Read Lips Touch: Three Times for Free Online Page A

leaning
back on her elbows beside Jack Husk, that did interest her. She couldn't
stop glancing at his lips, and she kept pressing her own
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    together, hyperaware of them. She remembered babysitting an infant
cousin on the day he'd discovered his tongue; he'd kept wagging it and touching
it, making a whole repertoire of new sounds and trying to stick it out far
enough to see it, obsessed by the discovery of this new appendage. Kizzy felt
like that about her lips today, like she was just now finding out what they
were for, but she hoped she was more discreet than her baby cousin had been.
    "Let's go over there," Jack Husk said, nodding his head
toward a distant corner of the cemetery where there looked to be a sort of
overgrown garden. They made their way slowly, Kizzy scarcely noticing the graves
they passed, so wrapped up was she in this newness of strolling like lovers,
slow and fused. But at the end of the row of graves, she did notice something.
    She walked on past it; it took a moment to register, but a few
steps later her head swung around and she looked again, recognition tingling in
her.
    The frowsy green of the unkempt cemetery lawn was disturbed by a
patch of brown, stark as a wound. It seemed to describe a radius around one
particular grave, and Kizzy squinted to see what the tombstone said. She
couldn't read it, and Jack Husk was tugging her gently in the other direction.
She surprised herself by reaching for his velvet lapel and tugging him back.
"Over here," she said. "I want to see something."
    "What?" he asked, coming easily along with her.
    "This." She stopped before it. A grave where nothing
grew, not even grass. She read the name on the headstone. Amy Ingersoll. "I
knew her," Kizzy said, surprised.
    "You did?" asked Jack Husk.
    Kizzy nodded. "I was a freshman. I think she was a junior,
but
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    I barely saw her because she got taken out of school. She was
sick. She ..." Kizzy's voice trailed off. She had almost said, She
starved herself to death. But seeing this dead brown grave, other words
came to her mind. She wasted away.
    "Sad," said Jack Husk. "She was your age when she
died."
    "Yeah," said Kizzy, thinking of the picture of gaunt Amy
Ingersoll she'd seen in the paper, her eyes seeming huge and haunted in her
pinched face. There had been a special assembly in school about eating disorders.
A doctor had talked about anorexia and bulimia. After, Kizzy and Evie had
pinched the generous skin of their hips and joked crassly that they could use a
little anorexia themselves, and Cactus had said they could start by switching
to Diet Coke.
    "I wonder why the grass is all dead here," Kizzy said,
wanting there to be some other explanation than the one buzzing in her
thoughts. Surely in this dull town the wild things her family believed in were
just stories. Such things happened far from here, on cobblestones, and in the
haunted dooryards of ancient churches.
    "Damned" said a ghost right in Kizzy's ear. She
shivered.
    Jack Husk felt it and let go of her shoulder to shrug off his
velvet jacket. "You're cold," he said. "Here." He draped it
over her shoulders and drew her back against him. Her brow rested against his
jaw briefly, skin against skin. "Come on," he urged.
    She went with him to the little garden in the corner, and Jack
Husk laid out his checked blanket behind some stone urns overflowing with ivy
and scant alyssum blossoms left over from summer. They settled down and he
opened his picnic basket and produced from it a loaf of golden bread and a
round cheese with an artisan's stamp in its thick rind. Things like that,
cheeses signed like
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    artworks, were unknown in Kizzy's house, where they had either
salty lumpish cheese her mother made or an army-feeding slab of impossibly
orange stuff from the superstore.
    Tucking her dress around her knees, Kizzy watched Jack Husk lay
out purple linen napkins and a real silver knife with just a hint of tarnish on
it, and then a footed silver bowl of chocolates