Only Flesh and Bones Read Online Free

see you, too, Cecelia.” And I was. Why is it that any thousand shifty-eyed teenagers glimpsed on the street can be written off as slouching delinquents to be avoided, but when just one of these half-formed creatures turns a hopeful glance our way, we lose all caution and greet her with an undefended heart?
    I held out my arms for a hug.
    Cecelia contorted her body into a cave-chested twist and looked anywhere but into my eyes as she shuffled closer. A few inches from me, she threw herself onto me like a stevedore discharging a sack of grain onto a waiting cart.
    Bracing my feet, I caught her in my arms and squeezed. “You’re taller than I am now,” I declared, for want of a more inspired opener.
    “Mmpf.”
    “It’s been rough, huh?”
    She began to sniff.
    I ran my hands through her hair, coaxing her sniffling into a bawl, saying, “I’ve missed you. I feel rotten not coming to see you sooner. Did your dad explain that I’ve been out of town?”
    Head nodding up and down. Hoarse coughing.
    “There now. There.”
    “You never called,” she said reproachfully.
    “Um, sorry.”
    “I mean, shit, you—”
    I cut her off, a mixture of guilt over not better acknowledging her pain and self-pity arising from my own making me impatient. “Couldn’t be helped,” I said. She stiffened.
I tightened my hug, reaching into her for another dose of importance.
    Cecelia abruptly pulled away and stuffed her hands up against her face. “I hate this. My nose gets all red.”
    “Need a Kleenex?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, I don’t have one. We’re outside, so blow it on the ground like I taught you for skiing.”
    Cecelia twisted her now-swollen lips in a rueful smile, bent, placed a finger to each side of her nose, and blew. When she had wiped her hand on the tiny scrap of lawn the developer had insisted on planting in this semiarid part of creation, she slung an arm around my shoulders and leaned her head against mine. She had to crane her neck. “Missed you, too,” she allowed, approximating a kind of offhanded candor.
    “So things have been bad.”
    “The pits.” She rolled her eyes. “Sorry. Haven’t lost it like that in months.”
    “Maybe you need to do it more often.”
    “No, it sucks. I mean, I’m glad to see you, but you know? I got to go on living. At least, that’s what the shrink keeps saying.” She shrugged, a sulking gesture of such unappealing awkwardness that no one who had slipped the mighty bonds of adolescence would hope to replicate it. Suddenly, she threw herself against me again and whimpered. “You always understand. You’re my best friend in the whole world. You love me better than anyone!”
    Embarrassed that I felt so pleased to hear such sentimental nonsense, I said, “Tell me about the shrink.”
    Cecelia’s eyes suddenly widened in terror. “I don’t remember a thing!” she blurted.
    “I’m not investigating your mother’s death; I’m here for you . Remember, I never even met your mother.”
    She nodded, eyeing me with bald suspicion.
    “Listen, Celie, life’s tough enough when you’re sixteen—”
    “Almost seventeen!”

    “Right, and you’ve lost your mother the hard way. Not good. Worse yet, your dad says you were there when it happened. When she was murdered,” I said, choosing harsh words to cut through the pompous crap she must have been getting from everyone, “so you should be able to finger the person who killed her.”
    She hung her head.
    “But you can’t. So help me with this. You just don’t remember the incident, or is there a bunch else missing?”
    She lifted her head, stared blankly into the air beside my head. “That day, and the whole week after, except bits,” she recited. “It happened on a Tuesday, and I can remember from Saturday, waking up back here.”
    “When did you come down from Wyoming?”
    “Friday. Or so I’m told. Dad says it took a few days to get the—um, body released.”
    “Your dad drove you?”
    She looked away.