Consumption Read Online Free PDF Page A

mouth. The candy was firm and stale, its sugar melting in an unpleasant gummy mess in her mouth. She spit it out, an orange stream of saliva hitting the dry ground.
    Of course. Why should she expect anything else with the luck she’d been having? This, like everything else in her life, was fucked up. Star sank against the fridge and pulled her school bag over her head, letting it shade her from the worst of the sun.
    Her day had started off by giving her its big, fat middle finger.
    Debbie Malkowski, Star’s supposed school best friend (her real best friend, Mabel Joyce, went to Cavus High instead of Star’s Catholic school, so Star had to find somebody else to hang around with during the school year) was caught by the school administration giving Seth Richardson a blow job in the teacher’s parking lot. Which wouldn’t have been such a big deal—hell, Star considered herself open-minded, a fucking liberal, for God’s sake, whatever that meant—so no, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if Seth Richardson hadn’t also been Star’s boyfriend.
    The rumors started after third period, and by lunch, they were flying fast as balls in a batting cage, so that Star practically
had
to skip her last class.
    Debbie’s betrayal was only the beginning of her day’s troubles, a fact she was well aware of as she snuck the attendance sheet from its resting place in the plastic envelope beside her homeroom’s door and erased the
A
the teacher had marked for “absent” beside her name before returning it. Not that it mattered. It was the last day of school, after all, what were they going to do, drag her back to make up the hours during summer? But she didn’t want to mess with the bother in case they
did
decide to do something. Especially if that something was call home.
    She’d walked the five miles to the convenience store near her house instead of calling her father for a ride home. She hadn’t wanted to face him, not yet.
    Still didn’t. Star sank onto the dirty earth of the field, moving an ancient and faded Sprite can out of her way.
    Star’s mother had always warned her away from the place, but her father, knowing that she was bound to find the warnings more appealing than repellant, took her by the hand one spring day when she was seven and walked her through each and every nook and cranny, showing her what was safe and what wasn’t.
    It had become their special place after that. Sometimes, she and her father would hunt through the wreckage together, find pieces of discarded furniture that the two of them would work to salvage. Star used them to build a kind of playhouse for herself and Mabel.
    But mostly, the junkyard was just a place for Star and her father to spend time together.
    Star flipped her arm over and looked at the black ink of the bear there, its dark shadow framed inside a five-point star. Star Bear. Her dad’s nickname for her since she’d been a little girl. She’d gotten the nickname, he told her, from the very minute she was born.
    “Hairy,” he told her. “All covered in fur.”
    “Daaad.”
As a little girl, she’d loved this story, loved to take delight in the first part, at her role of indignation. “I was not. Tell me the real reason.”
    Her father would always grow serious then. Look her in the eyes, lean down to her level.
    “All right. It was because when I first held you, you grabbed my finger. And you looked at me. I swear, you weren’t no more than a minute old, but I haven’t ever seen anybody give me that kind of look before.”
    “What kind of look was it?”
    “Strong,” her father would always say here. “Just like your grip. And that was it. I knew you were my little bear. My little Star Bear, and hadn’t nobody better mess with you.”
    “And?”
    “And I made a promise to you, right there.”
    This was her favorite part.
    “What promise?”
    “That I would help keep you safe and strong. That I would give you anything you asked for, Star Bear.”
    And