I screamed until my throat hurt.
I tried to pull back. Shut my ears. Come back to my body. My mind was a bubble, and in a moment I would pop—
My belly twisted. The pain restored clarity. I was stronger than my body. My hunger was proof.
I breathed. I listened. I let the sounds pass through me. I stopped worrying about what might happen. Let go of the pigs and their pain, their cries, dropped it like a hot coal I’d been clenching in my fist. I focused on erasing—like the books said—my sense of self. I marveled, at how big the universe was. How full of sounds. How cold and solid the earth was. How much power I could tap into. And how easy it would be to let go of the earthly tether that connected me to my body, my troubles, my whole miserable existence. And just cease to be.
It made me shiver. It would be so much easier than actually killing myself. Less pain, less mess to clean up. With practice I could just . . . float away.
I decided to stick with this meditation thing.
RULE #11
No superhero, no Chosen One, no budding witch or demigod or changeling gets better by playing it safe. Sooner or later, you will have to put yourself in a dangerous situation. You will have to test yourself. You will have to risk losing everything, before you can gain anything.
DAY: 8
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
Two hours before Tariq came to pick me up, while Mom napped, I stole her cell phone from her purse and took it to my room. A simple thing, old and clunky, but that was better, because a smartphone might complicate the kind of shenanigans I needed to pull off.
I switched out Mom’s SIM card for Maya’s. And sent a text message to Tariq, which would look to him like it came from her:
I’m going to tell.
Almost immediately, Mom’s phone vibrated in my hand. TARIQ, it said. I pressed the red button to reject the call.
A text came in.
Please don’t.
There were so many things I wanted to say. But I bit my lip and rode out the silence.
A second text from him: It would destroy my life.
At this I smiled, and thought: Like you destroyed hers?
A second call. Again I rejected it. And then, five minutes later, he texted: Why would you do that to me? After what we shared?
So. There was something. I didn’t know what, and I needed to be very very careful about what I said, because one wrong word would trigger his suspicions that something was up.
People need to know, I wrote.
I know you’re mad, came his response. But that doesn’t give you the right to hurt me. What’s going on? Can we talk? I’ve been trying to call you at—
Rage made me rip the SIM card from Mom’s cell phone. That doesn’t give you the right to hurt me. He believed he could harm her with no consequences, but if she tried to fight back she was—what? Violating the Rules?
I stuck the SIM card back in, and looked up Maya’s bandmates, and scribbled down their numbers. Then I took it out again, hid it where I kept my porn flash drives, brought the phone back to Mom’s purse, went outside.
Hunger and rage tore and screamed inside me, a whirl of blades that shredded the walls of my stomach. The generator in my gut had been cranked up too far by my anger, and the electricity threatened to split me open.
I had to calm down. My ride would be here in a second or two.
Of course it was a pickup truck. Of course it was brand-new, red, too big for Tariq, detailed with fiery half-circles around the tires. Of course he drove it with a face of grim tight worry, like it was a test of his manhood or a bull that at any moment might buck him. But when he pulled up to a stop and put it in park, his smile was epic.
“Hey, Matt,” he said when I climbed up and opened the door. I’d asked him to meet me down the block. Told him it was because I didn’t want my mom to know I was leaving, but really it was because I didn’t want him to see my house. Its ramshackle frame, its unmowed lawn with fallen leaves piled three inches deep.
When he picked up Maya, it would have been nighttime. He wouldn’t have seen, then.
“Hi,” I said, trying several unsuccessful times to shut the door once I was in.
“You really gotta slam it,” he said, reaching past me to grab the handle and wrench it shut with a manly yank.
The senses kicked in hard. It smelled like him in here. Like a well-used pair of soccer shorts had spent several weeks under one of the seats. The intimacy of it was electrifying.
“You got a curfew?” he asked, looking distracted.
He kept glancing at his phone. The texts had shaken him up, no doubt about it.
“Not when no one knows I’m out,” I said.
He laughed. Did he ask her the same question when she got in? Did she have a hard time shutting the passenger-side door? I looked down at my feet. Punk rock flyers and pamphlets littered the floor. SMASH THE SYSTEM, one of them urged, and another said GOD IS A LIE THEY TELL YOU TO MAKE YOU BEHAVE.
“I didn’t know you were into punk,” I said, thinking of Maya.
“Only pretty recently. I just love it. There’s so much . . . anger.”
“What do you have to be angry about?” I asked. “Everybody loves you.”
Tariq laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh. “That doesn’t mean I have nothing to be pissed about.”
It occurred to me to be afraid. If he had hurt Maya, he wouldn’t think twice about hurting me. And the texts I sent had made him uneasy, anxious. People, like animals, are at their most dangerous when they’re afraid.
So I stepped back from what I’d been about to say—Kids whose dads can afford to buy them fancy new pickup trucks don’t have a right to be pissed.—and said nothing at all. He started the car, and we were on our way, the radio filling in the silence.
A few blocks later, he said, “You’ve never been interested in this kind of party before, so what made you want to come to this one?” He smiled when he said it. A cautious smile.
“Maybe I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”
“Yeah, well, you’re in for a disappointment. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to go, until—”
He stopped the sentence, but I think I knew where it was going.
The sad, dirty, trash-strewn roads of my neighborhood were extra pathetic, looking down on them from the cab of that truck. The extra height gave me distance, perspective, but so did knowing how Tariq must have seen them. This is a place where hard-up people live: workers in the quarry and the zipper factory and the slaughterhouse. People easily taken advantage of. Girls I can hurt with no consequences.
“Got a cigarette?” I asked, when he came to a stop along a strip of dark road beside a bunch of other cars. Music thumped in the distance. I turned my head in that direction so I could burrow down deeper into the noise of all those people, hear the interwoven strands of so many conversations.