Sacred Read Online Free PDF Page A

tension in my shoulders, streaming down my back, rivulets caressing the backs of my thighs …
    My body felt as if it might be waking from a long, deep sleep. On the one hand, this might be a good thing. The numbness I’d strived to maintain throughout the summer couldn’t go on forever, after all. On the other hand, the thought of my pain overwhelming me as it had those first few weeks after Ronny’s death … Perhaps numbness had its advantages.
    I didn’t want to think about it anymore, not now anyway. So I cranked the water off and clambered out of the bathtub, fighting my way through the plastic shower liner and wrapping myself in a towel.
    It was easy to avoid my reflection in the bathroom; themirror was steamed up. And as I entered my room at the end of the narrow hallway, passing the closed door to Ronny’s room, there was no danger that my full-length mirror would reflect my image; I’d turned it toward the wall.
    I don’t know why, exactly, but lately the idea of looking in the mirror had seemed repulsive to me. Not that I was repulsive to look at; Andy had never complained, that was for sure, and I knew I’d inherited my mom’s easy prettiness, with my straight flaxen hair and light blue eyes. But I didn’t want to see myself anymore. I bet the school shrink would have had a field day with that little piece of information.
    The jeans I’d worn to the stable today were my smallest pair, a detail I hadn’t chosen to share with Alice when she’d started in on how loose they looked. My other three pairs were stuffed in the back of my closet. They all swam on me.
    So jeans were out for the night. That left me with the option of shorts, a dress, or a skirt. The evenings were beginning to get cold, so I settled on my favorite skirt, a heavy hemp wrap that skimmed my ankles, and pulled on a blue long-sleeved tee.
    I didn’t feel like blow-drying my hair, so instead I wove it into a loose braid and fastened it with a thin band of leather. I slipped on my favorite Rainbow sandals and called it an outfit.
    My wallet had twenty dollars in fives and ones, tips left in the bedrooms of our B&B by the guests. I earned extra money by helping my mom clean the rooms, so I usually had a small fold of cash to spend around town.
    This summer, my take was definitely smaller, due in equalparts, I thought, to the faltering national economy and my family’s private grief. Still, twenty dollars would be more than enough for mini-golf and sodas.
    Then I couldn’t avoid it any longer. The pull was too great, like a deep treacherous undertow.
    I knelt by my bed and reached underneath it, extracting a slender yellow notebook. Before I sat with it by the window, I closed my bedroom door silently.
    There was a ritual to maintain. Before I could open the notebook, I had to turn on my overhead light, then turn it off, then turn it on again. It didn’t matter if light still streamed through the window; I had to flip the light switch exactly three times.
    Then I had to straighten the pillows on my bed. It was an old white iron bed, a double, with a white chenille spread and throw pillows in pastel colors. The yellow pillow had to sit closest to the headboard, then the mint-green one, then the two robin’s-egg-blue ones.
    After this, I gazed out the window and scanned the back garden. There was Daddy, sitting in his favorite spot near the water feature he’d installed with Ronny two summers ago, just beyond the gazebo. Even from here, I could see the glint of the koi fish as they swam in the miniature pond.
    Each time I held the notebook, I would sit in the rocking chair that had been a fixture in my room as long as it had been my room—all my life. It was white too, and it was angled toward the large bay window that spanned one whole wall of my room. I would sit, rock for a bit, and then open the notebook.
    But this time, before I opened the notebook, before I even sat in my rocking chair, I heard loud footsteps bounce up the