Page 8 of Who's that Girl?
I am hungry though. Really hungry. I do the math and realize I haven’t eaten anything since dinner yesterday. And we ate early. At 5:00 pm. And now it’s past noon. I haven’t eaten anything in like, 20 hours. My stomach clenches and moans and my head is pounding. I feel almost faint, if I’m being honest, which is pathetic. And weak.
In addition to being hungry all the time these days, sometimes, at night, my legs hurt. They actually hurt. Sharp pains shoot up and down my shin bones. The pains freaked me out at first, so much so that I even told my mom about them, but Marla only laughed.
“It’s just growing pains, baby,” she said. “You’ll see. You’re about to shoot up and fill out.” She was sure I was going to be big one day, like my father had been. I figured if that was the case, the pain would be worth it, but so far, I was still a shrimp. An average, 12-year-old nobody. Currently starving.
That’s what I’m thinking — that I’m a hungry nobody — when I see her.
I round a tight corner, pushing my way through the branches of two pines, and there she is — the girl from the parking lot with the reddish hair and the toasted skin. She’s wandering between the trees, her hands reaching out, brushing the needles on both sides with the tips of her fingers. And … are her eyes closed?
They are. She’s walking along with her eyes closed, coming right at me.
I don’t want to startle her, so I sort of cough lightly, like I can’t help it. It sounds totally fake. Her eyes fly open.
“It’s you,” she says, like she knows me. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I say. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t,” she replies with a smile. “I wasn’t startled.” And I guess that’s true.
“You had your eyes shut,” I say. Stupid thing to say. Like she doesn’t know she had her eyes shut. Now it sounds like I’m criticizing her. Calling her weird or something. “You looked cool,” I add, hastily. “How do you keep from bumping into things?”
“I could feel the trees, so…”
“So…”
“So that helped. And anyway, I was trying to catch you. Sometimes, when an animal is skittish, if you pretend you can’t see it, it’ll come right up to you. My dad taught me that.”
I think of all the things Mac has taught me. How to shotgun a beer. How to watch TV. How to twist the collar of someone smaller than you so you can slam them up against a wall.
I don’t know if my real dad liked animals at all.
Well this is going great, I think.
Up close, the girl looks a little younger than I expected. She’s nearly as tall as me, but her face is round and sweet, her cheeks chubby, like a five-year-old’s.
“Where’s your family?” I ask.
“Oh, everywhere. All over. Tree hunting. But everyone knows we’re just going to pick whichever one Gray says he likes because he’s the baby.”
She talks like I know her family. Like I know who Gray is.
“Where’s yours?” she asks.
“I dunno,” I say. “Far away, I hope. I’m sort of avoiding them.”
She nods like she understands, which seems doubtful.
“Sometimes I like slipping away from everyone,” she agrees, like we’re the same. Maybe we are? Suddenly she looks deep into my eyes, like she’s studying me. It’s … strange. I look away.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “You look kinda funny.”
“Haha. Very funny.”
“No, I mean. You look funny like, sick or something. And sad. Are you okay?”
“Oh. Yeah, I’m okay. Just hungry. I didn’t have breakfast.”
She looks up at the sky, scrubbed over with gray clouds, like she’s checking the position of the sun.
