The Vow by Jessica Martinez Read Free Book Online Page A

like my only hope. So I stopped eating. I told Him I’d start again when He brought Lena back. Back then he was still worth a capital letter at the beginning of his name.
    I didn’t know then that already-skinny nine-year-olds aren’t allowed to go on hunger strikes. Four weeks and twenty-three pounds later, my parents yanked me out of fourth grade and checked me into the psychiatric ward of Hardin Children’s Hospital. A nurse put a tube into my neck, and I had to watch the calories pour into my vein all day long, wondering whether God considered the tube a deal breaker or not.
    The child psychiatrist tried to get me to confess to hating my body, then pursed her lips and gave me soft, sad eyes when I wouldn’t.
    But why would I hate my body?
    Her attention-seeking-behavior theory made even less sense. It was the opposite. I wanted to disappear, but that fact didn’t have anything to do with my deal with God either.
    Then she tried to convince me I was punishing my parents for giving up on Lena. I already disliked her, with her frizzy bun and coffee breath, but now I had a reason to hate her. She wasn’t allowed to talk about my parents like she knew them. They weren’t moving on. They were moving into themselves—away from each other and me and the world. Mom was sure that Lena was still alive, living with hippies or polygamists or devil worshippers or whoever. And Dad had transformed from a man who built birdhouses for Mom’s garden to a man who kicked holes in walls. Why would I want to punish them more?
    I would die, the shrink finally told me, if I didn’t start eating.
    I pretended not to hear her. I didn’t tell her that God would save me. I knew he would, though. Not because I needed saving, but because he was going to bring back my sister.
    It wasn’t until spring that I started eating again. Hunters found Lena’s body in the woods only forty miles south. Of course nobody told me the details, but I read them years later online. Naked, raped, strangled, discarded, frozen, thawed, and gnawed on by wild animals. That was how god brought her back to me.
    The frizzy-bunned shrink took full credit for my recovery, and I never told her or my parents about my pact with god. Just Mo, when we were fourteen.
    He listened, then asked who won.
    “Won? It wasn’t a contest, Mo. It was a deal.”
    “A deal? But what does God have to gain from you not eating?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. That’s not really the point.” I’d expected sympathy, not a critique. But I’d forgotten that Mo thinks first and feels later. “It made sense at the time. I was ten , Mo.”
    “So you started eating again because you realized God doesn’t make deals?” he asked.
    “No. I started eating because there is no god.”
    He said nothing. Then finally, “Hmm.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “What if you’re wrong? What if there is one and he just doesn’t make deals? Or what if he does make deals and the feeding tube was breaking it? What if you lost?”
    “It wasn’t a contest.”
    “Sounds like one to me.”
    “Forget it.”
    But he didn’t forget it. The next day he slid an envelope into my locker with a bumper sticker inside—one of those Christian fish symbols with feet and DARWIN written across it. The accompanying note said: Sorry. I’m an ass. You’ve totally earned atheism.
    That’s something Mo can do better than anyone else: apologize. It isn’t that easy for most people to say sorry and mean it, but I knew he meant it.
    At the time, I didn’t have a car, and I was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t let me use her Tahoe to mock Christianity, so I put the sticker on my bathroom mirror instead. My parents never asked about it.
    “Why don’t you head out,” Reed says. My head snaps up and into the present. “I can finish,” he adds.
    I stare down at the rag in my hand. How long have I been wiping circles with this same dirty rag? He must think I’m crazy. I glance at the clock. “It’s okay. My ride