Tariq smoked. Smoking might help me worm my way into his life—so I could destroy it.
“It’s not your fault,” I said, speaking fast before I lost the significant nerve it took to say something like that to my mom. “What happened to Maya isn’t your fault.”
Mom frowned. She looked at her cigarette, and I thought, here it comes. She’s going to destroy me. Instead, her frown deepened. And then dissolved. Into tears.
“It is,” she whispered, turning her head away. “In a way, it most surely is.”
Something was there. Guilt? Simple sorrow? A secret she was keeping from me?
I flushed with happiness, with pride, and then with shame. I made my mother cry. I put my hand on her shoulder.
But I couldn’t stop. Because suddenly I had the power to get answers.
“Have you had any conversations with her, without me?”
“Once, maybe twice, she called when you were at school, and I was sleeping off a night shift.”
“What did she tell you that she wouldn’t tell me?”
“Nothing important, honey. You know I’d tell you anything you needed to know.”
She was lying. I could hear it. Something changed in the pitch of her voice on the word needed, something so small that a person without, well, superpowers could never have heard it.
I sank back, sat down on the cold stone of our stoop. “I just don’t understand why you aren’t more upset,” I whispered.
“Christ, kid, you don’t think I’m upset?” and the exhaustion I heard in her voice hurt more than the screaming angry fit I’d been fearing. “You don’t think I’m terrified? You don’t think I’ve been having a hard time sleeping—every night—even when I’m so tired I can’t get out of bed to take a sleeping pill?”
I listened. I listened to her words and the spaces between them. I tried to track the ups and downs of her voice. The more I listened, the more I thought I could hear something. A timbre to her words. The specific vibration of particular emotions. My ears felt thick and stupid but also like I was at the edge of a dizzying amount of information. The power to hear what someone was feeling, even when their words tried to hide it. My stomach groaned, and for a split-second I smiled. The hunger was real. Hunger was causing—all of this. My head spun with happiness, with fear, at this bizarre miraculous thing I could barely believe.
She plopped herself into a plastic lawn chair. Put one hand against her face. Then the other one. Seeing her so in pain magnified my own immeasurably.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked. It hurt even to whisper.
“Be here for her when she gets back.”
I didn’t want to worry her any worse than she already was. Asking the question I needed to ask might plant bad ideas in her brain. But if she knew something and she wasn’t telling me, I had to take a risk. “I’m worried someone hurt her,” I said. “That maybe that’s what drove her away—what’s keeping her away.”
Mom lowered her hands. She looked at me a good hard while before she said, “What makes you think that?” And her voice, when she said it, was raw and fragile. My mom wore almost no makeup. I could see the veins through her thin delicate skin, smell the slaughterhouse soap she used to wash up with.
Shame sucker-punched me. I’d let selfishness guide my actions, and now I’d upset my mom. How could I say, I think Tariq and Ott and maybe Bastien did something? Because Tariq was all interested in Maya, and since she disappeared he can’t look at me, and neither can his henchmen. “Nothing.”
She frowned at me. She took a long drag on her cigarette until there was nothing left of it, all the while holding eye contact. Now it was her turn to not believe me.
“Maya is hurting,” she said. “I know that much. I don’t know how to make it better. But we can’t fight someone else’s battles for them.”
That’s bullshit, I thought, but did not say. Power trembled in my hands, in my stomach.
I’ll fight Maya’s battles.
I’ll destroy Maya’s enemies.
I’ll do it all for her.
When Mom was asleep, I snuck into Maya’s room. I shut my eyes until the fear of Maya punching me repeatedly for invading her space evaporated. I breathed in the smell of it. Focused on all the normal notes, the smells of her lip balm and hair products, her dirty clothes and Trident gum. Once I had acclimated myself to the room’s smells, I could focus on the smell of her. After a while I could almost see her with my nose, trace her movements through the room the last time she was in here. I followed that lingering memory—Maya to the bookshelf, and ran my finger along every single book . . . I stopped at Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture.
Was it possible? Could it be that I actually knew what my senses told me? Maya had paused here, before she left the room for the last time.
I picked the book up. Maya had held it in her hand, had opened it.
I opened it. And found, stuck between two pages at the back: the SIM card to Maya’s cell phone. She would have replaced it if she didn’t want to be tracked, but she wanted to still be able to use her smart phone.
And if I put it in my phone, I could send texts and make calls that people would think were coming from her.
My stomach gurgled triumphantly.
I pitied them, all the people I was up against, the ones who had hurt her and the ones who were keeping secrets. All those men and women and boys and girls had puny senses, and the skills of mere mortals.
They hadn’t unlocked the power that I had.
RULE #10
Human hearing is a complex mechanical process. Understanding how it works will allow the student of the Art of Starving to expand its power exponentially.
The ear detects vibrations. The outer part of the ear focuses sound waves into the ear canal, where they strike the eardrum and are passed on into the middle ear. There, they pass through a series of complicated pieces that transform mechanical stimuli into neural transduction, ultimately sending information through the auditory nerve and into the brain stem, where it’s combined with other signals and filtered through several parts of the brain that enable you to know the difference between a dog barking and a woman singing, and the language you speak from a language you don’t.
DAYS: 6–7
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 900
Magneto, supervillain par excellence, archenemy of the X-Men and leader of the evil Brotherhood of Mutants, was a Jew like me. He lost his whole family in a concentration camp, and only survived himself due to his mutant superpower, the ability to control metal. His whole life was about getting back at a world that had hurt him so badly. Professor Xavier, leader of the X-Men, just wanted mutants to be tolerated by an intolerant world, but Magneto wanted to burn that intolerant world to ash.