Read Online The Empress Chronicles by Suzy Vitello - Free Book Online Page A

will not cry. Not again.
    “We have the milking stanchions over on the side of the shed. It’s getting to be about that time. Want to watch?” Dad grabs Shamrock’s collar and starts hauling the doe toward a stockade-type device. It’s shaped like something from eighteenth-century Salem, where they burned women they thought had powers.
    I’m itchy suddenly, as though poison oak has suddenly infested my body from the inside out. My throat, the backs of my hands, under the gloves. It’s taking all my concentration not to scratch.
    Dad slams the goat’s head between two wooden slats, Marie Antoinette style. The goat bleats but then seems happy enough when Dad hangs a bucket of grain on a hook near her face. He assembles the goods: the pail, the gloves, a bottle of something with a skull-and-crossbones warning on it. Then, he turns to me. “I’m really proud of you, Liz,” he says, rubbing his stained mechanic’s hands on the hem of my T-shirt sleeve. My arms look even more sticklike next to my father’s sausage fingers, which are like an emery board on my skin, but still, I love feeling them there. “You’ve worked really hard, and your hair is growing in well, and you’ve gained a bit of weight. I think you’ll like it here once you settle in.”
    I look down at my sneakers, embarrassed. He has no idea how hard it is, every day, just to do normal things without worrying about germs and feeling out of control. I hated disappointing my father the way I did this past year. The hospitalization, the ongoing sessions with Dr. Greta—I knew I was a drain. Even though Dad regularly comments on my level of flesh, smiling when I gain, frowning when I lose, it doesn’t change anything. I’m not like other anorexics—the girls on the fourth floor of Providence, for instance, who kept thinking they were fat even when they weighed eighty pounds. I know I’m freakazoid skinny. Really, if I had my way, I’d have boobs and hips and long, thick hair.
    “Does it hurt?” I ask Dad as he pulls Shamrock’s two teats in an alternating fashion.
    “She hasn’t complained,” he says, squeezing fishing lines of milk into the metal pail beneath.
    Shamrock’s bag of milk shrinks. Pretty soon the whitish-blue liquid slows to a dribble. I turn away while Dad cleans up. Birds are fighting in a tree nearby; one crow has a squiggle of something hanging out its beak and the other crow wants it. There is squawking and flapping, black feathers soiling the small patch of sky between branches. Nature at its ugliest.
    Behind the trees and the crows, a flash of movement comes toward us. The Girlfriend. She’s running toward us at a fast clip. A smile takes up her entire face. It’s so over-the-top she could be a model for Celexa in one of those glossy magazine spreads. I take hold of a post, getting some support from the strong part of the fence, steeling myself for whatever is making her that happy. I can’t help notice how pretty she looks when she smiles that big. Pale and freckled, not one bit of makeup but awesome cheekbones.
    Dad lights up as she approaches the goat shed. “Well, hi there, darlin’,” he croons. “What’s got you all bubbly?”
    Not only is she Ivory Soap pretty, but she has these mannerisms that make her seem shy and confident at the same time. Like now, when she gathers a hunk of her wheat hair and untucks it from where it caught under the collar of her top. “It’s confirmed,” she says through a smile. “My parents are sending Cory up tomorrow.”
    My father, I can tell, is forcing himself to match her enthusiasm. He used to do that with Mom, too. Like when she had the big idea to start a branded calligraphy pen business. Or when she enrolled in chef school. But Mom didn’t have the sweet and wholesome affect. Mom was much more Veronica. The Girlfriend? Total Betty.
    “That’s terrific,” says Dad.
    She gives me a prying look. “Liz, you’re okay with this, right?”
    “His name is Cory?” I