It screamed, “What did I do?”

 

 “Timber wolves,” Miss Leroy says, and she laughs. We don’t have that trouble. Not here, she says. Not anymore.

 

 How Olson died, it’s called myoglobulinaria. In extensive burns, the burned muscles release the protein myoglobulin. This flood of protein into the bloodstream overwhelms each kidney. The kidneys shut down, and the body fills with fluid and blood toxins. Renal failure. Myoglobulinaria. When Miss Leroy says these words, she could be a magician doing a trick. They could be a spell. An incantation.

 

 This way to die takes all night.

 

 The next morning, the snow plow came through. The driver found them: Olson Read dead and Miss Leroy asleep. From melting snow in her mouth all night, her gums were patched with white. Frostbite. Read’s dead hands were still locked around hers, protecting her fingers, warm as a pair of gloves. For weeks, the frozen skin around the base of each tooth, it peeled away, soft and gray from the brown root, until her teeth looked the way they do. Until her lips were gone.

 

 Desquamating necrotic tissue. Another magic spell.

 

 There’s nothing out in the woods, Miss Leroy would tell people. Nothing evil. It’s just something so sad and alone. It’s Olson Read not knowing, still, what he did wrong. Not knowing where he’s at. So terrible and alone, even the wolves, the coyotes are gone from up that end of the White River.

 

 That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.

 

 Every night’s scattered with them. These wandering people who can’t be saved but won’t die. You can hear them at night, screaming out there, up this side of the White River Fault.

 

 Some February nights, there’s still the smell of hot grease. Crisp bacon. Olson Read not feeling his legs but still getting tugged back. Him screaming. His fingers hooked claws into the snow, getting tugged back into the dark by all those clenched little teeth.

 

 

 

 

21.

 

 According to Mrs. Clark, the average person burns sixty-five calories per hour while asleep. You burn seventy-seven calories each hour awake. Just walking slow, you burn two hundred. Just to stay alive, you need to eat 1,650 calories each day.

 

 Your body can only store about twelve hundred calories of carbohydrates—most of them in your liver. Just being alive, you burn through all your stored calories in less than one day. After that, you burn fat. Then muscle.

 

 This is when your blood fills with ketones. Your serum-acetone concentrations soar, and your breath starts to smell. Your sweat stinks of airplane glue.

 

 Your liver and spleen and kidneys shrink and atrophy. Your small intestine swells from disuse and fills with mucus. Ulcers open up holes in the wall of your colon.

 

 As you starve, your liver converts muscle to glucose to keep your brain alive. As you starve, your hunger pains disappear. After that, you’re just tired. More and more, you’re confused. You stop noticing the world around you. You quit keeping yourself clean.

 

 Once you burn through 70 to 94 percent of your body fat, and 20 percent of your muscle, you die.

 

 For most people, this takes sixty-one days.

 

 “My daughter, Cassandra,” Mrs. Clark says, “she never did tell me what happened.”

 

 Most of what we know about starvation, Mrs. Clark says, comes from watching prisoners in Northern Ireland on hunger strikes.

 

 While starving, sometimes your skin fades to pale blue. Sometimes it turns dark brown. A third of the starved swell—but only the ones with pale skin.

 

 On the wall in the Gothic smoking room, Saint Gut-Free has counted off forty days’ worth of hash marks. Forty stripes of his pencil.

 

 Our story, the true-life epic of our brave survival in the face of cruel, cruel torture, well, the royalties get split only thirteen ways. Now that Miss America’s bled to death.

 

 Most of us have quit trying to break the furnace after it’s been fixed by the ghost. Still, we don’t wash our clothes. Some days, from lights-on to lights-out, we lie in bed in our dressing rooms, backstage. Each of us, reciting our story to our self.

 

 If we have the strength, we might borrow a knife from Chef Assassin and hack our hair off at the scalp. Another humiliation inflicted on us by Mr. Whittier. Here’s another way to make ourafterpicture more terrible compared to thebeforepictures of us, right now being stapled to telephone poles or printed on milk cartons.

 

 The Reverend Godless breaks the leg off a chair and twists the wood inside his ass, to get some slivers for the police to find. A fine idea, provided by Mrs. Clark’s daughter, Cassandra.

 

 After dark, we hear footsteps. Doors creak open. The ghost footsteps of here. Mr. Whittier. Lady Baglady. Comrade Snarky and Miss America.

 

 Since what the ghost did to the Duke of Vandals, we all lock our doors after lights-out. No one wanders except in twos or threes, every witness with another witness, to stay safe. Everybody carries one of Chef Assassin’s knives.

 

 After she came home, Mrs. Clark says, her daughter never did gain back much weight. Cassandra’s fingernails grew back, but she never painted them. Her hair grew back, but Cassandra would only wash it and keep it combed. She never curled it, piled it into hairdos, tinted it. Of course her missing teeth never grew back.

 

 She wore a size nothing. No hips. No chest. Just knees and shoulders and death-camp cheekbones. Cassandra could’ve worn anything, but every day was just the same of two or three long dresses. No jewelry. No makeup. She was so almost not there, it would take just a spoiled slice of lunchmeat to kill her. Just a handful of sleeping pills stirred into her oatmeal. If she would eat.

 

 But of course Mrs. Clark took her to a dentist. Paid money for a good partial denture. Offered to pay for implants to replace the teeth. The withered breasts. She did research on anorexia nervosa.

 

 Mrs. Clark lied and said she looked pretty, thin. Cassandra was never outside long enough to be anything but pale blue.

 

 No, Cassandra just went to school, where nobody talked to her. Everyone talked about her, the stories of her torture getting more horrible every term. Even the teachers let their terrible imaginations run wild. Around the neighborhood, everyone stopped Mrs. Clark to pat her hand and say how sorry they felt. As if Cassandra had been found dead.

 

 All the people who had canvassed, searched with the police dogs, they quit pressing for details. They got tired of Mrs. Clark telling them, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’tknow . . .”

 

 Cassandra’s first year back in school, her grades went up. She didn’t try out for cheerleader. She didn’t play basketball or soccer. She didn’t do anything but read and come home. She watched the birds in the sky. She watched her goldfish swim.

 

 Still, Cassandra wouldn’t wear the partial denture even when Mrs. Clark begged and threatened—threatened to hurt herself. Mrs. Clark could burn her arm with cigarettes and her daughter would just sit by and watch. Breathing in the smell.

 

 Cassandra would just listen. While Mrs. Clark begged her and yelled at her, asking Cassandra topleasemake an effort to be pretty. To be popular. To talk to a counselor. Get back into the swim of life. Anything. All Cassandra did was listen.

 

 “My own daughter,” Mrs. Clark says, “and she was friendly as a houseplant.”

 

 A robot that got straight A’s through her senior year but didn’t go to the prom. Didn’t date. Didn’t have any girlfriends. A Nightmare Box that ticked away, high up on some shelf.

 

 “She sat through every day,” Mrs. Clark said, “the way people sit in church.”

 

 Silent. Straight-backed. Bright-eyed. But not singing, never offering any detail about what went on inside her head. Cassandra would just watch and listen. Not the girl her mother had known, but someone else. A statue that looked down from behind an altar. A statue carved in a cathedral a thousand years ago. In Europe. A statue that knew it was carved by Leonardo da Vinci. That’s how Cassandra looked to people.

 

 Mrs. Clark says now, “It drove me crazy.”

 

 Other times, it was like living with a robot. Or a bomb. Some days, Mrs. Clark waited for whatever cult or nutcase to call and ask for Cassandra on the phone. Some nights, Mrs. Clark slept with a knife under her pillow and her bedroom door locked.

 

 Nobody knew what this silent girl might become. She’d lived through something the rest of them could never imagine. So much torture and horror that she didn’t need to tell people about it. She’d never need drama or joy or pain ever again.

 

 You could walk into a room, turn on the television, eat a bag of popcorn, and only then notice she was sitting beside you on the couch.

 

 Really, she wasthatkind of spooky. Cassandra was.

 

 One dinner, just the two of them at the kitchen table, Mrs. Clark asked, did Cassandra remember the Nightmare Box? Did that night in the gallery have anything to do with her disappearing?

 

 And Cassandra said, “It made me want to be a writer.”

 

 After that, Mrs. Clark couldn’t sleep. She wanted her daughter gone. Into college. In the army. In a convent. Anywhere. Just gone.

 

 And, one day, Mrs. Clark called the police to say Cassandra was missing.

 

 Of course she’d looked all over the house. Mrs. Clark knew the way Cassandra could disappear into the wallpaper or the stripes of the sofa fabric. But she really was gone.

 

 With all the faded yellow ribbons still flapping from everyone’s car, those flags of surrender, Cassandra Clark had disappeared, again.

 

  

 

 Cassandra

 

 Another Story by Mrs. Clark