Echo (Black Lotus #2)(86)

“Margo,” she says. I wait for the command, breath bated. This time she is looking at my reflection, slightly behind hers. “You’re not a pretty girl. You could at least lose the weight. What you don’t have in the face, you can have in the body.”

So I can sell it like you do?

“I’ll try, Mama.”

Submission. That’s my job.

“Margo, you can go now,” she says. “Stay in your room.”

My name followed by a double command. What a special treat!

I walk backwards out of the bathroom. It’s what I’ve learned to do to avoid being struck in the head with something. My mother is dangerous when she doesn’t take her pills. And you never know when she’s off. Sometimes I sneak in her room to count them, so I know how many safe days I have left.

“Margo,” she calls when I am almost to my door.

“Yes, Mama?” I say. My voice is almost a whisper.

“You can skip dinner tonight.”

She offers it like it’s something good, but what she’s really saying is, “I won’t be allowing you to eat tonight.”

That’s all right. I have my own stash, and there’s nothing in the cupboards anyway.

I go to my room, and she locks the door behind me, pocketing the key. The lock on my door is the only working lock in the house, besides the one on the front door. My mother had it installed a few years ago. I though it was to keep me safe, until I figured out that my mother was stashing her money under a loose floorboard in my room. Her money is all there under my feet. She doesn’t spend it on clothes, or cars, or food. She hoards it. I skim money off the top to buy food. She probably knows, since I’m still alive and also fat.

I sit on my floor and slide a box out from under my bed. I choose wisely in case she’s listening at the door: a banana and two slices of bread. No noise, no crunching, no wrappers. The banana is black and sticky, and the bread is stale, but it still tastes good. I pull off pieces of the bread and squash it between my fingers before putting it in my mouth. I like to pretend I’m taking Holy Communion. My friend, Destiny, took her first communion. She said the priest put a flat piece of bread on your tongue, and while it was sitting on your tongue it turned into the body of the Lord Jesus. You had to wait for the Lord Jesus’s body to melt before you swallowed it, because you couldn’t very well bite the Lord Jesus’s body, and then you had to drink his blood. I don’t know anything about the Lord Jesus or why you have to eat his body or drink his blood to be Catholic, but I’d rather pretend to eat God’s body than stale, old bread.

When I’m done with my dinner I can hear muffled thuds and the floorboards groaning under the weight of feet. Whose feet? The tall man? The man with the gray, curly chest hair? Or perhaps it’s the man who coughs so hard he makes my mother’s bed rattle.

“The croup,” I say to my limp banana skin. I read about the croup in one of my books. A library book I keep checking out because I don’t want to give it back. I slide it out from my school bag as I eat a Honey Bun, and look at the pictures while licking the sticky off my fingers. When I hear Mama’s headboard creaking against the wall I eat another. I’m going to be fat for as long as I live in the eating house. For as long as the house eats me.