Kids of Appetite Read Online Free Page A

ice cream in front of us. “Frakking weirdo, that kid.”
    Zuz snapped once.
    Baz walked over to help pick up the soup cans while I went back to my book, pretending to read, pretending the blue of those eyes wasn’t quite so sharp, pretending not to wonder what the Foodville employee was about to say to that kid, what she surely would have said had his face not looked the way it did.

VIC
    I shook the snow from my boots and placed them by the front door to dry. Two black guitar cases smothered in Bat-Signals and The Cure patches sat in the hallway with mighty aplomb.
    Klint and Kory were here. Frank the Boyfriend’s kids.
    Since I’d knocked over a soup can pyramid in front of maybe the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen (or, if not the most beautiful girl, certainly the most striking, sweat-inducing one), the presence of Frank the Boyfriend—and his kids, who belonged in their own animated Tim Burton movie—was the last thing I needed.
    It aplombed me. Mightily so.
    Klint and Kory weren’t twins, but hardly anyone could tell them apart. They wore the same Goth-style clothes, and their teeth were far too big for their heads. I liked to imagine the roots had dug deep into their skulls, firmly planted in the space usually reserved for normal-sized brains. Like me, Klint and Kory had lost a parent to cancer. Unlike me, they used that loss as a reason to wear black makeup and start a band called the Orchestra of Lost Soulz. (I used my loss for much more sensible things, like seeing how hard one must push the edge of a credit card into one’s skin before one starts to bleed.) Mom offered them our basement as a rehearsal space, and just like that, they were regulars around the Benucci residence.
    As I said: mighty aplombing.
    I heard Mom now, in the kitchen with Frank and Klint and Kory. One happy family. With their happy family voices ringing like happy family bells from our happy family kitchen.
    Ding-dong-how-was-your-ding-dong-day?
    I set my backpack next to the guitar cases, hung up my coat, and started down the hallway. Mom, intent on not wasting another holiday, had begun baking and decorating the day after Thanksgiving. Pies, tarts, breads, cakes, puddings—“in the name of Christmas,” Mom said, probably a hundred times. I wondered if maybe Christmas could go by a different name this year.
    But hey.
    I could hardly blame her.
    Last Christmas was a bleak affair. The one-year anniversary(ish) of Dad’s death. There were no lights. There were no pies. There was no tree. So if Mom wanted to string lights from every corner and crevice of our house this year, decking our halls like some wild-eyed holiday elf, I was fine with it. There was, however, one piece of furniture that remained untouched by my mother’s voluminous cheer: the end table in the hallway.
    The end table in the hallway was nothing special.
    But what sat on the end table in the hallway was a thing of such momentous proportions, I could scarcely pass it without my knees buckling.
    My socked feet inched forward, seemingly of their own volition, until I was close enough to nudge the table with my waist—close enough to reach out and touch my father’s urn.
    My phone buzzed. I pulled it out, glanced at a new message from Mom.
    Where r u?
    The happy family voices rang from the kitchen.
Ding-dong-how-was-your-ding-dong-day?
I set my phone on the endtable, and reached toward Dad’s urn, fingers stopping only centimeters away.
    Not being able to close my eyes made many things difficult: sleeping and blinking, primarily. But one thing people didn’t consider was
envisioning
, and how frequently people closed their eyes—not for long, more like a prolonged blink—when picturing a place or thing.
    It was a real problem for me. Until Dad taught me to go to my Land of Nothingness. He said the reason people closed their eyes when they tried to picture something was because they needed a blank