“All you’ll do is warn him,” Felix told her, “and he’ll pack her up and fly out of the country before we can get there.”
The whole thing made Story’s head spin. They’d abandoned the meal half-eaten—plates on the table, their chairs pulled out. She ran around, trying to get them packed, but in the end they’d left it all behind. It was an eight-hour drive, and Felix was desperate to get started. All they took were some toiletries, a few pairs of underwear.
Travel light. That’s what his father taught him. Confuse your trail. And always pack heat. Which is why, after he got Story in the car, he went into the garage and slipped a .32-caliber Ruger from its hiding place behind the furnace. It was tucked into a black Velcro sleeve, which he pocketed, along with a box of bullets.
He came out at a half run, carrying their water bottles.
“Don’t worry,” Story told him, seeing his face. “We’ll find her.”
They drove through the night, stopping for gas in Junction. While Story was in the bathroom, Felix swapped license plates with a dented green Ford parked by the air pumps. They were from Georgia now, state motto: Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation. Felix had driven through Georgia many times. He doubted Story had ever been below the Mason-Dixon Line before she moved to Austin. Certainly not to the Deep South. Searching the car, he’d found her cell phone in the center console and threw it in the trash. His own he’d smashed at the house, flushing the pieces down the commode.
Leave no trace.
They drove west with the windows down, feeling the wind on their faces. At 1:00 a.m. Story fell asleep, her bare feet perched on the dash. Felix drove the speed limit, keeping his eyes out for cops. It was force of habit for a man who worried his identity wouldn’t hold up to real scrutiny. He didn’t vote, had never gotten a parking ticket. His high school transcript was real, just not his. True lies, he called them. In this way he’d convinced himself he was safe, hidden, that the truth of what he did will never come out.
This is another form of denial. Wishful thinking.
Felix’s anxiety was that of a hunted animal. He woke often in the dead of night convinced that his father was standing by the bed, dressed in camouflage.
They found us, he’d say. Get dressed.
For Story, anxiety had come into her life in the form of an eating disorder. A devil that penetrated her brain, telling her not to eat. A demon that stank of bad breath, who refused to let her drink anything, even water. A devil who forced her to exercise all day and pace her room at night until she had burned off each calorie consumed and more. It spoke its devil tongue in her ear, telling lies. Such a fat, hateful creature, it said. No one will love you until you disappear.
In those days panic kept her awake, an electric terror filling every daylight hour. She was a thirteen-year-old girl, wasting away. For months she hid her condition under oversize sweatshirts. Her mother, busy at work, and her stepfather, preoccupied with her toddler stepbrother, noticed only that she had become more finicky in what she ate. Not that she had become an expert at cutting her food into small pieces and rearranging her plate to make it appear she’d eaten. Not that she had mastered the art of microbiting, outlasting her parents, who wolfed down their meals and hurried to clear their plates.
This is what slow-motion suicide looks like.
When her mother finally realized that Story was a shadow of her former self, when she forced her daughter onto a scale, the number she saw was so small it nearly made her faint.
Oh my God, she said.
And somewhere deep down inside, Story’s demon smiled.
She had become a fourteen-year-old skeleton.
What followed were months at an eating disorder clinic, followed by intensive individual and group therapy sessions. Zoloft became Celexa. Slowly she fought her way back. But the demon lives inside her still, in the marrow of her bones, in the whorls of her fingerprints. In high school she joined the track team, hoping to outrun it. She threw herself into her studies, hoping to outsmart it. She loaded up with extracurricular activities, hoping to outlast it. She listened to loud music and books on tape when she ate, trying to drown out its voice.
But deep in the cerebral cortex, she could still hear its demon creak, casting spells.
The spell of starvation.
The spell of regurgitation.
The spell of ex-lax, two fingers down the throat.
She met Felix last year at a bar. He was a skinny, mop-haired boy up from San Marcos with haunted eyes. He wooed her with strange animal facts. The Texas horned lizard, he said, shoots blood out of its eyes when threatened, up to five feet. He was a fount of facts like these. Did you know, he would say, that when the hairy frog is attacked, it breaks its own toe bones and forces them through its skin to make claws?