Delilah, I picked it up from where it lay on the ground, blowing off the dust before putting it on.
    But Will did not appear. I began to wonder if he had been a dream, or some sort of hallucination. Except his eyes—the shocking electric green of his eyes, staring at me with such intensity, such bewildered pain … I knew I didn’t have that good of an imagination.
    The day after Labor Day, I awoke to a strange mixture of anticipation and dread. Life seemed to be insisting on moving ahead, with or without Ronny.
    Time was a cruel bitch. Either move on with her or get steamrolled; I don’t think she cared much either way. My mom seemed to be taking door number two—steamrolled. Myself, I was ambivalent.
    Still, I’d get to see Lily today. That was worth getting out of bed for.
    There was no competing with Lily’s sense of fashion, especially considering that she’d just returned from two and a half months in Italy. So I dressed quickly, pulling on my favorite dress. It was violet,