Then I placedthe blade next to the skin on my palm.Ī tingle arced across my scalp. The ribbon unfurled into two piecesĪnd slipped to the floor without a sound. I touched the blade to apiece of ribbon draped across the table and pressed,ever so slightly. The little knotscame undone, just like that. I picked it upand laid the blade against the doily. It was sleek, like a fountainpen, with a thin triangular blade at the tip. Next to thecatalogue was a special craft knife with the wordEXACTO on the handle. On the table there was a roll of batting, a glue gun, adoily, a 1997 Krafty Kitchens catalogue. The room tilted left, then right, then straightened out.I grabbed hold of the edge of the dinner table andtried to remember if we stopped eating there becauseit was piled with junk or if it was piled with junkbecause we stopped eating there. The kitchen slid sideways, thenrighted itself. I let myself in and flipped the light switch. It was starting to get dark now, and I slowed down,walking past houses with windows of square yellowlight where mothers were inside making dinner, pasthouses with windows of square blue light where kidswere inside watching TV, to our house, where thedriveway was empty and the lights were off. Until, somehow, I was at theentrance to our development.

Past fast-food placesand car repair shops and video stores. I was still running, but now Iwas off the path, heading away from the finish line,past the cars in the parking lot, the flagpole, and theHOME OF THE LIONS sign. Muffled applause, the weak sputtering ofgloved hands clapping. Remember the moment when I’d stopped seeing her.And I knew then that if I couldn’t see her, no one couldsee me. Scared me, really scared me, was that I couldn’t

Then she was gone.I couldn’t even picture her anymore. She leaned in around acorner, I leaned in around a corner. My feet wentwhere her feet had just been. The soles of her sneakers swam up and down infront of me, first one, then the other, a grid of ridgesthat spelled out the upside-down name of the shoecompany. Our shadows passed along the groundslantwise slowly they merged, then her shadowpassed mine. We were the onlyones left in the last stretch of the course, the part thatwinds through the woods and comes out behind theschool. Everybody-except a girl from the other team. Everybody had passed me, just likethe week before and the week before that. It was at the last cross-country meet, right around thefour-mile mark. “Can you remember how it started?”you say. Your stockinged legs make a shushing sound asyou cross them. Like thecow it used to be before somebody killed it and turnedit into a chair in a shrink’s office in a loony bin.

You leanforward, place a box of tissues in front of me, and yourblack leather chair groans like a living thing.

Cut book by patricia mccormick