Rosmond was a quiet out-of-towner when Ezrah met her first four years ago. She smiled well on command, but she wouldn’t invite herself to talk to you and she would stop eating if she knew you were watching.
Ezrah thought she didn’t eat at all when his parents told him to come to lunch with the nice new family in town with a daughter your age, Ezrah. He watched her hand hovering over her fork to see if he could catch the butterfly wing movement of her picking it up, but she did not. She kept her head bent. Halfway through Ezrah’s grilled cheese, she could finally talk to him.
“Can you stop watching?” she said in a voice that only reached as far as Evander in the seat next to Ezrah. There was not a daughter four years older like Evander but Evander had to come to this stupid lunch anyway.
“Why don’t you just eat?” Evander snapped. Rosmond could not answer. She also could not eat. She still could not answer until Ezrah’s parents took them to see the lovely little boardwalk just outside of town. Evander stepped over the still water tide pools and stilled the waving anemone with the point of a stick.
“Why not just leave it alone,” she whispered, and only Ezrah heard her.
Nihilistic Porcupine 