The fox.
It had been moved, in all its disconnected parts, onto her floral sheets. The fox was just a heap of globbing bones and decomposed tissue, not even shaped like an animal anymore, flies swarming around its toothy jaw. It looked so wrong, lumpen and congealing on Carol’s pink blanket, that Saffy’s vision went dusky. She knew better than to scream.
Instead, she held an inhale. Gathered her shock into a little ball. She squeezed that shock tight, let the oncoming tears harden into a mass she could control. Look, Saffy thought, in her mother’s most demanding voice. You have already lived through much worse. And it was true. So she let out the slowest, longest breath as she pulled the corners of the sheet from the mattress and balled the fox inside. Ansel must have dumped it while she was cooking with the girls, because the liquid had barely soaked through to the mattress.
With the bundle held away from her body, Saffy snuck down the stairs and slipped out to the dumpster.
We take care of ourselves, her mother had repeated. That face was Saffy’s favorite of her mother’s. Jaw set. Eyes like steel. Me and you, Saffy girl, her mother would say. We are warriors.
At the dinner table, Saffy said grace like always. When Miss Gemma asked her to pass the Fanta, she did.
Across the wide mahogany, Ansel piled casserole calmly onto his plate. Saffy could feel him in her periphery, every tiny way he moved. When Ansel stood to clear the dishes, Saffy flinched so violently she knocked over Lila’s water glass. She watched the liquid pool across the table, thinking how love was not at all what her mother had promised it would be.
*
Saffy did not eat dinner that night. She did not eat breakfast the next day, or lunch either. By the time a week had passed, she’d lost nearly ten of her eighty-seven pounds. Kristen and Lila brought cups of juice to the couch—Saffy refused to go back into that bedroom. It did smell kind of weird, Kristen noted, though Saffy could not tell her why.
Miss Gemma was worried. When she sat down, a puff of musty couch air blew up toward Saffy’s face, along with the sharp chemicals of Miss Gemma’s perfume.
“Saffron, honey,” Miss Gemma said. “You have to tell us what’s going on.”
Miss Gemma looked so ridiculous, blue paint powdered across her eyelids, house slippers shuffling against the carpet. Saffy didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. For two more days, Miss Gemma visited Saffy on the couch, unable to coax even a shaky spoonful of soup into her mouth.
Finally, a pair of social workers came. They murmured with Miss Gemma in the kitchen, then sat across from Saffy, hands clasped in their laps, faces stern. It’s harder for mixed kids, they told her earnestly. She knew she was different, in more ways than one. She would be transferred to a new foster home; a change of scene often helps, they said. When Saffy began to cry, even she could not tell if the feeling was sadness or relief.
While Saffy packed, Kristen and Lila hovered. Kristen gave her a parting gift: the tube of lip gloss they’d swiped from Bailey’s nightstand, Maybelline Kissing Gloss. Their most prized shared possession.
“Are you sure?” Saffy asked, crying again at the gesture. The tears were constant now, unstoppable, and Saffy felt so weak and dumb for all of it—for not being able to eat, for not being strong enough to handle this like her mother would have wanted, for the way Lila looked at her, full of pity and curiosity as she suckled that purple ring between her chapped lips.
“You should have it,” Kristen said, closing the sticky tube of lip gloss into Saffy’s palm.
*
Saffy was packing the last of her clothes when Ansel came to say goodbye.
Kristen and Lila had gone downstairs to pick at the donuts the social workers brought. Saffy was alone. She smelled him first. Laundry detergent and summer sweat, slightly bitter, the same scent from his T-shirt that night on the basement floor. The smell that had intoxicated her before now sent a shiver of fear down her spine. It was the sort of fear that felt somehow enticing, a fear she wanted to chase.
“Can I come in?” Ansel asked.
He looked infuriatingly normal. Saffy had made a point of glancing away the past few days whenever he entered a room. He held himself like nothing had happened at all. He looked as handsome as always, if slightly apologetic, a fact that burned annoying in Saffy’s chest.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Saff,” he said. He had never called her that before. His eyes were new, a forced sort of sad. “I’m really sorry.”
“The fox,” she said. “Why did you do it?”