The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,12

the aisle and tried not to think about Bobby. Tried not to think of how he’d always made me feel something was about to happen.

Well. Something had happened. That’s for sure.

Think about something else. Think about anything else.

But, of course, that never worked.

BOBBY AND I MET THROUGH HIS SISTER, ONE OF MY BEST friends. Olive Binardi—her name fit her Mediterranean skin, her round face, her ample curves—was one of those people whose car was littered with fast-food wrappers, who perpetually lost her keys, and who was late every single place she went. She was also, in my opinion, the best massage therapist on the planet. When I first met her she was a physical therapy major and my first roommate in the Ohio State University dorms. We rented an apartment above a pizza parlor after our sophomore year.

Olive’s family lived in Columbus, and Olive received free tuition because her dad was a professor in the math department. Olive’s dad also drank a few bottles of Chianti a day, and sometimes Olive’s mother, Mimi, would arrive at our apartment at three in the morning to sleep on our thrift-store couch.

Olive invited me to the Sunday dinners, where up to thirty other relatives would descend upon their house, all shouting, all smoking, all casually using profanities that made my jaw drop.

The combination of thick smoke and the need to yell to make myself heard left me hoarse each time I attended. No wonder that the first time I brought Olive home with me to Dayton for the weekend, she thought all of us Andersons were angry with one another. We were so quiet.

I’d seen photographs of Olive’s brother, Bobby, long before I met him. He’d been banished by their father, for reasons neither Olive nor Mimi could make clear to me. That made him mysterious and bad, and therefore more appealing. Bobby lived in Brooklyn for a while and worked as a sous-chef in a relative’s restaurant. He didn’t go to college. When he came home to Columbus for Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day, he stayed at the apartment I shared with Olive instead of at the Binardi house. I went home to Dayton for those holidays—an hour away from Columbus—so our paths crossed only briefly, but enough for us to flirt, for me to stammer and blush, and for Olive to warn me, “Don’t go there, Cam. He’s trouble.”

With an endorsement like that, I was doomed.

Once, Bobby came back early for Mother’s Day weekend. He and I ate ice cream. That ice cream became as much family lore as the tornado.

My mother might say I didn’t know when to stop, but in my dabbling with starvation, I honestly didn’t know how to stop. I’d finally realized, as I arrived at my preveterinary program—existing on cigarettes, black coffee, and plain yogurt—that this had truly turned into an addiction. About the time Bobby and I sat down to ice cream, I’d grown afraid of my own behavior. When my brother arrived on a surprise visit to tell me he was worried about my health, I didn’t confess that I lied about my weight to our parents on the phone, that Olive and I argued over the grocery shopping (when it was my turn I stocked the fridge with celery, Jell-O, and grapes), or that I had freakish white hair growing on my stomach. I told Davy I’d been on a “little diet.” I sat on my hands so he couldn’t see how they trembled, and said nothing, of course, about how I couldn’t go from sitting to standing without white sparkles crowding my vision, about the bruises smudging my spine, or the scab on my tailbone. I said all the right things to him but told myself it was nothing dangerous, just enough to feel that lovely high.

And then Bobby walked into my life a day early and changed everything. I opened the door and there he stood with that curly black hair, that Roman nose, those ridiculous lashes.

I went for ice cream with Bobby. Yes, ice cream, which I hadn’t eaten in three years. It felt too tense in the house, waiting for Olive—she wouldn’t be home from work until midnight. I didn’t want to leave him alone and return to my room to study, but I didn’t know what to do sitting with him, so close to him and his clean leather smell. He’d already eaten but said he needed dessert. He opened our kitchen cupboards, then closed them. He opened