Runaway

immediately, her eyes filled with tears.
    “I don’t even know this person Joyce,” she said miserably.
    Delphine shifted her feet to the floor, got up slowly from the bed, set her cup on the bureau.
    “If your stomach feels sick you should lie down. You probably drank that too fast.”
    “I just want my jacket.”
    Delphine lifted the jacket down but held it too high. When Lauren grabbed at it she would not let go.
    “What’s the matter?” she said. “You’re not crying, are you? I wouldn’t’ve took you for a crybaby. Okay. Okay. Here it is. I was just teasing you.”
    Lauren got her sleeves in but knew she couldn’t manage the zipper. She stuck her hands in the pockets.
    “Okay?” said Delphine. “You okay now? You still my friend?”
    “Thank you for the hot chocolate.”
    “Don’t walk too fast, you want your stomach to settle down.”
    Delphine bent over. Lauren backed off, scared that the white hair, the silky flopping curtains of hair, were going to get in her mouth.
    If you were old enough for your hair to be white, then it shouldn’t be long.
    “I know you can keep a secret, I know you keep our visits and talks and everything a secret. You’ll understand later. You’re a wonderful little girl. There.”
    She kissed Lauren’s head.
    “You just don’t worry about anything,” she said.
    Large flakes of snow were falling straight down, leaving on the sidewalks a fluffy coating that melted into black tracks where people walked, and then filled up again. The cars moved along cautiously, showing blurred yellow lights. Lauren looked around now and then to see if anybody was following her. She could not see very well because of the thickening snow and the failing light, but she did not think anybody was.
    The feeling in her stomach was of both a swelling and a hollow. It seemed as if she might get rid of that just by eating the right sort of food, so when she got into the house she went straight to the kitchen cupboard and poured herself a bowl of the familiar breakfast cereal. There was no maple syrup left, but she found some corn syrup. She stood in the cold kitchen, eating without even having taken her boots and her outdoor clothing off, and looking out at the freshly whitened backyard. Snow made things visible, even with the kitchen light on. She saw herself reflected against the background of snowy yard and dark rocks capped with white, and evergreen branches drooping already under their white load.
    She had hardly got the last spoonful into her mouth when she had to run to the bathroom and throw it all up—cornflakes as yet hardly altered, slime of syrup, slick strings of pale chocolate.
    When her parents got home she was lying on the sofa, still in her boots and jacket, watching television.
    Eileen pulled her outdoor things off and brought her a blanket and took her temperature—it was normal—then felt her stomach to see if it was hard, and made her bend her right knee up to her chest to see if that gave her a pain in her right side. Eileen always worried about appendicitis because she had once been at a party—the sort of party that went on for days—where a girl had died of a burst appendix, with everybody too stoned to realize that she was in any serious trouble. When she decided that Lauren’s appendix was not involved she went to get dinner, and Harry kept Lauren company.
    “I think you’ve got schoolitis,” he said. “I used to get it myself. Only when I was a kid the cure for it hadn’t been invented. You know what the cure is? Lying on the couch and watching TV.”
    Next morning Lauren said that she was still feeling sick, though it was not true. She refused breakfast, but as soon as Harry and Eileen were out of the house she got a large cinnamon bun, which she ate without warming it up while she watched television. She wiped her sticky fingers on the blanket that covered her, and tried to think about her future. She wanted to spend it right here, inside the house, on the sofa, but unless she could manufacture some genuine sickness she did not see how that would be possible.
    The television news was over and one of the daily soap operas had come on. Here was a world she had been familiar with when she had bronchitis last spring, and had since forgotten all about. In spite of her desertion not much seemed to have changed. Most of the same characters appeared—in new circumstances, of course—and they had their same ways of behaving (noble, ruthless, sexy, sad)