One of the curious aspects of middle school is how extraordinary the pain feels, even when the affliction is quite mundane. The wrong pair of jeans, your unpronounceable last name, a paper wad thrown by a popular boy that hit your back during an assembly. Has anyone ever suffered like this? My mother used to tell me all kids were struggling. Even the bullies. “It’s such a tough time for everyone,” she would say, and get a tsk-tsk look, like she was talking about Ethiopia. A nice perspective, I suppose. But I was pretty sure my unhappiness was worse than everyone else’s.
In sixth grade, I walked home alone every day. In the quiet hours before my brother returned from football and my parents returned from work, I rooted around our cabinets for new kinds of comfort. Graham crackers. Chunks of cheddar cheese melted in the microwave for exactly seven seconds, the moment the sides began to slump. Sips of occasional beer weren’t enough anymore. I needed the numbing agents of sugar and salt.
Becoming a binge eater in a house like mine wasn’t easy. You had to get creative. My mother bought natural, oily peanut butter, but if you swirled a spoonful with molasses, you had something approaching a Reese’s. Four tubes of cake icing sat on the fourth shelf of the pantry, and I squirted a dollop in my mouth each day.
But my new comfort also brought a new pain. “You’re getting fat,” my brother told me one day, as I watched Oprah on the couch. He and I didn’t speak much anymore. He stuck to his room and his Judas Priest. But he had an older sibling’s homing device for sore spots. “Fat” was the meanest word you could call a girl. The absolute worst thing in the world.
My first diet started in seventh grade. My cafeteria lunch shrank to iceberg lettuce dribbled with low-cal ranch dressing. I loaded up on Diet Cokes. Three, four a day. After school, I grape-vined to Kathy Smith’s aerobic workout. I confined myself to frozen Lean Cuisine dinners. Cheese pizza. Cheese cannelloni. Cheese lasagna. (The same three ingredients, rolled up in different shapes.) The diet craze of the 1980s was a nationwide tornado that left leg warmers and V-hip leotards in its wake. Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.
The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.
My extreme dieting became a power struggle with my mother, just like the extreme amount of Wet N Wild makeup I wore or the extreme number of sitcoms I watched every afternoon. I was the dish thrower in our house now. The good part about weight obsession, though, is how it bonded me with other girls. Quite a few of us were sweating in unitards by then. Two of my friends told me about lying in bed one afternoon in their bathing suits, circling trouble spots on each other’s body with a permanent marker. And when I heard that story, I thought: That is love.
BY EIGHTH GRADE, I had discovered a surprisingly dependable revenue stream for adulation. I wrote morbid little tales inspired by Stephen King books. Teachers and classmates cooed over my twisted imagination and PSAT vocabulary. Writing made school an opportunity instead of a fear parade. Of course, English was my favorite subject.
I met one of my first great loves in my English class. Jennifer had big brown eyes, long brown hair, and a bohemian beaded necklace that suggested an older sister who taught her about Pink Floyd. She sat directly in front of me, and we bonded over our liberal politics and Helter Skelter, required reading for curious teens dabbling in darkness.
One day she slipped me a note on a torn piece of paper. Do you want to spend the night on Friday? Later, she told me she spent the entire class holding the tiny scrap of hope in her hands, trying to talk herself into passing it my way.
That Friday night, we sat in her bedroom and ate an entire gallon of Blue Bell ice cream. That’s how nervous and excited we were. We swapped stories of our own personal hells and discovered they weren’t so personal after all. Is there any bonding agent like shared pain? We spent most Friday nights together after that.
I thought I had delicate sensibilities, but Jennifer was the most sensitive girl I’d ever met. We once passed a bird with a broken wing as we walked to NorthPark Mall. He was tipped over on the sidewalk near the highway, claws scrambling for purchase, and she scooped him up in her hands and redirected us back to her house, where she nestled him in a shoe box padded with cotton balls. I just wanted to go to Limited Express.