Bones & All

Barry’s truck dies a month later while Lee and Maren are staying at Laskin National Park. An inbound college senior named Keri-Ann Watt picks them up while they hitchhike. At campus, she says they can stay with her, and they help her move in. She keeps touching Lee, which annoys Maren. It also irritates her that Keri-Ann has so much makeup, and it gets worse when Keri-Ann tells Maren she’d be attractive with more effort.

Keri-Ann has Lee sleep in her room on an air mattress while Maren lies on a couch in the common room. Security wakes her up and asks if she’s a student. They go to Keri-Ann’s room, but Keri-Ann smirks and says she doesn’t know Maren. Outside, Maren runs away from the guard, who doesn’t follow her.

She falls asleep on a park bench by the lake, and Lee is there when she wakes up. He says there’s no rush because he has eaten Keri-Ann. Over the next few days, Maren wears Keri-Ann’s black clothes and uses her student ID to access the college library, where she starts reshelving books. She doesn’t know what Lee does during the day, but he brings her food each evening when he returns.

Maren likes the environment and the people. One day, when she returns to her book after using the restroom, she finds the tail and collar of Puss, Mrs. Harmon’s cat, lying on the pages. She goes back to the dorm room, where Sully is waiting with a knife. She doesn’t believe him when he says Lee is dead. Maren tells Sully that Lee “eats people the world is better off without” (271). Lee comes in while they are struggling over a knife. He pulls Sully off her and tells her to wait in the bathroom, where she sits in the bathtub. Eventually, Lee comes in and brushes his teeth. He says he felt like he needed to come back early and can’t believe how close he came to losing her. Lee sees something protruding from Sully’s bag. He takes out the rope and looks horrified.

When he pulls the whole rope out, it’s longer than Maren thought. Lee says it is “the most repulsive thing [he’s] ever seen” (274). After Maren showers, she looks at Keri-Ann’s copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lee says he loves her expression when she reads. He found some money and Mrs. Harmon’s jewelry—including the locket with Douglas’s picture—in Sully’s bag. There is also silver flask. Lee takes a drink of whiskey, and Maren joins him. Though it disgusts her, she drinks until nothing bothers her.

Lee undresses and he says it’s only been three months since they met. She admires his body as he gets in bed with her and asks if she’s okay. Then he laughs and says she’s going to have a hangover. He touches her hair and says Sully would have used it for his rope. He kisses her neck, which is where they usually start when eating someone. Maren says he should stop and notices that her stomach is rumbling.

Maren wakes up with “the bad taste” in her mouth (280). She wishes Lee hadn’t let her eat him. She hates that he is now another name in her journal.

The next day, she sees a student named Jason watching her in the library. She sits at a table across from him and reads The Legends of Babylon, enjoying his attention. He passes her a note that recommends I Dreamed of the Tigris if she is interested in Babylon. They exchange notes for a few more minutes, and she pretends to be a student.

His name is Jason. When he asks if she has a boyfriend, she says yes. One day she sees a man in the aisles. He has noticed that she is always shelving the books. He tells her that shelvers make $6.50 an hour and that she has to register with the library director. His name is Wayne, and he’s a Library Science PhD student. Maren likes that he respects her.

She looks for rooms to rent in the campus newspaper that evening. She uses Travis’s money to pay for a room at a house where two other women board. Over the next few weeks, she thinks about Travis occasionally and often talks with Jason at the library. One day, Jason asks if he can open the locket around her neck. When he sees Douglas Harmon’s picture, he says he is a handsome man. Embarrassed to be wearing a memento of someone else’s love, Maren never wears the locket again.

Weeks later, she’s still wearing black, but begins wearing skirts and lace stockings, thinking that Jason might like seeing her legs. Jason invites her to Thanksgiving dinner, but she declines. In December, he follows Maren as she leads him to the quietest area of the library. After she takes off her shirt, she says it’s just to keep it clean, and then asks him if he knows the Dewey decimal number for cannibalism: 391.9. When he jokes that she might be a succubus, she tells him that 133 is the Dewey decimal number for demonology. She tells Jason that she will eat him, throat first, if he doesn’t leave. When he says he didn’t know how twisted she was, Maren says that no one ever does.