This Is How I Find Her Read Online Free

school and went down to the studio, then up to the apartment. That walked across the shredded catalog pages and into the bedroom. The outfit that found my mother lying across her bed, diagonal and still.
    I take it off. The rest of my clothes are still rolled up inside the wheely suitcase on the floor, shirts and pants spiraled to fit as much as possible into the small bag, toothbrush holder and hairbrush and balled pairs of socks stuffed into any leftover space. I grab a T-shirt at random and get dressed.
    â€”
    Downstairs, Aunt Cynthia’s eyebrows lift when she sees me. Her mouth falls slightly open. She stops halfway between the coffeemaker and the counter, coffeepot held aloft in one hand.
    â€œI didn’t think we’d see you today,” she says, starting to move again, toward the two tall aluminum mugs waiting next to the sink. I listen to the coffee stream into the cups, then I sniff in the smell. Hazelnut.
    There’s a lilt of surprise in Aunt Cynthia’s voice, and I know I was right; no one would have come upstairs to get me up.
    Then I register Aunt Cynthia’s words, I didn’t think we’d see you today . Something about those words, the light way she says them, penetrates the thick cloud over my brain. I realize that since I got here, she still hasn’t called me by my name or said a word about my mother. She hasn’t told me whether she thinks what happened is my fault.
    Just say it! I think at her, and I don’t even know what I’m expecting to hear. But Aunt Cynthia keeps moving through her morning routine, snapping lids onto the coffee cups and leaving the pot to soak in the sink. She points out the bread drawer, exactly where it was when I was eleven, and the cold cuts in the fridge for sandwiches. Those are the same too—turkey, ham, salami—and it’s strange to me that everything around me feels so familiar when the circumstances are so different. Aunt Cynthia tells me, still in that same light voice, that I can ride with Leila to school if I’m going.
    She can’t hear me yelling at her from inside my head.
    She doesn’t realize I’m actually waiting for a different voice, to tell me she’s making waffles with ice cream for breakfast, to send me off on my walk to school with a see you later and a wink, maybe to hint that there’s a note hidden somewhere in my backpack.
    And I just twist my fingers together and stand there, saying nothing.
    â€”
    Ten minutes later, I’m in the front seat of Leila’s car, my backpack braced between my legs and the dashboard. I haven’t eaten breakfast. One corner of my math book is digging into my right knee, but I don’t want to ask my cousin if I can move the seat back. I’d rather we both just pretend I’m not actually in the car.
    Leila jitters next to me. She jiggles her left leg, sips from her coffee, drums her fingers against the steering wheel, hums a few bars of music, over and over again.
    Usually, as I walk to school in the morning, Leila drives fast past me, windows open, elbow out, music blaring so loudly it seems to echo down the street long after she’s gone by. But this morning, with me in the car, she keeps the music off and inches carefully out of the driveway. Her car is silver and still looks new, nothing like the ancient, battered two-door my mother and I share, sitting unused in the parking lot at our apartment complex.
    As Leila backs into the street, turns left at the corner and then right at the next, the silence crackles around us like radio static.
    Then Leila’s voice breaks through. “How’s your mom?” she asks. She says your mom and not Aunt Amy , as if she doesn’t actually know her.
    â€œI don’t really know yet,” I say. I shift, trying to get comfortable, but the math book just pushes more sharply into my leg. “They told me she’s going to be fine. But she was getting her stomach pumped