Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien Read Free Book Online Page B

broke their
     necks, skinned their bodies, and drained the blood in the kitchen sink. She made rabbit stew, simmering the meat until it
     was tender, and you could smell the potatoes and carrots and meat all through the house and down the street.
    The first time we snuck outside, Paula unlatched the door and poked her face up to the cage. “Be free,” she whispered. “Be
     free or be stew.” The rabbits came and stood in the long grass, their noses twitching. We lay down, and they crawled timidly
     on top of us, onto our heads. “They like our hair,” Paula told me. “They feel safe there.” She tried to coax them across the
     backyard, crouching on her hands and knees, leading the way to the fence. But they were nervous and would only take a few
     loping steps before something scared them, a bird overhead, a motorcycle on Knight Street. They scampered back to their hutch.
    “What can we do?” Paula asked. “They’re not wild, after all.”
    We stayed out on the back lawn listening to the traffic. At one point, a light came on in the kitchen and we froze. Paula’s
     dad stood at the window, a glass of water in his hand. He took forever to drink it, staring straight at us through the glass,
     but we trusted the dark and willed ourselves invisible. Whenthe light in the kitchen went off, we breathed easy again, felt the chill in the wind, came back to life.
    The nights I slept over, I would wake up with my face in Paula’s hair. It leaped away from her, full of static. The smell
     would wake me up, apples and dish soap and sweat. I wondered what it would be like to wake up beside someone night after night,
     hair in your face, legs crossing heavily under the blankets. If the smell and feel would tire you out, like it had my mom
     and dad. They slept in separate rooms, Mom on the couch and Dad in the bedroom. Sometimes they sat in the same room though
     neither of them would acknowledge the other. They had perfected it, made it an art to see something but believe it wasn’t
     there.
    Once, when Paula and I were lying in bed, she asked me, “Are you a virgin still?”
    “Of course,” I said, thinking of Jonah. I stared at her fingers on the top of the blanket, spread out and still. “Aren’t you?”
    She lifted her hands, holding them over our heads like planets, constellations, something we’d never seen up close. “I’m not
     sure,” she said.
    We lay together quietly under the blankets. For a long time lying there, I wondered if I should say something more, but then
     the moment passed. I could hear her breathing grow heavier. Before she fellasleep, she turned over and held on to me. Her grip was so plaintive that I felt sorry for her and held on, too. I had the
     sense that some things were impossible for her to say.
    In school, we’d been learning about species. We had to imagine billions of years, different species rising like bubbles to
     the surface, all this time passing. But I could not imagine ten years, fifteen, twenty. My sixteen years felt like eternity
     but I knew I wouldn’t be like this forever. In all my life, the total sum of it, I was a species rising and falling. One day
     I would wake up and all of it would be gone.
    At first, when Paula and I talked about Jonah, we were conspirators. Together, we laid out a course of action. She made sure
     I stood behind him at the line-up in the cafeteria, that I sat in front of him in French class, that we happened by his locker
     three times a day, every day. She planned out the life we might have and whispered it to me in the hallway, one hand excitedly
     grasping my elbow. He would take me into his confidence, slowly. He would unburden secrets he never shared with anyone. A
     long time in the future, he might kiss me.
    One day Jonah appeared in front of my locker and said, “Let me drive you home, Miriam.” Outside my parents’ apartment, below
     their window, he put his carinto neutral and reached over, running his hand from my chin to my