Red Leather (Book 2)

Chapter 18

They were right. How could you save someone who didn’t want to be saved?

***

Cora died, of course. Unfortunately, Daddy was given the task of breaking the news to Mr. and Mrs. Grey. Cora Grey had dealt with a negative body image her entire life, and had begun dieting at the age of thirteen. By fifteen, it was no longer a six-week plan to lose some extra weight – it had become something serious.

The damage it created was irreversible – her bones hadn’t developed properly, her blood cell levels decreased, her muscles starved of nutrients, and her heart just couldn’t cope. Her menstrual cycle also stopped, and had ceased permanently for over two years.

Even if she had survived, Cora would never have been able to produce children.

This brought forward an onslaught of heart and respiratory complications, most of which she took medicine for, on top of excess amounts of laxatives. Just as when she began to show signs of recovering – just when she finally begun to eat carrot cubes and tiny sips of Coke – she relapsed yet again into her old ways.

This time, all the interventions in the world wouldn’t have worked. The only way Cora could’ve gotten thinner was to be a skeleton, and that’s exactly what she became.

Cora’s heart stopped beating in the middle of that volleyball game, much like Michaela’s had. Just as Cora made impact on the hard ground, her spine, having been weakened to the point where it had the strength of a dry sponge, fractured severely. Several blood vessels burst inside the cerebral cortex of her brain.

She had been a corpse long before that ambulance had come.

As the grief spilled open in the room like ripe yolk, I contemplated whether I really was the source of her death. Even if I hadn’t complimented her that day, and I hadn’t complimented her regularly ever since, would Cora still have died? Would her heart still have collapsed, and her bones fracture?

Absolutely.

And the thought brought an itch under my skin. An itch that I couldn’t scratch.

I stayed in the hospital until daylight broke out. Tammy, having cried herself hoarse, had fallen asleep on my shoulder. Arthur, Charlotte and Yuri wanted to see her body for the last time. Yuri had left a while ago, but Cora’s parents were still in there. The ten cups of coffee inside my stomach prevented me from sleeping. Daddy would take us home whenever his shift ended, which was soon.

Tammy sniffled suddenly, shaking me out of my trance. “Renee?” she croaked, overcome with grief. Cora’s death, along with her own situation, must have been having a tremendous effect on her. “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

Her question sounded so childish, so utterly vulnerable and naïve, that I was taken aback for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“Look at us – look at all of us. It’s only been a couple of months since school started, and now Shanelle’s in jail, Georgia’s in a convent, I can’t afford a bus ride home, and Cora’s dead.” At this, she broke into tears. “I just want it all to stop.”

I hesitated very briefly, before stroking her hair. A strange feeling settled over me, and I had yet to decipher whether it was good or bad – yes, I had built up quite a collection in Alistair. But having them listed off, one by one, was something I hadn’t been used to hearing. I cleared my throat, deciding to dodge her question. She wouldn’t like my answer. “Daddy’ll drop you home, sweetie. In fact, I’m sure he would drive you around for the rest of his life, if you were okay with it.”