Then I thought better. So what, I told myself. That doesn’t give him the right to hurt people. That doesn’t diminish or excuse the hurt he’s caused.
I stepped closer, tapping into some ancestral genetic carnivore. Some feral creature who knew loneliness for what it was: a weakness. Tariq was desperate for a friend. His body had snitched on him.
I could be that friend. I could get close enough to make him feel safe confiding his loneliness. His pain. And something else—
A secret. Something so big and so dark it blotted out the space between us, turning Tariq into a swirl of night beside me.
Except I already know your secret. Or—almost. And when I learn it, when I know exactly what you did, nothing will save you.
He stood beside Bastien and Ott, both of whom were still trying hard not to look in my direction, and I realized—
Tariq is the weakest link. Whatever happened, he’s the one I can get the truth out of. The one who will help me destroy all three of them.
Inside, a small circle of boys and girls played poker. I sat down beside them and watched their faces. Watched the emotions they were feeling, and how they tried to hide them. How they failed.
“Deal me in?” I asked, unsure if that sentence was even a real thing people said.
Here is a helpful hint: even if you’ve never played poker in your life, even if you don’t know the rules, you can be really really good at poker if you can practically read minds. Which is how I earned a hundred dollars in small bills and the respect and semi-frightened awe of a slowly growing circle of soccer players and kids I’d never seen before.
Including Bastien, who clapped me on the back and said, “Damn, son!” at several points, and Ott, who grunted after I won a particularly impressive hand, which was the nicest noise he’d ever made at me.
“Hungry?” Tariq asked, evidently forgetting what I’d said when he asked me that same question an hour or so ago. Already his eyes were strange and feral, his expression distant and distorted. Alcohol was turning him into something else. Something that made mistakes; something I could manipulate. He stooped to pick up a pan someone was using to cook meat over the fire. The alcohol and the firelight made him look brutal, monstrous.
“Um, sure,” I said. If I wanted to gain his confidence, yes was most assuredly better than no. I reached my hand out and grabbed a sausage. Molten-hot hog fat scalded my fingertips, dripped down to pool in my palm. When Tariq wasn’t looking I let the sausage fall to the earth, and whispered a tiny prayer of apology to that pig who died for nothing.
RULE #12
Your body is unique. A snowflake. No body is precisely like yours. Over thousands of years, the little differences between bodies add up to genetic drift, the differentiation of species. Evolution. So remember this the next time you curse some knob of fat or funny-shaped thumb, or sexual predilection for something society says you shouldn’t predilect: your differences might make you miserable, but they might also make you better.
DAY: 9
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
My sense of triumph was gone when I woke up. Only sadness was left, and hunger. Sadness over what had happened to my sister and sadness over Tariq’s open, desperate smile. Sadness over what I would eventually do to him. Revenge was necessary. He was a monster. But then, he was also a person.
When I came down the hall to find the massive breakfast Mom had made me, I was almost happy. Bacon, crisp and heaped on a plate, oatmeal bubbling on the stove, a pile of pancakes stacked high, a brand-new box of cereal.
Food was love.
Then I thought, food is failure.
I stood in the doorway for a good long minute.
“Can I have some coffee?” I asked, walking in. This made maybe ten years I’d been asking that question, so I was more than shocked when she said, “Sure, I made enough for both of us.”
It meant something, something big, as much as if she’d bought me a dirty magazine or box of cigarettes, but not even with my new abilities could I see clear to what exactly it meant.
I sat down. Mom gave me a mug, a spoon, milk, and sugar. I skipped them both. These vile substances are nothing but calories.
“You’ve had coffee before,” she said, when I took a long sip and smiled.
“Of course, Mom. Shouldn’t I have?”
Mom shrugged. Then she sighed, sat down across from me. Perhaps she finally saw, that morning, in that moment, that I was a person in the world and could do all sorts of things she told me not to do.
“Eat,” she said, pushing plates in my direction. And stared at me, eyes boring into mine.
All of a sudden, my chest hurt.
The bacon, probably made from the sister of the sausage I dropped into the dirt the night before, was pure salty fat, and therefore out of the question. So I slid several pancakes onto my plate, not intending to eat any of them, and added syrup sparingly.
“How is that?” she asked, tapping the well-worn copy of The Dharma Bums I took with me everywhere.
“It’s good,” I said, aware that this, too, meant something. Perhaps as close to a conversation about my father as my mother was capable of having. So I pushed it, just a little. “These dudes just wandering around, seeing the country, no attachments, focusing on living life, you know. Getting down to what’s important.”
Mom snorted, made a face, looked into the distance.
I sliced off a large strip of pancake, then cut it into smaller ones. “You don’t think that sounds good?”
“‘No attachments’ does not sound good,” she said, and I knew she was choosing her words carefully. “Some attachments are beautiful.”
Here, she patted my hand. So this was about my dad, and his lobster boat—which, from my heightened perspective, I realized was either a lie or a euphemism.
“What’s life, if not attachments?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything at first. My pancake had been reduced to pieces practically too small to see with the naked eye.
She was watching me.
So far she hadn’t said anything. But I had to eat something, as much as it pained me to do so. “I don’t know, Mom.”
Life was revenge. Life was making bad people hurt. Life was Maya.
“They restricted the runs again,” Mom said, rubbing the back of her neck, her voice aching the way it always did when she talked about work. “Another three pickups canceled. That’s two more guys laid off.”
Here is something you need to know about my mother. She loves her town. She loves the people in it. The ones she works with, the ones she grew up alongside. She loves the rusted wheelless vehicles along its roads and the falling-down houses with the roofs gone. I don’t know why. She’s a smart lady. She’s not small and hateful like so many of them are. And yet she loves the twisted pothole highways and the happy blanket of ignorance everyone wraps themselves up in, the deluded crazy stupid belief that This is all we need.