She pushed them around with her fork. She had tried to eat the food but it was tasteless, and just the sulfurous smell of it, the look of it, was making her stomach rebel. Across from her, Del was doing the same thing. Shoveling beans up into mountains and smashing them to mush, using her fork as a weapon. Her hair was a tangled mess. She’d gathered it back into a ponytail, but hanks of it fell forward over her face and trailed over the tabletop. And she’d chewed most of her fingernails off, one finger after another, spitting the half-moon curls into the air. One had ripped into a jagged edge, and a spot of blood welled next to the cuticle. She sat hunched in her seat as if her spine couldn’t support her, and her eyes were shadowed and looked huge in her face. Lucy probably looked just as crappy. She knew her hair was one big frizzy knot, but she couldn’t make herself care too much. She had the curious sensation that she wasn’t really in her body. Beside her, Aidan turned a hunk of bread into a pile of crumbs.Leo had died half an hour ago, first his breath becoming more and more labored, then the veins on his thick neck standing out like cables.
